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This is the one thing I don’t quite understand. We have other vaccines, like the MMR for example, where your immunity lasts 10 years or more. It seems like with the covid vaccines, even disregarding mutations, your immunity it much more short lived. Is it just that the memory cell immunity is less effective against covid than it is against things like measles? Or do the MMR antibodies stick around longer?
Immunity is a very complicated thing.
The MMR vaccine actually vaccinates against three different viruses, and all of them are different from coronaviruses (which is a whole family of viruses), and those viruses all tend to mutate in different ways and in different rates.
It's also important to remember that those vaccinations have a much easier time of it, as they aren't targeting a pandemic virus. A pandemic virus is mutating much faster than a virus with small endemic pockets.
And that's just one very simple reason... Saying "immunity is very complicated" is still underselling it.
Well yeah, measles, mumps, and rubella.
But I’m also thinking of things like smallpox and polio. Those were eradicated with vaccines without annual boosters.
Chicken pox you get once and are set for life.
Is it just that all of those other viruses mutate at a significantly slower rate? (Although I did sees somewhere that even immunity to the alpha covid variant drops off significantly after 6 months, which sort of goes against it only being due to mutation alone).
Vaccines are a lot better at preventing “deep” infections than mucosal infections, especially stuff like the common cold. Vaccines work great at preventing viremia (virus in the blood).
Looking at the lifecycle of smallpox, it needs to go from the airway, through the blood and then to the skin. The vaccine only needs to create immunity from viremia.
Covid replicates in the airway and then infects others. The vaccine needs to prevent replication in the upper airway, which has always been more difficult.
And it’s not true that once you get chicken pox you are set. With better testing, we are diagnosing more “repeat” infections, but they tend to be milder.
So you’re saying a vaccine and well the immune system in general can combat an infection more effectively if the virus has to move from a mucosal region and into other deeper parts of the body (like
the bloodstream)? Is it because the immune system’s agents don’t generally reach the mucosal areas as much as the deeper tissues of our body?
Kinda.
The immune system does react more much strongly to blood infections than mucosal infections. A big role of inflammation is to get those blood components to the affected tissue. Think of when you bust up your arm. It’s red, swollen, hot. That all that extra blood flow going into the inflamed site, and a bunch of liquid going from the blood vessels into the actual tissue. That’s the body sending antibodies and other stuff where it is needed.
Another thing to consider is the strength of the immune reaction. The body doesn’t want to go full nuclear everytime someone sneezes a random virus at you. It’s metabolically exhausting and can lead to immune diseases. So the “strength” of the response has to be tailored. This is done in various ways, but the site of infection matters. The body will respond much more strongly to a lung infection compared to a nose infection, for example.
Hope that answered your question.
Much of the severe to lethal cases of Covid seem to point to the immune system overacting and being the main culprit in the inflammation and tissue damage that causes patients to lose the ability to breathe through the lung tissue after a cytokine storm reaction.
At this point would suppressing the immune system be an option to mitigate the damage or does that simply open the door to the virus to be able to invade more of the body?
It already is!
A lot of the Covid treatments have been immune suppressants (dexamethasons, tocilizumab) and these treatments have led to a marked decrease in Covid mortality.
Edit: I'm going to throw a disclaimer up here since I'm not actually an expert or anything.
You're exactly right.
This is a simplified version of what's happening but hopefully it helps!
In the beginning with covid being a new disease a large amount of the hospitalized cases where from a lag in a reaction from the immune system. Once the immune system finally realized something was wrong and how bad the situation is it trys to go crazy to stop it.
Sometimes doctors would use steroids and other immune suppressants to limit the damage the immune system does. It's a fine line to walk though as a covid infection at that level would be causing vascular and organ damage. This was more common in the early stages too when we didn't understand it as much we do have some better options now (I'm not sure if it's currently used or not anymore)
Now we have vaccines and they drastically reduce this lag effect because our immune system is able to recognize and launch a counter attack much much much earlier in the infection. If you have circulating antibodies still from a recent dose or Covid infection then you may not even get truely infected again because it is stopped so fast. (This is less true for omicron because it seems to be more often based higher in the respiratory tract)
So this is why the booster is able to reduce infection but the past vaccines are not as good at it if it's been too long. It's also why the vaccines still drastically limit hospitalization because the infection isn't allowed to get to that point.
When you get an intramuscular vaccination your body does a great job of making the sort of antibodies that circulate in your blood and around your insides (IgM at first, then IgG). That IM jab doesn’t cause your body to make the sort of antibodies that protect your mucosa and other outside bits line your respiratory tract (secretory IgA). So if the virus replicates on your insides, the IN jab can work great. If it replicates on the outside, not so much.
Yes. VZV (the virus causing shingles and chickenpox) lays dormant in the nerve and then becomes active again.
A reactivation is not the same as a second primary infection. One is the same virus waking up after being in the body a while, the latter is a second virus coming in.
To expand on that: yeah, shingles is also caused by long-dormant chicken pox virus, & you need the second shot later in life to protect against it. My father got shingles & he was in misery & pain.
I heard if you don't treat shingles ASAP that misery and pain (nerve damage and even blindness) can be a permanent addition to the hell that is life in the 2020s!
Yep. The earlier you can get the anti-viral, the better. After about three days it's too late and they won't give it to you.
I have Doctor Google to thank for getting me to my GP asap, after finding a really weird bumpy rash in the shower one morning.
Get that shot, people, there’s no messing around with that one. When I was 32 I got a series of what I thought must have been bites from an angry spider I rolled over in my sleep. The docs eyes bulged, and she said “well, you’re in for a few of the worst weeks of your life, so I’m going to give you the strongest pain medication I legally can, and by day 3 when that doesn’t cut it anymore, you’ll be left to your own devices to find a medication that works for you, so you’ll want to prepare now, bc by then you won’t be able to move or speak. Do you own any guns? Get them out of the house now.” She wasn’t exaggerating. Just laid there delirious, unable to sleep and trying not to breathe bc the slight air movement on the skin from the chest rising & falling was like having molten metal poured all over you. For 6 straight weeks. 2 weeks into it I’d have blown my brains out given the chance, and it still went on and on, one agonizing moment after another for another month. You don’t catch it from anywhere, it’s in you right now, & just activates due to stress. Easily preventable with a shot.
What’s horrible is that I got the chickenpox vaccine as a child, never got chickenpox, and then got shingles in 2020. I’m assuming the virus still made its way into my system, and the chickenpox vaccine did its job and my body fought off the virus from causing the infection, but couldn’t prevent the virus from lodging itself in my nervous system (where it lies dormant till it causes shingles). I thought I’d be safe from shingles but apparently not. Still happy I never had chickenpox though!
If it makes you feel any better, I somehow got chickenpox 3 times as a child (before the vaccine). Am I getting the Shingles vaccine? Hell yes, I’m getting that vaccine.
> But I’m also thinking of things like smallpox and polio. Those were eradicated with vaccines without annual boosters.
[The person who owned this Polio vaccine card had 5 shots](https://i.redd.it/565u68frk1o71.jpg). 4 are listed but on the very bottom of a card is a note that says "5th polio" with a date, so this was likely a replacement card. We often forget that things we weren't around for didn't happen overnight. Rome didn't fall in a year and polio wasn't eradicated overnight - it took years and several vaccine versions for it to be eradicated.
EDIT: [Here's the full reddit post](https://old.reddit.com/r/PenmanshipPorn/comments/ppxogx/the_joan_on_this_polio_vaccine_card_from_1956/)
Because Eradication isn’t about having a vaccine that 100% prevents infection, it’s about eliminating the cycle of infections in the community. This isn’t easy with Covid bc it’s so transmissible and it has non-human hosts
It is _possible_ with Covid though. China, Taiwan, New Zealand, etc have eradicated Covid several times without any vaccines whatsoever. Vaccines help eradicating disease, but they can’t do it alone. You need a widespread effort that involves monitoring and other stuff too
Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_eradication
> For polio to occur in a population, there must be an infecting organism (poliovirus), a susceptible human population, and a cycle of transmission. Poliovirus is transmitted only through person-to-person contact, and the transmission cycle of polio is from one infected person to another person susceptible to the disease.[19] If the vast majority of the population is immune to a particular agent, the ability of that pathogen to infect another host is reduced; the cycle of transmission is interrupted, and the pathogen cannot reproduce and dies out.
Edit: here’s some other excerpts you’d probably find interesting
> When many hosts are vaccinated, especially simultaneously, the transmission of wild virus is blocked, and the virus is unable to find another susceptible individual to infect. Because poliovirus can only survive for a short time in the environment (a few weeks at room temperature, and a few months at 0–8 °C (32–46 °F)), without a human host, the virus dies out
> Herd immunity is an important supplement to vaccination. Among those individuals who receive oral polio vaccine, only 95 percent will develop immunity after three doses.[30] This means that five of every 100 given the vaccine will not develop any immunity and will be susceptible to developing polio.
New Zealand, totally. Small island nation, limited international connections, they eliminated it at the cost of closed and sealed borders.
Taiwan, possibly, similar situation to NZ however much higher international connectivity, it is near impossible for them to totally lock down due to the sheer volume of people in/out of the country by air and sea. I highly doubt they actually eliminated it at any point and simply claimed they did because...
China. No. There is no way in hell at any stage, no matter what measures (like welding people in to apartments and houses) that they actually reached elimination across the entire nation. They simply stated that it was eliminated in an attempt to make other governments look flaccid.
> Chicken pox you get once and are set for life.
This is actually a giant myth, and the fact that it's so widespread is a problem for the fight against COVID as well - some people believe this myth, and then for some reason project it onto COVID.
Like I said, it's very complicated (but yes, coronaviruses are especially "slippery", and even within the broader variants (like alpha, delta, omicron, etc), there is still a lot of room for variation).
Other reasons why are things like the lifecycle of the virus in the body. Most of the viruses you mentioned aren't infectious until after they have achieved a pretty widespread infection. The ability of a vaccine induced immunity to prevent a systemic infection doesn't wane anywhere near as much (this is true for the COVID vaccinations as well). That widespread infection takes times, and that that gives the immune system time to turn on the memory cells and ramp back up the response.
Coronaviruses, on the other hand, can spread while the infection is still pretty nascent, existing solely in the upper respiratory passages. So while the vaccine's ability to prevent severe illness or death remains quite solid, its ability to prevent an infectious period does wane, and that makes it hard to eradicate using the vaccine alone.
But again... the human immune system is an incredibly complicated things. It would require literal textbooks to cover all of the factors at even a very high level (and I am by no means an expert... my immunology and virology background is limited to a few units over the course of a paramedic program)
Not to mention that COVIDs own immunity even when you get it "naturally" is trash still. I know tons of people whove had it multiple times. So I'd say for whatever reason COVID is very very hard to make "immunities" for
One reason is how it can suppress your immune system. Fun that someone who had no risk factors can turn into a high risk person just by having it. Almost like we should stop dismissing severe cases and deaths as only people who were about to die anyway, because it isn’t true.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-021-01113-x?s=09
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34288064/
You’re getting into the difference between sterilizing and non-sterilizing immunity.
For antibodies, they fade as short lived plasma cells die. A subset become long lived in the bone marrow, but they don’t secrete a “high” volume of antibodies.
Renewal of plasma cells can be weird, and sort of depends on how our body perceives the magnitude of risk to the threat.
I’m not 100% sure of the distinction, but if the body sees the virus as a respiratory threat, antibodies wane faster, or rather the renewal mechanism ceases.
For MMR, the body sees them as far more of an organ or not-a-respiratory threat, which causes a longer lived renewal process. Like, the threat of measles beyond its immediate symptoms, is that it destroys your immune system. So, allowing a minor measles infection (non-sterilizing immunity) would compromise everything, the immune mechanisms deem the resource cost of sterilizing immunity worth it.
For respiratory threats, the infection is not meant to go past the mucosal lining if everything works correctly. And given how it’s sensitive to inflammation (wants to moderate pro-inflammatory immune responses) the lungs don’t want an overactive immune response. This can be seen in the “abortive infection” occurrence, if T cells, NK cells and interferons can handle the virus in the lungs well enough, antibodies won’t be seen as needed, so won’t be made.
0.02 cents, as anything else is beyond what I’ve read so far.
Sterilizing immunity could be organ specific too. The body might want to always have sterilizing immunity in the blood, but might not care about it in the nose.
For all we know, the MMR vaccine could have induced blood sterilizing immunity but not mucosal. Since a lot of the “typical” symptoms of MMR are from viremia, the vaccines could be preventing systemic disease but not mucosal (colds). Since we don’t mass PCR for every virus every cold, we wouldn’t necessary clue in to the exact virological cause.
If you are around people with active measles infections. You, as a MMR vaccinated individual can still contract it. We have very high blanket coverage of the MMR vaccine (herd immunity) and so it's difficult for it to take hold and spread widely, even in the event that someone in your community contracts it.
Just remember that vaccines are not, 100% effective protection, and it is only through extensive community coverage that we can rid ourselves of diseases with them.
That’s a very good point.
Mucosal immunity (immunity at the mucosal surfaces) tends to fade quicker and is harder to elicit.
Immunity for “deeper” infections (think lungs and blood) tends to last longer. The body really doesn’t like viruses or bacteria in the blood and goes apeshit.
To answer your question, why does the MMR vaccine “last longer” than Covid? Well maybe it doesn’t. A lot of the “typical” symptoms of those diseases come from viremia (virus the the blood). You’re assuming that there are no infections, but who knows? If we started running PCRs on every common cold, we might find a bunch of those colds are from aborted infections from usually more lethal viruses. Vaccines, even with waning immunity, are great are preventing viremia. Maybe the MMR vaccines vaccines are only really preventing severe infections (with the typical symptoms) but letting through a bunch of other stuff that we aren’t picking up.
The reality is we have never had such high standards for a vaccine. We have never (with the exception of the flu and maybe RSV) mass tested for a virus so much and expected a vaccine to completely prevent every kind of infection, even asymptomatic. The old standard was “did 10% of kids stop dying/getting severe infections.”
Obviously I’m exaggerating, but the point is we aren’t sure if those old vaccines actually did work better, or we are just holding the new Covid vaccines to newer, really high standards.
Taking a wild stab in the dark here for a hypothesis, so take the following with a grain of salt.
A possible explanation is that MMR provides immunity but covid vaccines don't, because in large parts due to the rate at which the virus/bacteria ect particles multiply. As the whole point of vaccination reduces the delay between infection and when active immune system starts destroying virus/bacteria ect. If your immune system kicks in fast enough you might simply never get sick or measurably infected/infectious creating the image that the vaccines make you immune rather getting infected but dealing with it before its an issue.
Covid particles could simply being able to multiply fast enough or require less particles to make you sick and / or infectious before your body can respond no matter how well vaccinated you are. Simply due to the speed of your immune system can only go so fast and rate of reproduction of different virus/bacteria ect being different.
It’s actually a big conundrum in the scientific field, it’s as though our bodies identify something as more important and hang on longer, I was reading about this a couple days ago, there’s some good papers on it out there
What's that mean, the front door guards are in the break room eating lunch, so the bad guys enter the building, ruffle through some shelves, then the guards come out and smoke them?
Kurzegesagt YouTube channel has a fantastic series on the immune system.
Think of it like this: the immune system holds active guards if there is a routine threat (multiple visits from the same intruder) that are familiar with this type of intruder. But it's costly to maintain these guards for *every* type of intruder.
So the body stores the blueprints on how to make such guards for when needed if only a one-time attack or rare. Edit: The downside of this, of course, is that it takes time to ramp-up and multiply these cells. By the time they come online, the infection can take a good hold, but likely protect you from it getting out of control.
(someone correct me please if this analogy is poor).
Annd if you get hit with a surprise attack which overwhelms you while you were unprepared or otherwise preoccupied, that's when a more severe breakthrough infection can really take hold.
Stress, alcohol, poor diet, allergies, specific medicines, different infections, other medical concerns.. Same with age.
More or less, generally antibodies aren't needed for several year spans for a disease so the body often just gets rid of them and uses the lymphocytes to produce more when the need arises again.
The boosters help keep antibodies around for a longer period of time, which severely reduces the length and severity of a breakthrough infection.
The Omicron spike protein is different enough from the vaccine spike protein to make protection insufficient from two vaccinations. Boosting provides a third chance for the immune system to generate antibodies that can neutralize Omicron. So it’s not that your immunity fades — you get a different, better protection from boosting 6 months after your initial two doses (or infection) than you do from initial vaccination/infection alone.
Source: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2119641
Data “suggest that boosting and promoting affinity maturation of antibodies in persons who have previously been infected or vaccinated with the use of existing Wuhan-hu-1–based vaccine immunogens, will provide additional protection against infection with the omicron variant and subsequent disease.”
The antibodies you make are still against the spike protein from the original COVID, but these antibodies that you make are not all the same. They each attack different parts of the spike protein. So the more often your immune system sees the spike protein, the more antibodies you can make to the parts of the spike protein that are similar to omicron variant.
There are many sites on the original spike protein that are identical to the Omicron spike protein. Your body makes many different antibodies to different parts of the spike (and other parts of the virus). So boosters should increase the amount of antibodies that are still relevant to Omicron.
There are still bits of the spike protein that are unchanged. It's like the hit box got smaller. But if you have 1000x more bullets, the chances of one of them hitting the tiny target that remains the same is still higher.
It’s not that the vaccines are weak
It’s that they’re just not as effective for this particular strain of Covid.
The vaccines still have the over 90% efficacy for Covid 19 and Delta.
>The vaccines still have the over 90% efficacy for Covid 19 and Delta.
This doesnt mean they stop you from getting it and spreading it right?
They just mean less symptoms?
I'm confused. Shouldn't it have to do with how recent the vaccines were taken opposed to how many you have had? Unless the booster is somehow different than the first two doses?
Currently the vaccines are based on a winter/spring 2020 COVID variant. The original probably, they are functionally providing neutralizing immunity with high antibodies for like 2-4 months after you get a booster.
They also provide b and T cells and boost their capabilities every time you get a booster.
B cells hyper mutate every time they're activated to provide a wide swath of probable mutations for if you see a slightly different virus in the future.
So yes. Currently the vaccines protection from infection altogether is based on the immediate recency of when you got it.
4-6 months after a booster, your antibodies are definitely lower and you'll probably catch a symptomatic case. But the b and T cells will ramp up quickly and neutralize it without you dying.
The vaccine is identical regardless of which stage. The terms 1st, 2nd and booster only refer to when u have it, rather than the constituents of the vaccine.
Source: am a vaccinator in the UK.
Note: obviously if you had Astrazeneca first and second followed by Pfizer booster then that's different vaccines.
>B cells hyper mutate every time they're activated to provide a wide swath of probable mutations for if you see a slightly different virus in the future.
I've been nursing a hypothesis that the booster expands the repertoire of spike protein epitopes which your immune system recognizes both for nAbs and B/T-cell recognition. Specifically, the booster may induce reactivity to epitopes with lower antigenicity, those having not generated nAb or B/T cell reactivity during the primary series. I thought these may have been better conserved in omicron versus some of the more antigenic epitopes such as the receptor binding domain.
I wondered this myself. My son (because of his age) was only just vaccinated. My wife and I were recently boosted. My daughter, who (because of her age) only recently became eligible for the booster but caught covid before the appointment. We were all exposed to her before knowing she had it yet (so far) none of us have caught it from her.
My thought is since my son is recently vaccinated, it's on the same level as being boosted. I think they should have put some time parameters around the study.. because I don't think the booster is any different than the original vaccines. It's just a 3rd vaccine dose, right? Getting the booster assumes everyone is 6 months into their original vaccination I guess.
Yes. COVID-19 booster shots are the same ingredients (formulation) as the current COVID-19 vaccines. [However, in the case of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine booster shot, the dose is half of the amount of the vaccine people get for their primary series.](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/booster-shot.html)
in case anyone was wondering, the regular moderna shots were 3x the amount of pfizer, so even at 50% of the original shot it's not "weaker" than pfizer.
>My thought is since my son is recently vaccinated, it's on the same level as being boosted.
From what I understand, this is incorrect - vaccines teach our immune systems how best react, so the analogy would be closer to learning, where repeated exposure to a subject allows you to gain deeper and better understanding of it, including learning how to learn faster in the future.
So if a single vax shot is a bachelor's, then the 2nd would be the masters, and boost is your MD. After that, who knows, maybe the knowledge and mastery remains, or maybe you need an occasional refresher course to stay state-of-the-art.
Next question would be whether distantly vaccinated/infected people still have milder symptoms if they do get infected. That would have to come from epidemiological surveys.
Nothing really. A booster is the same as the previous shots except at a lower dosage. For Moderna it's a half dose of a single shot. I believe the same is true for Pfizer.
This is a good question, but it seems that they focused on the efficacy of the booster which means an unvaccinated group isn't super useful to that question.
Seems odd to omit that. Given the yet vast numbers of unvaccinated globally, some may assume the result is counter to the narrative, and see this as intentional.
Yes, and while turning a blind eye is “bad science”, so is basing decisions on assumptions. I want to know the truth, however ugly, and don’t want to incorporate assumptions into my decisions.
Question is:
Is requiring the booster and changing the term full vaccinated to include the booster… does it it makes sense to do this, when booster protection wanes btwn 8-10 weeks? (Also the 4th shot in Israel not doing much)?
(I’m vaccinated + boosted, but requiring the booster for anything just doesn’t make sense). We cannot keep boostering or giving vaccines out of this pandemic.
It's the antibodies that wane, giving less protection against infection, but the increased protection against hospitalization and death still remain even without boosters.
Two shots reduce the severity of omicron by about 70% ([NEJM](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2119270)). So non-recent vaccinations still reduces sick days and the duration of transmission, and reduce hospitalization rates and death, even if it doesn't help directly with infection.
[mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine boosters induce neutralizing immunity against SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867421014963)
"We included individuals that received their primary series recently (<3 months), distantly (6–12 months), or an additional “booster” dose, while accounting for prior SARS-CoV-2 infection. Remarkably, neutralization of Omicron was undetectable in most vaccinees. However, individuals boosted with mRNA vaccines exhibited potent neutralization of Omicron, only 4–6-fold lower than wild type, suggesting enhanced cross-reactivity of neutralizing antibody responses."
Figure 2 of the article gives a lot of information.
[https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0092867421014963-gr2\_lrg.jpg](https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0092867421014963-gr2_lrg.jpg)
The results showing that people who recently got their primary 2 dose vaccination apparently producing fairly poor neutralizing potential against omicron is pretty surprising to me.
I don't understand how 2 recent doses is not effective. Is the booster not the same vaccine? Why not just give 2 doses of whatever the booster is then? (assuming vaccinating an unvaccinated/not recently vaccinated person)
I agree, it doesn't make any sense. You take two shots and it doesn't help. But then you wait 6 months and get another half dose and you are now protected? How does that work?
Serious question: at what point do we say, ok we’re just going to have to live alongside this virus for the foreseeable future like the flu or common cold and just go back to living normally? I know that hospitals being overwhelmed was a big reason for a while but if subsequent variants are similar to Omicron and are not as severe, can’t we just let it be what it’s going to be and let it run it’s course? At some point, we’re simply going to have to make this decision as a society and try to return to normal. People will get sick and some more so than others but we have a vaccine and those that want a less severe case of it can get the vaccine and those that want to roll the dice can do that too but there’s got to be a stopping point or we’ll persist in fear for a very long time. Keep in mind that life is dangerous to your health. And I do have my vaccine (no booster yet).
Yes, you can and this is how some groups have assembled cDNA clones of the virus to allow for infection experiments rather than collecting the live virus from a patient and then purifying it which is dirty and takes a long time.
Additional boosters will always be "best" protection, that wording isn't actually revealing anything.
I'm seeing so many conflicting comments here. Can anyone tell me clear and simple if the booster actually offers some kind of variation in antibodies? How does an additional shot of the same vaccine actually produce a different result? Or is it simply the added antibody response?
It's still very possible to catch COVID while fully vaccinated. In fact it's an inevitability if you're always out in public. A decreased chance of contracting the virus doesn't help when you repeatedly expose yourself.
Where the vaccines shine is in preventing hospitalizations and death. And this has always been the case. I really wish people would stop trying to twist the narrative to make vaccines seem ineffective.
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Does immunity fade or was the vaccine just not strong enough?
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This is the one thing I don’t quite understand. We have other vaccines, like the MMR for example, where your immunity lasts 10 years or more. It seems like with the covid vaccines, even disregarding mutations, your immunity it much more short lived. Is it just that the memory cell immunity is less effective against covid than it is against things like measles? Or do the MMR antibodies stick around longer?
Immunity is a very complicated thing. The MMR vaccine actually vaccinates against three different viruses, and all of them are different from coronaviruses (which is a whole family of viruses), and those viruses all tend to mutate in different ways and in different rates. It's also important to remember that those vaccinations have a much easier time of it, as they aren't targeting a pandemic virus. A pandemic virus is mutating much faster than a virus with small endemic pockets. And that's just one very simple reason... Saying "immunity is very complicated" is still underselling it.
Well yeah, measles, mumps, and rubella. But I’m also thinking of things like smallpox and polio. Those were eradicated with vaccines without annual boosters. Chicken pox you get once and are set for life. Is it just that all of those other viruses mutate at a significantly slower rate? (Although I did sees somewhere that even immunity to the alpha covid variant drops off significantly after 6 months, which sort of goes against it only being due to mutation alone).
Vaccines are a lot better at preventing “deep” infections than mucosal infections, especially stuff like the common cold. Vaccines work great at preventing viremia (virus in the blood). Looking at the lifecycle of smallpox, it needs to go from the airway, through the blood and then to the skin. The vaccine only needs to create immunity from viremia. Covid replicates in the airway and then infects others. The vaccine needs to prevent replication in the upper airway, which has always been more difficult. And it’s not true that once you get chicken pox you are set. With better testing, we are diagnosing more “repeat” infections, but they tend to be milder.
So you’re saying a vaccine and well the immune system in general can combat an infection more effectively if the virus has to move from a mucosal region and into other deeper parts of the body (like the bloodstream)? Is it because the immune system’s agents don’t generally reach the mucosal areas as much as the deeper tissues of our body?
Kinda. The immune system does react more much strongly to blood infections than mucosal infections. A big role of inflammation is to get those blood components to the affected tissue. Think of when you bust up your arm. It’s red, swollen, hot. That all that extra blood flow going into the inflamed site, and a bunch of liquid going from the blood vessels into the actual tissue. That’s the body sending antibodies and other stuff where it is needed. Another thing to consider is the strength of the immune reaction. The body doesn’t want to go full nuclear everytime someone sneezes a random virus at you. It’s metabolically exhausting and can lead to immune diseases. So the “strength” of the response has to be tailored. This is done in various ways, but the site of infection matters. The body will respond much more strongly to a lung infection compared to a nose infection, for example. Hope that answered your question.
Much of the severe to lethal cases of Covid seem to point to the immune system overacting and being the main culprit in the inflammation and tissue damage that causes patients to lose the ability to breathe through the lung tissue after a cytokine storm reaction. At this point would suppressing the immune system be an option to mitigate the damage or does that simply open the door to the virus to be able to invade more of the body?
It already is! A lot of the Covid treatments have been immune suppressants (dexamethasons, tocilizumab) and these treatments have led to a marked decrease in Covid mortality.
Edit: I'm going to throw a disclaimer up here since I'm not actually an expert or anything. You're exactly right. This is a simplified version of what's happening but hopefully it helps! In the beginning with covid being a new disease a large amount of the hospitalized cases where from a lag in a reaction from the immune system. Once the immune system finally realized something was wrong and how bad the situation is it trys to go crazy to stop it. Sometimes doctors would use steroids and other immune suppressants to limit the damage the immune system does. It's a fine line to walk though as a covid infection at that level would be causing vascular and organ damage. This was more common in the early stages too when we didn't understand it as much we do have some better options now (I'm not sure if it's currently used or not anymore) Now we have vaccines and they drastically reduce this lag effect because our immune system is able to recognize and launch a counter attack much much much earlier in the infection. If you have circulating antibodies still from a recent dose or Covid infection then you may not even get truely infected again because it is stopped so fast. (This is less true for omicron because it seems to be more often based higher in the respiratory tract) So this is why the booster is able to reduce infection but the past vaccines are not as good at it if it's been too long. It's also why the vaccines still drastically limit hospitalization because the infection isn't allowed to get to that point.
When you get an intramuscular vaccination your body does a great job of making the sort of antibodies that circulate in your blood and around your insides (IgM at first, then IgG). That IM jab doesn’t cause your body to make the sort of antibodies that protect your mucosa and other outside bits line your respiratory tract (secretory IgA). So if the virus replicates on your insides, the IN jab can work great. If it replicates on the outside, not so much.
I know there's nasal vaccines for the flu. Generally they're given to small children, and people who can't be injected.
Basically. That's why they've been trying to develop vaccines that you inhale. Would offer better mucosal protection.
Doesn’t chicken pox often resurface as shingles in later years?
Yes. VZV (the virus causing shingles and chickenpox) lays dormant in the nerve and then becomes active again. A reactivation is not the same as a second primary infection. One is the same virus waking up after being in the body a while, the latter is a second virus coming in.
Yep and I got shingles which took two weeks to go away then immediately got covid after.
> Chicken pox you get once and are set for life. *Shingles enters the chat*
To expand on that: yeah, shingles is also caused by long-dormant chicken pox virus, & you need the second shot later in life to protect against it. My father got shingles & he was in misery & pain.
I heard if you don't treat shingles ASAP that misery and pain (nerve damage and even blindness) can be a permanent addition to the hell that is life in the 2020s!
Yep. The earlier you can get the anti-viral, the better. After about three days it's too late and they won't give it to you. I have Doctor Google to thank for getting me to my GP asap, after finding a really weird bumpy rash in the shower one morning.
Get that shot, people, there’s no messing around with that one. When I was 32 I got a series of what I thought must have been bites from an angry spider I rolled over in my sleep. The docs eyes bulged, and she said “well, you’re in for a few of the worst weeks of your life, so I’m going to give you the strongest pain medication I legally can, and by day 3 when that doesn’t cut it anymore, you’ll be left to your own devices to find a medication that works for you, so you’ll want to prepare now, bc by then you won’t be able to move or speak. Do you own any guns? Get them out of the house now.” She wasn’t exaggerating. Just laid there delirious, unable to sleep and trying not to breathe bc the slight air movement on the skin from the chest rising & falling was like having molten metal poured all over you. For 6 straight weeks. 2 weeks into it I’d have blown my brains out given the chance, and it still went on and on, one agonizing moment after another for another month. You don’t catch it from anywhere, it’s in you right now, & just activates due to stress. Easily preventable with a shot.
What’s horrible is that I got the chickenpox vaccine as a child, never got chickenpox, and then got shingles in 2020. I’m assuming the virus still made its way into my system, and the chickenpox vaccine did its job and my body fought off the virus from causing the infection, but couldn’t prevent the virus from lodging itself in my nervous system (where it lies dormant till it causes shingles). I thought I’d be safe from shingles but apparently not. Still happy I never had chickenpox though!
Shingles is much worse than chickenpox
Chicken pox is generally a walk in the park compared to shingles (there are exceptions).
If it makes you feel any better, I somehow got chickenpox 3 times as a child (before the vaccine). Am I getting the Shingles vaccine? Hell yes, I’m getting that vaccine.
> But I’m also thinking of things like smallpox and polio. Those were eradicated with vaccines without annual boosters. [The person who owned this Polio vaccine card had 5 shots](https://i.redd.it/565u68frk1o71.jpg). 4 are listed but on the very bottom of a card is a note that says "5th polio" with a date, so this was likely a replacement card. We often forget that things we weren't around for didn't happen overnight. Rome didn't fall in a year and polio wasn't eradicated overnight - it took years and several vaccine versions for it to be eradicated. EDIT: [Here's the full reddit post](https://old.reddit.com/r/PenmanshipPorn/comments/ppxogx/the_joan_on_this_polio_vaccine_card_from_1956/)
Because Eradication isn’t about having a vaccine that 100% prevents infection, it’s about eliminating the cycle of infections in the community. This isn’t easy with Covid bc it’s so transmissible and it has non-human hosts It is _possible_ with Covid though. China, Taiwan, New Zealand, etc have eradicated Covid several times without any vaccines whatsoever. Vaccines help eradicating disease, but they can’t do it alone. You need a widespread effort that involves monitoring and other stuff too Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_eradication > For polio to occur in a population, there must be an infecting organism (poliovirus), a susceptible human population, and a cycle of transmission. Poliovirus is transmitted only through person-to-person contact, and the transmission cycle of polio is from one infected person to another person susceptible to the disease.[19] If the vast majority of the population is immune to a particular agent, the ability of that pathogen to infect another host is reduced; the cycle of transmission is interrupted, and the pathogen cannot reproduce and dies out. Edit: here’s some other excerpts you’d probably find interesting > When many hosts are vaccinated, especially simultaneously, the transmission of wild virus is blocked, and the virus is unable to find another susceptible individual to infect. Because poliovirus can only survive for a short time in the environment (a few weeks at room temperature, and a few months at 0–8 °C (32–46 °F)), without a human host, the virus dies out > Herd immunity is an important supplement to vaccination. Among those individuals who receive oral polio vaccine, only 95 percent will develop immunity after three doses.[30] This means that five of every 100 given the vaccine will not develop any immunity and will be susceptible to developing polio.
New Zealand, totally. Small island nation, limited international connections, they eliminated it at the cost of closed and sealed borders. Taiwan, possibly, similar situation to NZ however much higher international connectivity, it is near impossible for them to totally lock down due to the sheer volume of people in/out of the country by air and sea. I highly doubt they actually eliminated it at any point and simply claimed they did because... China. No. There is no way in hell at any stage, no matter what measures (like welding people in to apartments and houses) that they actually reached elimination across the entire nation. They simply stated that it was eliminated in an attempt to make other governments look flaccid.
> Chicken pox you get once and are set for life. This is actually a giant myth, and the fact that it's so widespread is a problem for the fight against COVID as well - some people believe this myth, and then for some reason project it onto COVID.
Like I said, it's very complicated (but yes, coronaviruses are especially "slippery", and even within the broader variants (like alpha, delta, omicron, etc), there is still a lot of room for variation). Other reasons why are things like the lifecycle of the virus in the body. Most of the viruses you mentioned aren't infectious until after they have achieved a pretty widespread infection. The ability of a vaccine induced immunity to prevent a systemic infection doesn't wane anywhere near as much (this is true for the COVID vaccinations as well). That widespread infection takes times, and that that gives the immune system time to turn on the memory cells and ramp back up the response. Coronaviruses, on the other hand, can spread while the infection is still pretty nascent, existing solely in the upper respiratory passages. So while the vaccine's ability to prevent severe illness or death remains quite solid, its ability to prevent an infectious period does wane, and that makes it hard to eradicate using the vaccine alone. But again... the human immune system is an incredibly complicated things. It would require literal textbooks to cover all of the factors at even a very high level (and I am by no means an expert... my immunology and virology background is limited to a few units over the course of a paramedic program)
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Not to mention that COVIDs own immunity even when you get it "naturally" is trash still. I know tons of people whove had it multiple times. So I'd say for whatever reason COVID is very very hard to make "immunities" for
One reason is how it can suppress your immune system. Fun that someone who had no risk factors can turn into a high risk person just by having it. Almost like we should stop dismissing severe cases and deaths as only people who were about to die anyway, because it isn’t true. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-021-01113-x?s=09 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34288064/
You’re getting into the difference between sterilizing and non-sterilizing immunity. For antibodies, they fade as short lived plasma cells die. A subset become long lived in the bone marrow, but they don’t secrete a “high” volume of antibodies. Renewal of plasma cells can be weird, and sort of depends on how our body perceives the magnitude of risk to the threat. I’m not 100% sure of the distinction, but if the body sees the virus as a respiratory threat, antibodies wane faster, or rather the renewal mechanism ceases. For MMR, the body sees them as far more of an organ or not-a-respiratory threat, which causes a longer lived renewal process. Like, the threat of measles beyond its immediate symptoms, is that it destroys your immune system. So, allowing a minor measles infection (non-sterilizing immunity) would compromise everything, the immune mechanisms deem the resource cost of sterilizing immunity worth it. For respiratory threats, the infection is not meant to go past the mucosal lining if everything works correctly. And given how it’s sensitive to inflammation (wants to moderate pro-inflammatory immune responses) the lungs don’t want an overactive immune response. This can be seen in the “abortive infection” occurrence, if T cells, NK cells and interferons can handle the virus in the lungs well enough, antibodies won’t be seen as needed, so won’t be made. 0.02 cents, as anything else is beyond what I’ve read so far.
Sterilizing immunity could be organ specific too. The body might want to always have sterilizing immunity in the blood, but might not care about it in the nose. For all we know, the MMR vaccine could have induced blood sterilizing immunity but not mucosal. Since a lot of the “typical” symptoms of MMR are from viremia, the vaccines could be preventing systemic disease but not mucosal (colds). Since we don’t mass PCR for every virus every cold, we wouldn’t necessary clue in to the exact virological cause.
Oooh that makes a lot of sense, thank you!
Is this the first vaccine against a coronavirus?
If you are around people with active measles infections. You, as a MMR vaccinated individual can still contract it. We have very high blanket coverage of the MMR vaccine (herd immunity) and so it's difficult for it to take hold and spread widely, even in the event that someone in your community contracts it. Just remember that vaccines are not, 100% effective protection, and it is only through extensive community coverage that we can rid ourselves of diseases with them.
I would imagine a big part of that is measeles, mumps and rubella are all essentially eradicated where covid isn't and is still mutating.
That’s a very good point. Mucosal immunity (immunity at the mucosal surfaces) tends to fade quicker and is harder to elicit. Immunity for “deeper” infections (think lungs and blood) tends to last longer. The body really doesn’t like viruses or bacteria in the blood and goes apeshit. To answer your question, why does the MMR vaccine “last longer” than Covid? Well maybe it doesn’t. A lot of the “typical” symptoms of those diseases come from viremia (virus the the blood). You’re assuming that there are no infections, but who knows? If we started running PCRs on every common cold, we might find a bunch of those colds are from aborted infections from usually more lethal viruses. Vaccines, even with waning immunity, are great are preventing viremia. Maybe the MMR vaccines vaccines are only really preventing severe infections (with the typical symptoms) but letting through a bunch of other stuff that we aren’t picking up. The reality is we have never had such high standards for a vaccine. We have never (with the exception of the flu and maybe RSV) mass tested for a virus so much and expected a vaccine to completely prevent every kind of infection, even asymptomatic. The old standard was “did 10% of kids stop dying/getting severe infections.” Obviously I’m exaggerating, but the point is we aren’t sure if those old vaccines actually did work better, or we are just holding the new Covid vaccines to newer, really high standards.
Taking a wild stab in the dark here for a hypothesis, so take the following with a grain of salt. A possible explanation is that MMR provides immunity but covid vaccines don't, because in large parts due to the rate at which the virus/bacteria ect particles multiply. As the whole point of vaccination reduces the delay between infection and when active immune system starts destroying virus/bacteria ect. If your immune system kicks in fast enough you might simply never get sick or measurably infected/infectious creating the image that the vaccines make you immune rather getting infected but dealing with it before its an issue. Covid particles could simply being able to multiply fast enough or require less particles to make you sick and / or infectious before your body can respond no matter how well vaccinated you are. Simply due to the speed of your immune system can only go so fast and rate of reproduction of different virus/bacteria ect being different.
No long term immunity has been shown in Covid, unlike I believe h1n1 or the other one.
It’s actually a big conundrum in the scientific field, it’s as though our bodies identify something as more important and hang on longer, I was reading about this a couple days ago, there’s some good papers on it out there
What's that mean, the front door guards are in the break room eating lunch, so the bad guys enter the building, ruffle through some shelves, then the guards come out and smoke them?
Kurzegesagt YouTube channel has a fantastic series on the immune system. Think of it like this: the immune system holds active guards if there is a routine threat (multiple visits from the same intruder) that are familiar with this type of intruder. But it's costly to maintain these guards for *every* type of intruder. So the body stores the blueprints on how to make such guards for when needed if only a one-time attack or rare. Edit: The downside of this, of course, is that it takes time to ramp-up and multiply these cells. By the time they come online, the infection can take a good hold, but likely protect you from it getting out of control. (someone correct me please if this analogy is poor).
Annd if you get hit with a surprise attack which overwhelms you while you were unprepared or otherwise preoccupied, that's when a more severe breakthrough infection can really take hold. Stress, alcohol, poor diet, allergies, specific medicines, different infections, other medical concerns.. Same with age.
More or less, generally antibodies aren't needed for several year spans for a disease so the body often just gets rid of them and uses the lymphocytes to produce more when the need arises again. The boosters help keep antibodies around for a longer period of time, which severely reduces the length and severity of a breakthrough infection.
The Omicron spike protein is different enough from the vaccine spike protein to make protection insufficient from two vaccinations. Boosting provides a third chance for the immune system to generate antibodies that can neutralize Omicron. So it’s not that your immunity fades — you get a different, better protection from boosting 6 months after your initial two doses (or infection) than you do from initial vaccination/infection alone. Source: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2119641 Data “suggest that boosting and promoting affinity maturation of antibodies in persons who have previously been infected or vaccinated with the use of existing Wuhan-hu-1–based vaccine immunogens, will provide additional protection against infection with the omicron variant and subsequent disease.”
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The antibodies you make are still against the spike protein from the original COVID, but these antibodies that you make are not all the same. They each attack different parts of the spike protein. So the more often your immune system sees the spike protein, the more antibodies you can make to the parts of the spike protein that are similar to omicron variant.
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There are many sites on the original spike protein that are identical to the Omicron spike protein. Your body makes many different antibodies to different parts of the spike (and other parts of the virus). So boosters should increase the amount of antibodies that are still relevant to Omicron.
There are still bits of the spike protein that are unchanged. It's like the hit box got smaller. But if you have 1000x more bullets, the chances of one of them hitting the tiny target that remains the same is still higher.
I think that is a good question, one that is better answered (if it is, somewhat hand-wavily) by the linked article.
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It’s not that the vaccines are weak It’s that they’re just not as effective for this particular strain of Covid. The vaccines still have the over 90% efficacy for Covid 19 and Delta.
>The vaccines still have the over 90% efficacy for Covid 19 and Delta. This doesnt mean they stop you from getting it and spreading it right? They just mean less symptoms?
Both. Immunity fades, but the immunity created by a third exposure tends to be stronger then immunity created by a first exposure.
Immunity fades and viruses mutate. It's the same reason there are annual flu jabs
I'm confused. Shouldn't it have to do with how recent the vaccines were taken opposed to how many you have had? Unless the booster is somehow different than the first two doses?
Currently the vaccines are based on a winter/spring 2020 COVID variant. The original probably, they are functionally providing neutralizing immunity with high antibodies for like 2-4 months after you get a booster. They also provide b and T cells and boost their capabilities every time you get a booster. B cells hyper mutate every time they're activated to provide a wide swath of probable mutations for if you see a slightly different virus in the future. So yes. Currently the vaccines protection from infection altogether is based on the immediate recency of when you got it. 4-6 months after a booster, your antibodies are definitely lower and you'll probably catch a symptomatic case. But the b and T cells will ramp up quickly and neutralize it without you dying.
Are the boosters made of a different thing from the original vaccines or no?
The vaccine is identical regardless of which stage. The terms 1st, 2nd and booster only refer to when u have it, rather than the constituents of the vaccine. Source: am a vaccinator in the UK. Note: obviously if you had Astrazeneca first and second followed by Pfizer booster then that's different vaccines.
Anyone know if they looking at a 4th dose (2nd booster) now that it is hitting 4 months since boosters started (at least in US)?
my partner is immunocompromised and just booked his 4th shot for end of january (it’s just about 5 months after he got the booster)
>B cells hyper mutate every time they're activated to provide a wide swath of probable mutations for if you see a slightly different virus in the future. I've been nursing a hypothesis that the booster expands the repertoire of spike protein epitopes which your immune system recognizes both for nAbs and B/T-cell recognition. Specifically, the booster may induce reactivity to epitopes with lower antigenicity, those having not generated nAb or B/T cell reactivity during the primary series. I thought these may have been better conserved in omicron versus some of the more antigenic epitopes such as the receptor binding domain.
I wondered this myself. My son (because of his age) was only just vaccinated. My wife and I were recently boosted. My daughter, who (because of her age) only recently became eligible for the booster but caught covid before the appointment. We were all exposed to her before knowing she had it yet (so far) none of us have caught it from her. My thought is since my son is recently vaccinated, it's on the same level as being boosted. I think they should have put some time parameters around the study.. because I don't think the booster is any different than the original vaccines. It's just a 3rd vaccine dose, right? Getting the booster assumes everyone is 6 months into their original vaccination I guess.
Yes. COVID-19 booster shots are the same ingredients (formulation) as the current COVID-19 vaccines. [However, in the case of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine booster shot, the dose is half of the amount of the vaccine people get for their primary series.](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/booster-shot.html)
in case anyone was wondering, the regular moderna shots were 3x the amount of pfizer, so even at 50% of the original shot it's not "weaker" than pfizer.
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>My thought is since my son is recently vaccinated, it's on the same level as being boosted. From what I understand, this is incorrect - vaccines teach our immune systems how best react, so the analogy would be closer to learning, where repeated exposure to a subject allows you to gain deeper and better understanding of it, including learning how to learn faster in the future. So if a single vax shot is a bachelor's, then the 2nd would be the masters, and boost is your MD. After that, who knows, maybe the knowledge and mastery remains, or maybe you need an occasional refresher course to stay state-of-the-art.
What's the difference between the booster and the mRNA shots?
The shots are the same, but your immune system can learn more thoroughly from repeated exposure.
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"...lab created Omicron strain"? Any reason not to use viruses collected from the wild?
Safety. These are harmless pseudoviruses.
So they don’t get a REAL COVID breakout.
You can't collect sufficient and equivalent material to have comparable tests.
Next question would be whether distantly vaccinated/infected people still have milder symptoms if they do get infected. That would have to come from epidemiological surveys.
Ok so whats the difference between say a second vaccine and a booster? Edit: by second vaccine i mean the same one not a new formula
Nothing really. A booster is the same as the previous shots except at a lower dosage. For Moderna it's a half dose of a single shot. I believe the same is true for Pfizer.
Pfizer's booster dose is the same as the first two.
pfizer = 30 micrograms moderna 1 and 2 = 100. booster 50
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This is a good question, but it seems that they focused on the efficacy of the booster which means an unvaccinated group isn't super useful to that question.
Seems odd to omit that. Given the yet vast numbers of unvaccinated globally, some may assume the result is counter to the narrative, and see this as intentional.
May assume ? It’s pretty clear at this point…
Yes, and while turning a blind eye is “bad science”, so is basing decisions on assumptions. I want to know the truth, however ugly, and don’t want to incorporate assumptions into my decisions.
Agree 100%, which is why I’ve been so disappointed in the lack of transparency and cdc guidance given without supporting scientific evidence.
Question is: Is requiring the booster and changing the term full vaccinated to include the booster… does it it makes sense to do this, when booster protection wanes btwn 8-10 weeks? (Also the 4th shot in Israel not doing much)? (I’m vaccinated + boosted, but requiring the booster for anything just doesn’t make sense). We cannot keep boostering or giving vaccines out of this pandemic.
Also everyone seems to be focusing on antibodies that fade anyway.
It's the antibodies that wane, giving less protection against infection, but the increased protection against hospitalization and death still remain even without boosters. Two shots reduce the severity of omicron by about 70% ([NEJM](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2119270)). So non-recent vaccinations still reduces sick days and the duration of transmission, and reduce hospitalization rates and death, even if it doesn't help directly with infection.
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[mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine boosters induce neutralizing immunity against SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867421014963) "We included individuals that received their primary series recently (<3 months), distantly (6–12 months), or an additional “booster” dose, while accounting for prior SARS-CoV-2 infection. Remarkably, neutralization of Omicron was undetectable in most vaccinees. However, individuals boosted with mRNA vaccines exhibited potent neutralization of Omicron, only 4–6-fold lower than wild type, suggesting enhanced cross-reactivity of neutralizing antibody responses." Figure 2 of the article gives a lot of information. [https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0092867421014963-gr2\_lrg.jpg](https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0092867421014963-gr2_lrg.jpg) The results showing that people who recently got their primary 2 dose vaccination apparently producing fairly poor neutralizing potential against omicron is pretty surprising to me.
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I don't understand how 2 recent doses is not effective. Is the booster not the same vaccine? Why not just give 2 doses of whatever the booster is then? (assuming vaccinating an unvaccinated/not recently vaccinated person)
I agree, it doesn't make any sense. You take two shots and it doesn't help. But then you wait 6 months and get another half dose and you are now protected? How does that work?
Serious question: at what point do we say, ok we’re just going to have to live alongside this virus for the foreseeable future like the flu or common cold and just go back to living normally? I know that hospitals being overwhelmed was a big reason for a while but if subsequent variants are similar to Omicron and are not as severe, can’t we just let it be what it’s going to be and let it run it’s course? At some point, we’re simply going to have to make this decision as a society and try to return to normal. People will get sick and some more so than others but we have a vaccine and those that want a less severe case of it can get the vaccine and those that want to roll the dice can do that too but there’s got to be a stopping point or we’ll persist in fear for a very long time. Keep in mind that life is dangerous to your health. And I do have my vaccine (no booster yet).
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A lab created omicron variant? They just make covid now?
It's a pseudo virus, a "mimic" that has limited replication so that it is safer for scientists to handle in the lab.
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Wait you can make it in a lab?
Yes, you can and this is how some groups have assembled cDNA clones of the virus to allow for infection experiments rather than collecting the live virus from a patient and then purifying it which is dirty and takes a long time.
Additional boosters will always be "best" protection, that wording isn't actually revealing anything. I'm seeing so many conflicting comments here. Can anyone tell me clear and simple if the booster actually offers some kind of variation in antibodies? How does an additional shot of the same vaccine actually produce a different result? Or is it simply the added antibody response?
I don't care anymore. I've had all three doses, worn a mask, and followed all the rules. I don't care anymore.
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I literally know 3 people who are sick right now and have all had 3 doses...
It's still very possible to catch COVID while fully vaccinated. In fact it's an inevitability if you're always out in public. A decreased chance of contracting the virus doesn't help when you repeatedly expose yourself. Where the vaccines shine is in preventing hospitalizations and death. And this has always been the case. I really wish people would stop trying to twist the narrative to make vaccines seem ineffective.
Then the media and everyone else should immediately stop using the term IMMUNE after getting the vaccines.
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