I think this reporting is dancing around the issue, that the vaccine supply is most concentrated in countries that have essentially reached their maximum vaccination percentage. By not providing access to those developing or smaller countries, larger countries are shooting themselves in the proverbial global foot. I don’t think countries like the US and Canada aren’t trying to do that, I just think these experts would like more of a conscious effort.
I also think this advice feels like a slap to healthcare workers like myself who desperately want to continue taking care of patients as safely as possible. When your coworkers can spread virus more easily due to less immunity, being unvaccinated, etc, it would be more reassuring to continue to have stronger immunity to continue seeing patients. I don’t have the luxury of waiting for a patient to test negative before seeing them in the emergency room or clinic.
The US has not met their maximum vaccination percentage. According to the graph I get in Google the US is stuck on around 50% fully vaccinated. Considering the head start they had on most of the world and the vaccine supplies this can't be described as anything other than a complete and utter failure on all levels.
Seems more an acknowledgement that zero-Covid is never ever going to happen. At which point not sure if vaccinating outside of risk populations or to control hospitalizations if they are too high makes any sense.
sounds like another policy/politicized blanket statement not based on science. Have they tested levels of anti-bodies? Why is Israel with its early high vaccinations levels doing third shots?
I mostly agree, but these experts need to calculate how many shots this really is (~150Mil) and then look at how many shots are still needed in the rest of the world (~10Bil). So if everyone who had a single shot also got a booster, it would increase this time by 1.5 (or less since distribution and production rates increase with time)?
Prioritizing the elderly in developing nations (rather than the wealthy and politically connected) and speeding vaccine production (likely Adenovirus rather than MRNA due to encapsulation and cold-chain bottlenecks) would have order of magnitude larger effects on deaths than preventing booster shots. The number of wasted shots is closing in on the number likely to be administered.
Delaying immunization school children for the school year (barring much higher than expected immune side effects in unpublished data) is likely going to be another own-goal for the FDA/CDC.
> I don’t have the luxury of waiting for a patient to test negative before seeing them in the emergency room or clinic.
Agreed that it makes total sense for HCWs to get a booster, but also why are you seeing patients before they test negative? Every patient could be getting a $5 antigen test as they walk in the door. The fact that this is not being done is just one more missed opportunity.
There is not strong evidence supporting a 3rd booster dose in immunocompetent people. We have partly seen a misinterpretation of the Israeli data [1] and specifically the single low effectiveness value that appears to be the result of Simpson's Paradox [2]. Dr. Fauci reported this single value decline from the high nineties to the high seventies on Andy Slavitt's podcast [3]. Pfizer's CEO has promoted this same data, Israel's 3rd dose campaign is well under way, and Fauci's public statements are a strong indicator that the U.S. will follow the same path. British Columbia's Dr. Bonnie Henry indicated yesterday [4] that the Canadian numbers do not yet support a general 3rd dose booster but, like the UK, a longer 2nd dose interval due to a First Doses First (FDF) strategy may be a factor.
The 3rd dose is safe and will probably provide a small benefit to the recipient as Shane Crotty described in TWiV 802 [5]. The downside is that these doses are in short supply globally where they could make a significant difference.
with regards to misinterpretation of israeli data, it's more like miscalculation of israeli data:
1) his calculated efficiency for different age groups is up to 40%+ higher compared to numbers that released by israeli ministry of health in official presentations. when asked about it, he said that he doesn't know how they calculate it and this is his numbers
2) his calculations from the beginning included people that got booster shot. Kinda hard to base statistics about efficiency of two doses when you get inside it data about people who got three
> a strong indicator that the U.S. will follow the same path. British Columbia's Dr. Bonnie Henry indicated yesterday [4] that
...an even stronger indicator is that the Biden administration seems to have asked two multi-decade long FDA vaccine approval experts to resign following them authoring this report saying that the evidence didn't support the widespread use of boosters as a public health measure.
I'm fairly convinced that the pharmaceutical companies want Uncle Sam to buy and mandate 350 million shots per year and that's why the boosters are being pushed and combined with flu shots, while Dear Leader figures out the best way to dictate the health choices of his subjects without so much as first having Congress vote on it.
The whole booster conversation seems like a political game.
If you have a vaccine, then your risk of death is far below that of the flu (statistically).
If you don't have a vaccine by now, you want covid instead and this booster conversation is irrelevant.
Kids are banned from taking anything.
So I expect booster or no booster, frankly it just won't matter much at the population scale.
I also don't understand the mask/booster thing now.
Is it to protect kids? If so, then all that effort is better directed at the FDA who has banned them from getting the vaccine. I think this is the area where people should have the most anger and Biden should frankly push legislation to replace or reform the FDA. Their behavior has been atrocious.
Is it to protect the unvaccinated? COVID is not going away, so IMO here we just want everyone in this population to get the disease as fast as possible to get it over with. Spreading is basically "good" for this group.
Is it to protect the vaccinated? This makes no sense, as the risk to the vaccinated well below the range we have accepted for decades.
There’s a serious disconnect between public health experts and the general public, and the experts have continued to not learn that lesson over the last year plus. It’s mind-boggling.
Earlier in the summer, we lifted mask mandates “because the vaccines were preventing disease”, and regardless of the technical facts behind that decision, the perception was reality for the general public. Now they are trying to walk that back to “vaccines prevent serious disease” in the face of delta breakthroughs but the baseline had already been set.
Not to mention the fact that experts continue to pedantically stick to their definition of serious disease as “needed oxygen in the hospital”, once again out of touch with the layperson’s opinion that a week of debilitating sickness at home followed by a month of weakness until full recovery seems pretty “serious” and something people do not want. Boosters are appealing because laypeople don’t want any serious-by-their-definition disease and experts seemingly are incapable of acknowledging or understanding that, let alone their part in creating confusing messaging (partly to appease a 3rd set of people who ironically don’t really want to hear from them at all).
Public health officials need to understand that their primary job is managing public perception of a situation first and foremost. They can go push their glasses up and pedantically spout off technical corrections behind closed doors as much as they want, but in public they have to connect and empathize with normal humans.
Part of this probably comes from medicine’s continued promulgation of their air of expertise (read: superiority) that they’ve affected for a long while, but things like compassion and bedside-manner at lower importance. I worked in medicine and studied public health, and this status-over-all-else attitude was one of the reasons I left.
>Is it to protect kids? If so, then all that effort is better directed at the FDA who has banned them from getting the vaccine. I think this is the area where people should have the most anger and Biden should frankly push legislation to replace or reform the FDA. Their behavior has been atrocious.
What specifically has been atrocious? The FDA has ALWAYS been extremely cautious in approving vaccinations for children. The vaccine was just officially approved for adults, they don't feel they have the data to do so for kids yet as far as I can tell.
> Is it to protect the unvaccinated? COVID is not going away, so IMO here we just want everyone in this population to get the disease as fast as possible to get it over with.
No we definitely do not want that. There are large deaths of the country where vaccinated people are dying of unrelated conditions simply because hospitals are too full of dying unvaccinated COVID patients. The only way this works is if hospitals deny admittance to unvaccinated patients entirely, to reserve capacity for all the normal reasons that people need hospitals. No one is seriously suggesting this level of care rationing though.
> Is it to protect the vaccinated? This makes no sense, as the risk to the vaccinated well below the range we have accepted for decades.
What is the acceptable range? Older people are still dying from Covid even after 2 shots. If a third shot can improve someone's protection from death due to Covid, say from 70% to 90% [1], that sounds like a good reason to take that shot.
The comparison between someone in Israel taking a booster shot and someone in a 3rd world country without access to vaccines is irrelevant - at least until there's a serious global initiative to provide vaccines to everyone around the world.
[1] Original stats talked about 90% protection, but that has gone down since then. One of the possible reasons is the need for a booster shot. But we still don't know what level of protection the booster shot will provide.
I believe a serious issue with your “protect the unvaccinated” statement is it overlooks the amount of pressure they exert on our shared medical system. If your hospital beds are overrun with unvaccinated Covid patients, there is less room for others.
> If you don't have a vaccine by now, you want covid instead and this booster conversation is irrelevant
Friend’s mother visiting from Jamaica. People in her country are dying while they wait for first shots. The voluntarily unvaccinated in America are idiots. The author’s point is there are billions of unvoluntarily unvaccinated around the world to whom these doses could go.
The reason for masks always has been to flatten the curve. The hospitals are too full for everyone just to get it and get it over with, so people without COVID can't get medical help. Right now, the CDC recommends everyone older than 2 years old should wear a mask indoors. This is not just to protect kids but prevent them spreading it.
> I also don't understand the mask/booster thing now.
It’s to reduce strain on hospitals and healthcare in general, but ICU beds in particular. It’s one thing for someone to get severe covid when the healthcare system knows how to treat it and has the capacity. It’s another thing to get severe covid (or have a heart attack, or be in an auto accident) when hospitals are at full capacity. The goal of the US government has always been to flatten the curve and never to eradicate the disease.
It's to flatten the curve. Approx 10% of vaccinated still require oxygen and other medical measures. And with hospitals currently at full capacity, boosters are a short-term way to keep the hospitalization numbers low until kids can get vaccinated and every one else has had their chance before we fully open everything up once and for all.
Unfortunately, yes. The unvaccinated are a fertile ground for strains to develop. Protecting the unvaccinated is in your own best interest. We're going to need new vaccines when the the virus evolves in the unvaccinated, but the vaccinated can delay that eventuality.
The risk to the vaccinated increases over time, as the protection wears off.
Not to mention, the original version of the virus is gone, it has been outcompeted by the variants. The booster should be updated to work against the latest dominant variants. Think of it as a software update.
I think this is the correct analysis - the focus should be to provide vaccines to the rest of the worlds nations that have not yet gotten widespread access to vaccines. This is likely to cause the greatest benefit in the form of fewer global deaths, and reduced global spread of the disease.
But we do not have a limited number of vaccines. At this point there has been plenty of time supply chains to produce the necessary precursors so we are limited entirely by demand. If we are distributing extra vaccines to other countries it is because we don’t want to not because we can’t or because we’re fighting over a single scarce resource.
There is no evidence that we have to choose between boosters or sending vaccines to other countries.
This is the same flawed logic that officials made when they spread doubt about the effectiveness of masks early in the pandemic, hoping to “conserve” masks for healthcare workers.
The assumption of vaccine scarcity is actually a hidden assumption made outside the expertise of those who aren’t deeply knowledgeable about vaccine supply chains.
They need to make the actual data based argument not just appeal to authority.
Booster shots have these benefits, these risks, and these tertiary effects.
The argument seems to be that boosters have small increases in immunity, very small difficult to quantify side effects likely similar, and because of limited global supply and large numbers of unvaccinated.
The optimal deployment might be a very few should have boosters, and the rest of supply should be directed towards people who want but can’t yet get vaccines.
I just got an unsanctioned booster in NY (a 2nd J&J). I expect a 2nd J&J, though classified as a booster, to provide an immunogenic response comparable to a second dose of Moderna or Pfizer; the fact that J&J marketed itself as a 1-dose rather than 2-dose solution seems to have been motivated by a desire to get to market faster [0] rather than something intrinsic about the vaccine, and we already know that one dose of J&J ~= one dose of Moderna/Pfizer [1].
Now that many months have passed since our first dose, I think it makes sense for people who got Johnson & Johnson to get a second dose, and to treat it as a "full" dosage, equivalent to the Moderna/Pfizer/AZ shots.
I basically decided to go it alone, and diverge from our public health experts, when the CDC started recommending boosters for people who got Moderna and Pfizer shots and not for people who got J&J; as Alex Tabarrok pointed out at the time [2], that makes no sense. In light of that, I think we need to do our best to apply scientific reasoning to the issue, rather than deferring to people with scientific degrees and political authority.
I’m curious what happened to all of the other vaccines that were in development, which we heard about in 2020. Now it still only seems to be Moderna and Pfizer.
If supply is a major constraint we would benefit from expanding the number of options in the market and have more pharma production built in other countries.
Although the pharma cartel is a very small community with a few mega firms. Making vaccine development an even smaller subset.
So one in 500 Americans have died of covid-19 at this point. If you get vaccinated, your chance of death from this stupid virus drops by a factor of 10. But apparently these are not good enough odds for those of us who consider ourselves armchair epidemiologists doing the research so to speak.
So let's rephrase this. I just gave you a free ticket to Disney world. But what will make this trip to Disney world unlike any other trip you will ever have to Disney world is that for every 60 visitors I'm going to give a sniper a bullet. And that sniper gets to shoot anyone the sniper wants to shoot. Are you going to accept my free visit to Disney World?
Because basically one in eight Americans have had covid-19 to the extent that their case was recorded. And 1:61 of those people then died of it.
And and before you think I'm some sort of weird tyrant enabler, I support your right not to get vaccinated if you support my right to require you to be tested whenever you want to mix among the vaccinated.
But what's funny is when anti-vaccine ideology was considered part of one political party that sort of viewpoint was just fine but now it's some sort of Nazi Germany outlook because reasons or something. What changed? For bonus points please explain how this is consistent with getting a cavity search every time you want to fly or you hate America.
ugh... can we please just get a medical expert to publish a report directly rather than having the media report it? I am so tried of the way the media twists things to suit their point of view or sensationalize things. I just want direct information... is that too hard to ask for?
I put myself out there as a frontline healthcare worker and was vaccinated prior to Christmas. My second dose fell before the 1/20 time frame by over a week.
It was a one-off thing for me - trying to help - did COVID testing and vaccination until late April... As one of the first groups of people to be vaccinated, I am concerned that my immune response is starting to lessen.
It's sad and ironic that if I were the type to lie at all about this, I'd even have my state paying me to get a first vaccination - no ID required...
It's a hard decision - and I suppose my actions may depend on how booster shots are or are not approved.
I’m not subscribing to a lifetime of shots. If anyone else wants to do so please go ahead, but Im good.
And I expect this create even more pushback to the vaccine. The anti-vax crowd will say this is what the pharma gods want, to be paid subscription revenue in perpetuity by entire populations.
In the mid 70s I contracted measles. I was only 9 or 10 but I think I remember it was because there was a batch of vaccines that didn’t work, or maybe it was doctors learned we actually needed two doses. Whatever; I’d had the vaccination prescribed at the time, it didn’t work, I got measles.
Fast forward 25 years to when I applied to grad school. There was a measles outbreak happening and in order to attend I either needed to have a recent vaccination or a blood test proving immunity.
Even though I had natural immunity I just went ahead and got the additional vaccination. It was faster, cheaper, and I didn’t care.
The point is, medical knowledge changed. No one made a big deal about needing an extra vaccination. No one made a big deal about even needing certain vaccinations to do things like go to school. Why now?
The recent CDC study [1] suggests that vaccine efficacy against hospitalization for people 65+ is ~80% in the US. If we have reason to believe that a third vaccine dose would increase that efficacy, and the immunological data suggests that we do, then IMO it's clearly the right thing to do. Incontrovertible data will mean many seniors being hospitalized and dying in the interim.
There's so much we can do to increase the global supply of vaccines without sacrificing American citizens. Let's focus on those things to improve vaccine equity.
[+] [-] epmaybe|4 years ago|reply
I also think this advice feels like a slap to healthcare workers like myself who desperately want to continue taking care of patients as safely as possible. When your coworkers can spread virus more easily due to less immunity, being unvaccinated, etc, it would be more reassuring to continue to have stronger immunity to continue seeing patients. I don’t have the luxury of waiting for a patient to test negative before seeing them in the emergency room or clinic.
[+] [-] Thlom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ambolia|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianhawes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AzzieElbab|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kurthr|4 years ago|reply
Prioritizing the elderly in developing nations (rather than the wealthy and politically connected) and speeding vaccine production (likely Adenovirus rather than MRNA due to encapsulation and cold-chain bottlenecks) would have order of magnitude larger effects on deaths than preventing booster shots. The number of wasted shots is closing in on the number likely to be administered.
Delaying immunization school children for the school year (barring much higher than expected immune side effects in unpublished data) is likely going to be another own-goal for the FDA/CDC.
[+] [-] cameldrv|4 years ago|reply
Agreed that it makes total sense for HCWs to get a booster, but also why are you seeing patients before they test negative? Every patient could be getting a $5 antigen test as they walk in the door. The fact that this is not being done is just one more missed opportunity.
[+] [-] hanselot|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sradman|4 years ago|reply
The 3rd dose is safe and will probably provide a small benefit to the recipient as Shane Crotty described in TWiV 802 [5]. The downside is that these doses are in short supply globally where they could make a significant difference.
[1] https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
[3] https://lemonadamedia.com/podcast/dr-fauci-answers-your-bigg...
[4] (YouTube ~3.5min @36m45s) https://youtu.be/93Rnjmr7iCk?t=36m45s
[5] https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-802/
[+] [-] tguvot|4 years ago|reply
1) his calculated efficiency for different age groups is up to 40%+ higher compared to numbers that released by israeli ministry of health in official presentations. when asked about it, he said that he doesn't know how they calculate it and this is his numbers
2) his calculations from the beginning included people that got booster shot. Kinda hard to base statistics about efficiency of two doses when you get inside it data about people who got three
[+] [-] nullc|4 years ago|reply
...an even stronger indicator is that the Biden administration seems to have asked two multi-decade long FDA vaccine approval experts to resign following them authoring this report saying that the evidence didn't support the widespread use of boosters as a public health measure.
[+] [-] uselesscynicism|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NDizzle|4 years ago|reply
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E_F6vV0XoAMbaNO?format=jpg&name=...
https://imgur.com/a/fzMdPFE
I guess ignoring data to push an agenda can be defined as "misinterpretation", fair enough. Carry on.
[+] [-] mchusma|4 years ago|reply
If you have a vaccine, then your risk of death is far below that of the flu (statistically).
If you don't have a vaccine by now, you want covid instead and this booster conversation is irrelevant.
Kids are banned from taking anything.
So I expect booster or no booster, frankly it just won't matter much at the population scale.
I also don't understand the mask/booster thing now.
Is it to protect kids? If so, then all that effort is better directed at the FDA who has banned them from getting the vaccine. I think this is the area where people should have the most anger and Biden should frankly push legislation to replace or reform the FDA. Their behavior has been atrocious.
Is it to protect the unvaccinated? COVID is not going away, so IMO here we just want everyone in this population to get the disease as fast as possible to get it over with. Spreading is basically "good" for this group.
Is it to protect the vaccinated? This makes no sense, as the risk to the vaccinated well below the range we have accepted for decades.
[+] [-] tzs|4 years ago|reply
That seems worth checking.
US flu deaths per year over the last 10 years ranged from 12000 to 61000, averaging 35900 [1]. That's 3.7 to 18.6 per 100k, averaging 10.9 per 100k.
Weekly COVID deaths among vaccinated people is 0.1 per 100k [2].
The flu season is typically about 8 months. A weekly death rate of 0.1 per 100k over 8 months would be 3.5 per 100k.
So...about 1/3 the risk of dying from from flu in an average flu year which arguably is indeed "far below".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_influenza_statis...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037e1.htm
[+] [-] merrywhether|4 years ago|reply
Earlier in the summer, we lifted mask mandates “because the vaccines were preventing disease”, and regardless of the technical facts behind that decision, the perception was reality for the general public. Now they are trying to walk that back to “vaccines prevent serious disease” in the face of delta breakthroughs but the baseline had already been set.
Not to mention the fact that experts continue to pedantically stick to their definition of serious disease as “needed oxygen in the hospital”, once again out of touch with the layperson’s opinion that a week of debilitating sickness at home followed by a month of weakness until full recovery seems pretty “serious” and something people do not want. Boosters are appealing because laypeople don’t want any serious-by-their-definition disease and experts seemingly are incapable of acknowledging or understanding that, let alone their part in creating confusing messaging (partly to appease a 3rd set of people who ironically don’t really want to hear from them at all).
Public health officials need to understand that their primary job is managing public perception of a situation first and foremost. They can go push their glasses up and pedantically spout off technical corrections behind closed doors as much as they want, but in public they have to connect and empathize with normal humans.
Part of this probably comes from medicine’s continued promulgation of their air of expertise (read: superiority) that they’ve affected for a long while, but things like compassion and bedside-manner at lower importance. I worked in medicine and studied public health, and this status-over-all-else attitude was one of the reasons I left.
[+] [-] tw04|4 years ago|reply
What specifically has been atrocious? The FDA has ALWAYS been extremely cautious in approving vaccinations for children. The vaccine was just officially approved for adults, they don't feel they have the data to do so for kids yet as far as I can tell.
[+] [-] CydeWeys|4 years ago|reply
No we definitely do not want that. There are large deaths of the country where vaccinated people are dying of unrelated conditions simply because hospitals are too full of dying unvaccinated COVID patients. The only way this works is if hospitals deny admittance to unvaccinated patients entirely, to reserve capacity for all the normal reasons that people need hospitals. No one is seriously suggesting this level of care rationing though.
[+] [-] tomerv|4 years ago|reply
What is the acceptable range? Older people are still dying from Covid even after 2 shots. If a third shot can improve someone's protection from death due to Covid, say from 70% to 90% [1], that sounds like a good reason to take that shot.
The comparison between someone in Israel taking a booster shot and someone in a 3rd world country without access to vaccines is irrelevant - at least until there's a serious global initiative to provide vaccines to everyone around the world.
[1] Original stats talked about 90% protection, but that has gone down since then. One of the possible reasons is the need for a booster shot. But we still don't know what level of protection the booster shot will provide.
[+] [-] MontagFTB|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|4 years ago|reply
Friend’s mother visiting from Jamaica. People in her country are dying while they wait for first shots. The voluntarily unvaccinated in America are idiots. The author’s point is there are billions of unvoluntarily unvaccinated around the world to whom these doses could go.
[+] [-] peakaboo|4 years ago|reply
If big pharma can get billions of people signed up for regular booster shots and new vaccines, they will become enormously powerful.
[+] [-] mattwad|4 years ago|reply
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si....
[+] [-] after_care|4 years ago|reply
It’s to reduce strain on hospitals and healthcare in general, but ICU beds in particular. It’s one thing for someone to get severe covid when the healthcare system knows how to treat it and has the capacity. It’s another thing to get severe covid (or have a heart attack, or be in an auto accident) when hospitals are at full capacity. The goal of the US government has always been to flatten the curve and never to eradicate the disease.
[+] [-] CyanLite2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macspoofing|4 years ago|reply
That's a very American-centric view. I'm not aware of any regulatory bodies (WHO included) which allow vaccination for kids under 12.
[+] [-] gls2ro|4 years ago|reply
Also overall their health/body works different than adults thus lot of medication available for adults cannot be used for kids as it is dangerous.
Thus what is beneficial for adults might not be for children.
[+] [-] zamalek|4 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, yes. The unvaccinated are a fertile ground for strains to develop. Protecting the unvaccinated is in your own best interest. We're going to need new vaccines when the the virus evolves in the unvaccinated, but the vaccinated can delay that eventuality.
[+] [-] beamatronic|4 years ago|reply
Not to mention, the original version of the virus is gone, it has been outcompeted by the variants. The booster should be updated to work against the latest dominant variants. Think of it as a software update.
[+] [-] spywaregorilla|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] occz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Robotbeat|4 years ago|reply
There is no evidence that we have to choose between boosters or sending vaccines to other countries.
This is the same flawed logic that officials made when they spread doubt about the effectiveness of masks early in the pandemic, hoping to “conserve” masks for healthcare workers.
The assumption of vaccine scarcity is actually a hidden assumption made outside the expertise of those who aren’t deeply knowledgeable about vaccine supply chains.
[+] [-] colechristensen|4 years ago|reply
Booster shots have these benefits, these risks, and these tertiary effects.
The argument seems to be that boosters have small increases in immunity, very small difficult to quantify side effects likely similar, and because of limited global supply and large numbers of unvaccinated.
The optimal deployment might be a very few should have boosters, and the rest of supply should be directed towards people who want but can’t yet get vaccines.
[+] [-] setgree|4 years ago|reply
Now that many months have passed since our first dose, I think it makes sense for people who got Johnson & Johnson to get a second dose, and to treat it as a "full" dosage, equivalent to the Moderna/Pfizer/AZ shots.
I basically decided to go it alone, and diverge from our public health experts, when the CDC started recommending boosters for people who got Moderna and Pfizer shots and not for people who got J&J; as Alex Tabarrok pointed out at the time [2], that makes no sense. In light of that, I think we need to do our best to apply scientific reasoning to the issue, rather than deferring to people with scientific degrees and political authority.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/which-virus-vaccine-shot-is-best-...
[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/02/si...
[2] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/08/th...
[+] [-] dmix|4 years ago|reply
If supply is a major constraint we would benefit from expanding the number of options in the market and have more pharma production built in other countries.
Although the pharma cartel is a very small community with a few mega firms. Making vaccine development an even smaller subset.
[+] [-] varelse|4 years ago|reply
So let's rephrase this. I just gave you a free ticket to Disney world. But what will make this trip to Disney world unlike any other trip you will ever have to Disney world is that for every 60 visitors I'm going to give a sniper a bullet. And that sniper gets to shoot anyone the sniper wants to shoot. Are you going to accept my free visit to Disney World?
Because basically one in eight Americans have had covid-19 to the extent that their case was recorded. And 1:61 of those people then died of it.
And and before you think I'm some sort of weird tyrant enabler, I support your right not to get vaccinated if you support my right to require you to be tested whenever you want to mix among the vaccinated.
But what's funny is when anti-vaccine ideology was considered part of one political party that sort of viewpoint was just fine but now it's some sort of Nazi Germany outlook because reasons or something. What changed? For bonus points please explain how this is consistent with getting a cavity search every time you want to fly or you hate America.
[+] [-] dfawcus|4 years ago|reply
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[+] [-] stkdump|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrownaway561|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b112|4 years ago|reply
Instead, as per article, it is about how these shots will save more lives, if administered to people without access to first shots!
If vaccine doses were unlimited worldwide, 3rd shots (according to article logic) would by recommended for all.
[+] [-] gentryb|4 years ago|reply
It was a one-off thing for me - trying to help - did COVID testing and vaccination until late April... As one of the first groups of people to be vaccinated, I am concerned that my immune response is starting to lessen.
It's sad and ironic that if I were the type to lie at all about this, I'd even have my state paying me to get a first vaccination - no ID required...
It's a hard decision - and I suppose my actions may depend on how booster shots are or are not approved.
[+] [-] arrakis2021|4 years ago|reply
I’ve had Covid.
I’m done, thank you.
I’m not subscribing to a lifetime of shots. If anyone else wants to do so please go ahead, but Im good.
And I expect this create even more pushback to the vaccine. The anti-vax crowd will say this is what the pharma gods want, to be paid subscription revenue in perpetuity by entire populations.
[+] [-] jrjarrett|4 years ago|reply
Fast forward 25 years to when I applied to grad school. There was a measles outbreak happening and in order to attend I either needed to have a recent vaccination or a blood test proving immunity.
Even though I had natural immunity I just went ahead and got the additional vaccination. It was faster, cheaper, and I didn’t care.
The point is, medical knowledge changed. No one made a big deal about needing an extra vaccination. No one made a big deal about even needing certain vaccinations to do things like go to school. Why now?
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] henron|4 years ago|reply
There's so much we can do to increase the global supply of vaccines without sacrificing American citizens. Let's focus on those things to improve vaccine equity.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037e3.htm
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] say_it_as_it_is|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exabrial|4 years ago|reply