As I understand it(which could be completely wrong, so take with a grain of salt), there is no actual 'stopping' variants. The idea is to keep tricking your body with mock spike proteins, so that your body builds defenses against it. And data shows the more shots you get, the more your body builds resistance. So when the real thing arrives, it doesn't affect the host as much, if at all.

Is the booster customized for Delta? The article doesn't say.

No. Pfizer indicated it could develop and begin mass-producing a variant-specific booster within 100 days, if a third dose of the original vaccine is ineffective. [0] But the plan is to use the existing stock.

I'd feel a lot safer if Pfizer started developing a polyvalent booster with mRNA for all significant variants.

0. http://ctmirror.org/2021/08/13/pfizer-ceo-to-public-just-tru...

The boosters in question are not at this time. Same as other shot.

It's confusing because Pfizer was touting they could modify boosters for variants months ago.

This binary thinking is wrong. Nobody thinks three shots will "stop" the delta variant. They think it'll lower the number of severe cases and deaths.

Okay, so if the binary thinking is wrong, why stop at three? Why stop at all? Does the science say we just blast our bodies with as much mRNA as we can get away with?

Elementary economic thinking answers this question.

Benefits asymptote, so you'll stop at the point where the marginal benefit of an additional shot is less than the marginal financial cost, marginal opportunity cost and marginal cost of side effects all combined.

That's definitely not the case before two and may not be the case before three based on data we've seen. It might be the case before four.

And this doesn't factor in declining immunity over time. It might make sense to keep taking shots every half a year forever, until COVID mutates into something less deadly perhaps.

This is basically what is done with the flu shot although it's a very different mechanism in the actual vaccine.

> until COVID mutates into something less deadly perhaps.

How do we know that that hasn't already happened? If we don't know, when will we know?

We will know when CFR/IFR goes down among unvaxxed people who haven't had COVID before.

Assuming you are asking earnestly, because of diminishing returns. Pfizer has been found to be 90 something percent effective at 2 months. They've noticed it seems to lose about 3% effectiveness per month, leaving you at 70-something percent after 8 months. That's with the data we have today, it could be much higher or lower as more data is collected.

To preemptively answer your question - yes, I could see needing to get a booster every 8 months for the foreseeable future.

"Assuming you are asking earnestly, because of diminishing returns."

The economics of this are showing increasing returns to the worldwide medical cartels, so this looks like it will continue indefinitely. With broad immunity to product safety laws, why not lay in another billion or two as profit? The C-level company staff will gleefully take home fat bonus checks.

They can't. No clinical trials. It's a hail mary.

I feel like "hail mary" would imply some sort of negative consequences for failure in this case. But short of the third shot just dropping dead everyone who takes it (unlikely), it will be easy enough with our media ecosystem to suppress adverse events and handwave away any problems with efficacy.

I mean, we're already seeing numerous countries experience higher cases and hospitalizations with 50%+ vax rates than they ever did before the vaccine rollouts but hardly anyone is asking "hey, what's going on here?"

>I mean, we're already seeing numerous countries experience higher cases and hospitalizations with 50%+ vax rates than they ever did before the vaccine rollouts but hardly anyone is asking "hey, what's going on here?"

There's no reason to ask because we actually do know what's going on here. The r0 of OG COVID is ~3, higher than the flu. The r0 of Delta COVID is between 5 and 9, and the CDC currently estimates it at 8.5. Worse, Delta generates more, and more serious, hospitalizations (among the unvaccinated). [0]

Which countries are experiencing hospitalization rates higher than pre-vaccine times? More importantly, do those trends disappear if you look at areas within those countries that are highly- or poorly-vaccinated?

[0] https://health-desk.org/articles/how-contagious-is-the-delta...