Fall Covid-19 boosters are here. Here's what I'm doing for my family.

Photo by Spencer Davis on Unsplash

The FDA pushed the seasonal Covid-19 vaccine schedule up a few weeks in response to ongoing summer waves. Whether this early release reflects wise epidemiology is unclear, but I am worried that for most people**, we are “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” by adding protection to eager vaccine recipients who will get boosted now, but will be doing so at the expense of less protection later in the fall and winter, come peak virus season. (**Immunocompromised people can get vaccinated more often, so this early release is good for them, because they don’t have to worry about one-and-done timing.)

The most common question I get from readers, friends, and family is “Should I get another dose of the Covid-19 vaccine now?”

The first thing to know is that one-size-fits-all approaches are dicey, and the CDC has a tough job. So, my main “stadium-voice” message for you is this: While I might not agree with all aspects of it, the CDC’s latest guidance on when to get a Covid vaccine is safe and is a reasonable “best fit” message for 330 million Americans.

But that’s not exactly what I'm personally doing for my family and me, and I want to give you a sense of how I work through these issues. What follows are explicitly not recommendations for anyone but the specific people and the situations I’m describing. Rather, this is a window into how I think about these problems. And, as you’ll read below, it truly is case-by-case…