“Are We Jumping the Gun on COVID Boosters?” (MedPage Today, August 24, 2021):
Diminishing vaccine effectiveness supposedly makes the case for boosters. But there are two big questions here: First, what is current vaccine effectiveness? And second, what justifies boosters? Let’s consider these in turn.
We have to be honest, many vaccine effectiveness studies are poorly done. All studies compare the rate of getting a breakthrough infection among vaccinated people against the rate of infection in unvaccinated people. But there are some issues with this approach. First, as time goes on, more unvaccinated people have had and recovered from COVID-19 (and these individuals may be less likely to go on to get a shot). This means that their risk of getting COVID-19 a second time is far less than the typical unvaccinated person who has never been sick. Even if vaccines “work” as well as before, this factor alone will result in the appearance of diminishing vaccine effectiveness.
Second, the order of vaccination in all nations is non-random. The folks who got vaccinated first are often the oldest and most vulnerable people with frailty and senescent immune systems. Vaccine effectiveness after 6 months, 8 months, and 12 months increasingly compares older, frailer people who got vaccinated first against unvaccinated people. These older people may always have a slightly higher risk of breakthrough infections. This bias will also give the false appearance of diminishing vaccine effectiveness.
Humans are terrible at reasoning from statistics. Will our booster shot mania prove to be another example of this phenomenon?
Separately, I do wish someone would explain to me the mania for trying to coerce all of the unvaccinated into #AcceptingScience. We know that the vaccines we have don’t prevent infection or transmission. Our hospitals have plenty of capacity if we’re willing to do a little geographic load-balancing. Maybe an individual should care whether he/she/ze/they gets vaccinated. But why do his/her/zir/their neighbors care if he/she/ze/they gets vaccinated? We now know that the pandemic would not end even if 100 percent of humans were vaccinated.
All peasants must do their part for Big Pharma’s bottom line.
The real question is how many more people the vaccines will damage or kill with short and long-term adverse effects vs how mamy people they will protect from the same severity effects due infection.
Given the abysmally bad safety profile of the jabs and low IFR of COVID I’d say the medicine is worse than the disease in this case.
(Anyone who thinks the jabs are safe is welcome to take a look at VAERS… it’s still open to public. Trusting partisan hack words when the evidence is juat clicks away is for stupid lazy humaniform hamsters.)
Oh, and don’t forget that most people won’t get COVID even if they will be swimming in the virus, due to cross-immunity from earlier coronavirus infections or successful immunity formation due to low-dose exposure to the virus. The vaccine will still damage them. The actual fatality rate in general population is WAY less than 0.003 IFR, and this is what needs to be compared against vaccine adverse reaction rate.
Apparently, even some FDA bureaucrats are not happy with the push for the third shot (bashfully named “booster”, the dosage being the same as in the two “main” shots).
2 top FDA officials resigned over the Biden administration’s booster-shot plan, saying it insisted on the policy before the agency approved it, reports say
https://www.businessinsider.com/2-top-fda-officials-resigned-biden-booster-plan-reports-2021-9
9.5% effectiveness? https://voxday.net/2021/09/02/almost-but-not-quite-completely-worthless/
Not a maths person so I ain’t going to check the work.
Pfizer is coming out with a twice daily pill to go along with the vaccine boosters. No one has commented on pill taking being correlated with vax passports and to even think such things is probably against the law or something.
Engage in conspiracy theory and see the future or wait 3 months and get told to do what was recently dismissed as cuckoo talk. When you know the ending it is fun to watch people being surprised.
@philg “We know that the vaccines we have don’t prevent infection or transmission.” is incorrect.
There are plenty of studies, but here is one from done by the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.06.21261707v1.full.pdf … Page 16 has the pertinent table. Incidence rates of both Moderna and Pfizer a significantly lower than unvaxxed.
That being said, effectiveness does wane over the months (lots of Israeli studies show reduced effectiveness of Pfizer anyway), and if there is a breakthrough case the vaccines don’t appear to help much in reducing transmission.
Ara: Thanks for that reference. By “prevent infection or transmission” I meant “prevent like the measles vaccine” (i.e., those injected will not be infected with measles nor transmit measles). My understanding is that the COVID-19 vaccines we have currently are “leaky”, like the vaccines for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek's_disease
So I can believe that the current vaccines will reduce the likelihood of infection, but it isn’t enough of a reduction to satisfy our society’s implicit goal of Zero Cases.
(I’m not sure that the unvaccinated versus vaccinated infection rate in that Mayo article is a sensible comparison to make. Rich white people love to get vaccinated, but they’re also the ones who can most easily hide in their massive suburban bunkers. I’d want to look at vaccinated versus unvaccinated infection rate with income, job type, and residential neighborhood held constant.)
GB, above, cites an article suggesting the COVID-19 vaccines don’t substantially change the probability of tested positive or developing COVID-19 symptoms. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/health/san-diego-breakthrough-covid.html covers the same study, I think:
“Even among its fully vaccinated workers, the University of California San Diego Health witnessed a significant increase in infections from June to July, according to a letter published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
From March through July, a total of 227 workers tested positive, according to the letter. Of those, 130 — or 57 percent — were vaccinated.
The total number of symptomatic Covid-19 cases went up more than eightfold, from 15 in June to 125 in July, with 75 percent of the cases occurring in fully vaccinated employees.”
Original article: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2112981 (says 76-83% of the workers were fully vaccinated during the study period).
If we believe these data, the reduction in infection/transmission from vaccination is small. So we have to circle back to my original post question… other than a desire not to be among those who reject our religion, why do we care whether or not anyone other than ourselves is vaccinated?
A reasonable argument to have more people vaccinated (to reduce the probability of hospitalization) may be the health system overload as is apparently happening in Israel:
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/312904
Unfortunately, their stats are as opaque as anyone else’s, e.g. they do not provide (or I was unable to find) a breakdown of vaccinated vs unvaccinated infection/hospitalization/death by age, gender, ethnicity at least. They used to publish data like this:
“seriously ill patients are unvaccinated (45.3%), compared to 11 (1.6%) who had one dose of the two-dose vaccine, and 346 (51.6%) who had two or three doses (including the booster)”
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/312240
but not any longer.
Ivan: But the U.S. has never come anywhere close to health system overload. Our incompetence at load-balancing has been exposed at times, but since March 2020 the main aggregate problem in U.S. health care has been empty beds, not full ones. Even at the height of Andrew Cuomo’s heroism, when he was bravely going on TV every night, most hospitals in New York State were empty because, with a health budget larger than Russia’s military budget, Cuomo and his young female friends couldn’t figure out a way to transport patients from the city to upstate.
(Thanks for the link to the article about the Israeli hospital system being overwhelmed right now despite nearly the entire population being vaccinated. Given that Israel has had mask orders, lockdowns, and early-and-often vaccinations, I think that the only conclusion that we can draw is we need to double down on mask orders, lockdowns, and vaccinations. #FollowScience)
The mood among the Isaeli decision makers is a bit schizophrenic. On one hand you have Gamzu, the former covid boss who “decried the use of nationwide lockdowns as a “solution of weakness”, saying that the concept should be dropped entirely” and “emphasized that the virus is already endemic and will never be eradicated.”
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/312413
On the other, “As part of changes in the green pass to take effect in October, anyone who hasn’t had a third dose will be considered unvaccinated.”
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/312893
I think the general mood there now is a big disappointment after the initial success, real or coincidental. So, there’s a strong push for a third shot.
What is it called now when you lose the capacity to feel like you have been lied to and used because you knew from the beginning you were, and always will be, but you are forced to obey the people who do it?
Unlike in the United States, Israeli public healthcare does not take 20% of GDP. So public hospitals are at full load threshold or even over it during regular times (private clinics available of course and general level of medicine, except for empty hospital beds, is good). Something that @philg suggested to do with emergency units, great minds think alike
Phil some would suggest ‘zero risk living’ is the satanic spell of the moment. Evil disguised as do goodness.
https://www.francisberger.com/bergers-blog/the-unapologetic-cruelty-of-none-are-safe-until-all-are-safe
NH highway signs say one death is too many, I’d ask how we can justify driving cars in NH then but I doubt they have a coherent answer.
GB: For maximum safety, folks in NH can get around via motorcycle with no helmet (legally). https://www.iihs.org/topics/motorcycles/motorcycle-helmet-laws-table
NH state motto is “live free or die”, lol
I’m sorry philg, but I’m gonna have to break the news to you – you are in mortal danger, according to the microcovid.org website. I have calculated your risk profile using the following parameters on your behalf:
Location: Palm Beach County
Helicopter Ride with 1 other person for 60 mins (I chose the Car ride template but what’s the difference?)
Vaccinated 2x with Pfizer/BioNtech (I am assume you #followthescience)
1 nearby person
Distance: close , less than 1 ft apart
Duration: 120 minutes
Risk profile of the passenger: average person (20k microcovids) with unknown vaccination status (they could be lying to you!!)
Indoor environment
No masks and talking very loudly (it’s a helicopter!)
You are dangerously high risk in this case! In fact, just as dangerous as a potential child support plaintiff seeking a one night stand with a Florida plastic surgeon. Which btw can also be calculated! (see the template: One night stand with random person, distance = kissing).
German: I got Moderna, which happens to be headquartered in the building formerly occupied by the MIT AI/LCS research teams (NE43 or 545 Tech Square back then, 200 Technology Square now). And Tom Knight, the most creative of the AI Lab researchers, and his new-ish company Ginkgo Bioworks were instrumental in getting Moderna vaccines manufactured.
(Separately, I think a Florida child support profiteer seeking to avoid COVID-19 during a brief sexual encounter with an already-married specialist physician could arrange the encounter for an outdoor venue, e.g., a balcony. So, although the cash opportunity isn’t quite as good as in Massachusetts (see http://www.realworlddivorce.com/ ), the COVID-19 risk could be much lower.)
Phil: ok, Moderna and not Pfizer, but give me credit, I was pretty close! 🙂 I didn’t know that Moderna were located in Cambridge/MIT! Also didn’t know about Gingko Bioworks’ role. I had read that the key to the mRNA vaccines’ success was actually the lipid nanoparticles to deliver the mRNA into cells. Reminds me, I should look into stocks of companies producing those lipids , if mRNA therapy takes off for other diseases such as cancer, for example.
The templates (and default values) for scenarios on the microcovid.org website are interesting: one night stands (they assume the activity lasts for 600 mins!), voting in-person, outdoor party masked and 3 feet apart, etc. These people spend a lot of time thinking about covid (see blog post: https://www.microcovid.org/blog/budget) . They came up with this calculator and budgeted themselves 68 microcovids each weak for a 1% risk over the year. Wow. My liberal arts college professors friends are now using this to calculate their risk for every thing they do (teaching, office hours, etc ). This is nuts.
Off topic, but absurd enough for this blog:
San Fran is now paying people not to shoot each other!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9951135/San-Francisco-rolls-program-pay-people-300-month-not-shoot-other.html
So in a few years we will be paying gangs a regular salary not to kill other citizens?
It’s called universal basic income.
I don’t understand why booster shots are such a big deal in the US. If you had two shots without significant side effects, what’s the issue with getting another one? Side effects are most likely less.
It’s different if you got one of the vector vaccine and then get an MRNA one. There may be new side effects then, but it’s also considered to be more effective than just having one type of vaccine. Going to do that, as I had two Astrazeneca shots and will be eligible for MRNA in December.
> Side effects are most likely less.
Tim, thanks for that insight. I didn’t know that when playing Russian roulette, the chance of a bullet falls the more you play.
Take a look at the achievements of mass vaccination in England and Wales. It worked so well that July’s all-cause death rate was 7.6% higher than the July five-year average. The leading cause was dementia; only 2.4% of deaths were tagged “covid”.
We could look forward to even more success with boosters, but for some strange “vaccine hesitancy“: “the programme may be more targeted” (great way of putting it!).
“Side effects are most likely less.”
I’ll be interested to see what the Israelis say about this now that they’re rolling out boosters. It isn’t obvious to me what side effects may be like because most people I know said the second shot was much worse than the first.
I am fully vaccinated via Pfizer back in March/April. The first shot I felt almost nothing. The second shot I had a fever of about 1 degree within 1/2 hour, then gradually escalating muscle aches (although the fever did not get worse) and soreness in legs, arms and ribcage/torso for about 24-36 hours. Nothing significant after that. Older relative had fewer second-shot symptoms. Another older relative had worse second-shot symptoms and stayed in bed for a day. Everyone recovered. I am now eligible for the booster shots.
Alex: “I am now eligible for the booster shots”
How many ? Monthly refills ? Or more frequently, nightly, before you go to sleep ?
@Ivan: Forever, probably, or until I die or this BS stops. Maybe I’ll start injecting something else in the meantime.
@Ivan, @Tim: In less than six months we’ve gone from eradicating the pandemic with widespread vaccination, to attacking Deplorable Imbeciles and having compassion for Angry Black People who Don’t Trust White People to announcing a new variant of the virus every few weeks. And for the people at the WHO and the CDC it’s, like, who knew?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-mu-variant-health-officials/
“Fauci said the Mu variant, technically known as B.1.621, has mutations suggesting “it would evade certain antibodies,” potentially including those from vaccines.
“But there isn’t a lot of clinical data to suggest that. It is mostly laboratory in vitro data,” he added. “…We don’t consider it an immediate threat right now.”
I know one thing that will definitely stop COVID regardless of the variant, right in its tracks in any living host: the guillotine.