What The COVID Vaccine Does To Your Body

Need a booster
In fact, booster doses are required to maintain the effectiveness of most vaccines.

Take, for example, the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine known as MMR, which is given to babies around the world to prevent these childhood infections.

About 40% of people who received only one dose are not protected from all three viruses, compared with 4% of those who received the second dose.

People in the first group are four times more likely to get measles than people in the second. Outbreaks have been observed in places where a significant proportion of people did not complete the full MMR vaccination.

"The reason people think boosters are vital is because they kind of put you into a completely different mode of fine-tuning your body's immune response," says Danny Altmann, professor of immunology at Imperial College London.

How Vaccine Boosters Work
When the immune system first encounters a vaccine, it activates two important types of white blood cells. First of all, these are plasma B cells, which are primarily involved in the production of antibodies.

Unfortunately, this type of cell is short-lived, so while your body can fill up with antibodies in just a few weeks, without a second injection, it is often accompanied by a rapid decline in their number.

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