Hacker News Reader

Comment by windows2020 | Hacker News Reader

windows2020

In CS, part of being an expert is knowing what you don't know. Each incorrect prediction or contradiction decreases trust and legitimacy. I'm disappointed in our institutions for marketing the COVID shot as a one-time vaccine. What was the basis for thinking this wouldn't happen?

View on HN

Did that really happen? The importance of getting a vaccine was stressed but very little was said about the endurance of that protection. Many vaccines require boosters. It is also important to acknowledge that the original COVID-19 was essentially defeated until the Delta variant came about. So instead of imagining that authorities said this would be a one time vaccine it might be more realistic to accept that authorities said no such thing, that variants are unpredictable, and that the endurance of any particular vaccine is difficult to determine, especially early on.

It's kinda implied when you hear 'fully vaccinated people do not require a mask'. I think that it's a bit of a stretch to come to the conclusion that that implies the vaccine is a magic bullet, but I have been surprised IRL by people who really do think that and would expect to be completely immune after getting a few mRNA shots. I was not surprised by their annoyance at learning that wasn't the case.

I think you are coming from a place of having a bit more knowledge than the absolute minimum you'd pick up through osmosis by never doing any research or due diligence. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that awareness campaigns deliberately ignored facts that might make the vaccine sound less appealing. It's hard to make good decisions if you don't really have a full picture.

> Many vaccines require boosters.

There is no other vaccine routinely administered to large numbers of people that requires a booster every 6-12 months in the general population.

Of the vaccines that require ongoing boosters in the general population, Tdap is probably the most common, and the booster is every 10 years.

The "flu shot" is not an annual booster. It is a different reformulated vaccine every year that, in the case of the trivalent vaccines, targets the 3 strains of influenza that are predicted to be most prevalent in the coming flu season.

It's true that they pick different strains each year but we would still need annual flu shots if that wasn't the case because efficacy goes down by almost 10% each month: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/73/4/726/6104243

No, you wouldn't. If influenza viruses didn't mutate the way they do, you'd inevitably get infected (whether vaccinated or not) and you would have natural immunity such that the benefit of getting vaccinated every year would be miniscule unless you were in a high-risk category. So in this scenario, an annual "flu shot" wouldn't be a thing for the general population.

That's true in the sense that if you don't want to prevent people from getting influenza you don't have to give them a vaccine.

Otherwise, even if natural immunity to influenza lasts for a lifetime, most people don't get influenza very often (however people often confuse colds and influenza and don't realize this), so merely having a large existing number of strains would make it incredibly difficult to get natural immunity to all of them even if it wasn't continuing to mutate.

If you don't want people to be able to get influenza 10 times in their lifetime you would still have to give flu shots, and since their effectiveness decreases rapidly you would have to do this every year.

And that's assuming that natural immunity really lasts longer than flu shots.

Anyway that whole point is somewhat irrelevant to your original point that I was responding to that no other vaccines require boosters but it is clear based on your response that you are essentially engaging in circular reasoning (you don't think that boosters are required because no other vaccines require boosters, therefore flu vaccines are not boosters, therefore no other vaccines require boosters).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com