Why are we boosting kids?

People had no idea the highly transmissible Omicron variant was going to come along. Against prior variants the mRNA vaccines really looked like a miracle in that you could really get people vaccinated before the disease got to them. Moderna said they could have an Omicron vaccine ready in 100 days but I (I think the median person) got it 45 days after it was discovered.

I am sick of the armchair quarterbacking. In our family we had our own model for how it was going to progress last summer and we thought that the seasonal effects would really drive it, the Delta and Omicron variants broke all our assumptions.

The new battle is over variants it's a global problem. China has kept the virus out with strict but targeted lockdowns. Even if they achieve "zero COVID" that won't stop variants from being bred in the rest of the world. Even if the US controls it will spread in Africa and other developing countries. Even if the blue states do everything right than the red states will breed new variants.

Stricter controls in better controlled areas are going to have a limited impact, what will make a different is stricter controls in less controlled areas.

The right wing in America generally supports Trump, who initially called covid a minor cold in February 2020. Ever since then there’s been a strong faction of the right that argues that taking measures to prevent covid is wrong, whether that be masks, vaccines, or anything else. Implicitly this is because if fighting covid is good, downplaying covid in February 2020 was wrong. (This persists even now that Trump has claimed the vaccine as his achievement).

> How much peer-reviewed research about booster shot efficacy has come to light? We were told that a third shot is ineffective against the Omicron variant, and also told that the Omicron variant's symptoms are very cold-like and that it's not really killing people

FWIW, research is and has been showing the opposite - that booster shots generate antibodies which can neutralize the Omicron variant, and that Omicron is killing people despite initial claims - mostly from the right wing, anti-covid mitigation crowd - last year that it was “mild”.

Everywhere I go, I'm hit with messaging about how important the "vaccine" is. On the buses, on YouTube, on the Twitter sidebar "fact-checking" doctors who don't toe the party line. Nine or ten months ago, we were told by our President and media elites that vaccination is the way out of the pandemic. Unfortunately, that turned out not to be true. We can point the finger and say we were lied to, or that they were operating off incomplete information, but none of that really matters. What matters is that now, we know a lot more about these "vaccines" (which should REALLY have been called a prophylactic shot) than we did a year ago. The clear and present facts are:

1) Even with mRNA shots, you can catch COVID

2) Even with mRNA shots, you can still spread COVID

3) Even with mRNA shots, you can still die from COVID, however the risk and severity of illness is supposed to be far reduced, though that benefit seems to wane after 4-5 months.

4) Even in a country in which over 90% of the population has had mRNA shots, COVID continues to spread. Why is this? I don't know. But it's clear as day that contrary to what we were told before, vaccination is NOT the path out of the pandemic, nor the path to herd immunity. Omicron is actually the answer. Study the great flu of 1917-1919 - the virus mutated to a far less harmful form, and became endemic. The same will happen with COVID, unless puts on tinfoil hat some fuckery goes on.

But vaccines could help, sure.

Just, we don't know the percentage of severe existing preconditions in these mortalities, but the guess is 99.9%