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> I understand the booster is the same formula as the existing shots. Which means the boosters will do as well or worse than the original two shots.

The booster being the same formula does not, in any respect, mean that. There are quite a few vaccines that are given in multiple similar or identical doses and provide stronger and longer lasting protection after the later sides.

My guess (purely a guess) is that the actual problem with the Pfizer vaccine is that the sides are too close together. The Moderna doses are spaced farther apart and (preliminary, unreviewed) results suggest that it works just fine even six months after the second dose.

I would not be at all surprised if a booster dose of either mRNA vaccine after six months gives essentially lifelong protection. I also would not be surprised if it didn’t.

Bookmarking this so we can have this delightful conversation 6 months down the road when chances are the boosters prove to be just as effective as the original shots.

Early indicators from Israel, which is ahead of the booster curve:

> Israel Is Preparing for Possible Fourth Covid Vaccine Dose

> “We don’t know when it will happen; I hope very much that it won’t be within six months, like this time, and that the third dose will last for longer,” Health Ministry Director General Nachman Ash said in an interview with Radio 103FM.

> Israel, which has mainly used the Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE vaccine, has so far inoculated about 2.8 million people with a third dose after beginning a drive to administer booster shots in August. Health officials have said the effects of the initial Covid-19 shots weaken five months after inoculation, making boosters necessary.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-12/israel-pr...

You’re comparing traditional vaccines to mRNA vaccines here. An mRNA “vaccine” is closer to a biologic than to a traditional vaccine. We’re told they’re not “gene therapy”, instead the Moderna CEO has called them “information therapy”.

Anyway, I’m rambling. In a nutshell, they shouldn’t be thought of as the same technology because well, they’re not.

If you read up on the standard CDC vaccine schedule, you will discover many different vaccines with many different technologies. There is no such thing as a “standard” vaccine.

IPV , OPV, the DTaP vaccines, the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine, and measles are all different technologies. They’re all biologics, though.

It’s flat out wrong to say vaccines do next to nothing against the delta variant. You can trivially examine this but have chosen not to. My state, Connecticut ,publishes weekly in depth reports that break down cases. Nearly 100% of infections are delta. You’re about 5x safer worth a vaccine than without - for catching COVID, hospitalization, and death. 2/3 of the cases in CT are amongst the less than 30% unvaccinated. CDC dates are similar.

https://data.ct.gov/Health-and-Human-Services/COVID-19-DPH-R...

This is a good report, thanks for sharing. Though would be more informative to also share raw data tables for all the charts.

I dug a bit to double-check the hospitalization rate. The Oct 28 report claims (page 7) "18 Times higher risk of being hospitalized with COVID-19". That's a pretty spectacular number, how did they derive it?

1. The report says "One hundred ninety-one patients are currently hospitalized with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19; of these, 134 (70.2%) are not fully vaccinated.".

2. I found the vaccination rate as 67%, using the dashboard at https://data.ct.gov/stories/s/CoVP-COVID-Vaccine-Distributio....

3. I do a little bit of math.

  pop_rate = pop_cases / pop_count
  pop_cases = pop_case_rate * cases_total
  pop_count = pop_count_rate * pop_total

  risk = unvax_rate / vax_rate 
       = (unvax_rate / unvax_count_rate) / (vax_rate / vax_count_rate)
       = (70.2 / 33) / (29.8 / 67)
       = 4.8x

Your number (5x) is close to what the data indicates compared with what the report claims (18x). Perhaps someone with better fifth grade math skills can riddle me out...

>This puts tremendous evolutionary pressure on the virus to mutate, which has already happened. Now we have the Delta variant which the vaccines do next to nothing against. Why? Because the virus has obviously found a way around our vaccine induced immune response.

Except Delta emerged in India before there was any evolutionary pressure causes by vaccines and the vaccines still work good for Delta.

>Natural immunity looking better every day eh?

Natural immunity is not immune to evolutionary pressure either

Note that natural immunity provides even more pressure to mutate because it's likely to be targeted against more unstable parts of the virus. We are already seeing this in action--while natural immunity provides very good protection against reinfection *with that strain* it doesn't do so well against other strains. The good vaccines (not the killed-virus Chinese garbage) deals with variants better than prior infection.

And the vaccine *does* provide protection against Delta--you're less likely to get it and if you do get it it generally is less serious. Being vaccinated cuts your death rate 10x.

Natural immunity isn't going to happen, we have seen far too many cases of reinfection with different variants. The more we see the more hopeless the death cult approach looks.

>We are already seeing this in action--while natural immunity provides very good protection against reinfection with that strain it doesn't do so well against other strains.

Please post some proof to corroborate any of this. I assume you’re talking about COVID strains here?

>Natural immunity isn’t going to happen, we have seen far too many cases of reinfection with different variants.

Again, source desperately needed here. I’m more than willing to change my take but only with hard data, not sweeping generalizations based on a misunderstanding of how natural immunity works.

I didn't save links, a couple of recent reports:

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/delta-variant-what...

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr...

We see a lot of data from Israel because they made a deal with Pfizer early on to trade early access to vaccine for allowing Pfizer access to anonymized health records about vaccination and infection. Thus they have some of the best data around on the effect of the Pfizer shot on a population scale.