The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended simplifying COVID-19 vaccine use, including nixing the term booster. The change is an uphill climb and offers lessons in change communication.

The FDA’s deck from January 2023 explains the rationale. The goal is “harmonizing the vaccine strain composition of primary series and booster.” In other words, to eliminate the need for and complications of multiple shots. Instead, the FDA and Center for Disease Control (CDC) want people to think of the COVID vaccine like a flu vaccine and to get a new one each year. The push to avoid the term booster started even earlier, when Stanley Plotkin, renowned physician who developed the Rubella vaccine, suggested the change:

My point, basically, was that calling them boosters implies that the first doses were failures.

Calling the third dose a booster is immunologically incorrect and also gives the wrong impression that somehow the vaccines failed when they could not really have been expected to give a long-lasting immunity from the first doses.

(Here’s an Atlantic article for a fuller linguistic discussion.)

Last month, CDC vaccine advisor Keipp Talbot said, "Bye bye, booster. We are no longer giving boosters, and it's going to be very difficult to stop using that word because that word has become pervasive.” The CDC’s and FDA’s latest webpages about COVID-19 vaccines don’t mention boosters but refer to “updated vaccines.” On New York’s site, we’re instructed to “Make an appointment for an updated COVID-19 vaccine,” but a page titled, “Booster Doses” still exists, likely for people searching for the old term. As Talbot warned, the change will take some time.