The launch of the COVID-19 vaccination is well underway in the United States. Millions of people have already been vaccinated, and states are beginning to expand eligibility widely.
Although experts are hopeful that we will achieve collective immunity by autumn, if vaccinations continue at our current pace, there are doubts about the need for booster doses and how long our current vaccines will last. According to health experts, this depends a lot on some factors: how long the vaccines guarantee immunity to infection and whether the emerging variants reduce the vaccine’s effectiveness.
The drivers are not yet a reality, but they may be in the future.
At this point, the conversation about the need for booster vaccines for COVID-19 is still somewhat hypothetical, although vaccine manufacturers and researchers are already preparing for the possibility of testing boosters and vaccines adjusting for known variants of coronavirus.
“Currently, the most important thing now is to vaccinate people,” he said Waleed Javaid, director of prevention and infection control at Mount Sinai Downtown Network in Manhattan.
Javaid explained that the faster we vaccinate the population, the fewer opportunities the virus will have to circulate and mutate. Mutations are what lead to more contagious variants, which may require an updated vaccine in the future.
Current variants of COVID-19 – such as variant B.1.1.7 discovered in Great Britain, variant P.1 found in Brazil and Strain B.1.351 discovered in South Africa – are more transmissible and can lead to a fourth wave of cases.
However, to date, vaccines have been shown to be somewhat effective against variants. The shots may not be as strong against the current new strains, but they are by no means useless.
“We have not seen any variant completely escape vaccination,” said Javaid.
Experts mainly define the vaccine’s effectiveness as preventing serious infections, hospitalization and death. Although mild infections can occur after vaccination, this is not the main cause of alarm. Jennifer Lighter, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist at the Langone Health University hospital in New York, compared the symptoms to a common cold or mild flu. “All vaccines prevent hospitalization and death: that is the main point,” said Lighter.
Scientists are still measuring how long current COVID-19 vaccines offer immunity.
We also don’t know how long vaccines guarantee immunity against coronavirus. TD vaccines (tetanus and diphtheria), for example, require a booster every 10 years. If we start to see new cases of COVID-19 popping up in the population anywhere from six months to five years from now, then that would be a good reason for reinforcement, said Javaid.
At the moment, we use the antibody test as a marker of an immune response. But we need more time to study the population’s response to vaccines before we are able to sufficiently assess the duration of immunity.
Making a booster injection, if and when we need it, will not take as long as the original vaccines.
With Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech injections, vaccine manufacturers can update existing vaccines to deal with new strains. Typically, this process it takes about three months. Both companies are already testing a shot reinforcement and working on a shot that targets the COVID-19 mutations, but has not committed to when or if they will be needed by the public.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine uses an adenovirus – part of the common cold – to send a message to cells in the body and trigger an immune response against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The J&J vaccine tests took place when some of the new variants were circulating, so experts are not concerned with their effectiveness when it comes to hospitalization or death. The company’s CEO told CNBC in early March that he is working on software that will address new and emerging variants, if necessary, but he did not offer many other details about what that software might be.
COVID-19 is unlikely to disappear completely.
Although there has been some response to the vaccine against known variants of COVID-19 so far, Lighter noted that the virus is likely to continue mutating.
“COVID-19 is not going to disappear,” she said. “Looking at the long term, it will look like the flu. The flu changes every year, we have to have a vaccine every year, but it is completely controllable because there are treatments and vaccines and people have immunity ”.
At the moment, we do not know whether or exactly when we will need adjustments to the vaccine, in the form of boosters, to target ongoing variants. But given the fact that we will continue to see new mutations, it is likely that scientists will eventually need to create updated images to provide protection against subsequent virus strains. Whether that after six months, a year or five years, is the question.
Experts are still learning about COVID-19. The information in this story is what was known or available at the time of publication, but the orientation may change as scientists discover more about the virus. Check the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the most up-to-date recommendations.