When Should You Get Your Next Covid-19 Booster? How To Decide

With Covid-19 cases apparently on the rise again, you may be wondering when to get your next Covid-19 booster vaccine. Do you arm yourself again now to better protect yourself against a Summer surge or do you wait for it, wait for it, wait for the next updated version of the booster to be available this Fall? Well, in most situations, you probably want to wait until the Fall but there are some caveats.

Here’s the situation with the next booster formulation. In June, after an advisory panel to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended that the next round of Covid-19 boosters be targeted against the Omicron XBB.1.5 subvariant of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax began working on such vaccines. These won’t be completely new types of vaccines. Rather they will use the same mechanisms and structures and the vaccines that have already been used. For the mRNA vaccines, it will be including mRNA that can get your cells to produce Omicron XBB.1.5 spike proteins. For the Novavax adjuvanted protein vaccine, it will be simply including the Omicron XBB.1.5 spike protein. These XBB.1.5 boosters will likely be available by the late September, early October range. But surprise, surprise, there’s no word of a definite date. So, don’t expect the timeline to proceed like an atomic clock. Things could end up getting delayed for a few weeks. In general, that’s still only about a couple months away, assuming that you treat vaccination like the premier of the movies “Barbenheimer” and partake in it soon after its available.

A couple months can seem right around the corner or an eternity depending on who you are and what you are doing. So again how do you decide when to give yourself a boost? Well, here are some considerations.

Why you should wait until the new XBB.1.5 Omicron subvariant booster is available in the Fall

There are essentially three reasons to wait for the next formulation of the booster. One big reason is that this new version should be a better match against the versions of the virus that are circulating now and that should be circulating over the ensuing months. Recall that the XBB.1.5 Omicron subvariant became the dominant one in the U.S. when 2022 segued into 2023, as I covered for Forbes back then. Granted, the XBB.1.5 is no longer the alpha-dog of variants, having since been overtaken by an alpha-numeric soup of other subvariants, such as EG.5, for example. However, the XBB.1.5 still comprises an estimated 10.3% of all Covid-19 cases in the U.S., according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Covid-19 Data Tracker. And the currently available bivalent boosters were designed to target the original SARS-CoV-2 strain as well as the BA.4/BA.5 Omicron variants that were yesteryears’ news and have essentially gone poof by now.

So, consider the currently available bivalent boosters to be a bit like gaucho pants, hoodie sets, or skinny jeans with chunky sneakers. These bivalent boosters can still work but may not completely match the times. The updated booster with XBB.1.5 will certainly be more up-to-date and thus better match what going on around you. As a result, the XBB.1.5-targetted booster should in theory offer better protection than what you can get now.

The second big reason rhymes with laser printer splurge—an anticipated Winter surge. The past three Winters have seen Covid-19 cases surge in the November through February time frame. This hasn’t been super surprising because that’s when the weather gets colder and drier and lots of activities move indoors, all of which could favor transmission of the virus. And what do you think will happen again this coming November through February now that many people are kind of doing nothing to stop the spread of the SARS-CoV-2? If your answer is, “Definitely no Winter surge,” then you may want to phone a friend or ask the audience.

OK, let’s assume that some kind of Winter surge will occur and protection offered by Covid-19 vaccination begins to wane around four to six months after getting it. Then, getting boosted now might be a case of premature vaccination. Your resulting protection may start waning, oh, around December or so, which guess what could be right in the middle of the Winter surge. By contrast, getting the updated booster in late September or later vaccination could keep you better covered throughout the anticipated Winter surge period.

A third reason to wait until this Fall to get all boostered up is if you just got your last Covid-19 vaccination sometime in 2023. Technically, you aren’t even allowed to get another booster within four months of the last one. This is because studies have suggested that getting another booster too soon may not lead to as robust protection since your immune system might be a bit like a recent college graduate. It needs time to fully get its act together after being exposed to important information like the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2. Only after it’s had time to mull over what it’s seen and contemplate life can your immune system mount an even stronger response to subsequent exposures to the spike protein. In this way, boosters ain’t like avocado toast. You shouldn’t necessarily get them as soon as you see them. Instead, make sure that you space them out appropriately.

Why you may want to get the Covid-19 booster now rather than wait

All that being said, health advice can be like ultra low-rise jeans. It’s rarely one-size-fits-all. Rather, you need to take into account your personal health situation. Not everyone should wait for the next version of the Covid-19 vaccine to become available. There are several reasons why the importance of having better protection over the next two months may outweigh waiting a couple months to get even better protection.

One reason is if you never really got fully vaccinated in the first place. That could leave you relatively unprotected against Covid-19 going into this current Summer situation. Just because you’ve managed to avoid Covid-19 to date despite not being fully vaccinated doesn’t necessarily mean that you have some kind of special sauce in your body that protects against Covid-19. You could have simply been very lucky up till now, which could always run out at any time. Getting vaccinated now to get at least some level of protection against a Summer surge would be better than having virtually no protection.

A second reason is if you are at significantly higher risk for getting severe Covid-19 and haven’t gotten a Covid-19 vaccine in over half a year. This would be the case if your immune system is substantially weakened from some combination of illness, medications, or advanced age. Your doctor can help best make this call because it would entail weighing many different factors. Of course, you could try to be careful about avoiding any SARS-CoV-2 exposure over the next two months. But that’s been getting harder and harder with so many people around you somehow believing that “Covid is over” and acting that way.

A third reason is if you will be at very high risk for getting Covid-19 over the next two months and haven’t gotten a Covid-19 vaccine in over half a year. This may be the case is you will be having heavy interactions with those who have a likelihood of carrying the virus such as working in some kind of a healthcare setting. Again, this is a judgement call best made with your doctor because so many different individual and external risk factors need to be considered together.

What should you do

The bottom line is that most people will probably want to wait until the updated XBB.1.5 Omicron subvariant version of the vaccine becomes available. In the meantime, you can do other things to protect yourself against what may be yet another Summer surge. You can wear a good quality face mask such as an N95 respirator while indoors in public. You can keep your workplace and other gathering locations well-ventilated by opening windows and running air purifiers. You can stay away from poorly-ventilated, crowded locations such as Happy Hours at bars and dungeons. This may not be the only reason to steer clear of Happy Hours in dungeons. In general, it’s a good idea to avoid any settings and circumstances that are at higher risk for transmission such as playing Twister with people who think that the Covid-19 pandemic is a hoax. You can also regularly test yourself and those around you whenever you suspect that you might have been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2, although keep in mind that testing is not super-accurate and can often miss infections. Oh, and, by the way, ask people around you for permission before you test them. Don’t just stick cotton swabs in their nostrils without any warning. If someone tests positive for Covid-19, make sure that they stay isolated until they are no longer infectious.

These would be good precautions to maintain regardless of when you get your next Covid-19 booster. As I’ve indicated multiple times before, while Covid-19 vaccination can offer some important protection, it’s not like a full-body concrete condom. They do not offer perfect protection. In fact, far from it. You can still get Covid-19 after getting vaccinated or after getting Covid-19. And while the risks of hospitalization and death are now much, much lower than they were in 2020, they are still significantly higher than the risks associated with other respiratory viruses. Plus, there’s still the substantial risk of getting long Covid.

The current Summer upswing is a reminder that while the SARS-Cov-2 may be in the process of transitioning more towards a seasonal virus, the Covid-19 pandemic is technically not yet over. While the activity of seasonal respiratory viruses such as influenza tend to drop effectively close to nothingness during the Summer, this hasn’t yet been the case for the SARS-CoV-2. But we are probably getting there. The need for various Covid-19 precautions won’t last forever. In the words of that Guns N' Roses song, “All we need is just a little patience.”