Will we all need COVID vaccine booster shots?

How do boosters work and how can we celebrate Eid safely this year?

As more and more people are fully vaccinated around the world, attention has turned to whether or not booster vaccines will be required to maintain immunity and to protect against emerging variants of the COVID-19 virus. A booster vaccine is designed to strengthen our body’s immune response to an antigen or “foreign invader” that it has been primed to respond to by a previous vaccine. These are commonly used to protect against diseases such as tetanus and polio, where, after time, our immunity against the antigen wanes. Boosters are usually a shot of the same vaccine again, just given at a later date. Scientists are still studying how long immunity provided by the COVID-19 vaccines lasts, and whether or not they are effective against the new variants of the virus which have already emerged.