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New boosters are coming; here’s why they’ll be better, says Dr. Jha
"This combination of vaccines and treatments really have turned this into a non-lethal disease.”
This September may bring more than fall leaves and cooler temperatures: A new round of COVID boosters can be expected this fall, Dr. Ashish Jha said on an episode of “A Second Opinion” posted Monday.
The boosters, which Jha said he hopes to see in September, are specifically designed to protect against BA.5, a subvariant of omicron.
“Based on the data we have, [the new vaccines] should be better at providing protection against infection, preventing transmission and then providing even more robust protection against serious illness and death,” the White House COVID-19 response coordinator said. “Again, we’ll see where the data lands but I am very hopeful that that’s what these new vaccines are going to add.”
Jha said the vaccines should be “widely available as we get into September and October,” noting that they must be approved by the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Prompted by a question from the podcast host, former Sen. Bill Frist (a physician himself), Jha emphasized that being up to date with the COVID vaccines is crucial for people to protect themselves from serious infection.
“We need to make sure people are up to date on their immunity. This is a virus that’s evolving very rapidly,” Jha said. “Just in the last year we’ve seen not just omicron but all the sub variants of omicron, BA.5 out there now, a lot of evolution of the virus. We have got to make sure our immunity is staying up.”
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Being up to date has two main components, Jha said. First, Jha said he has come to conclude that the COVID vaccine is, at minimum, a three-shot vaccine. He noted that it is common to have multi-shot vaccines, pointing to polio and hepatitis B, which are four and three doses, respectively.
Timing of doses, however, is also important, Jha said.
“It can’t be too far out. If you got your third shot, let’s say a year ago, your protection against serious illness may still be pretty good but your protection against infection is not very good at this point,” Jha said.
While the pandemic today looks very different from a year or two ago, Jha said there is still a long way to go.
“We are in a much, much better place, that is good. Unfortunately, we still have some challenges ahead,” Jha said. “We’re still at about 4 to 500 deaths a day, so a lot … A lot of people getting very sick, a lot of people dying. We’ve got to do more to drive those numbers down.”
Jha called the COVID treatments a “real game changer” in the fight against the pandemic and said Paxlovid, an antiviral treatment that reduces hospitalizations and deaths by almost 90%, is one of few drugs he has seen in clinical practice that is so effective.
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Paxlovid does come with some setbacks, Jha said, namely the Paxlovid rebound that made headlines with President Joe Biden’s case earlier this month.
“What happens with Paxlovid is it is such a powerful antiviral, that it just shuts viral replication down almost immediately and people feel remarkably better within 24 to 36 hours, as though they weren’t infected at all. But you still have a little bit of lingering virus,” Jha said.
In about 5 to 10% of cases, Jha said, people will get a rebound infection from that lingering virus. This rebound may be less frequent with a longer regimen of the drug, Jha said, something the National Institutes of Health is looking at right now.
Though rebound cases can be “annoying”, the good news is very few rebounds lead to hospitalizations or deaths, Jha said.
He said his thinking is that if you are eligible for the antiviral, get it because the “downsides of getting it are so minimal.”
“We are at a point where, if you’re up to date on your vaccines, you’ve gotten vaccinated, and you get treated, your chances of dying of COVID is close to zero,” Jha said. “It’s really impressive, this combination of vaccines and treatments really have turned this into a non-lethal disease.”
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To hear the rest of Jha and Frist’s conversation, listen to the Aug. 22 episode of “A Second Opinion.”
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