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Comment by tedunangst | Hacker News Reader

This paper is dated November 2020, but I don't think anything has changed. In the past 48 hours, the local paper ran a story about everybody needing a third booster shot, a story about all the things it's still not safe to do if you're fully vaccinated, and finally a story that the city was immediately moving to full general eligibility because vaccine providers couldn't fill appointments. Nowhere did they provide links to any of the providers with open slots. You had to work that out for yourself.

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Why is a third booster shot bad news? That seems like neutral news and possibly even good news since it means we have a solution to the problem.

Edit: if you’re going to downvote this comment that’s fine but could you do me the courtesy of explaining why? I don’t understand what the flaw is in my reasoning and I am curious to understand it.

"Why should I get this shot instead of waiting for the one that works?"

Do I really need to clarify that I am not the one asking this question?

Many reasons. To minimize the chances our health care system is overrun and new mutations don’t emerge it’s beneficial to maximize public immunity to as many variants as we can as early as possible. Additionally the booster shot may come in the form of a third dose anyway, so there may be no personal benefit to waiting either.

Why should I study now instead of revising before the exam?

The booster isn't because the first shot isn't working now. It will be required because your body will eventually forget how to fight COVID (you'll need three shots no matter when you start) or because new variants will pop up. Either way, your choice is "get the shots now and be safe for the intervening year, or get the two shots a year of non-protection later". The cost of getting another shot every year is nothing. I'd much rather get a shot every year than go a year without being protected.

But being infected by the virus (esp in moderate infections) causes the same antigen response as the vaccine. Is this saying that the antibodies to sars-cov-2 wane after a year? If so, it seems this virus is well on its way to endemic status

I've heard numbers thrown around for anywhere between 6 and 18 months for common antibody lifetime. Obviously, these are guesses based on similar viruses and have evolved over the past year. It's probably going to be endemic, although it's possible that with sufficient vaccine production we can knock it out of humanity. The problem is it seems to survive so well in animal hosts.

Reinfections right now are rare enough that we don't know much, but there have been second cases that seem more severe than the first. This is likely because of lung damage from the first case. But faded immunity from the vaccine won't have the same lung damage. So the faded immunity should be sufficient to eliminate the worst outcomes most times.

So the question of when we start boosters depends on how bad the condition will have to be that we are inoculating against.

Ironically, maybe confirming that people are interesting in those articles, I was curious what you can not do if fully vaccinated. There are two things you can not do according to the CDC:

- Visit indoors, without a mask, with people at increased risk for severe illness from COVID-19

- Attend medium or large gatherings

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac...

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