Biden says they’ve been planning for vaccine boosters for months. Which can only mean they’ve known for months that effectiveness fades very fast. It’s not surprising. I’ve known it for months, too. But this wasn’t widely publicly known. Nobody ever warned people that the shots they were getting – at the cost of, often, bad side effects – will become useless so fast. And will need to be repeated every few months.
So basically, instead of getting COVID symptoms once, you’ll get COVID-like symptoms (whatever they are for you, ranging from imperceptible to bad) many times. Would have been nice to hear about it a bit earlier.
Also, all those months of preparation to give another gigantic amount of taxpayer money to Pfizer, yet no preparation anyone can notice to evacuate Americans stuck in Afghanistan. Great priorities.
Clarissa's Blog 
Clarissa, I think the booster is to address the Delta variant. If there was no Delta variant I doubt there would be much need for a booster shot.
I’m very grateful we have this kind of vaccine tech. Without it, things would be much worse. Just look at how deaths have basically remained low as opposed to previous surges. My state is probably one of the most highly vaccinated in the nation and we’re in single to double digit daily deaths from COVID and the worse of this surge seems to be over.
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This is a rapidly mutating virus. This has been known since the beginning. Variants were a given. The existence of variants is precisely why there can be no vaccine from this. As we are now seeing.
Hospitalizations have been surging in the countries that have vaccinated the earliest and the hardest. Deaths usually trail so this remains to be seen.
There’s absolutely no consensus on whether things would have been worse. There is quite a bit of evidence that they might have been significantly better if we didn’t waste time on the vaccine route.
Question for you. Which booster will you be refusing? #4? #10? #15? Have you set a hard limit in your own mind?
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“More than 90% of those currently in Louisiana hospitals with Covid-19 aren’t fully vaccinated, according to state data, and just a handful of intensive-care unit beds are available in each region.”
“Generally, places with high vaccination rates have avoided the surges in Covid-19 patients experienced in areas with lower vaccination rates, according to a recent Wall Street Journal analysis. Fully vaccinated people are far less likely to become hospitalized or die from Covid-19 than those who aren’t, according to the CDC.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/delta-variant-low-covid-19-vaccination-rates-push-u-s-hospitalizations-higher-11629318796
Anecdotal data seems to suggest hospitalization is much higher among the unvaccinated. So the vaccines do seem effective in preventing hospitalizations, even against the Delta variant.
“Question for you. Which booster will you be refusing? #4? #10? #15? Have you set a hard limit in your own mind?”
Boosters seem to be primarily for those more at risk of catching COVID, so I don’t have any plans for that. Having said that, getting a vaccine is such an easy process here in the US I don’t see why people complain about them so much. Everybody I’ve talked to has had very positive experiences; I really don’t get the fear and paranoia.
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Many of us have refused the vaccine because a) we’re not afraid of a cold virus which, if we get it, we have a 99.7% chance of surviving; b) the vaccines are experimental and we have no interest in being guinea pigs for the pharmaceutical companies; and c) we don’t trust any product whose manufacturer is legally exempt from any liability if their product maims or kills us. I hope this answers your question. It’s not paranoia; it’s common sense.
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I don’t even take Tylenol, I’m so wary of all medication. I’ve been like this my whole life.
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You didn’t answer my question, though. What’s the highest number of boosters you’d go for? It’s always good to decide in advance.
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I would say 1 at most.
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Thank you! I’m very curious how people think about this.
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I got the vaccine — the J and J one in fact since I didn’t want to get an mRna vaccine — due to a bunch of complex reasons that mostly have to do with the vaccine mandate in my university. I will be getting exactly zero boosters, thank you. Boosters have no scientific data behind them. There’s no randomized control trial, no proper efficacy study, no safety study, nothing. I’m not taking any medication with this kind of bullshit record.
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I’d be fine with 1 a year, similar to the flu vaccine. Would grumble at 2 a year. Wouldn’t do 3.
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// What’s the highest number of boosters you’d go for? It’s always good to decide in advance.
People after a certain age are advised to get a flu vaccine yearly, especially if they work with many people, so I don’t see how annual or even half-annual covid vaccine is a huge difference.
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So you’ll get as many as you are told? What if it’s daily? Say, as a pill. Would you take it daily forever?
Totally your choice I respect it.
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// So you’ll get as many as you are told? What if it’s daily? Say, as a pill. Would you take it daily forever?
Daily is a wild exaggeration.
Annually more like it, or half-annually.
I believe it’s still very new now, but within 2-3 years at most there will be a good annual vaccine like the one against flu. Flu also mutates a lot like covid, but nobody proposes to throw out all flu vaccines because of that.
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“Flu also mutates a lot like covid, but nobody proposes to throw out all flu vaccines because of that.”
This is a great point. I also think these boosters will just become yearly COVID vaccines that older and more vulnerable people will be encouraged to take, same as the flu.
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I thought the mantra was “it isn’t just like flu.”
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It will be just like the flu once we’ve all been exposed to it. We’re not there yet.
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Mutation rate is slower than the flu, so I’m guessing yearlies won’t be necessary. Afaik, T-cell response stays strong (just as it did for sars-cov-1), it’s just free-floating antibodies that decrease
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“Flu also mutates a lot like covid, but nobody proposes to throw out all flu vaccines because of that.”
Nobody proposes to vaccinate the ENTIRE population of the world for flu either. If they did, perhaps there would be some people who would like to throw all flu vaccines out. I am not even going to start talking about the side effects.
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And nobody got fired or banned from gyms and restaurants for refusing the flu vaccine. It was always completely optional.
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It’s a new virus for which people didn’t have immunity. It’s very different than the influenza virus which we’ve all been exposed to already at some point multiple times.
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“And nobody got fired or banned from gyms and restaurants for refusing the flu vaccine. It was always completely optional.”
For what it’s worth, I agree with you here, at least in the first world. Vaccines are easily available and very effective (if not 100%) at preventing serious disease, so I don’t see any reason anymore to restrict any of A’s rights on the off chance that they may pass the virus to B. B has the tools to protect themselves at this point, if they feel like it, and if they don’t feel like it, that’s not A’s problem.
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Exactly. Absolutely true. So why are the vaccinated so angry at the unvaccinated? Why do they have so much rage? If they are safe, then what’s the problem?
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“Why do they have so much rage? If they are safe, then what’s the problem?”
From the other side of the Atlantic, it looks a bit like the rage is preexisting, and just finds various hats to wear.
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Absolutely. This isn’t about COVID at all. It started long before.
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Sounds like it’d be really useful to know where such rage is coming from…
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It’s starting to resemble my conversations with the friend whose husband beat her. “This isn’t going to happen! You are exaggerating! He promised to stop! He only hit me because I provoked him and I will be more careful this time.”
We are looking for a hard limit here. What’s yours. Monthly? Weekly? Daily? It’s a useful exercise, if nothing else.
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@ed: “Clarissa, I think the booster is to address the Delta variant. If there was no Delta variant I doubt there would be much need for a booster shot.”
Respectfully, it has been known for about a year now that antibodies and therefore immune response may reduce and become zero in less than 6 months, followed by reinfection.
The problem, therefore, isn’t a delta strain – it’s that this virus results in a kind of antibody that cease to exist in the body rapidly.
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Exactly. It’s been known for a while. Biden himself recognized this in the linked speech.
Nobody tests you specifically for Delta, by the way. It’s assumed to be Delta but the test just says “positive for COVID.” At least in the US.
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“The vast majority of people who have died from COVID-19 were unvaccinated. Fatal cases of COVID-19 among unvaccinated people are either very low or virtually zero in 48 states.”
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/covid-19-by-the-numbers-vaccinated-continue-to-be-protected#The-current-situation
From all I’ve seen, the vaccines are keeping a lot of people out of hospitals. It’s mostly the un-vaccinated that are in hospital and dying right now.
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Immune response doesn’t decrease, just circulating antibodies. Everyone is ignoring memory T- and B-cells, which is problematic.
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Once you had Covid or the vaccine you have the memory T-cells. So the immunity never becomes zero, it just takes a few days longer to get activated. Therefore boosters in most cases are complete nonsense because the body goes through the process of activating the memory T-cells just the same way as if it would go through it after a natural infection. Most people can afford these few days, very few can’t.
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