There is no reason to believe that getting COVID-19 booster shots, along with vaccinations for flu or other ailments, would pose a danger to people's health systems, Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said on Newsmax Friday.
"We give kids up to a dozen shots in their first year of life," Jha said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "They do fine with it. If you think about the polio vaccine, it is four shots over about a nine-month period, so the body can actually handle this."
His comments come after Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser, said in recent interviews that nobody would argue that optimal protection comes with getting a booster shot, but that it remains to be seen if the booster shot will become a workplace requirement to determine if someone is fully vaccinated.
Jha said that it may not be "ideal" to need multiple vaccines, but "we're in the middle of a pandemic, and we're trying to get our country through it."
Still, "the body manages to deal with this," said Jha. "I get an annual flu shot every year. I've gotten 28, 29 flu shots over my lifetime. It's OK."
Further, there is neither a biological nor a clinical basis to think extra booster shots will be bad for a person's immune system, said Jha.
"It's just immune training," the doctor said. "Your body gets immune training all the time. It's a different way to train your immune system. Sometimes though, these viruses advance and they become weaker, not stronger. Maybe we're seeing that with omicron."
Meanwhile, the doctor said he's been speaking with several companies about how to bring workers back safely, and he's explaining that a third shot is "really helpful" with dealing with the waning immunity from the first course of vaccines.
Jha agreed that determining what constitutes a full course of vaccinations will make a difference in companies' policy requirements, and the terminology is not merely "semantics."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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