US to Advise Boosters for Most Americans 8 Months After Vaccination | Hacker News Reader

US to Advise Boosters for Most Americans 8 Months After Vaccination

nytimes.com

13 pointskvee10 comments

I believe yearly booster shots was on the conspiracy theory bingo card.

If immunity is waning after ~1 year, will people who supported passports continue to support them when told they need to be triple vaccinated?

Probably not, and any credibility health authorities had left with the vaccinated population will be gone.

Who was saying the vaccine would last forever? I just figured it would be like the flu vaccine.

the narrative from every health body, CDC included, was take the vaccine to achieve heard immunity and we can get back to normal. Now normal is take the vaccine every year, possibly two to stay ahead of it.

These are also the same health bodies that said only two weeks to lock yourself in your home to eradicate the virus. Or that masks don’t work, then work.

So I understand if you’re confused and keeping up with the latest information is hard giving how much they flip flop.

Given that herd immunity was not achieved before mutation occurred and spread — in no small part due to folks refusing to take the vaccine — it seems obvious that more vaccines would be required, as with the flu.

I’m curious as to your logic on why that should not be the case?

It’s unarguable that early communication on the virus varied wildly in terms of accuracy, which is also quite logical given an entirely new pathogen. But using that as an excuse to ignore the evidence-based information those authorities have since obtained seems short sighted at best.

Delta variant was identified in India in December 2020. India began administering vaccines in January 2021. Vaccine refusal could not have played a role.

With regard to the Delta variant, certainly. But it surely has played a role in the subsequent known variants that have appeared as recently as the Olympics.

All of which contribute to our lack of herd immunity, or am I incorrect?

The current vaccines were/are known to be non-sanitizing. The best vaccines are sanitizing, think measles vaccine. We never were going to reach herd immunity via natural infections and it appears with the current batch we're not going to with vaccines either. Natural infection and a now-canceled nasal vaccine did produce sanitizing effects albeit shortlived.

Towards your original point, only 15% of the world is vaccinated. Say even 5% extra could have been vaxed by now, a difference maybe but nowhere close to the order of magnitude difference required to drop mutation rate below multiple helpful ones per year

Thank you for taking the time to explain that — that is largely new information to me and I appreciate the succinct summary with clear starting points to learn more.

When I got the vaccine, I fully expected that at some point it was likely I’d be getting either a booster or a different vaccine or both. I don’t really see why I’m expected to object to this? Hep B can be up to _4_ jabs, and many people get a new flu vaccine every year.

Hopefully at some point there’ll be an easy to administer vaccine that gives near perfect sterilising immunity, and that will about wrap it up for covid. Until and unless that happens, we are where we are.

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