I may not be looking at the science of the third doses fully, my understanding it’s it’s a about “well, a third dose can’t hurt, let’s try that for Omicron for now”.
So, waiting until there’s an actual omicron specific vaccine in 6 months seems better. My initial two doses were also 6 weeks apart, the science leading to a third dose recommendation is based on closer spaced initial doses.
The initial messaging was “get a vaccine, we’ll get back to normal soon!”.
Then it was “get two shots of vaccine to fight delta, we’ll get back to normal soon!”.
Now it’s, “get two shots and a booster to fight omicron, we’ll get back to normal soon!”.
In 6 months it’ll be “get this omicron vaccine, we’ll get back to normal soon!”. I’m fine skipping the non omicron booster.
Thankfully no COVID arm this time like I had from Pfizer #2. Only side effects this time were a sore arm and feeling low energy the day after the shot.
3 days later, my arm is actually still sore enough that I can’t sleep on that side. I usually sleep on my belly anyway and I had no other noticeable side effects, so that’s a win.
The initial message was “get fully vaccinated, and we’ll hopefully get back to normal soon.” It’s true that a single dose was pretty good (although the protection was probably short-lived) but there was never official advice to get a single dose of anything but J&J. It was always 2.
When Delta came around, they said “a single dose no longer gives much protection. But two doses recently, or two doses a while ago plus a booster, gives excellent protection”.
A small South African study showed that neutralization was 40-fold less effective against omicron than against wild-type. That’s a big reduction in effectiveness, but vaccination still provides a real benefit. So more antibodies are likely to help
(Note that a factor of 2 is a fairly small difference in effectiveness, typically.) So a third dose restores a lot of the lost effectiveness.
The best data I’ve seen on boosters for Omicron at the moment is from the UK, which spaced the first two doses. (No doubt better data will emerge; there’s very little data on omicron just yet.) This is actual infection data, not just counting antibodies. The immune system is a lot more complex than just antibodies, so this is superior to the antibody studies above, although preliminary, of course:
Among those who had received 2 doses of ChAdOx1 [Oxford-AstraZeneca], there was no protective effect of vaccination against symptomatic disease with Omicron from 15 weeks after the second dose. Among those who had received 2 doses of BNT162b2 [Pfizer-BioNTech], vaccine effectiveness was 88.0% (95%CI 65.9 to 95.8%) 2-9 weeks after dose 2, dropping to 48.5% (95%CI: 24.3 to 65.0%) at 10- 14 weeks post dose 2 and dropping further to between 34 and 37% from 15 weeks post dose 2. Among those who received ChAdOx1 as the primary course, from 2 weeks after a BNT162b2 booster dose, vaccine effectiveness increased to 71.4% (95%CI: 41.8 to 86.0%). Vaccine effectiveness increased to 75.5% (95%CI: 56.1 to 86.3%) after the booster among those who had received BNT162b2 as the primary course.
Summary: Protection from symptomatic Omicron is decent from recent completion of two doses of Pfizer, or from recent boosting with a third dose of Pfizer (75%+). Protection from AZ more than 15 weeks ago was nil, but that increased to 71% after a Pfizer booster.
They only analyzed 581 total cases of omicron, so they didn’t have enough data to determine the efficacy of Moderna, nor the efficacy of any vaccine against serious illness.
All that being said, the theory predicts that vaccine (and prior infection) should protect better against serious disease than against symptomatic disease. You need neutralizing antibodies to protect against symptomatic disease, but trained T-cells protect against serious disease, and T-cell responses tend to be less specialized and more flexible in the face of viral mutations than the antibodies you have knocking around.
So if you are low-risk, and don’t have anyone in your life you are trying to protect from catching covid from you, you can probably wait until we get an omicrom-specific vaccine. Me, I’m old. I will take all the protection I can get. (And I care for my immune-compromised mother.)
Why is snik screaming so much? Don’t get the booster if you don’t want the booster.
They are learning as they go along. So saying they promised we would “get back to normal” didn’t actually entirely happen, but it isn’t like there is a concerted effort to mislead you.
Snik made the first covid thread on the ao, and was therefore up on the seriousness of covid way sooner than I was. I think sniks thread was where i first heard that covid was a thing. Not sure why he is in give up mode now.
Preliminary studies suggest they drop more slowly after a booster. Also, you probably still have enough antibodies to fight off the wild-type virus. You need 8-fold more “wild-type” antibodies to fight off Delta, and perhaps 40-fold more for Omicron. And it’s almost certainly seasonal. I think it’s highly unlikely that the final recommendations will be more than “some subset of people get an annual booster at the start of the respiratory disease season”.
I’d hazard a guess that far more people have quit because they can no longer deal with the ongoing shitshow fueled by anti-vax, conspiracy-theorist, covid-minimizers/deniers than have quit or been fired due to vaccine mandates. Resiliency pizza and gratitude cookies somehow doesn’t make up for vitriol and unnecessary deaths.
The pandemic of 1889 might offer the best insights into the next few years. The pattern of infection was very similar to COVID19 and many researchers now think it was OC43, a now common coronavirus that causes only a mild cold. That pandemic caused notable waves of illness for about 5 years. 2x a year boosters for life seems unlikely, but it also suggests a single round of vaccine or natural immunity would be enough for this to to become a mild endemic cold virus.
One of my extremely pro-vax friends is having a severe allergic reaction to a Moderna booster. She went to the ER and they had her on an IV for several hours with some mix of drugs that made her feel better, but now she’s home and miserable.
She has a rash, not at the injection site, and intense itching that she can’t sleep through. ER prescribed Prednisone and told her to use CeraVe lotion, but it’s not helping… or at least not helping enough. She’s literally bruised from all of the scratching.
Anyone had any experience like this or know someone who has? Any advice?
She’s meeting her PCP later today, but hoping for relief sooner.
