[Prefatory Note: Do NOT take this as medical advice. Check with your doctor. What you see below is what the Atlantic and other publications are now saying about the new booster that is coming soon, if you have not been Covid infected. If you have, depending on when, the recommendation could be different. Again, check with your doctor]
"In less than two weeks, you could walk out of a pharmacy with a next-generation COVID booster in your arm. Just a few days ago, the Biden administration indicated that the first updated COVID-19 vaccines would be available shortly after Labor Day to Americans 12 and older who have already had their primary series. Unlike the shots the U.S. has now, the new doses from Pfizer and Moderna will be bivalent, which means they’ll contain genetic material based both on the ancestral strain of the coronavirus and on two newer Omicron subvariants that are circulating in the U.S. If you haven’t had COVID since about November 2021, the advantage of a bivalent booster over the original formula is obvious, and as long as you haven’t gotten boosted recently, there’s every reason to get the new one right away. (If you have been boosted in the past few months, your antibody levels are probably still too high for a new shot to do much for you.) Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington, told me that Americans who have already gotten three or more doses “have probably maxed out the protective capacity” of the original shots. By contrast, the bivalent vaccines offer something new to those who have so far escaped Omicron: a lesson on the spike proteins of the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants, which will help the immune system fight the real thing should it get into your body."
PS: The Atlantic, along with The New York Review of Books and The Economist, are the top 3 periodicals on my every issue reading list. My heart and sympathy goes out to anyone who does not read every article from beginning to end in every issue of them.
[EOP]
