Mayo Clinic Q&A podcast: Breaking down the booster terminology for COVID-19 vaccines

COVID-19 vaccine boosters will soon be recommended 8 months after a person's second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, according to news reports.

"A vaccine booster dose is generally an additional dose above and beyond the primary series needed to achieve protective immunity," says Dr. Gregory Poland, an infectious diseases expert and head of Mayo Clinic's Vaccine Research Group. "So the dose that was approved this past week would be better classified as an “additional dose” for those who are moderately to severely immunocompromised." Dr. Poland says those people will have already received two doses but need the additional dose in order to improve their immune response to the vaccine.

Dr. Poland continues, "If we got to the point where we would offer a third dose of the same vaccine to older adults, health care providers and essential workers that would be a booster dose. Then if we used a variant-specific vaccine, which researchers are working on, that would be called a variant booster dose."
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Information in this post was accurate at the time of its posting. Due to the fluid nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific understanding, along with guidelines and recommendations, may have changed since the original publication date.

Dr. Poland has served as a consultant for Merck & Co. Inc., Medicago Inc., GlaxoSmithKline plc, Sanofi Pasteur, Emergent BioSolutions Inc., Dynavax Technologies Corp., Genentech Inc., Eli Lilly and Co., Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc., Kentucky BioProcessing Inc. and Genevant Sciences Corp. Honoraria: Elsevier.