COVID-19. Prakash Nagarkatti and Mitzi Nagarkatti are immunologists who study infectious disorders and how vaccines trigger different aspects of the immune system to fight infection.
They weigh in on how the updated booster shots train the immune system and how protective they might be against COVID-19. 1.) What is different about the updated booster shots?
The newly authorised shots are the first updates to the original COVID-19 vaccines that were introduced in late 2020. They use the same mRNA technology as the original vaccines.
The key difference between the original COVID-19 shots and the new “bivalent" version is that the latter consists of a mixture of mRNA that encodes the spike proteins of both the original SARS-CoV-2 virus and the more recent omicron subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5.