'Better to Stay Ahead of It.' Why the White House COVID-19 Strategy Now Involves Vaccine Booster Shots
vaccine may also need an additional dose, but the relevant studies are still ongoing. For now, the government plans on rolling out Pfizer and Moderna booster doses the week of Sept. 20, beginning with people who received their last dose eight months earlier.
Whether booster shots can slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, remains unclear. For now, health officials are going on indirect lines of evidence—some of which is strong, but inferential nonetheless.
The data on which health officials based their updated booster recommendation included results from athat showed the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines in preventing infection with SARS-CoV-2 dropped from 91.7% in May to 79.8% by the end of July, by which time the Delta variant was the dominant strain in the area .
The idea of a booster dose is to bring people’s immune defenses—specifically antibodies—back up to the level generated soon after the last vaccine dose. It’s a well-established principle in immunology that antibodies tend to decline in number over time, whether it’s after people get vaccinated or get naturally infected with a virus. The vaccines were never designed to protect completely against getting infected with the virus, only from getting severely ill after getting infected.
That’s why boosting with another dose of the existing vaccines should prove effective in controlling SARS-CoV-2, even if the shots aren’t specifically targeted against the Delta variant. And that applies to not just the antibody response, but to another type of immune response generated by a different group of immune cells known as T cells, which tends to be a little more durable.
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