141–150 of 717 posts
Why haven’t they updated the vaccine? I thought one of the major benefits of this technology was the ease with which you can modify them.
Feel free to unflag me now-
https://www.businessinsider.com/omicron-specific-booster-sho...
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According to the CVS person who did my booster, the booster for Pfizer is a full dose while the Moderna booster is a half dose (relative to each manufacturer's original first and second shot doses).
According to this source https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/02/comparing-the-covid-19-v... the original Pfizer dose was 30 micrograms of vaccine, while Moderna's was 100 micrograms. If that is correct, then Moderna's booster would still be more vaccine (50 micrograms) than Pfizer's original dose. Of course more is not necessarily better!
I have a few relatives in the medical field (all vaxxed and boosted) that have explained the booster shot is just more of the same stuff - they haven't had time to make a new recipe.. so isn't this just the same study all over again? i.e 2 shots had high protection in the beginning and waned over time. Can we expect the same from the booster shot?
Soo... you're building up better immunity against the "baseline" virus with each dose. That immunity translates to some (reduced) immunity to the variants. But if the "baseline" is high enough, you can afford some drop in efficiency.
Perhaps in some ideal world, the boosters would be tuned to the variants. But as you say, they would need to be re-tested etc. Cf. the AZ vaccine, which through some arcane process causes (extremely rare) blood clots, it's probably hard to verify ahead of time a modified vaccine wouldn't suffer from such side effects.
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Vaccination. Why it doesn't seem to be working is that not everyone is getting vaccinated and there are pockets where the numbers are even lower. EVERY single study shows the likelihood of hospitalization and death is much higher in unvaccinated individuals, why is this hard to understand?
Let’s suppose we won’t hit 100% vaccination rates, for whatever reason. Are we doing this lockdown thing forever, then?
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So you're saying no company ever should undertake any promotion of the benefits of their products? The advertising industry wants a word with you!
That's exactly the point I'm trying to make - it's just advertising, and you're all acting like it's an announcement from a public health authority.
Why should they lie? If their data had something different to their press release, lying and then getting caught (e.g. by a whistleblower) would damage their reputation. If their data shows it's bad, as responsible scientists why shouldn't they come out with the truth to protect the general public, and say "We'll continue work on the Omicron-specific vaccine.".
Unless you think their main motive is to boost their stock price in the short term. That kind of thinking should be reserved for people dealing with the blockhain-ponzi schemes.
So it seems to me that as long as we all remain obsessed with case numbers and not actual hospitalizations and death, this isn't going away, at least not anytime soon. I personally find this beyond depressing.
[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3963606
I have a few relatives in the medical field (all vaxxed and boosted) that have explained the booster shot is just more of the same stuff - they haven't had time to make a new recipe.. so isn't this just the same study all over again? i.e 2 shots had high protection in the beginning and waned over time. Can we expect the same from the booster shot?
One impact is that antibody levels are higher after the booster than after the second dose.
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No they should not make recommendations to the public, because they aren't a public agency - they have a conflict of interest. It's like a hedge fund manager giving public advice on stock picks.
Not the same. They are not giving advice or recommendations, they are reporting the results of a study. That's the beauty of a good scientific study: you do not have to trust the author. In fact don't, the more people try to find errors the better.
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At this point, does anyone believe we’ll get back to normalcy? What’s the path?
Personally I think the path is countries which have a high vaccination level need to stop implementing restrictions whilst making mitigations such as increasing healthcare capacity (which they should have done 18 months ago but many didn't), paying for rapid testing, enabling PTO for people who think they are sick, sensible mask mandates, etc... These countries need to lead the way to accepting we've waited for vacci…
Besides, restrictions have an exponential effect (by reducing the R value) whilst mitigations only have a linear effect. That makes it hard to replace one with the other. Instead I think earlier, less stringent, restrictions to start damping the wave early, combined with as much mitigation as possible are probably the right solution.
Every wave, its a new game of 'flatten the curve'. And really that is what we need.