It feels intuitively right that a reformulated booster vaccine aimed at the omicron BA.5 variant would vastly improve our protection against it as well as any offspring that might threaten us in the fall. But intuition doesn’t always agree with scientific data.
It’s not intuitive at all to think that waiting six months before getting boosted vastly improves protection. Yet that’s what the data show, and it’s starting to make sense to a few researchers who are looking under the hood at how our immune systems work and what they’re capable of, given enough time.
There’s almost no public data on the efficacy of the boosters for the currently circulating omicron BA.5. Yet the Joe Biden administration has purchased more than 170 million doses from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. Pending recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control, the shots will be available to all adults who are fully vaccinated and, for the Pfizer, to teens as well.