RELATED: Half of People Who Got Pfizer Have Lower Antibodies—Here’s Why. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, you are eligible to receive the Pfizer booster if you received your second dose of the vaccine at least six months ago and meet at least one of the following criteria: You are age 65 or older, live in a long-term care facility, are age 18 or older and have an underlying medical condition that could put you at higher risk of severe COVID-19, or are age 18 or older and work in a location that puts you at high risk of exposure to COVID-19. Underlying medical conditions include, but are not limited to, cancer, diabetes, stroke, heart disease, and obesity. For a full list of conditions, possible exceptions, and other information about your eligibility, consult your doctor or visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website. You may be wondering how, if at all, the third dose is different from the first two you received. And the answer is, it isn’t, according to Albert Shaw, MD, PhD, a Yale Medicine infectious diseases expert. “The simplest answer is that it’s just another dose of a vaccine you received,” Shaw explains. “The concept is to prolong protective immunity, particularly if there is evidence that protection is waning after a period of time.” RELATED: If You Got Pfizer, This Is When Your Protection Plummets, New Research Says. According to Yale Medicine, “so-called “mixing and matching” of vaccines has been used in Europe and other places, particularly ones where there have been supply issues. And there have even been studies that suggest this approach—one dose of AstraZeneca’s vaccine (which is not available in the U.S.) and one dose of Pfizer’s vaccine—potentially offers increased protection. However, in the U.S., the current public health recommendations are that people should stick with one type of vaccine for all doses. Everyone reacts differently to vaccinations—from mild symptoms to more severe feelings of sickness. The good news is that with the third dose of the Pfizer vaccine, you will have an idea of what to expect.ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb According to a recent CDC study, most people that received the Pfizer booster “reported local and systemic reactions were mild to moderate, transient, and most frequently reported the day after vaccination.” In addition, the CDC found that “the patterns of adverse reactions observed after dose three of Pfizer-BioNTech were consistent with previously described reactions after receipt of dose two.” For more helpful COVID news and information sent straight to your inbox, sign up for our daily newsletter. In addition to finding that most patients react similarly to a third dose of the Pfizer as they did to the second, the CDC also determined the most common side effects in general experienced by patients who received the booster. In a recent report that analyzed more than 22,000 participants who completed a check-in survey after receiving a third vaccine dose between Aug. 12 and Sept. 19, the CDC found that pain at the injection site was the most common initial reaction to the shot, followed by swelling, redness, and itching. From the same report, the CDC found that the most frequently experienced side effect of a third dose of Pfizer was fatigue, which 51 percent of survey respondents reported feeling. Other common reactions reported by the participants included headache (38.4 percent), muscle pain (36.3 percent), joint pain (23 percent), fever (22.2 percent), chills (17.5 percent), and nausea (13.6 percent). RELATED: Pfizer Just Made Another Major Announcement About Its Vaccine.
