COVID Science Is Moving Backwards

Paul Sax is an infectious-disease physician and professor at Harvard Medical School. Even so, when Sax’s kids asked him whether they should get the updated COVID vaccine this fall, he wasn’t really sure what to tell them. His two children are in their 20s, healthy, and at no special risk of complications from disease. Each had recovered from COVID, and thus, he reasoned, had extra immunity on top of what they’d gotten from their prior shots. Another injection would likely cause them a day or two of unpleasant side effects, and expose them to a very small risk of heart inflammation. Would it also meaningfully lower their chances of infection or the severity of their symptoms if they did get sick? Would an extra shot reduce their minuscule odds of death?

Sax admits he didn’t have “iron-clad data” to back up his thinking either way. The bivalent vaccines had been only on the basis of how many antibodies they produced, a gauge of their positive effects—and so, even now, no one knows for sure how much real-world benefit they provide for the majority of Americans who are already shielded by vaccination and prior infection. have that, going by antibody levels, recovering from COVID is a good booster. There’s another problem, too: The new shots are designed to target the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of Omicron, but these now account for fewer than of infections in this country, according to the CDC. The FDA believes that the boosters are still “,” but studies that the shots are already out of date.