Children’s Minnesota Doctor studies effectiveness of COVID booster shots

Dr. Anupam Kharbanda, told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS his research, along with researchers at the CDC, showed COVID-19 booster shots helped people, between the ages of 18 and 65, avoid emergency room visits, urgent care and hospitalizations.

“What we found is, if you had your booster shot, you were definitely protected,” said Kharbanda.  “There was 94-percent protection against ER visits and hospitalizations and we found that a COVID-19 booster dose protected you against Omicron and that the vaccines were very safe.”

Kharbanda said he believes, in the long run, the vaccines most likely won’t be specific to a certain variant, but rather they will be more encompassing.

“I think there are two lines of logic and one piece is that the vaccine doses that we’ve received have durability which means they will protect against all of the variants that will come over the next period of time,” said Kharbanda.

And, Dr. Kharbanda told KSTP vaccines will evolve greatly in the future.

“I suspect what will happen, over time, is that we will build a vaccine that is similar to the flu vaccine which will have the most common types of circulating Coronavirus,” said Kharbanda.  “Some lines of logic would say that you don’t want a vaccine to be too specific.”