Covid-19 booster works best if taken in same arm as last Covid-19 shot: Report

For best result in terms of immune response, a person should take the booster dose in the same arm as their last Covid-19 shot, as per the study.

Updated on: Aug 20, 2023, 01:45:53 IST

By Adarsh Kumar Gupta

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According to latest study, it has come to the picture that the arm in which a person takes the Covid-19 booster shot, makes a difference in terms of its impact. According to a study published on August 11 in the journal eBioMedicine and reported by CNN, for best result in terms of immune response, a person should take the booster dose in the same arm as their last Covid-19 shot.

“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.

The study was done during Germany’s vaccine campaign. The study involved the medical data of 303 people who received the mRNA vaccine as well as a booster shot.

According to the study, two weeks after the booster dose, the number of “killer T cells” were significantly higher in those persons who had got both shots in the same arm.

Dr. William Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, commented on the study although he was not associated with it.

“It’s absolutely fascinating because this is a subject that is clearly under studied,” said Schaffner.

“I can’t remember another study similar to this with other vaccines,” he added.

“I began thinking, ‘Which arm am I going to get them in?’ And I think I’m going to get my Covid booster — on the basis of this study — in the same as the previous inoculations,” said Schaffner.

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Scientific reasoning of the study

Schaffner tried to scientifically reason with the study to comment on why the location of the injection may result in different immune response.

The cells that provide the immune response are in local lymph nodes, said Schaffner as quoted by New York Post.

According to the study, if the immune cells in those lymph nodes are restimulated in the same place, there is a greater immunological response.

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