Who doesn't want to boost their immunity? That sounds great. Like why not boost something that we just want more of?

From boosters to breakthroughs have the words we use to explain our pandemic moment obscure as much as they reveal.

From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Also on this show, we tend towards simple stories,

and that's what's made the complexity of the pandemic so hard to follow.

If you go up and down and up and down and up and down,

you've sort of lost the feeling that we're on a path to something,

that there's an end point of any kind.

Plus, our greatest medical breakthroughs always come with a cost.

Everything at some level is a gamble.

And I think we don't like to think of it that way.

I think we like to think there are safe choices, but they really are never safe choices because there's always some risk.

It's all coming up after this.

From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

This week, the FDA authorized booster doses of Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines.

This follows the agency's approval of additional shots of the Pfizer vaccine back in August.

The FDA says no matter what COVID-19 vaccine you initially received, your booster can be whichever one you choose.

A recent study found a small pool of J&J recipients saw a 76-fold

increase in antibodies with Moderna, a 35-fold increase with Pfizer, and just a four-fold increase

with J&J. The term booster is just one example of a term that's crossed over from the medical

lexicon into the mouths of us non-specialists,

eager to embrace language that clarifies the COVID risk we face.

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