"What they're saying: "Even if boosting were eventually shown to decrease the medium-term risk of serious disease, current vaccine supplies could save more lives if used in previously unvaccinated populations than if used as boosters in vaccinated populations," the scientists wrote."
In other words, it isn't even saying they aren't needed at all, but that it is better to have everyone fully vaccinated before we start on giving boosters - with the exception of some folks with compromised immune systems.
And to be fair, this is the sort of messaging that other places were handing out. It also isnt all that unusual that different parties give out different information, especially when some of those folks aren't medical professionals versed in such diseases or the intricacies of the immune system.
Your comment also makes me very happy to not be in the US right now. The government here (Norway) simply sent me an SMS when the vaccine was available, and prompted me to schedule both doses at that time. I imagine if we get to the point of booster shots, something similar will happen.
But I hope we get the world a dose or two of the vaccine first so that fewer people might die.
If it's not clear, I'm talking about how "we don't need to wear masks" != "masks don't work" as much as it was "we need all the masks for medical staff right now and there is a shortage". Similarly, the messaging should not be "we don't need boosters" because we we inevitably DO need people to take a booster it will be met with resistance due to "changing facts", instead the messaging should be "boosters help but it's better to get more people vaccinated with 1-2 shots before we focus on boosters".
Places like Israel that immunised large swathes of population very early are already seeing signs of waning effectiveness and are planning to give booster shots in the near term. In the UK we're also in the same boat. Early vaccination has transformed life here, with low death rates despite high transmission. The protection the vaccine gives is providing us with massive benefits. It looks like boosters for older people going into winter make sense.
In the US that's not as clear. Vaccination has become a bitterly contested right vs left issue, in a way that it just isn't in Europe. Our Conservative government in Britain has been at the front line of pushing through a massively successful vaccination campaign, with broad cross party support for the strategy overall. There's plenty of political credit to go around. The contrast with the US couldn't be more stark.
I think the Biden booster plan looks ill advised, but at least he's not talking his voters into getting them or their loved ones killed or crippled by this thing. I'm sitting here, a fully vaccinated British conservative, watching interviews with dying patients in US hospitals saying they didn't get vaccinated because they are conservatives, wondering how things could have gone so horribly wrong.
There's an entire subreddit dedicated to this and the patterns of behavior from these people become clear pretty quickly. They think prayers are more effective than vaccines.
But yes there clearly is a religious dimension to this, which again there just isn't at all over here in Europe bar some fringe cults. But it's the political affiliation that seems to be the defining factor. I know there's been an anti-vax movement, but as far as I'm aware that wasn't a mainstream Christian position across the evangelical landscape in the US. Fringe yes, but a tiny fraction of the levels we're seeing for covid.
Expecting simple and final answers to questions depending on a myriad of factors (some unknown or even unknowable!) is stupid.
In my opinion, it betrays a complete misunderstanding of how <science> works, and what it can do; the fact that scientific consensus CHANGES with new data is central and necessary.
And it's also completely meaningless to complain about "disagreement between experts" unless you are willing to precisely lay out and compare all those base assumptions that were made to interpret and answer your question (something "sceptics" rarely bother with).
Sorry for the rant if I misinterpreted your position.
I don't think "covid sceptics" are the only ones guilty of this. Far from it in fact.
Vocal believers in "covid orthodoxy" (can't think of a better descriptor right now) seem much worse at acting as if simple and final answers exist for everything.
Annoyingly necessary disclaimer: I am not a "covid sceptic" by any stretch, I am fully vaccinated and believe that many precautions are warranted. But I am sick of being told what to do based on uncertain emerging science.
Case in point: vaccine passports seem to be an example where the policy was concocted based on assumptions about the science which turned out to be untrue (the assumption being that vaccinated people wouldn't carry or transmit Covid.) I believe that most governments are only keeping them in place in order to inconvenience people into getting vaccinated. This is exactly the sort of thing that fosters more scepticism, even if a lot of it is misguided.
There are multiple reasons for experts to be against boosters. A few that come to mind:
- Requiring boosters to maintain "fully vaccinated" status undermines public trust in the vaccine's efficacy. This depresses willingness to get it in the first place, and utterly destroys the confidence of those that already "did their part".
- While the long term prevention of COVID contraction and spread seems to be beyond these vaccines, they do significantly reduce the severity of a COVID infection. I would guess that a large portion of the scientific community has accepted that this may be the best that can be done. Getting COVID and having the vaccine means that you likely have more durable long term protection with severely reduced risk of hospitalization.
Something to remember when it comes to public health: you, the individual are unimportant. What matters is the herd. If that means sacrificing a few to save the many, governments will do it and lie to you the whole way if that is what is required to accomplish their goal.
Booster shots confirm that the vaccine doesn't actually work. IMHO, vaccines for colds cannot work because "cold viruses" are fundamentally different than viral diseases like chickenpox or measles.
A very large percentage of the population thinks the public health authorities are full of it. I gently poke fun at people who half-heartedly take mask recommendations seriously [0].
[0] https://twitter.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1420989505163567107
> - While the long term prevention of COVID contraction and spread seems to be beyond these vaccines, they do significantly reduce the severity of a COVID infection.
I think the injections were only tested/deployed in the spring/summer, when virus 'cases' would be expected to decrease anyways. I expect the injections will be recognized as a total failure by next spring.
IMHO, the pandemic-as-vaccine-marketing-campaign was obvious from the beginning. It reminded me of the time I convinced my passenger that the moon was 'going away' [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881670
> Something to remember when it comes to public health: you, the individual are unimportant. What matters is the herd. If that means sacrificing a few to save the many,
At least you're honest about this.
> governments will do it and lie to you the whole way if that is what is required to accomplish their goal.
The core lie is that SARS-CoV-2 is a super-virus that warrants extraordinary measures, when in fact the commonly-used treatment (oxygenation) for SARS-CoV-2 is what drives the deterioration [2]. Public Health should have stuck with the 2019 plan for pandemics, instead of tossing all the old recommendations.
If the Government had used the "pandemic" to address the 'obesity epidemic' it would have improved public health. But instead lockdowns worsened the obesity epidemic. Whoops.
Maybe you still think there's a ventilator shortage [3]? If so, take SCUBA diving classes. They'll teach you how to not blow up your lungs.
[2] https://www.taxiwars.org/2021/06/folly-medical-hyperventilat...
[3] https://twitter.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1439999710702358531
[minor edits]
It's not our job to be virologists, it's not our job even to be scientists. It is our job to conceptually understand science well enough to know that disagreement between scientists does not imply that one of them is wrong, or that their "expertise" is suspect, or that they're motivated by culture wars.
P(vaccine worth it | aforementioned) = low
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01442-9
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/928365 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr...
“If you have had COVID-19 before, please still get vaccinated,” said CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky. “This study shows you are twice as likely to get infected again if you are unvaccinated. Getting the vaccine is the best way to protect yourself and others around you, especially as the more contagious Delta variant spreads around the country.”
What is clear, however, is young people with antibodies (either through vaccination or prior infection) don't need to live in fear.
"SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold (95% CI, 8.08 to 21.11) increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected, when the first event (infection or vaccination) occurred during January and February of 2021. The increased risk was significant (P<0.001) for symptomatic disease as well."
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
There's more data coming out supporting getting vaccinated even with a prior infection: https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/covid-19-studies-natural-i...
It is also just logical that vaccination + natural immunity is better than one or the other.
BTW, the WaPo opinion piece you linked is out of date based on the numbers: https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/covid-19-studies-natural-i...
vaccinated vs. unvaccinated & previously uninfected vs. unvaccinated & previously infected.
Giving any support to the middle group runs the risk of individuals who need to be vaccinated to not get vaccinated.
Many people will think it must be like masks: once the "experts" get their boosters, then they'll tell everyone else it's a good idea to get it. They just want to be sure there's enough for them, first.
I have some travel coming up in October. I plan to get the Moderna booster even though I'm not in an eligible group.
Still waaay better than covid or the flu, but damn. The world is never going to be the same.
I get the flu shot every year and have zero side effects, it’s a different type of vaccine but I believe the Chinese have developed an inactivated virus vaccine for covid.
Im not sure it quite works that way but maybe it really is as simple as "less more often" = fewer side effects, "more less often" = more side effect, less often"
I could have easily lied and said that I am immunocompromised, but that is not my style. Maybe I need to keep looking to find someone who will give it to me.
> Still better than covid, but damn
I mean maybe?
Technology advances, fortunately.
There is no going back to normal if everyone gets covid: it is a deadly disease that has killed close to five millions of people.
This sort of fatalism is not a really useful approach for reasoning about the risk, in my view.
People will forget, it's in our nature to push on and survive.
> Technology advances, fortunately.
If you have the current technology you will get Covid. It's not if, it's when. Eventually we will have good vaccines (in a decade or two?) and maybe people won't get it. By that point it will have mutated into being a cold for most people.
> This sort of fatalism is not a really useful approach for reasoning about the risk, in my view.
Covid is a serious thing and I'm sad for the people that died from it, before vaccines and the unvaccinated. If someone is carrying even a little extra weight I would plead with them to get the vaccine. Let's just be honest though, the risk is just really really low for anyone in decent health. With the vaccine it's 0.
Just to clarify that it's not the virus that will become more benign in an endemic situation - it's the hosts that will adapt to it, similar to how baby's/children's immune systems develop. At birth they are immunologically naive but then their immune systems are being primed by exposure to common pathogens like coronaviruses, influenza etc (which is why young children are ill all the time).
> Let's just be honest though, the risk is just really really low for anyone in decent health. With the vaccine it's 0.
I agree with your assessment but let's not forget that the IFR of Covid-19 scales exponentially with age. Which is another reason to get the vaccine.
It's a huge system that involves thousands of people.
I'm convinced if Covid hit in the 50's we wouldn't have near the deaths. We're such a unhealthy society now. Best just to focus on health going forward.
edit: that's not what they were suggesting. I misunderstood!
He is repeating what experts have said, which is basically, because Covid is dormant in animals and domestic pets, and because you can spread it while vaccinated, essentially everyone will eventually get Covid. If you are vaccinated, your symptoms will be, on average, less severe.
Will babies be exposed to it enough, to eventually make vaccination a thing of the past? Do we vaccinate for other common colds right now (OC43)? Or maybe the opposite conclusion, that as you age you should be vaccinated against the common colds.
Never have I said that. I'm just saying it's time to get vaccinated and move on with life. Everyone will get Covid at some point.
if your decision making is fueled primarily by click bait bylines, youre going to have a bad time. if you read through to the nuance of each story, the narrative doesnt flip flop quite as much as it first appears.
quite honestly, the details havent changed that much since the beginning. primarily effects the elderly, travels by spit through the air but not as airborn as measles, on a spectrum more load is worse, if infected seek monoclonal antibodies and quarantine yourself, vaccines prevent hospitalization, occasional boosters will be likely until entire population develops built in immunity. delta has brought the age bracket down (or is that because the first round of most likely to be infected are already gone) a bit and increased the transmission rate.
And I've seen other talk about "experts" saying that boosters are not needed (https://www.axios.com/covid-19-vaccine-booster-not-needed-ex...)
This shit is so fucking exhausting.