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Comment by josh_today | Hacker News Reader

I know many will disagree but with the booster shot set for approval any day now, we need to stop calling something a vaccine when 3 doses within a 12 month period of it are needed

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I don't see why. HPV vaccine takes three doses several weeks apart. Hepatitis B vaccine needs three doses with a month between the first two, then another 4-5 months later. This is really not new territory.

And after the 3 doses the patient has immunity against HPV.

Bloomberg: “A month after the third shot, 55% of those who got it developed antibody levels likely to provide significant protection.”

Only 5% over half were “Likely” plus “significant” which is not definite by a long shot (no pun intended)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-11/third-mod...

Are you expecting the results in people with compromised immune systems to generalize to the broader population?

If so, why?

My point was equating a “multi dose defense shot” to a vaccine.

After the immunocompromised have had the opportunity to protect themselves, the booster will be made available to all, just like the initial shots earlier this year. Those will be followed by another booster or more next year and so on.

Many vaccines don't have 100% efficacy, and diminished protection over time. The point is that if everyone has good enough protection from a vaccine, the outbreaks die down (r_0 < 1).

For example,

One dose of MMR vaccine is 93% effective against measles, 78% effective against mumps, and 97% effective against rubella.

Two doses of MMR vaccine are 97% effective against measles and 88% effective against mumps. [1]

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html#:~:te....

You are supposed to get a tetanus defense shot every 10 years too.

The logic for a booster actually would be defense, it boosts antibodies which helps block more infections. An injection designed to modulate immune response by exposing the immune system to the target antigen is certainly a vaccine though.

Those are immunocompromised transplant patients.

Basically when you get a transplant organ, the body's immune system tries to kill it so they have to use powerful drugs to kill off the immune system.

In the vernacular, or scientifically?

I think most folks around me call their annual flu vaccine a "flu shot", but I still think it qualifies as a vaccine even though we don't think of it of the same severity as your one-time childhood vaccines.

It still a vaccine. No vaccine ever promised absolute immunity, nor did any of them ever promise protection against materially different strains of the same basic pathogen.

Maybe but then again, the vaccines went from published SARS-CoV-2 genome to vaccine approval in less than a year too. A booster shot under those circumstances seems pretty consistent under that compressed timeframe. 10 years from now people will probably get something more stable with boosters at bigger intervals. A vaccine is a vaccines; just because the virus is evolving quickly doesn't mean it's not. You're still almost certainly way better off with a vaccine than not.

Tetanus vaccines would have to be called something else, as well. I think a lot of vaccines lose effectiveness over time.

Check out the schedule for tick-borne encephalitis vaccine:

http://mri.cts-mrp.eu/download/AT_H_0126_001_FinalPL.pdf

1st dose,

2nd dose 1 month later,

3rd dose 5 months later,

1st booster 3 years later,

additional boosters every 5 years

I think it would be great if we had effective covid vaccines with such a schedule

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