Let’s simplify the COVID vaccine message

Credit: uscvhh.org

The U.S. still lags on COVID vaccination, and I think fuzzy messaging bears some of the blame.

So let’s simplify things.

Starting this past April, the only vaccine in the United States is a bivalent mRNA vaccine. Bivalent means it has two different pieces of virus in it that instruct the immune system.

The two pieces are the original virus strain (a piece of the ancestral Wuhan strain), plus one of the Omicron variants. These little snippets instruct the immune system to make antibodies to protect you from COVID infection.

It's recommended that everyone have at least one bivalent booster. So if you have not had a booster since September 2022, please get one.

Now, if you’ve had one bivalent booster and you are 60 or older, you can get a second booster of the COVID bivalent.

For the future, it's looking more and more like we're going to do an annual COVID vaccine with the flu shot.

This fall, it looks like that would be two different injections, one in each arm.

Eventually, people are trying to put both vaccines together in one shot.

And the bivalent COVID booster this year will be different than the one that’s currently available because you want to keep up with the evolving the story of COVID. We want to keep up with new variants. The whole idea behind changing vaccines is to keep up with the virus, actually try and get ahead of it and deal with those variants.

So the message is: Get the new bivalent booster, stay current with the vaccine and let’s stop virus spread.