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Covid-19 vaccines will soon be available in pharmacies as the United States sees a surge in infections. But is it wise to get vaccinated quickly or wait a few weeks to get the best protection against a potential winter wave?
Experts say it depends on your health, whether you’ve recently had Covid-19, which vaccine you plan to get and when it’s convenient for you.
“It’s not a straightforward answer, quite frankly,” said Dr. Carlos del Rio, a distinguished professor of medicine at Emory University and an infectious disease expert.
“We are in the middle of a huge wave. Many people, including yours truly, have recently been affected by Covid,” he said.
This is why it will delay the updated shot.
“If you’ve been infected in the last three months, I would wait. There’s no need to get vaccinated because you’ve been vaccinated, in a sense. You’ve been ‘vaccinated’ by the current strain,” he said.
On the other hand, if you haven’t had Covid recently, and especially if you’re 65 or older, “I recommend getting vaccinated as soon as possible,” Del Rio said. The same goes for people with underlying health conditions that put them at higher risk of serious outcomes from a Covid infection.
Who is most at risk of hospitalization or death? Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Center for Vaccine Education at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee, says people who get seriously ill with COVID fall into four main groups.
“First, there are people who are immunocompromised, then there are people who have health conditions that put them at high risk, such as obesity, diabetes, and chronic liver, lung or heart disease. I think three of them are pregnant women, and four of them are what I now reluctantly call elderly,” which Offit categorizes as people over 75.
Offit and other experts say younger, healthier adults can wait their turn. In fact, it may be wise to do so, because the first-line immunity boost the vaccine provides wears off within a few months. Waiting until the fall ensures you’re better protected during respiratory virus season, which tends to peak in December and January.
“If you haven’t been infected recently, the new booster doses are very important,” said Dr. Megan Ranney, dean of the Yale School of Public Health. “The current COVID variants are very different from those of last winter, and this year’s booster doses are tailored to the new variants.”
She agrees that older people and people with underlying health conditions who have not been recently infected should get vaccinated now, but she will delay hers a bit.
“I plan to wait until the same time I get my flu shot, in October,” she said.
Ranney noted that the updated mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna will likely be available first, with the Novavax vaccine arriving in a few weeks.
“If you are nervous about mRNA for any reason – although these vaccines are very safe – the Novavax booster, which is protein-based, will be available soon as well,” she said.
Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco, is also waiting a few weeks.
“I’m certainly not going to rush to get vaccinated. I’m more worried about the winter than the summer,” he said.
But the golden rule of vaccination is to “know thyself,” he said. If you’re someone who tends to get distracted and busy and forget to get vaccinated, the best time for you is whenever is convenient for you.
“It’s a general principle that if it works for people and they can’t get vaccinated later in the year, any shot is better than no shot,” Chin-Hong said. “I think for me, I like to get it all at the same time. So I get the flu and COVID at the same time. It kind of minimizes the travel.”
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Ideally, people wouldn’t have to try to figure out the best time for a single shot when there are multiple waves of Covid each year, said Dr. Peter Hotez, an infectious disease expert and director of vaccine development at Texas Children’s Hospital.
“The reality is we’ve had waves of Covid every summer for the last few years, and so I think we need to kind of reset or rethink how we administer Covid vaccines,” Hotez said.
“Given that the mRNA vaccines are not very durable – not as durable as we would like them to be – we would have to vaccinate twice a year,” he said. “The question then becomes, do companies have the capacity to produce more than one vaccine per year? … And so that’s the next set of questions that will arise.”
