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Which arm gets the Covid-19 booster may make a difference, study shows
When you go to get your newly updated Covid-19 booster this fall, you might want to choose the arm the vaccine goes in carefully.
The immune response may be stronger if your booster goes in the same arm as your last Covid-19 shot, according to a study published August 11 in the journal eBioMedicine.
“The question seems so banal, so trivial that nobody before has thought to ask it,” study coauthor Martina Sester, a biologist and head of the department of the Institute of Infection Medicine at Saarland University Hospital in Germany, said in a news release.
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS - SEPTEMBER 09: A pharmacist prepares to administer COVID-19 vaccine booster shots during an event hosted by the Chicago Department of Public Health at the Southwest Senior Center on September 09, 2022 in Chicago, Illinois. The recently authorized booster vaccine protects against the original SARS-CoV-2 virus and the more recent omicron variants, BA.4 and BA.5. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
The immune response may be stronger if a Covid-19 booster goes in the same arm as your last shot, a new study suggests.
The researchers used the data of 303 people who received the mRNA vaccine as well as a booster shot as part of Germany’s vaccine campaign.
Two weeks after the booster, the number of “killer T cells” was significantly higher in those who had both shots in the same arm, according to the study.
Those cells, which attack and destroy the other cells they target, were present in 67% of the same-arm cases and only 43% in people who had their injections in different arms, according to study coauthor Laura Ziegler, a doctoral student at Saarland University.
“It’s absolutely fascinating because this is a subject that is clearly under studied,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville and former medical director of the nonprofit National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. Schaffner was not involved in the study.
“I can’t remember another study similar to this with other vaccines,” he said.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/18/health/covid-vaccine-arm-wellness/index.html