[whynotminot]

You’re thinking about the booster wrong. Having a vaccine for the ancestral strain is actually pretty great, because it confers (or has to this point) some level of protection against all child strains due to there being at least enough similarity still.

If you make some highly specific omicron booster, it might not do anything against whatever variant comes next.

As long as the original shot keeps working, it’s the best one to ride with for now.

[throwaway894345]

With how much more contagious omicron is, I wonder what the odds are that future strains will come from it or an earlier strain? In particular, I assume there is some zero-sum competition going on between strains—if someone gets infected with Omicron it becomes very unlikely that they would later contract Delta—thus at a certain point Omicron is everywhere and less contagious strains largely die out? This has happened in the past with syphilis, for example.

[whynotminot]

It’s sort of interesting to think about. One epidemiologist I follow mused that we could end up with delta and omicron co-existing, with omicron hitting the vaccinated (but not boosted) while delta continues to wreak havoc among the unvaccinated. It’s hard to tell if omicron is actually more contagious than delta, or if it just appears to be because of its immunity evasion.