Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Moderna booster increased neutralizing antibody levels against Omicron ~37-fold

investors.modernatx.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 198 posts

Re: Moderna booster increased neutralizing antibody levels against Omicron ~37-fold

#131

Post by zamalek »

ed_balls wrote: post #99

Meta: Let say I'm 30 years old, healthy, vaccinated with JJ over 6 months ago. Denmark, Sweden, Finland have banned Moderna for younger than 30. Some countries were recommending it to people over 50. Whole communication is a mess. Should I get a booster shot? What are the pros and cons? Is there any data on that? I asked a friend doctor and she said that I should get a test for antibody count (a lab one, not garbage…

Get a Moderna. Omicron isn't the only variant that you have to worry about, Delta is still ravaging people (and the booster is much more effective against it).

Re: Moderna booster increased neutralizing antibody levels against Omicron ~37-fold

#132

Post by sauwan »

ed_balls wrote: post #99

Meta: Let say I'm 30 years old, healthy, vaccinated with JJ over 6 months ago. Denmark, Sweden, Finland have banned Moderna for younger than 30. Some countries were recommending it to people over 50. Whole communication is a mess. Should I get a booster shot? What are the pros and cons? Is there any data on that? I asked a friend doctor and she said that I should get a test for antibody count (a lab one, not garbage…

I had J&J in April, and it kicked my butt for a solid 24 hours. I got Moderna's booster in early Nov and had I not gone for a 12 mile run the morning afterwards, I probably wouldn't have noticed it. Obviously everyone will have different reactions, but thought I'd share my anecdote.

Re: Moderna booster increased neutralizing antibody levels against Omicron ~37-fold

#133

Post by thaufeki »

jacquesm wrote: post #112
thaufeki wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Or would you rather that they stopped the development of vaccines completely and focused just on the treatment of symptoms? No, but surely it would be easier to produce an antiviral for home use that would alleviate the symptoms of Covid-19, rather than relying on the development of a vaccine, and then demanding almost universal uptake for it to work? Then we could have had vaccines for the sick, elderly, immunocom…

That's the equivalent of 'a mere matter of engineering'. Developing anti-viral drugs is hard, for plenty of viruses we have vaccines but no anti-virals, for RNA based viruses (which mutate rapidely) anti-virals are even harder.

Thank you. I'm not aware of the complications of developing an anti-viral for this disease (and I'm not going to go into the debate around existing anti-virals). I did not intend to be dismissive of the effort involved. I'm coming at it from a place of real frustration.

I can't see how this pandemic ends without an effective treatment.

Re: Moderna booster increased neutralizing antibody levels against Omicron ~37-fold

#134

Post by fsh »

treffer wrote: post #108
ed_balls wrote: post #99

Meta: Let say I'm 30 years old, healthy, vaccinated with JJ over 6 months ago. Denmark, Sweden, Finland have banned Moderna for younger than 30. Some countries were recommending it to people over 50. Whole communication is a mess. Should I get a booster shot? What are the pros and cons? Is there any data on that? I asked a friend doctor and she said that I should get a test for antibody count (a lab one, not garbage…

Cons: you might be sick for a day. (Had very bad reactions to the shots and this one lasted 1 day - but I caught something else before/after...) Pros: seems to help against Omikron. And given the speed at which it spreads you don't have time to wait for updated shots or alike. JJ was particularly bad in not catching it, and even worse after 6 months. Get a booster or have a close to 100% chance to catch Omikron. Offi…

Could you cite exactly where "they announced that Moderna is way better"? All official sources I can find say that Moderna and BioNTech are "gleichwertig" (equivalent).

Re: Moderna booster increased neutralizing antibody levels against Omicron ~37-fold

#135

Post by crate_barre »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #116
najqh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck. I already reached my breaking point with omicron. I am not taking a booster at all. It is quite clear that this will never end. We have to send a message to the authorities.

What is the exact message? I agree this is frustrating but I don’t understand what message not getting a booster will send.

The message is stop playing political theater and creating a media cycle at every variant less it be particularly fatal one.

Re: Moderna booster increased neutralizing antibody levels against Omicron ~37-fold

#136

Post by zrail »

toolz wrote: post #97
ianhawes wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don’t realize that hospitals typically run at 98%+ capacity in the winter in a pre-COVID environment. This maximizes their profitability and allows them to operate relatively at a loss for the rest of the year.

Pre-covid, if you picked a random hospital at a random point in time in the U.S. there was a 16% chance it would be at max capacity and something like a 30% chance it would be over 80% capacity. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840149/ It amazes me that hospitals are shutting down, healthcare worker numbers have barely recovered to 2018 numbers, bed capacity is shrinking in many areas and even still peop…

Healthcare workers take many years to train. When they die of COVID, go on long term disability because of long COVID, or burn out because they can't mentally handle watching another willfully unvaccinated person die, that person is irreplaceable in the short term.

Re: Moderna booster increased neutralizing antibody levels against Omicron ~37-fold

#137

Post by kypro »

simonh wrote: post #78
kypro wrote: post #63

I only realised how serious a threat omicron was when I looked at the South African data recently and you can see how much of a impact it's had on deaths in a largely unvaccinated population. Even if you just compare the case numbers in South Africa to the UK (where most are double or triple vaxed) you get a good idea of how well vaccines are working. For example, in South Africa deaths have gone from about ~15 a day…

I think you're right overall, but that the data doesn't yet support the conclusion. Omicron got traction in the UK at least a week later than SA, probably 2 weeks, so the death rate will lag by the same margin. We need to compare the death rate in the UK now to the death rate in SA a few weeks ago. All the early indications are that the complete data will support your conclusion when it comes in, but frustrating as i…

So in terms of a government response do we care about data now or are we at the point where we just restrict liberties and mandate vaccines assuming the worst possible scenario every time something changes? I guess if we're lucky when the data shows they over reacted they might give some liberties back and hopefully the vaccine rollout won't result in too many adverse side effects. Common.. This is insanity.

I honestly don't know what you're arguing for here. I don't care if people take the vaccine or what the outcome of omicron is, my issue is with the government response given the data we have. The data supporting the use of vaccines to tackle omicron is extremely questionable. And that's not even mentioning the fact that it's already questionable enough to mandate COVID vaccines on healthy individuals given recent data suggesting those vaccinated have less robust immune responses to COVID and all of its potential future variants.

Re: Moderna booster increased neutralizing antibody levels against Omicron ~37-fold

#138

Post by najqh »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #116
najqh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck. I already reached my breaking point with omicron. I am not taking a booster at all. It is quite clear that this will never end. We have to send a message to the authorities.

What is the exact message? I agree this is frustrating but I don’t understand what message not getting a booster will send.

No post body was provided.

Re: Moderna booster increased neutralizing antibody levels against Omicron ~37-fold

#139

Post by jaclaz »

gandutraveler wrote: post #118
nharada wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd get it -- J&J is already known to be weaker coverage, and Omicron spreads so easily that the odds you get COVID are fairly high if you interact with people regularly. If you're looking at it from a sickness perspective, the expected value of sickness without the shot is probably higher (lower chance of many days of feeling bad vs high chance of a single day). Single person anecdote: I was quite sick from J&J and…

Same for me. I had J&J and now moderna booster. Other than mild body pain and tiredness, booster was pretty smooth. Maybe because it's a half dosage

I don't know, I got all three shots of Moderna (two doses at 1 month interval in the summer + booster last week):

1) first dose: nothing

2) second dose: some (minor) pain in the arm I received the shot, that lasted only the morning after I got the dose (that I got around 21:00, so I probably was sleeping when it began)

3) booster (half dose): same (a little stronger) pain in the arm, nothing relvant but this time it lasted a couple days + and it was accompanied by some - cannot really describe it - slight fogginess in my brain, again nothing serious, just the feeling of not being 100% prompt/reactive

Given that this time it was half dose, I tend to believe that while in July I was probably in a better overall status before the dose due to the season (or whatever).

Exactly the same happened to my wife (we had together all the shots).

Re: Moderna booster increased neutralizing antibody levels against Omicron ~37-fold

#140

Post by kypro »

najqh wrote: post #125
kypro wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> average age 28 SA vs 40 UK I think this is definitely part of the explanation. > A lot of immunocompromised people in SA (AIDS) Wouldn't this mean more deaths or am I missing something? Are COVID deaths in AIDS patients attributed to AIDS not COVID? > UK has most of it immunity from vaccination which was mainly targeting AC2 receptor. It's possible that natural immunity or Sinovac (attenuated virus) has better prot…

>Wouldn't this mean more deaths or am I missing something? Are COVID deaths in AIDS patients attributed to AIDS not COVID? I don't know about SA but many countries count any dead person who was infected with COVID as a COVID death, which is a convenient way of padding the numbers.

Yeah, this was my immediate thought. In the UK it would be counted as a COVID death, so assuming South Africa are recording numbers similarly you would expect COVID deaths to be higher in the more immunocompromised population if anything.
Post reply on HN