Europe’s Head of Vaccines Strategy warned in January that giving COVID-19 vaccine boosters every four months could lead to “potentially having problems with immune response.”
First, it was one or two COVID-19 vaccine shots. Then it was get a booster shot after eight months, until they changed it to six, then five months. Now, federal health authorities have approved yet another shot four months from your last one if you’re at least 50 or in poor health.
Early this year, the European Medicines Agency’s Head of Vaccines Strategy, Marco Cavaleri, raised the concern that excess boosting could weaken rather than strengthen our immunity. “T cells become dysfunctional when they repeatedly see antigen in certain contexts,” Fortune told Deutsche Welle. Vaccines introduce antigens to generate an immune response. But Fortune added that the studies on T cell exhaustion are based on HIV or cancer patients “where the antigen is there all the time, not just repeated vaccination.”
The COVID-19 vaccine booster intervals U.S. health officials are calling for have little precedent in public health. Many childhood immunizations are given in two to four shots from birth to six years of age. But apart from tetanus boosters every 10 years, they’re done after that. Flu shots are given annually, tailored to the prevalent strain around the world.
“We’re talking apples and oranges,” Quigley said. “You can’t extrapolate from the antibiotics to vaccines. The mechanisms of action are so unrelated and involve different fundamental scientific principles from one to the other.”