A simple trick could make your COVID vaccines more effective, study says. What is it?
As COVID-19 establishes a permanent place in our lives, it’s likely booster shots will become part of the vaccine regimen for many Americans.
An omicron subvariant took off during the holiday season — known as JN.1 — and now accounts for 90% of all new COVID-19 cases, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
New variants will continue to emerge as the virus evolves, the CDC says, but there may be a way to help COVID-19 boosters be just a bit more effective.
Researchers from the Oregon Health and Science University explained the easy way to get the most out of your COVID-19 shot in a Jan. 16 study published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
The trick? Alternate arms.
The researchers found “as much as a four-fold increase in immune response when people alternate from one arm to the other when given a multi-dose vaccine,” the university said in a Feb. 6 statement.
Vaccines creating ‘memory formation’
The researchers followed 947 people starting at the beginning of the pandemic who said they were going to get vaccinated against COVID-19, the study said.
All of the participants received a first dose of the vaccine in whatever arm they chose, but then half of the study participants received their second dose in the same arm and the other half switched arms.
The groups were paired based on age, gender, and time interval between vaccination and exposure to the virus later on, the study said.
In the weeks following the second dose, the researchers collected blood samples from participants and measured the number of antibodies in the body that were capable of fighting off the virus.
Those who got shots in two locations had a higher number of antibodies, the study found.
“By switching arms, you basically have memory formation in two locations instead of one,” study author Marcel Curlin said in the statement.
How do vaccines work in the body?
Vaccines were first discovered as an effective way to prevent viral infections 227 years ago when Edward Jenner, an English physician, used liquid from a cowpox lesion to create an injectable material that prevented the symptoms of smallpox, according to the study.
Since then, vaccines have become the primary way to stop the spread of infectious diseases in much of the world, the researchers said.
As of the time of publication of the study, 5.5 billion people had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, the researchers said, making it one of the most widespread vaccines in the world.
The vaccine works by triggering your immune system to create “memory” T-lymphocytes and B-lymphocytes, according to the CDC.
These are immune cells that “remember” the shape of the virus when it enters the body and can attack and kill the viral cells.
Lymphocytes are a type of white blood cell that are developed in bone marrow but triggered by lymph nodes, which are sacks of tissue that filter fluid in your body for outside invaders, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
The researchers believe that by getting the COVID-19 shot in different arms, it may be triggering an immune response from multiple lymph nodes in different parts of the body, increasing the number of lymphocytes that are created to fight the virus.
‘Might save a lot of lives’
When researchers checked the blood of the study participants two weeks after their second COVID-19 vaccine dose, they didn’t see much difference between the two groups, according to the study.
But when they checked again at three weeks post-shot, they “measured significantly greater numbers of antibodies capable of binding and neutralizing the SARS-CoV-2 virus in blood samples,” the university said.
The number of antibodies continued to increase as time went on, the researchers said, from increasing 1.3-fold to as high as four-fold for some participants, according to the study.
The researchers noted the antibodies against the omicron variant increased significantly.
“This question hasn’t really been extensively studied, so we decided to check it out,” Curlin said. “It turned out to be one of the more significant things we’ve found, and it’s probably not limited to just COVID vaccines. We may be seeing an important immunologic function.”
Many vaccines use the multi-dose model, including vaccines against tetanus, hepatitis, polio, meningitis, measles, whooping cough and shingles, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
If any of these vaccines could be even slightly more effective when alternating dose locations, it could make a significant difference worldwide.
“Any incremental improvement might save a lot of lives,” Curlin said. “I’m going to switch up my arms.”
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