In a perspective published Jan. 11 in the New England Journal of Medicine, vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit says it’s time to rethink booster recommendations. In the third year of the pandemic, the population’s immune situation is vastly different from what it was in 2019 when SARS-CoV-2 emerged.
Now, most people have been vaccinated against the virus, been infected with it (once or multiple times), or both. And the latest data show that the newest booster shot, which targets the Omicron BA.4/5 strain and original virus variants in a bivalent formulation, isn’t that much more effective in generating virus-fighting antibodies than the original vaccine when used as a booster.
“The experience of the past year has taught us that chasing these Omicron variants with a bivalent vaccine is a losing game,” says Offit, director of the vaccine education center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee. Offit also developed the rotavirus vaccine. In his perspective piece, Offit cites data from two leading virologists—Dr. David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Columbia University, and Dr. Dan Barouch at Harvard Medical School.