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New OHSU study says most adults don’t need tetanus or diphtheria boosters
New OHSU study says most adults don’t need tetanus or diphtheria boosters
New OHSU study says most adults don’t need tetanus or diphtheria boosters

Published on: 07/28/2025

This news was posted by Oregon Today News

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The federal government has been recommending adults get booster shots to prevent tetanus and diphtheria every ten years since the 1960s.

For the past couple of decades, Dr. Mark Slifka has been scrutinizing that claim. He’s finally ready to say definitively that most adults don’t need to follow that advice.

Mark Slifka, Ph.D., works in his lab at OHSU. A new review led by Slifka, suggests dropping precautionary booster vaccinations in the U.S. for tetanus and diphtheria among adults who have already gone through their childhood vaccination series. This would be similar to guidelines by the World Health Organization, the United Kingdom and in how the U.S. currently recommends vaccination for other infectious diseases.

“We compared countries like the U.S. that vaccinate every 10 years to countries like the UK that have never vaccinated their adults,” says Sifka, microbiologist and immunologist at OHSU. “And lo and behold, we found out that there was no difference.”

“In other words, you didn’t need to continue vaccinating the adults as long as you got your full childhood vaccination series,” Slifka says.

Of course, if you step on the proverbial rusty nail, or are planning to travel to a country with a diphtheria outbreak, it’s still recommended that you get the booster.

Slifka spoke with “All Things Considered” co-host Geoff Norcross.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Geoff Norcross: That’s a pretty bold statement: No shots needed. How did you arrive at that conclusion?

Dr. Mark Slifka: We’ve been studying tetanus and diphtheria for close to 20 years now. In the original study, we looked at a group of people where they had blood samples drawn almost every year for like 20 years.

And when we followed the immune response, we found that it was durable, could last possibly a lifetime. But that was based on a handful of people. So we did a follow-up study to ask the question, are those people superhuman in terms of their durable immune response, or is this something common to the rest of us?

So in 2016, we followed over 500 people and looked at their antibody response to tetanus and diphtheria, and it had that same long-lived immunity that looked like it could give potentially lifelong protection after getting that childhood vaccination series.

But would that translate to protection in real life?

For that, we published a paper in 2021 where we compared countries like the U.S. that vaccinate every 10 years to countries like the U.K. that have never vaccinated their adults.

And lo and behold, we found out that there was no difference. In other words, you didn’t need to continue vaccinating the adults as long as you got your full childhood vaccination series.

Norcross: Your recommendation is in line with what the World Health Organization says. Why do the WHO and the CDC have different recommendations about this?

Slifka: It really comes down to examining the issue and gathering the data. We try to have an evidence-based approach to all of our vaccination programs.

Tetanus and diphtheria vaccines were developed in the 1940s, long before we had the FDA and the CDC working on regulatory policies. And we locked in that 10-year vaccination schedule back in the 1960s.

The World Health Organization has looked at this and they’ve decided that it’s probably unnecessary to do adult vaccinations on a 10-year schedule.

Now, you would still get a vaccination if you step on that rusty nail. Or if you were going to a diphtheria-endemic country, you’d still want to get a booster. But you don’t have to get a shot every 10 years to maintain that immunity, and that’s the difference.

Norcross: There is a financial element to this. How much money could be saved by U.S. adults foregoing these boosters?

Slifka: When we first examined this issue, we calculated that it was about a billion dollars that would be saved by simply removing the 10-year vaccination schedule.

But in this most recent analysis, we added back in the importance of pregnant mothers being vaccinated because our tetanus and diphtheria shots also have acellular pertussis. That’s an important component that we added into our financial calculations.

So if we were able to increase vaccination coverage of pregnant women from the current 50% to up to 100%, we’d be able to increase that coverage and still get a billion dollars in cost savings.

Norcross: Government recommendations on vaccines is a hot topic right now. Given the political realities of the federal government at the moment, I’m wondering if your recommendations to actually get fewer shots might fall on more sympathetic ears.

Slifka: The point I think we really want to bring out is, the best thing you can do for your kid is to vaccinate them.

And not only does that provide vaccination coverage against a whole host of childhood diseases, including measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus and diphtheria, but that reduces the need for these adult boosters.

So this is actually a pro-vaccine study. By vaccinating the kids and maintaining high vaccination coverage, we can reduce the number of vaccines later on. So, in many ways, it’s a win-win.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/07/28/oregon-health-and-science-university-tetanus-diptheria-booster-vaccine/

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