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.
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
#22My understanding is that if you've had a two-shot series you should get a third shot within 12 months of your second in order to extend immunity for a significant period of time. I'm hoping boosters are offered for Pfizer & Moderna soon, because most people I know are fully vaccinated but also aware that COVID is basically endemic at this point.
Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
#23As 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 perhaps the rare side effects are due to personal susceptibility and aren't cumulative so people who didn't get bad side effects the first time won't get them the 90th.
Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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..
wow, wasn't aware of this development. which COVID vaccine is this? is it one of the nasal ones?
I assume this is snark, but misguided if so. I believe the parent comment was simply stating there are some vaccines generally with this trait, so perhaps the covid vaccines would similarly improve from a 3rd dose
Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
nope - as you allude to, ideally we could spit out these vaccines and just give people 6-month boosters until everyone is vaccinated and we're good. I believe the issue is that too many people fail to get vaccinated so it's challenging. Requiring boosters might also convert small numbers of people who got a vaccine one to not get it subsequent times.
In the first world there is an issue of take up. But around much of the rest of the world, the issues is they haven’t received nearly enough vaccine.
If we don’t significantly vaccinate much of the rest of the world, my expectation is a continued high rate of variant creation as well as continued economic instability due to logistics disruption.
Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
wow, wasn't aware of this development. which COVID vaccine is this? is it one of the nasal ones?
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.
Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
#27> Probably better to focus on the minimum number of vaccinations necessary to make hospitalization/death unlikely and move on from there. It would be nice if we could meet even that bar, but the US is currently at 53% of the population vaccinated, and much of its medical system is collapsing. Which is fine for that 53%, until they have a heart attack, get in a car accident, cancer, are immuno-compromised, etc, etc. G…
"Collapsing" is a serious overstatement.
The trauma center emergency room in my state is diverting patients to less-capable facilities. Elective surgeries (such as for cancer and other life-threatening conditions) are being cancelled. All of this is happening in states representing perhaps a third of the US population.
Not being able to get lifesaving cancer removal surgery is the state of affairs that people colloquially mean when say a medical system is "collapsing."
Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
wow, wasn't aware of this development. which COVID vaccine is this? is it one of the nasal ones?
I assume this is snark, but misguided if so. I believe the parent comment was simply stating there are some vaccines generally with this trait, so perhaps the covid vaccines would similarly improve from a 3rd dose
it was an honest question. what about it came across as snarky?
Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
#29I 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…
Annual flu jabs aren't exactly uncommon. Obviously the mechanism isn't quite the same but there's no real reason to expect a high chance of issues at that rate of revaccination.
Re: Israel’s Covid-19 boosters are preventing infections, new studies suggest
#30> Probably better to focus on the minimum number of vaccinations necessary to make hospitalization/death unlikely and move on from there. It would be nice if we could meet even that bar, but the US is currently at 53% of the population vaccinated, and much of its medical system is collapsing. Which is fine for that 53%, until they have a heart attack, get in a car accident, cancer, are immuno-compromised, etc, etc. G…
"Collapsing" is a serious overstatement.
How else would you describe a situation if ICU beds in your area are full? [1]
Do you think a bed will appear for you, if you get into a serious car accident? Will you even want to be going to the hospital for chemotherapy, right now (And that's assuming the oncologists are actually doing their jobs, instead of treating COVID patients)? To the doctor's office for some routine care, if you have a vulnerable person in your household?
Hospital beds and doctors aren't Kubernetes containers. You can't simply spin more up based on a demand surge.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-hospitals-...