Updated Covid-19 vaccines boost protection, but may not beat original formula against BA.4 and BA.5, early studies suggest

Updated Covid-19 vaccines boost protection, but may not beat original formula against BA.4 and BA.5, early studies suggest | CNN The updated Covid-19 booster shots appear to work about as well against the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants as the original boosters they replaced, according to two new studies from research teams at Harvard and Columbia universities. Brenda Goodman CNN

...The research suggests that our bodies have been well-trained to fight the original virus, which emerged from Wuhan, China, and that boosters mostly reinforce that response. Getting boosted this fall is still an important way to renew protection, even among people who were previously infected or vaccinated.

But the hope was that by tweaking the vaccine recipe to include currently circulating strains of the Omicron variant, it would help broaden immunity against those variants and perhaps offer better and longer-lasting protection.

When the researchers compared the immune responses of people who got a booster dose of the original shot to people who got the updated bivalent boosters, they looked about the same. ...