525 - Bivalent COVID-19 Booster Updates: Dr. Andy Pekosz on Efficacy, Recommendations, and More
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 3 October 2022
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Who should get a bivalent booster? How effective are they? How should people space out shots after infection, original strain boosters, and a host of other combinations of immunity and exposure? Can you get a bivalent booster and a flu shot at the same time and are there any benefits to spacing them out? How long did it take for us to get these boosters, and what's the hope for longer-term immunity? Virologist Dr. Andy Pekosz talks with Stephanie Desmon about bivalents and answers listener questions sent to publichealthquestion@jhu.edu.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:12.0 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, |
| 0:17.0 | and a former health commissioner here in Baltimore. |
| 0:19.7 | Our goal is to bring evidence and experience to illuminate critical public health issues. |
| 0:25.4 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.h.orgia. |
| 0:31.1 | That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:38.2 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer Public Health on Call. |
| 0:42.2 | Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Johns Hopkins virologist Andy Peckoshe about a topic that should be on everyone's minds, the new bivalent COVID booster shot. |
| 0:52.7 | They discuss who should get boosted and when and why some of |
| 0:56.0 | the guidance may seem confusing. Let's listen. Andy Pecosh, thanks so much for joining me. |
| 1:03.2 | My pleasure as always. So today, Andy, we want to talk about bivalent boosters. And I'm going to |
| 1:09.1 | start with the easiest question of them all, at least an easy question for you. What is a bivalent booster? A bivalent booster is the most |
| 1:17.3 | recent version of the COVID-19 vaccine that is a dose that's been split in half, with half of it being |
| 1:25.8 | the original vaccine strain, and half of it being the original vaccine strain and half of it being |
| 1:29.6 | a strain derived from the BA.5 Omicron variant, which is the variant that's currently dominating |
| 1:37.1 | here in the U.S. So the idea here is let's try to start getting immunity to people, not only to the vaccine strain, |
| 1:46.0 | but also to the currently circulating viruses |
| 1:48.8 | so that we can maximize protection against severe disease |
| 1:52.5 | as well as potentially from infection. |
| 1:55.6 | So who should be getting one and when? |
| 1:59.1 | So the who is the easy question. |
| 2:02.2 | It's approved. The booster is approved |
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