- With new variants,
slowing vaccination rates in the United States,
and the long-term effectiveness of vaccines still unknown,
scientists are looking at booster shots
as the next step in fighting the pandemic.
- So, the booster shot is the idea
that after the primary vaccination
that you might need an additional vaccination.
And the purpose there is to boost your antibodies.
- We spoke with Dr John Beigel
from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
about whether booster shots are needed and how they'll work.
- So, the antibodies are the proteins in the blood
that protect us against the virus.
Their whole purpose is they bind to proteins on the virus
and sort of neutralize the ability of that virus
to get into the cells and cause disease.
So, antibody titers is just a way that we are measuring
how many antibodies you have.
And what we know about antibody titers
is after one shot, the titers go up.
After two shots, then you get a much better immune response.
And then over time, that immune response wanes.
So as the antibody titers come down, at some point,
people are gonna start becoming at risk for disease again,
and that's when we would want to give a booster shot to make sure
that the population in general doesn't get down to that level.
Now, exactly when that is we don't know.
We don't know exactly when that's going to occur,
but we're trying to assimilate pieces of data
to support those decisions.
If we can use the current vaccines that we have,
then that's a much faster process.
If we have to go back and we have to make new vaccines,
then that's a slower process,
'cause then you have to establish that the new vaccine
is a similar protective as the old vaccines.
That is the study that we would call the mix-and-match study.
People come in that have already received Johnson,
have already received Pfizer.
They come in, and we boost them with Moderna, for example.
And then we say is the immune response --
the antibody titers that we talked about --
are those similar regardless of what you got?
Or maybe it's worse.
Maybe it's worse tolerability and more side effects.
Maybe it's not as good enough immune response.
But we really need the data to inform those discussions.
Most people had more side effects
after the second vaccine,
so we assume when we give a third vaccine as a booster
that you'll generate a robust immune response,
and to that, you'll get those symptoms --
that fatigue, those chills,
those what we would call constitutional symptoms.
We and other groups are constantly monitoring
the variants
and then, also, testing antibody titers
from our studies to all these variants.
The concern is that there will be an emergence of a variant
that doesn't neutralize as well.
But right now, all of the variants are neutralized
by the antibodies from the current vaccines.