Because it protects you and others around you from disease. Cowards will make up lies and excuses for not taking it, though. I suppose you have to decide who you trust, your doctor, or internet trolls. My guess is, if you ask your doctor, he or she will recommend you take it.
honestly, it's just not worth arguing- some folks are going to be permanently convinced that the case for vaccination is much stronger than it really is. Like I said in other comments: the medical researcher community moved on and no longer believes that vaccines were nearly as effective as originally believed, for any criterion. We certainly aren't ever going to reach ongoing herd immunity so the most reasonable approach now is to identify people at greatest risk and spend more resources protecting them.
I think it'll be interesting to follow further vaccine development in that sense.
Also, I don't know why you say researchers no longer believes that vaccines missed the mark. Yes they didn't prevent reinfection of future variants, and that I think everyone was hoping they would and no longer believes that, but just recently this study was published: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3... showing an estimate of 14 to 20 million lives saved by the vaccines just during the first year of vaccination. And while 80% of that is from direct protection, 20% is from indirect protection such as:
> reducing the levels of burden placed on health-care systems, reducing the number of days that health-care capacity would have been exceeded and therefore contributing to an overall lower fatality rate from infection
That said the study highlights the same conclusion as yours, people at greater risk should be prioritized since direct protection is much more effective, and also low income countries that are not able to get or pay for vaccines are disproportionately affected, it would make sense to send vaccines that are going to young healthy low risk individuals in high income countries to these lower income places.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended Thursday that millions of eligible Americans, including those as young as 12, get an updated omicron-targeting booster shot to bolster defenses against serious illness and death during a potential fall or winter rise in covid-19 cases.
If you doctor is telling you not to get the booster, you need a better doctor.
UCSF professor Vinay Prasad making the case against the new boosters (and claiming that those responsible for these recommendations ‘exhibit a pattern of gross incompetence’):
BA.5 avoids the immunity you gained from Delta, Alpha, and the original.
If you got COVID-19 this July-ish (when BA.5 was biggest), maybe you don't need a vaccine update. But given how much the virus has evolved, it only makes sense to update your body to the newest version that's out there.
If the next big strain is from the BA.5 lineage (or closely related lines like Omicron), having your body trained on the new proteins / RNA should help a lot.
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Fortunately, it's not as big a deal because original strain / original vaccine looks like it still prevents hospitalization and deaths. So this is strictly about reducing the spread of Omicron / BA.5 and related substrains.
> BA.5 avoids the immunity you gained from Delta, Alpha, and the original.
Is this based on serology studies? Or are there studies that show sharp risk increase for my demographic?
> Fortunately, it's not as big a deal because original strain / original vaccine looks like it still prevents hospitalization and deaths. So this is strictly about reducing the spread of Omicron / BA.5 and related substrains.
That's exactly what I'm wondering. I personally don't worry for myself, if I saw something convincing that showed reduction in transmission, common good all that then I'd potentially do this for someone else. But I'm not interested in participating in free experimentation for big pharma.
> this is strictly about reducing the spread of Omicron / BA.5 and related substrains
From cdc.gov:
Updated COVID-19 boosters add Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 spike protein components to the current vaccine composition, helping to restore protection that has waned since previous vaccination by targeting variants that are more transmissible and immune-evading.