When Nelly Furtado sang All Good Things (Come to an End) in 2006, she probably wasn’t referring to the protection offered by the Covid-19 vaccines. Nevertheless, few believe that the immune response to the Covid-19 vaccines will last forever. Even if you are fully vaccinated now, you will likely have to get another booster shot sometime in the future. The question is when. And the answer is wait for it, wait for it.
Right now the guess is sometime between six months and two years after you were fully vaccinated the first time around. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla did address this question during a recent Axios interview seen here:
As you can see, Bourla said that the data supports “the notion that likely there will be a need for a booster somewhere between 8 and 12 months.” So perhaps the Covid-19 vaccine will be a bit like the seasonal flu vaccine, a yearly thing. However, as Carlie Porterfield has reported for Forbes, not everyone agrees yet with this possibility.
There are two reasons why booster shots will probably be needed at some point. First of all, your immune system can be like your significant other when it comes to remembering things like birthdays, anniversaries, doing the dishes, wiping down your One Direction shrine, taking out the trash, and spike proteins. Both can forget things over time. The Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccines expose your immune system to the spike proteins that stud the surface of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV2). When seeing these spike proteins for the first time, your immune system essentially says, “what the bleep are these? They don’t belong in your body. Let’s respond ‘out of spike’ by setting up defenses against anything that wears these spike proteins.” Once you are fully vaccinated, your immune system is ready, raring to take on anything that has the spike protein.
Read More at https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2021/05/22/how-long-will-covid-19-coronavirus-vaccine-protection-last/
Comments