Booster?
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As I mentioned earlier I’ve tapped out of all things vaccine. I am getting the booster as soon as I can.
All the people who want to talk about it are the ones who were skeptics in the first place. If it gives those people some strange semblance of intellectual redemption that’s cool.
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But just think...If you just go out and get infected, you might have even more antibodies!
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The question of how best to use the available number of vaccines to slow COVID down is more relevant than ever. Is it better to maintain a small number of people with say 75% efficacy against transmission with quarterly boosters or would it be more effective to get a much larger percentage of the world population up to 40%? My bet is the latter, but I’m no mathematician. And since the vaccines do maintain their efficacy at protecting against serious cases, hospitalizations, and death then there are extremely important ethical considerations as well.
100% vaccination rates in the US does nothing to prevent new vaccine resistant variants from rising among the billions of unvaccinated around the world.
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Here's what I don't understand...If antibody levels can be correlated with clinical outcomes, why should we practice one size fits all medicine?
Antibody levels have been adopted for multiple discrete analyzers and with just a wee bit of effort would have less than 24-hr TAT. Then, you just jab who needs it...
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Their is sooth in what you say but I don’t know how that works in the real world. It’s probably easier to offer to everyone because most people have waning antibody levels. There will be some I presume that can wait longer than 6 months.
We don’t measure titres for childhood vaccines. Everyone gets the same schedule.
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I would think the presumed safety of the vaccine also impacts it, I mean why not? Right?
Of course, I am curious if there have been any studies done regarding the 6 month boosters or if we’re just flying by the seat of our pants?
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@lufins-dad I believe I posted the New England paper released 15 September.
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@bachophile thanks! I didn’t read through it. Does it only cover efficacy or does it cover safety as well? That’s about to become the new rallying cry, I’m sure…
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@bachophile said in Booster?:
Their is sooth in what you say but I don’t know how that works in the real world. It’s probably easier to offer to everyone because most people have waning antibody levels. There will be some I presume that can wait longer than 6 months.
We don’t measure titres for childhood vaccines. Everyone gets the same schedule.
Schedule guys for q 6 month antibody draws, if they are over 60. If they ping low, refer them to their PCP or other venue for their booster.
With volume, you could probably get the AB test raw cost to less than $10. As good as y'all are with money, technology and the ability to squeeze a deal, probably a good bit less.
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@lufins-dad the New England paper only covered protection from infection and severe disease as a primary objective.
Safety has been reported to the CDC in Pfizer’s phase III as being no different from the first two.
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So it seems the FDA says no boosters….yet
My prediction. Wait three or four months and it will be ok’d. In the meantime plenty of useless deaths.
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@bachophile said in Booster?:
So it seems the FDA says no boosters….yet
My prediction. Wait three or four months and it will be ok’d. In the meantime plenty of useless deaths.
Pushing this stuff through fast should be top priority. Somebody needs to light a fire under the FDA. Trump was praised for doing this by the some of same people that now say the vaccine is risky and/or ineffective.
Politics makes us stupid.
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Ok. Semi reasonable. But I still bet it will be ok’d for everyone eventually. Because hospitals will start filling up with only young patients. Often the parents of school age children who will bring it home with them and infect the parents with waning immunity.
Just sayin.
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@bachophile said in Booster?:
Ok. Semi reasonable. But I still bet it will be ok’d for everyone eventually. Because hospitals will start filling up with only young patients. Often the parents of school age children who will bring it home with them and infect the parents with waning immunity.
Just sayin.
Agree, it feels like this is just a stepping stone and that is the way people need to look at it.
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A scientific advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration on Friday overwhelmingly recommended against approving a booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for people 16 and older.
The committee voted 16 to 2 after holding an intense daylong public discussion on whether booster shots are necessary and if so, for whom. The Biden administration has been hoping the F.D.A. would approve a third shot of the Pfizer vaccine in time to begin rolling out boosters for Pfizer recipients next week.
The vote came after a sharp debate in which many of the panel’s independent experts, including infectious disease doctors and statisticians, challenged whether the data justified a broad rollout of extra shots when the vaccines appear to still offer robust protection against severe Covid-19 disease and hospitalization, at least in the United States.
“It’s unclear that everyone needs to be boosted, other than a subset of the population that clearly would be at high risk for serious disease,” said Dr. Michael G. Kurilla, a committee member and official at the National Institutes of Health.
It was not immediately clear whether a second vote, on whether booster shots should be approved for older people, who are more vulnerable to severe Covid-19, would follow the first.
Jonathan Sterne, a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology in the United Kingdom, said he had analyzed 76 different studies on the vaccines’ real world effectiveness and found that multiple factors can skew the results, including how many unvaccinated people in a study have natural immunity from prior Covid-19 disease. He also warned against drawing conclusions from short-term results from booster shots; data from Israel, for example, shows only that a booster can enhance protection for a few weeks in older adults.
Israeli experts made a different argument, telling the committee that they believed third Pfizer shots helped dampen a fourth wave of transmission as the Delta variant swept the nation this summer. The Israeli government, which has relied almost entirely on the Pfizer vaccine, began offering booster shots in late July, starting with the elderly.
Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, Israel’s head of public health services said the summer’s rise in the number of hospitalized patients who had been fully vaccinated with Pfizer’s vaccine was “scary.” She said 60 percent of severely or critically ill patients and 45 percent of those who died during what she called the fourth surge had received two injections of Pfizer’s vaccine.
After offering boosters to the general population, she said, Israel is now averaging about half as many severe or critically ill patients as anticipated. She said boosters not only helped curb the spread of infection, but “actually saved lives.”
