The increasing prevalence of new coronavirus variants is raising questions about how well protected those who’ve already had their COVID-19 shots are against evolving forms of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Here, microbiology and infectious disease specialist William Petri of the University of Virginia answers some common questions about COVID-19 booster shots.
William Petri
William A. Petri Jr., M.D., Ph.D., is a professor of medicine at the University of Virginia. He received MD and PhD (Microbiology) degrees from UVA, did medicine residency at Case Western and returned to UVA for infectious diseases fellowship immunology and molecular pathogenesis of enteric infections and their consequences. Petri spends 3 months of every year caring for patients on the general medicine and infectious diseases services and the remainder is focused on research on infectious diseases, especially the molecular pathogenesis of diarrheal infections in children living in poverty in Bangladesh and the immunology of C. difficile infection in a mouse model and in patients at UVA hospital.