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Comment by sjwalter | Hacker News Reader

Is there a reliable vaccine? I mean one that's reliable for longer than a few months. A lot of folks are still unaware that e.g., the Pfizer vaccine wanes to ~20% relative risk reduction after only 5 months[1]. This down from the unrestrained silliness of "100% SAFE AND EFFECTIVE" as the corporate press stated when the vaccines were rolling out.

There is no way in hell these vaccines can end the pandemic.

[1] "Effectiveness declined gradually thereafter, with the decline accelerating after the fourth month to reach approximately 20% in months 5 through 7 after the second dose." https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114114

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The evidence isn't yet in for immunity persistence post-booster, with Pfizer or Moderna. There's a chance that immunity wanes less quickly with the booster's 6 month+ window vs the original 2nd shot's 3 week window. Of course, if a mutation evades the vaccine's design then it doesn't matter much, but for the moment I'm hopeful that 5 months out from a booster is still a relatively high protection %.

"...protection against hospitalization and death persisted at a robust level for 6 months after the second dose" (from the above linked article)

This is the important part in my opinion and I've heard it explained thus: the level of antibodies circulating in the body goes down after six months, so you may be susceptible to infection. However, the immune system creates something called "memory cells" which live in the lymphatic system and will activate a robust immune response if they come into contact with the antigen again.

That's how it's meant to work. If that were true you wouldn't be seeing so many people getting COVID after being vaccinated.

In reality all these explanations we're being given are nearly junk value. Public health researchers don't understand the immune system or mRNA based vaccines well enough to predict things like how it adapts or learns, and in particular they just ignore any factor that they don't have a fast/cheap test for (or sometimes any test).

Memory cells do not prevent infection, they live in the lymphatic system and are only activated if a pathogen gets past the "innate immune system" and gets to the point we typically refer to as "infection". So, to re-use your phrase: if that were true we'd be seeing vaccinated people getting infected but recovering quickly and generally not dying, which is exactly what we see.

Its also pretty challenging to publish research longer than 6 months when you only have 6 calendar months...

What's wrong with taking a vaccine booster every 3 months or so? I'll gladly do it to get more normalcy.

Production is being ramped up a lot so this kind of volume shouldn't be any issue soon.

I don't expect a schedule that tight, mostly because infections naturally wane in the summer months anyway. My (un)educated guess is that it will be rolled into the flu vaccine at some point and become a once-a-year occasion.

Well here in the local news they were saying that it really starts waning at 6 months and the EU is planning to reduce the validity of the certificate to 9 months because of that. So I do expect it to be a 6-monthly affair. But probably just one shot every time because it's a booster.

But I'd be ok with every 3 months too though I agree there should be no need for it. I'm high risk and my work did an antibody test after 3 months, and I was full of antibodies still at that point.

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