To boost, or not to boost? That is the question!
▪ In the face of waning vaccines’ protection and rising infection numbers due to the highly contagious Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, some countries are considering extra doses for those who have been fully vaccinated. But there is not enough evidence of whether most people need them.
▪ Based on several trials’ results boosters actually work. According to these studies, several months after the second dose, third doses of Moderna, Pfizer–BioNTech, Oxford–Astra-Zeneca, and Sinovac vaccines provoked an increase in levels of virus-neutralizing antibodies.
▪ But researchers suggest that at this point, the case for vaccine boosters is weak. Currently, the majority of the population may not need them, and this could divert away these vaccines from others. “Wasting resources on boosters for those who are already protected against severe disease does not really make too much sense,” says Laith Jamal Abu-Raddad, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Weill Cornell Medicine—Qatar in Doha. “Down the line, probably, we would need to think of it. But really, we don’t have strong arguments for it right now.”
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