Covid-19 Booster Rules Getting Complicated; Mix and Match Coming?

In a world that makes less and less sense every day, add this to the mix: Government doctors and regulators are deciding right now if it's a good idea to allow mixing and matching booster shots. In other words, if you got the Moderna vaccine, could you get a booster of the Pfizer vaccine?

This debate is ahead of the likely approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of booster shots for both Moderna and Johnson and Johnson. But those are simple, straight-ahead, boosters, essentially one for one. If you originally got the Moderna vaccine, you'd be getting the Moderna booster, and the same goes for people vaccinated with the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. Pfizer is already approved.

But the discussion is going beyond that, according to this story on Click on Detroit. What's expected is the FDA will say, ideally, you should get a booster of the same vaccine you got first, but...researchers are finding that mixing a booster in, not from the original still gets the antibodies in to fighting mode. But when Johnson and Johnson recipients got a booster of one of the other brands, things got really interesting.

"Recipients of the single-dose J&J vaccination had the most dramatic response -- a 76-fold and 35-fold jump in antibody levels, respectively, shortly after either a Moderna or Pfizer booster, compared to a four-fold rise after a second J&J shot." -Click on Detroit.

Where the discussion is, too, Moderna has applied for approval of a half dose for its booster shot. All this has to be sorted through and figured out, since people come in all sizes.

And it doesn't get any less complicated with Merck working on a Covid pill. How does that playing into this?

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