COVID-19 VACCINE BOOSTER SHOTS
CONTEXT
- The Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and Oxford AstraZeneca vaccines— is already planning to give out boosters to those aged 50 and above before the winter.
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- Delta, Delta Plus, Lambda — as the novel coronavirus continues to mutate, all eyes are upon vaccine manufacturers who continue studies to see how capable their shots are against these variants.
COVID-19 BOOSTER SHOT MEANING
- A booster shot is nothing but a means of strengthening one’s immune system against a particular pathogen.
- It may be exactly the same original vaccine, in which case its goal is to increase the magnitude of protection by producing more antibodies.
- The vaccine contains weakened forms of the disease-causing virus or bacteria, or it may be made of an altered genetic “blueprint” for the germ that can make one sick.
- The shot triggers one’s immune system to attack the foreign organism, like it would if you actually got the disease. This helps your immune system remember the disease-causing germ.
- Scientists can also tweak what goes into the booster if they are aiming to protect you from a new variant — a version of the virus that’s mutated significantly from the original version you were vaccinated against.
- What a booster shot does is that it gives the memory cells the crucial signal to re-engage when the virus attacks.
- This can be useful whether the booster contains the original vaccine or something different.
- If it contains the original one, it’ll amplify the signal, increasing the number of antibodies produced and if it contains a tweaked recipe, it will train the cells to recognise new features of the virus and produce antibodies, should one be exposed to a newer variant.
NEED A BOOSTER SHOT
- The first thing to keep in mind is that these shots are only for the fully-vaccinated. With new variants leading to Covid waves across the world, health authorities will be considering a few factors before rolling out these shots.
- These boosters will be particularly helpful for the elderly and immunocompromised people whose bodies were unable to mount a robust protection against the virus following the first two shots.
- If there are studies showing that a new variant can sneak past the antibodies created by a specific vaccine, the need of a tweaked booster shot arises then.For example, Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech have started designing a version of their vaccine specifically to combat the highly-contagious Delta variant.