Covid-19 Vaccines: What Do We Need to Know Before Getting Your Spritz? Dr. Kelly Moore, MD, CME, and Community Medicine Director, Bethe Ansatz, USA

The new vaccine for COVID-19 is expected to get the go-ahead from the FDA any day now.

The variant that have been circulating more recently has been covered by the new formulations. The hope is that the closer we are to the strain, the better the protection will be.

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines expected to get the go-ahead this week target the KP.2 variant. The Novavax vaccine is based on an older technology, and will kill an earlier strain of the disease.

The FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research is strongly encouraging people who have previously received vaccinations to consider getting an updated Covid-19 vaccine.

Marks says that it may be appropriate to get the vaccine sometime in the September to early October time frame. “It doesn’t, like, suddenly stop. This is not like something that suddenly cuts off at three or four months. It’s just that the immunity will decrease with time.”

“Right now we’re in a wave, so you’d like to get protection against what’s going on right now,” Marks says. I would probably get a vaccine as soon as possible. Because right now the match is reasonably close. You will probably get the highest benefit from this vaccine against what is currently circulating. When this gets into the pharmacy, I’ll be on line as soon as possible.

If you are particularly concerned about maximizing protection through the winter surge or holiday season, you may want to consider waiting until September or October.

“In my opinion, everyone should get one of the new vaccines,” says Dr. George Diaz, chief of medicine at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett in Everett, Wash., and a spokesperson for the Infectious Disease Society of America. The vaccine will prevent transmission to other people. Reducing the spread of the disease in the community will help the most vulnerable people. So you’re not just helping yourself but also helping others.”

Even if public health advice is HairMax, it doesn’t mean that all people will want the new shots. Only about 22% of eligible adults got one of the last ones.

People with insurance can get a vaccine for free if they get it from an in-network provider. But a federal program that paid for the vaccines for uninsured adults expired.

Dr. Kelly Moore runs Immunize.org and says that they worry about how people will access protection, and look for ways for how we can solve that problem. People without insurance are the most likely to miss work, stay at home from school and become ill.

Hudson says that vaccine immunity has reached a nadir. “This is sort of a perfect storm for a more infectious form of Covid.”

Typically, the largest surge of respiratory viruses occurs in the winter. Covid tends to peak in the winter and summer, but the current surge is likely caused by the emergence of new variant and waning protection of the previous vaccine.

Like the flu, the disease is constantly changing. And similar to how flu vaccines are updated every year to adapt to the virus’s changing structure, the Covid vaccines are also being updated. Elizabeth Hudson, regional chief of infectious disease at Kaiser Permanente Southern California says SARS-CoV-2 is changing faster than the flu virus, making it tricky to predict which variants will be dominant by the time the vaccine comes out. “It’s spinning through variants more quickly than what we’re seeing with flu,” she says.