Month: October 2021

Enlarge / A vial of the current Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. (credit: Getty | Ivan Romano)

Mixing and matching COVID-19 vaccines for booster doses appears safe and as effective—if not more effective—than sticking with the same vaccine for a booster dose. That's according to preliminary data posted online Wednesday from a clinical trial run by the National Institutes of Health.

The trial bolsters what some have long hoped: that mixing and matching vaccines could provide stronger, broader protection against the pandemic virus and all its variants.

The trial was not large enough to definitively indicate which combination of vaccines offers the best protection. And the early results, available on a preprint server, have not yet been peer-reviewed. But the preliminary trial findings do hint that Moderna's mRNA vaccine may offer the strongest protection all around—backing up similar findings from earlier vaccine-effectiveness studies. The data also suggests that people who received the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine may want to get a boost with one of the two mRNA vaccines, either Moderna's or Pfizer/BioNtech's.

Enlarge / Whether you trust this man likely depends on whether you watch right-wing news. (credit: Getty Images)

The US public's response to the pandemic has been chaotic. Some people have observed strict social distancing, happily went into lockdown when case counts got high, and got a vaccine as soon as it became available. Others were nearly the oposite, protesting any public health measures and refusing the vaccine. And a whole lot of the population ended up somewhere between the two extremes.

Obviously, for a complex response like that, multiple factors are probably in play, untangling them can be difficult. For example, conservatives in the US have received anti-vaccine messages from their political leaders, but that's coming on top of a long-term trend of mistrust toward scientific information.

This week, however, a bit of data has come out that does a fairly good job of untangling those complications. One study indicates that skepticism toward scientific information appears to be linked to whether people followed lockdown instructions from health authorities. And a survey indicates that people are more likely to try untested "cures" for COVID-19 if they watch right-wing news sources.