Should You Get Your Covid & Flu Shots At The Same Time? Small Study, New Research Suggests Yes [View all]

NBC, Nov. 14, 2023. - A small study indicated that getting Covid and flu shots together could produce a stronger antibody response against the coronavirus than receiving them separately. - Ed.

The study measured the antibody levels of 42 health care workers in Mass. who were vaccinated last fall. Twelve of the participants received a bivalent Covid booster and seasonal influenza shot on the same day. Another 30 received the shots on different days within the span of a month. Three to four weeks after people got their Covid boosters, those who had received the flu shot at the same time had higher levels of IgG1, an antibody involved in the body's front-line defense against Covid.

The results held true 6 months later, suggesting that co-administering the vaccines could improve long-term protection. “We showed that the Covid antibody responses were higher and more durable if the Covid and flu vaccines were given on the same day,” said Susanna Barouch, the study’s lead author. The research is undergoing peer review and has not been published in a scientific journal.

Ryan McNamara, the lab's director and senior author on the study, said the findings still need to be replicated in a larger group of volunteers, but he felt it was useful to share the results right away. In Sept., the findings were posted to the preprint server BioRxiv. "We thought that these findings were very important for immediate public health decision making," McNamara said. He expects the results to apply to this year’s updated Covid vaccines, he added, though his team plans to explore that further.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends getting Covid and flu vaccines at the same appointment if people are eligible for both shots at once. But that recommendation is based on convenience rather than efficacy, said Dr. Judith O’Donnell, at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in Phila., who wasn’t part of the study. “We probably would want to see this kind of data replicated using the current 2023 vaccines to really know with 100% certainty how giving those together might enhance immunity or not,” she said...
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