Flu season will soon be upon us. Flu season runs from November to April. The flu vaccine typically lasts about 6 months. You should try and get it closer to the November timeline so it can carry you through the entire Flu season., With respect to the new COVID vaccine that should be gotten 6 months after your last vaccine/booster.
Should Your Flu and COVID Shots Go in Different or the Same Arm?
Two shots on one side might be expected to double how sore that arm will get, though the experience of each vaccine recipient will depend on a bevy of factors, including the ingredients in the shots and that person’s infection and vaccination history, as well as their immune-system health.
The CDC advocates for separating vaccination shots by at least one inch of space. Per the agency, if a COVID shot is being given at the same time as a vaccine “that might be more likely to cause a local injection site reaction,” the shots should be dosed into “different limbs, if possible.” Two types of flu shots cleared for use in people 65 years and older—the high-dose vaccine and the adjuvanted one—fall into that category. But the different-limb advice doesn’t seem to apply to other flu shots, including those cleared for use in younger adults and kids.
Sallie Permar, a pediatrician at Weill Cornell Medicine, and Stephanie Langel, an immunologist at Duke University, both said they’d probably get both shots in the same shoulder; so would Rishi Goel, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
However, someone ends up taking simultaneous flu and COVID shots, the placement is unlikely to affect how much protection the vaccines provide. There could be an argument for letting “each side focus on its own thing,” says Gabriel Victora, an immunologist at Rockefeller University. “But it probably doesn’t make a whole lot of difference.”
Which arm gets picked for which shot, though, will affect where the jab’s contents end up. After a vaccine is injected, its immunity-inducing ingredients meander to the nearest lymph node, such as the ones in the armpits. There, hordes of immune cells fight over the vaccine’s bits, and the fittest and fiercest among them are selected to leave the lymph node and fight. Here, again, doubling up on one arm shouldn’t be an issue, Goel said: The immune-cell boot camps in these lymph nodes have “a good amount of real estate.”
It might even be a good idea to stick the same limb—and thereby, the same lymph node—every time you get another dose of a particular vaccine. After immune cells in a lymph node spot a particular bit of pathogen, some of them march off into battle, but others may hang around like reserve troops, mulling over what they’ve learned. A couple of recent studies, one of them in mice, hint that repeated delivery of the same ingredients to those veteran learners could give the body a slight edge—though the extent of that advantage “might be marginal,” Says Victora.
Permar even points out that getting the newly formulated COVID vaccine, which includes new ingredients tailored to fight Omicron subvariants, on the opposite side from the previous rounds could help its ingredients reach a fresher slate of cells. “I think you could convince yourself either way,” she says.
That said, no one should stress too much about getting a shot in the “wrong” arm. It’s not like you’re immune on the left side and not on the right side.
Until Next Time: Stay Safe, Stay Healthy and be careful out there
James A Vito, D.M.D