Michael Lauzardo, deputy director of the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute and an associate professor at its College of Medicine. They include Chen, Rubin, Osterholm, and Dr. So how can journalists best cover medical issues like boosters and, at the same time, help their audiences understand the evolving nature of the scientific process? We asked several experts for advice. This week the agency will hold open sessions to discuss additional issues related to COVID-19 vaccine booster shots, including whether the agency should authorize additional doses of the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. Last month the FDA granted an emergency use authorization for a Pfizer-BioNTech booster dose in certain individuals. “But remember, we’re in the middle of a crisis. “If we weren’t in the middle of a pandemic and we had four or five years to develop these data to take to, we could have answered the questions, ‘Will you need a third dose at this point? And what does it mean?’” says Osterholm. Johnson & Johnson, which has a one-dose COVID-19 vaccine, is also calling its second dose a booster. Other researchers share Osterholm’s view.īut in press releases and official documents, federal officials and vaccine makers, including Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, have called the third COVID-19 dose a booster.
Covid vaccine timeline series#
A series can be a single dose or two or three doses, explains health journalist Katherine Wu in “ A Better Name for Booster Shots,” published on Oct. “It surely does boost the response, but I think it’s like a three-prime vaccine.”īy “three-prime vaccine” Osterholm is referring to primary vaccine series, which are meant to create immune response and protection in individuals who haven’t received a shot before. “I still believe it’s not a booster,” says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Now there’s debate among researchers and experts about whether the term “booster” is proper to use at this stage of COVID-19 vaccinations. “The two examples I can think of are polio, where the question of boosters never arose, and Ebola, where boosters aren’t really a consideration, at least yet, since the outbreaks resolve over the course of months,” said Rubin.īoosters, as they’ve been used for other vaccines, usually are given several years after the original vaccination, like the tetanus booster that’s given every 10 years. Chan School of Public Health, in an email interview. Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and an adjunct professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T.H. There are few instances in history where vaccines have been developed during an ongoing pandemic, none of which have been of this magnitude, said Dr. “Thinking about how you convey to the where the uncertainty lies and then, of course, the question of how that ultimately affects them, are just some things that we have to have dialed up in our brains a little bit more than usual,” says Caroline Chen, an investigative reporter covering health care at ProPublica. Uncertainty and change have been two common themes of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the recent confusion and controversy surrounding vaccine boosters - including the term “booster” - underscore the importance of journalists’ role in clearly explaining the scientific process to the public. This tip sheet on covering COVID-19 vaccine booster shots was updated on Jan.
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