Coping with COVID: Booster shots of Pfizer vaccine begin this week for workers at KC area hospitals

Hospitals in the Kansas City metro began administering the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine to frontline workers who received their initial doses last month.

The second dose – or booster – is said to be essential to the vaccine’s effectiveness.

However, people who get both doses should not consider themselves immune to the virus and should continue mitigation efforts, according to health experts.

It’s been three weeks since frontline workers at Truman Medical Centers in Kansas City started receiving Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.

Each vaccine is different in the amount of time people have to wait to get the booster. Pfizer has a 21-day wait time between doses, while the waiting period for Moderna is 28 days.

“When they gave it in this study, between doses and the amount that they were given were all carefully plotted out by by the people who organized the studies. When we talk about the high effective rate of this vaccine, it’s based on those studies of people that got second doses,” said Dr. Sarah Boyd, infectious disease physician at Saint Luke’s Health System.

“In that, that time frame that the study had dictated at the beginning. I think when we go outside of that, we don’t always know what does that do to our effectiveness or how far can we really push it,” Boyd said.

Symptoms could appear after the final dose., likely to last less than 24 hours.