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.
What has been generally disproved is the concept of herd immunity. Initially this was what scientists and researchers had hoped would occur with vaccinations, and sadly for multiple reasons this did not happen.
Vaccines does significant help in reducing the severity when a person get sick, which reduces the work load on the health care system and allowing the personal to focus their time and skill on people in worse conditions. That is great, but it changes the initial strategy in terms of application and goal.
True, though from my understanding, in some sense herd immunity was reached for the original strain and even delta, both of which are pretty much eradicated from the US.
Those were the deadliest strains as well.
What happened is that COVID started mutating much faster than expected in ways that it can avoid the immune system.
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’):
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it must be Vinay Prasad. Regardless of where he works he's still compared mask and vaccine mandates to the Third Reich. Most public health officials have a much lower tolerance for death or lasting injury than Prasad does. Even amongst laypeople Prasad's tolerance for someone elsedying is much higher than that of those other people.
A pattern of gross incompetence is the kind of thing you'd typically only level at people trying to Godwin their way out of scientific discourse.
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.
Page 9 in the PDF clearly shows that original strain had the least protection, while BA.1/BA.2 (Omicron) had the most protection vs BA.5, but it was still possible to be reinfected. Yes, this includes your demographic. (Population 12-and-older for this study).
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Delta was the first major strain that avoided immunity (IIRC: Gamma was also avoiding immunity to a greater degree than Delta, but Delta outcompeted Gamma). Omicron outcompeted Delta and also avoided immunity, and BA.5 is the mutant of Omicron that further avoids immunity.
Getting your body used to the original strain (aka: your original infection and/or the original vaccine), plus this updated BA.5 specific booster shot, seems to only make sense.
Especially because the vaccine is like, free? Your health insurance wants you to take it because it means less costs to them than if you got sick.
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I should note that even if you don't get hospitalized or dead from the virus, there's still the chance of "long COVID", and other such complications if you get sick. So it still is to your personal benefit to get the vaccine IMO, especially since it targets the latest strain.
> 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.
The original vaccine still has strong protective effects vs even BA.5 though.
That's my point. The original vaccine may be "worse" than the BA.5-specific vaccine that came out last week. But its still doing its most important job (ie: keeping people out of the hospital and/or morgue).
"Not getting sick" is still useful (and BA.5 specific vaccines should be great at that). But is kind of a secondary or even tertiary concern of mine. Deaths and hospitalizations are my #1 and #2 statistics that I'm worried about with regards to this subject.
I just don't see where the CDC or anyone else is saying that the new boosters are meant to prevent sickness but not to protect against hospitalization and death.
This is from fda.gov:
The updated COVID-19 vaccine boosters are designed to give you broad protection against COVID-19, including better protection against the Omicron variant.
COVID-19 vaccines can help protect against severe illness, hospitalization and death from COVID-19. As the virus changes and your immunity naturally decreases over time, you may lose some of that protection.
The updated (bivalent) booster vaccines are authorized to help provide better protection against COVID-19.
The reason most people are taking the booster, if I were to hazard a guess, is because they do not want to die or get severely ill. If the booster was only good for preventing minor sickness, well that changes the equation. I mean, the booster itself will likely make them feel sick anyway.
Maybe you're right that original vaccine still provides strong protection against severe illness and death, but it would be nice to hear that from the CDC and FDA as these boosters are rolled out so that those that are trying to decide whether or not to take it have a better understanding of the potential benefits or lack thereof.