“People that are vaccinated really are doing very well in terms of hospitalization,” mentioned Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York. Omicron has made it clear that stopping all infections is a misplaced trigger, he added.
If the vaccines prevented an infection and unfold of the virus, common boosters may make sense. “But with Omicron, what’s the point?” Dr. Nussenzweig mentioned. “The endgame is keeping people out of the hospital.”
Last fall, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s prime pandemic adviser, repeatedly spoke of the significance of stopping symptomatic infections. But in latest days he, too, has been saying that it’s hospitalizations that really matter.
In order to stop infections, booster photographs have to be exquisitely timed to a variant’s circulation within the inhabitants. Many individuals who obtained a 3rd dose early within the fall, for instance, have been left weak to Omicron as a result of the immune enhance had already subsided.
The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to Know
Generally, persons are informed to get vaccinated towards influenza simply earlier than the virus begins circulating in winter. If the COVID-19 coronavirus settles right into a flulike seasonal sample, because it appears attainable, “you can imagine a scenario where we simply give boosters before the winter each year,” Dr. Hensley mentioned.
Lessons from flu season additionally recommend that frequent vaccination is unlikely to be useful. Giving the flu vaccine twice a yr “has a diminishing return, and so it may not make sense to do vaccination so frequently,” mentioned Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist on the University of Hong Kong. “For the initial doses that people receive the responses get better and better, but then there’s a turning point.”
“I think it’ll be difficult to get high uptake with more frequent vaccinations,” he added.
Some specialists have raised issues that getting boosters too typically — as some persons are doing on their very own — could even be dangerous. In concept, there are two methods wherein it may backfire.