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Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

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Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#31
post #7

Assuming it's only as effective as the original two-dose shot and prevents for the same duration, it seems like COVID will never go away. Assuming the current trend and a 9 month prevention, that pretty much aligns to what happened last year. So we'd need no new significant variants to develop or any outbreaks. Seems unlikely given that there are many countries with vaccination rates under 50% Probably better to focu…

Is there any reason not to increase vaccine production rates so we have the capacity to vaccinate the world population faster than every 9 months?

> Is there any reason not to increase vaccine production rates

Intellectual property rights.

It's not a "good" reason. But it's a reality that needs to be overcome.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/22/headlines/south_afric...

Germany doesn't want the Pfizer vaccine made freely: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

and by some co-incidence, this is good for German money: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-economy-biontech-...

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#32
I have little understanding of this but someone who actually works on vaccines told me this theory: Your body upon coming in contact with the vaccine starts to product antibodies (the first shot). This is generally enough for a normal immune system to fight the disease if in the future the body was to come in contact with the virus. The second shot is for hyper immunity after 4 weeks. What it does is that it basically tells your body make a lot more antibodies now and the second shot is actually a booster shot. So every time you take a shot afterwards (like in the middle of a pandemic) your body produces an abundance of antibodies and will likely fend off the virus much more easily than if there was no booster dose of any kind and just a vaccine shot. This is important because simply protecting your body from the virus is not enough since you could be carrying the virus and spreading it with mild infection which will not be a problem for you but will not protect others and so the hyperimmunity is important for preventing spread during a wave. I won’t be surprised if this one is a yearly dose as you need to be hyperimmune to not show symptoms and spread.

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#33

Assuming it's only as effective as the original two-dose shot and prevents for the same duration, it seems like COVID will never go away. Assuming the current trend and a 9 month prevention, that pretty much aligns to what happened last year. So we'd need no new significant variants to develop or any outbreaks. Seems unlikely given that there are many countries with vaccination rates under 50% Probably better to focu…

It's why I'm more interested in companies that can treat the symptoms effectively than only the vaccines right now. IMO the only way this ever truly gets better is if the effects can be mitigated quickly.

Whoever figures that out is going to make a lot of money.

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#34
post #8

I am fascinated to know what the effects are of over-vaccination. Is there some spillover effects where a highly-primed immune system begins to get into weird autoimmune reactions? Do weird plaques develop or a build-up of antibodies begin to form in random parts of the body, like in a blood dyscrasia? Or does nothing happen? Chronic vaccine overdoses are so exotic, as access to vaccines had been historically so tigh…

A lot of people get a flu shot every year so on the level of abstraction of "a vaccine" it's not that big of a problem. These vaccines are slightly more side effecty than the average flu shot (flu shots don't usually make you feel as bad for the day or two after the shot) so who knows.

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#35

As far as I can tell is bad news for rare vaccine side effects. If the side effects are rare but you take a booster twice a year for 50 years, rare outcomes become much more likely. (Referring here to the high count but not that high stuff that shows up in VAERS like tinnitus.) Hopefully more vaccines are developed that become safer over time so that the danger falls faster than the repeated risk accumulates. Or perh…

People take the flu shot annually and are generally fine. Unless it’s showing that COVID-19 vaccines are much more dangerous than flu vaccines, this isn’t a big concern.

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#36

It's like Linux on the desktop and fusion reactors. It seems like we are always one jab away from being safe and overcoming covid.

There is no such thing as safety, only varying degrees of risk. Everyone has a different risk tolerance. Failure to explicitly quantify acceptable risks leads to people making invalid assumptions and talking past each other.

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#37

Assuming it's only as effective as the original two-dose shot and prevents for the same duration, it seems like COVID will never go away. Assuming the current trend and a 9 month prevention, that pretty much aligns to what happened last year. So we'd need no new significant variants to develop or any outbreaks. Seems unlikely given that there are many countries with vaccination rates under 50% Probably better to focu…

A few vaccines are 3 doses at 0,1,6-12 months and offer a decade of protection if you don't miss the last dose..

Do they decay in a few months if you do miss the 3rd dose though?

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#38
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're saying that other vaccines, not COVID vaccines, have this property. We can't assess decadal resistance yet for COVID vaccines.

If so, I'm not sure how that's relevant to COVID at the present. Per the article we're discussing it's unclear how long a 3rd dose will be effective for, hence my comment to begin with. If we were to pre-suppose you gain a decade of prevention then yeah, that'd be great.

We don't know how the protections in the current vaccines are going to play out until we investigate them more.

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#39
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're saying that other vaccines, not COVID vaccines, have this property. We can't assess decadal resistance yet for COVID vaccines.

If so, I'm not sure how that's relevant to COVID at the present. Per the article we're discussing it's unclear how long a 3rd dose will be effective for, hence my comment to begin with. If we were to pre-suppose you gain a decade of prevention then yeah, that'd be great.

I think they're saying that we can hope that three shots gives long term resistance, as it happens for other vaccines. We can only hope, and it's not a totally unrealistic hope given how other vaccines work.

Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest

#40
post #21

A question to consider is, how to we move from pandemic to endemic? COVID-19 isn't going away and will join the other endemic viruses like chicken pox, the other widely out there coronaviruses, etc.

It's got to be something like how much of the population are getting sick. I presume when a disease is endemic you have a fairly steady rate of illness and death taking into account seasonal variation. Whereas right now covid still seems to be spreading quickly through the population and causing large numbers to get sick at once.
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