Will Covid boosters prevent another wave? Scientists aren’t so sure

News Desk :
As winter looms and Americans increasingly gather indoors without masks or social distancing, a medley of new coronavirus variants is seeding a rise in cases and hospitalizations in counties across the nation.
The Biden administration’s plan for preventing a national surge depends heavily on persuading Americans to get updated booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. Now some scientists are raising doubts about this strategy.
Older adults, immunocompromised people and pregnant women should get the booster shots, because they offer extra protection against severe disease and death, said John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.
But the picture is less clear for healthy Americans who are middle-aged and younger. They are rarely at risk of severe illness or death from Covid, and at this point most have built immunity through multiple vaccine doses, infections or both.
In an interview, Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator, acknowledged the limitations of the available data on the updated boosters.
“It’s true, we’re not sure how well these vaccines will do yet against preventing symptomatic disease,” he said, particularly as the newer variants spread.
But, Dr. Marks added, “even modest improvements in vaccine response to the bivalent boosters could have important positive consequences on public health. Given the downside is pretty low here, I think the answer is we really advocate people going out and consider getting that booster.”
Diminishing returns from tinkering with the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines call for a new approach to protecting Americans altogether, Dr. Moore and other experts said. A universal vaccine that targets parts of the coronavirus that do not mutate would be ideal, for example. A nasal vaccine might be better at preventing infections than an injected one.
But the companies were measuring antibodies against BA.4 and BA.5, not the rapidly accelerating BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 variants. A spate of preliminary research suggests that the updated boosters, introduced in September, are only marginally better than the original vaccines at protecting against the newer variants – if at all.
 “What we need to do right now to get us through the next few months when I think we are in yet another wave of incipient wave of Covid,” Dr. Marks said. “And then we need to look forward, and lean into how we’re going to do things differently moving forward.”
Even from a scientific perspective, it may make more sense to diversify the body’s antibody response with different vaccines than to continue to roll out versions of the mRNA vaccines, some experts said.
Dr. Marks said the F.D.A. may recommend Novavax as a second booster after reviewing the data. Until then, that vaccine is authorized only as a first booster for people who are unwilling to, or cannot, get an mRNA vaccine.
That rule “is completely ridiculous,” Dr. Moore said. “If the F.D.A.’s goal is to increase vaccine uptake and boost immunity in the American population, why is it putting restrictions like this?” Courtesy: The New York Times