A Better Name for Booster Shots
The word booster kicked off the pandemic benign and simple, a chipper concept most people linked to things such as morale and rockets. Then, at the start of 2021, the word began to undergo a renaissance. By summer’s end, booster was a common fixture of headlines and Twitter trends; it was suddenly tethered tightly to words such as shot, vaccine, and immunity online, as experts and nonexperts alike clamored for the more, more, more promise of extra protection against SARS-CoV-2. According to Elena Semino, a linguist at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom, English-language news reports now deploy the word booster about 20 times more often than they did in pre-COVID times.
The pandemic has, in effect, boosted into the public sphere. And yet, we are still really bad at talking about them. In the top echelons of the CDC, in the back alleys of Twitter, no one can seem to agree on who needs boosters, or when or why, or what that term truly, technically means—even as additional shots that officials are boosters continue to enter arms. Some experts insist that boosters are ; others vehemently ; a few have insisted that . Discussions among the rest of us have been no less chaotic. A from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that more than a third of respondents find information on boosters to be confusing instead of helpful. Last week, my own mother, a retired medical technologist,
