Data Doesn’t Support New COVID-19 Booster Shots for Most, Says Vaccine Expert
Antibodies are the immune system’s first line of defense, and serve as the front line for blocking viruses from infecting cells. But as most people know, either from personal experience or anecdotally through reports from friends and family, even those who are vaccinated and have received the Omicron BA.4/5 booster have gotten infected with the virus. While their vaccination and boosting protected them from getting seriously sick, they weren’t immune to infection.
The important end result, says Offit, is that as the studies found, chasing variants of the virus with new boosters may not always produce appreciably better responses in the form of a barrage of antibodies. And it’s not just the bivalent BA.4/5 booster that resulted in this pattern. An earlier bivalent shot, aimed at another Omicron variant, BA.1, produced levels of BA.1-neutralizing antibodies that were just under two times those generated by a dose of the original shot.
But COVID-19, and the population’s ability to combat it, has changed since then. For one, the variant of the virus now infecting people—XBB.1.5—is different from the original. Through a combination of the fact that many people now have higher levels of protection from vaccines or having recovered from infections, and the fact that the Omicron variants as a group, BA.4/5 and XBB.1.5 included, do not seem to cause serious disease in most healthy people, the job of booster doses has also evolved.
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