Safety aside, a second shot might not even be necessary. Countries including Germany, Canada and the Dominican Republic have tried out such systems. That’s not a direct parallel, but it does support the general concept of mixing and matching doses. That study includes the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and initial results are expected soon.Įuropean research teams have also published results suggesting that it’s effective to mix one dose of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine with one dose of the shot made by AstraZeneca-Oxford University-which, like Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, is adenovirus-based. National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists are studying what happens when people get a booster of a different vaccine than their original shot. “Until we have better data, it probably is not wise to go and get vaccines unless it’s part of a clinical trial,” she says. Hana Mohammed El Sahly, a molecular virology and microbiology expert at Baylor College of Medicine, is not one of those researchers-and she says she wouldn’t recommend that course of action. Some prominent researchers have decided to forge ahead and get mRNA boosters on top of Johnson & Johnson shots, even without an official blessing from the CDC-and despite the fact that some pharmacies won’t give additional shots to people who are already fully vaccinated.ĭr. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s unsafe to mix them there’re just not a lot of data available to answer the question. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) official stance is that COVID-19 shots are not interchangeable. So, getting back to your immediate question: Should you go get a dose of Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna for additional protection now, as Delta continues to spread? Johnson & Johnson says it has provided those data-which have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal-to the FDA, but it’s not clear if or when regulators would recommend a booster. (Worldwide, the statement says, a booster dose was 75% effective against moderate-to-severe disease the company did not explain the discrepancy, but it may be related to which variants were circulating in countries where the shots were tested.) Two doses offered near-total protection against critical disease. But among a smaller group of people who received a second shot two months after their first, protection against moderate-to-severe COVID-19 rose to 94% in the U.S., according to the company. 21, Johnson & Johnson said in a statement that a booster dose offers improved protection against the virus.īased on a study of almost 400,000 people who received the single-dose vaccine, Johnson & Johnson estimated that its shot remained about 80% effective at preventing COVID-19 hospitalizations through mid-July. Health authorities have not officially recommended that Johnson & Johnson recipients receive boosters.

Moderna has also asked the agency to authorize a booster dose of its shot, but it’s not clear if or when that might happen.īut what about people, like you, who received Johnson & Johnson’s shot? Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) advisory panel voted to recommend third doses for Pfizer-BioNTech recipients who are elderly or at high risk of COVID-19 exposure, but stopped short of recommending them for the general population. Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about whether people who got the mRNA shots made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna should get booster doses. Is that something I should do, too? And if booster shots become recommended later on, should I switch to Pfizer or Moderna?

With the Delta variant spreading, I’ve heard that some people in my position are also getting shots of Pfizer or Moderna for extra protection.

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