With Covid-19 cases apparently on the rise again, you may be wondering when to get your next … [+]
With Covid-19 cases apparently on the rise again, you may be wondering when to get your next Covid-19 booster vaccine. Do you arm yourself again now to better protect yourself against a Summer surge or do you wait for it, wait for it, wait for the next updated version of the booster to be available this Fall? The answer is kind of like the name of that underwear brand. It depends.
Here’s the situation with the next booster formulation. In June, after an advisory panel to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended that the next round of Covid-19 boosters be targeted against the Omicron XBB.1.5 subvariant of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax began working on such vaccines. These won’t be completely new types of vaccines. Rather they will use the same mechanisms and structures and the vaccines that have already been used. For the mRNA vaccines, it will be including mRNA that can get your cells to produce Omicron XBB.1.5 spike proteins. For the Novavax adjuvanted protein vaccine, it be simply including the Omicron XBB.1.5 spike protein. These XBB.1.5 boosters will likely be available by the late September, early October range. But surprise, surprise, there’s no word of a definite date. In general, that’s only about a couple months away, assuming that you treat vaccination like the premier of the movies “Barbenheimer” and partake in it soon after its available.
A couple months can seem right around the corner or an eternity depending on who you are and what you are doing. So again how do you decide when to give yourself a boost? Well, here are some considerations.
Why you should wait until the new XBB.1.5 Omicron subvariant booster is available in the Fall
There are essentially three reasons to wait for the next formulation of the booster. One big reason is that this new version should be a better match against the versions of the virus that are circulating now and that should be circulating over the ensuing months. The XBB.1.5 Omicron subvariant became the dominant one in the U.S. when 2022 segued into 2023, as I covered for Forbes back then. Granted, it’s no longer the alpha-dog of variants, having since been overtaken by an alpha-numeric soup of other subvariants, such as EG.5, for example. However, the XBB.1.5 still comprises an estimated 10.3% of all Covid-19 cases in the U.S., according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Covid-19 Data Tracker. So, consider the currently available boosters to be a bit like gaucho pants, hoodie sets, or skinny jeans with chunky sneakers. They can still work but may not completely match the times. The updated booster with XBB.1.5 will certainly be more up-to-date than the currently available booster that was targeted against what was happening in early 2022. As a result, the XBB.1.5-targetted booster should in theory offer better protection than what you can get now.
The second big reason rhymes with laser printer splurge—an anticipated Winter surge. The past three Winters have seen Covid-19 cases surge in the November through February time frame. This hasn’t been super surprising because that’s when the weather gets colder and drier and lots of activities move indoors, all of which could favor transmission of the virus. And what do you think will happen again this coming November through February now that many people are kind of doing nothing to stop the spread of the SARS-CoV-2? If you were to assume that protection offered by the Covid-19 vaccines would begins to wane around four to six months after you get vaccinated, you may want to make sure that November 2023 through February 2024 falls within this not-waning-yet time frame. Getting boosted now might be a case of premature vaccination as protection may begin to wane by the end of the year whereas a late September or later vaccination may keep you better covered through the Winter surge period.
A third reason to wait is if you just got your last Covid-19 vaccine sometime this year. Technically, you aren’t even allowed to get another booster within four months of the last one. This is because studies have suggested that getting a booster within four months of the last one may not lead to as robust protection. Your immune system might be a bit like a recent college graduate. It needs time to fully get its act together after being exposed to the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 and mount an even stronger response. Boosters aren’t like avocado toast. You shouldn’t necessarily get it as soon as you see it. Instead, make sure that you space them out appropriately.
Why you should get the Covid-19 booster now and now wait
All that being said, health advice can be like ultra low-rise jeans. It’s rarely one-size-fits-all. Rather, you need to take into account your personal health situation. Not everyone should wait for the next version of the Covid-19 vaccine to become available. There are several reasons why the importance of having better protection over the next two months may outweigh waiting a couple months to get even better protection.
One reason is if you never really got fully vaccinated in the first place. That would mean that you may still be relatively unprotected against Covid-19 unless you’ve gotten Covid-19 itself and recovered already. Just because you haven’t been infected by the SARS-CoV-2 to date despite not being fully vaccinated doesn’t necessarily mean that you have that special sauce in your body that protects against Covid-19. You could have simply been very lucky up till now. And who knows when that luck may run out. Getting vaccinated now to get at least some level of protection from the Summer surge would be better than having virtually no protection.
A second reason is if you are at very high risk for getting severe Covid-19 and haven’t gotten a Covid-19 vaccine in over half a year. This would be the case if your immune system is substantially weakened from some combination of illness, medications, or advanced age. Your doctor can help best make this call because it entails weighing many different factors. Of course, you could try to be very carefully about avoiding any SARS-CoV-2 exposure over the next two months. But that’s been getting harder and harder with so many people somehow believing that the pandemic is over.
A third reason is if you will be at very high risk for getting Covid-19 in the next two months and haven’t gotten a Covid-19 vaccine in over half a year. Maybe you’ll be having heavy interactions with those who have a likelihood of carrying the virus such as working in a healthcare setting. Again, this is a judgement call best made with your doctor because so many different individual risk factors need to be considered.
The bottom line is that most people will probably want to wait until the updated XBB.1.5 Omicron subvariant version of the vaccine is available. In the meantime, you can do other things to protect yourself against what may be yet another Summer surge. You can wear a good quality face mask such as an N95 respiratory while indoors in public. You can keep your workplace and other gathering locations well-ventilated with air purifiers running. You can stay away from poorly-ventilated, crowded locations such as Happy Hours at bars and dungeons. This may not be the only reason to steer clear of Happy Hours in dungeons. You can avoid any settings and circumstances that are higher risk for transmission such as playing Twister with people who think that the Covid-19 pandemic is a hoax. You can also regularly test yourself and those around you whenever you suspect that you might have been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2, although keep in mind that testing is not super-accurate and can often miss infections. Oh, and ask people around you for permission before you test them.
These would be good precautions to maintain regardless of when you get your next Covid-19 booster. As I’ve indicated multiple times before, while Covid-19 vaccination can offer some important protection, it’s not like a full-body concrete condom. You can still get Covid-19 after getting vaccinated or after getting Covid-19. And while the risks of hospitalization and death are now much, much lower than they were in 2020, they are still significant above the levels of other respiratory viruses. Plus, there’s still the substantial risk of getting long Covid.
The current Summer upswing is a sign that while Covid-19 may be in the process of transitioning more towards a seasonal virus, the Covid-19 pandemic is technically not yet over. While the activity of seasonal respiratory viruses such as influenza tend to effectively drop to nothingness during the Summer, this hasn’t yet been the case for the SARS-CoV-2. But we are probably getting there. The need for various Covid-19 precautions won’t last forever. In the words of that Guns N’ Roses song, “All we need is just a little patience.”