When I got my latest COVID booster—the new one with the updated spike proteins, which we should all make sure to get—the pharmacist asked, as I rolled my sleeve back down, if I wanted her to update my vaccine card. To tell the truth, I’d forgotten I even had one.
Not only are vaccine cards no longer necessary to track your shots or to prove your vaccination status, the CDC has stopped issuing them. So if you can’t find yours, no worries. And if you do still have it handy, tuck it away to pass on to your grandchildren, as a souvenir of that time you lived through a pandemic.
How to keep track of your COVID vaccines without a vaccine card
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It’s gotten a lot simpler to keep track of vaccines, which is why the cards are no longer needed. If you got a COVID shot when they first came out, you probably remember timing your first and second doses (three weeks apart for Pfizer, four for Moderna) and then counting the weeks until your third shot (if you’re immunocompromised) and the months until you were eligible for a booster.
Those rules are gone now. Most of us just need one dose of the new shot, and that’s it. We’re done. There are only a few exceptions to that rule:
- Children under age 5 may need more than one dose, depending on which vaccine they get and whether they’ve had a COVID vaccine before.
- People who are moderately to severely immunocompromised may benefit from extra doses; the CDC has more information for you here.
- If you have recently caught COVID, you may (if you prefer) delay your next vaccine for three months. There’s no need to delay it, but you probably have a bit of protection due to your immune system having fought the virus recently, so you can rely on that for a short time.
How to find out about your previous vaccines
If you don’t have a card, the way you keep track of previous vaccines is the same as for flu shots or any other vaccine: your provider will have tracked it in your medical records.
If you got your vaccine at a pharmacy, then, the pharmacy will have a record of it. If you got it from your regular doctor, your doctor will have the record. If your provider uses an app like MyChart to share lab results and medical records, your vaccine record is probably in there somewhere. If you’ve looked and still can’t find it, ask your provider for that information. And if you can’t remember where you got your vaccine, some states have an immunization database that may contain your records.
By the way, even though technically it’s illegal to forge a CDC vaccine card, there is nothing stopping you from writing down the dates of your vaccines on a card or a piece of paper, the way parents often do for babies’ shots. As long as you don’t put the CDC’s seal on it, it’s just a piece of paper.