Last time I checked there were two COVID-19 vaccines: Pfizer or Moderna.
Now evidently there are three: they added one by a new company: Novavax.
I was all excited, because it uses an interesting strategy. It’s not a dead virus vaccine, nor a live virus vaccine, it’s a decoy vaccine. They make a copy of one of the spikes that make up the “Corona” in Coronavirus and inject it into you. Then your immune system reacts and remembers.
Yes, I was all excited … until I read that in May 2025 the CDC edited their recommendation to say “Individuals receiving immunosuppressant therapy … may have a diminished immune response.”
It occurs to me, don’t all my vaccines depend on stimulating my immune system to build antibodies? If so, then why did my Shingrix vaccine work? Or the Hep B vaccine? Or the boosters I’ve taken while I’ve been on immunosuppressants?
Well, anyway, the rest of you might want to try this Novavax option, if your pharmacy carries it.
2 responses to “TWIL: Three Vaccines”
I guess some mechanisms of antibody production stimulation may be more immunosuppresant-repressed than others? But I am not sure; this may just be a label that should be on all of them. There are also dose-dependent effects (anti-auto-immune-disease is a lower dose of immunosuppressants vs. certain [most?] transplant recipients), so while I’d maybe veer towards a vaccine type that doesn’t have that label, if there is one, I’d take “effects somewhat attentuated at an unknown level” over “not vaccinated” for most things, since even if the body only manages, say, half the effect, it’ll still give it a substantial boost against live virus. (and it may well be 80% or something with autoimmune disease immunosuppressant dose levels! Or not; who knows. But *something* anyway.)
KC – I think from what I read today, one factor is that Shingrix battles the chickenpox virus that it has known about since childhood, and the corona virus is new.