/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/eluniverso/UCT6U5A7HBFQ7KP5T4CBTMFDCU.jpg?fit=%2C&ssl=1 "Will we need boosters of the COVID-19 vaccine every year? | Health | Magazine")
The results of a blind controlled trial, published yesterday in the journal ‘The Lancet’, provide guidance on boosters and the future of vaccines.
Agencies
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The blind trial COV-Boost, from the UK National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), which analyzes the effectiveness of seven different boosters inoculated after two doses of AstraZeneca or Pfizer, indicates that no definitive answers yet on how many boosters of the COVID-19 vaccine will be needed, nor until when.
The teacher Saul Faust, research leader, and professor of pediatric immunology and infectious diseases from the University of Southampton, in the United Kingdom, explained to the London newspaper The Telegraph that no one can assure at this time if reinforcements will be necessary each year (as is the case with influenza).
Faust adds that immunity levels in people after a third dose they were much higher than after the first two. The vaccine elicits a broad response from T lymphocytes, which are a crucial part of the immune system, along with antibodies.
????Safety and Immunogenicity of Seven COVID-19 Vaccines as Third (Boost) Dose Following Two Doses of ChAdOx1 nCov-19 or BNT162b2 in the UK (COV-BOOST): A Phase 2, Blind, Multicenter, Randomized, Controlled Trial – The Lancet https://t.co/wB8HvIxavp
– Dr Camilo Salinas Ochoa (@CamiloSalinasOF) December 3, 2021
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“Although we do not fully understand its relationship to long-term immunity, the information of the T cells shows that they do have capacity against all variants of the virus”, Which gives hope, says the doctor, that current vaccines will be able to handle the variant they face, in the sense of avoiding hospitalizations and death, but not infection.
Which COVID-19 Booster Should I Get?
The results of the work of Faust and others, published in the scientific journal The Lancet, looked at the action of the vaccines AstraZeneca, Pfizer / BioNTech, Moderna, Novavax, Janssen, Valneva, and CureVac, and found that while all work well after a third dose, some are better than others. “RNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) were very high, but so are the reinforcements of Novavax, Janssen and AstraZeneca ”.
Will they modify COVID-19 vaccines to make them more effective?
The Influenza vaccine It needs to be reformulated every year, because with each season a different strain circulates. It is an imperfect solution, because scientists must guess what the dominant strain will be next season, and some years they are wrong, making the efficacy of the flu vaccine as low as 10%.
It’s too early to tell if COVID-19 vaccines will have to go through the same process. Those used at the time were developed to work against the original variant (that of the first cases registered in Wuhan), and they are known to have been sustained against the Alpha and Delta variants of SARS-CoV-2. But how they will be against the next variants remains to be seen.
Should we wait for the omicron version of the COVID-19 vaccine?
“No,” says Professor Faust. “People need to have their reinforcements as soon as possible”. His medical colleagues at the UK Health Safety Agency are looking for samples from Faust’s study to see how much of the omicron variant can be neutralized by vaccines. Immunity levels in young people who received Moderna and Pfizer are high.
The NIHR-supported COV-BOOST study has confirmed the safety and effectiveness of a range of COVID-19 booster vaccines.
About 3,000 participants and many research teams across the UK helped contribute to the findings, published in The Lancet.
Read more:https://t.co/gbpjcIfgor pic.twitter.com/aXSNgwSUhO
— NIHR Research (@NIHRresearch) December 3, 2021
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As to whether there will be in the future an improved vaccine to replace boostersThere are several tests underway, especially to see the formulas can take care of multiple variants, so as not to have to modify the different vaccines each year. But how long the immunity will last is not known. As with influenza, for some time an annual booster may be the most feasible. (I)
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