Millions Are Skipping Their Second Doses of Covid Vaccines | Hacker News Reader

Millions Are Skipping Their Second Doses of Covid Vaccines

nytimes.com

27 pointsKaibeezy14 comments

Burying the lede:

“ While millions of people have missed their second shots, the overall rates of follow-through, with some 92 percent getting fully vaccinated, are strong by historical standards. Roughly three-quarters of adults come back for their second dose of the vaccine that protects against shingles.”

Things are going relatively well, headline is overly alarmist.

Yes. Also

1. One shot still cuts the spread, take the win.

2. We’re still in the mad rush shots-in-arms phase. There will be a time when the most important thing to do is for people’s doctors to convince skeptics and check that everyone got their booster, but we’re still a ways out from there.

Agreed. Boosters will probably be required yearly or so, and those will then be the “second shot” for lots of people.

The only caveat is that partial immunization can create the conditions for viral escape, but hopefully we’ll have boosters by then.

Wait... the second dose of the covid vaccine protects you from shingles? This is news to me.

Does anyone have a source for that? My quick google search doesn't give me any results that aren't about the Shingrix vaccine.

They’re comparing second-dose no-shows for the COVID vaccine with second-dose no-shows for the Shingrix vaccine. They’re not saying that the COVID vaccine protects you from shingles (it doesn’t).

Yeah, I need to make a personal rule about posting questions before I've had any caffeine.

Nevermind, I see that I misread, they are comparing second shot rates of covid against second shot rates of the shingles vaccine.

The article is one sided. Is there data that proves that 1 dose of J&J has advantages over 1 dose of Moderna / Pfizer vaccine? Right now these people are giving space for other people to get vaccinated, so what they are doing can save lives (Just like what happened in UK)

I wonder this too, the non-mRNA vaccines are inferior technology

Inferior in the same way your chrome sandbox is inferior to node because it can’t access system files.

I'll take inferior and well tested over superior and untested any time.

which has nothing to do with determining efficacy of a single shot mRNA vaccine and a single shot non-mRNA vaccine

From the J&J trial results [1]:

Vaccine efficacy (VE) against central laboratory-confirmed moderate to severe/critical COVID19 across all geographic areas in which the trial was conducted was 66.9% (95% CI 59.0, 73.4) when considering cases occurring at least 14 days after the single-dose vaccination and 66.1% (55.0, 74.8) when considering cases occurring at least 28 days after vaccination.

I have seen estimates as low as 40-something % for single doses of the mRNA vaccines, but this may have been an underestimate caused by only considering the first two weeks after inoculation. Given enough time for immunity to fully set in, the real number may be over 90% [2].

HOWEVER, those numbers all refer to symptomatic disease. Prevention of hospitalization and death was 100% in the J&J trial.

[1] https://www.fda.gov/media/146217/download

[2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2036242

There’s a big difference between 2 weeks and 1 month, we know that now. Also the main concerns of the article are long term protection and protection against new variants. Both of these issues can wait until more people are vaccinated, and again we don’t have long term data on J&J vaccine, and I don’t see why it would be better than the mRNA vaccines.

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