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Comment by fractal618 | Hacker News Reader

Is "First Shot" "Second Shot" and "Booster" the same as 3 "doses"?

Yes. Admittedly a weird way of communicating it but I think they're trying to accommodate those who are already confused. I personally think it's having the opposite effect.

I wager it's more to avoid the "what, a 3rd dose?" reaction.

"Booster" is more positive than "we told you it would be immunization, but actually it's partial and limited, and you have to do it again. Woops, now again".

Especially since people have been talking about a 4th dose.

In the context of distrust of the pharma industry, it would be easy to have the social networks to claim pfizer is trying to become the netflix of vaccine and sell shots as a service.

So they are very careful with the wording.

Booster is also established immunology nomenclature that perfectly fits the situation, I don't think it's an attempt to "spin" it.

Well, it was effective as promised against the strains it was marketed as effective against. Those strains have been effectively eradicated. The issue is Delta, and now Omicron, which developed after the vaccine was designed.

They also said the vaccine targeted the spike protein, which was said to be very unlikely to mutate since it's such a vital part of the virus and there is little room for variation.

Unlikely to mutate much. The vaccine still remains effective because the new variants still have very similar spike proteins

Given how sick the second dose made me, I'm not keen on doing this every 6 months. Not keen.

My thoughts exactly. Why suffer through 1-2 days of sickness every 6 months to protect myself against an illness that I've already had and poses no threat to my demographic anyway? Sounds like the cure is worse than the disease. I smell a rat.

Because it reduces spread and thus reduces the chance of mutations becoming dominant. The vaccine is not only about protecting the individual.

It doesn't reduce spread in a significant enough amount to make a difference. This seems especially true with Omicron and the spread through vaccinated air travellers. It encourages mutating variants to escape/prevail because it reduces severity so you are more likely to function socially and keep spreading it.

> It doesn't reduce spread in a significant enough amount to make a difference

Yes, it does.

> This seems especially true with Omicron and the spread through vaccinated air travellers.

Nobody knows yet. We don't have enough data. Anyone who says something definitive about Omicron is either basing it off of a small amount of early data, or is lying to you. Things like infection rate, hospitalization and death are all lagging indicators. We do not have enough data to make such assertions yet.

> It encourages mutating variants to escape/prevail because it reduces severity so you are more likely to function socially and keep spreading it.

This we agree on - which is why vaccination is so important. It does reduce spread. Not sure where you got the idea it does not.

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E (to the person who responded to me): Your response was flagged and dead before I even came back to look, so it wasn't me. Nice try calling me "cowardly" though.

The vaccine does reduce spread of the virus(es) it is made for. That statement had little to do with omicron.

My second point about assertions still stands. I don't think my comment was that hard to decipher, and certainly didn't warrant calling me names.

Being purposefully obtuse about relatively simple concepts is generally not well received on HN. Perhaps that's why you were immediately flagged.

> "we told you it would be immunization, but actually it's partial and limited, and you have to do it again. Woops, now again"

This is often portrayed as something people say, do they actually? Because that's exactly how it works with e.g. the flu. It's called yearly flu shot for a reason... 'cause it's yearly.

    [x] Usually occurs in waves during winter
    [x] Vaccine is effective for around 4-6 months
    [x] Vaccine does not confer sterile immunity
    [x] Transmitted through air
    [x] Transmitted especially in crowds and enclosed rooms
    [x] Masks work
    [x] Infects respiratory tract but
        can cause severe auto-immune inflammation afterwards
    [x] Can cause long-term respiratory issues
    [x] Many people do OK being infected, but long tail of death

I strongly feel like it's the other way round. There are already diseases where we have multiple doses, like Tetanus[1]. If they said "hey, turns out we need a third and a fourth dose like with Tetanus, and then maybe a booster every 10 years" then that would be fine, and I think most people would accept that. But the word booster suggests to me they want to become (I hadn't heard the expression before, but I love it) "the Netflix of vaccine". Especially now that the EU has declared that vaccination certificates will expire 9 months after the last vaccination.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetanus_vaccine

According to the CVS person who did my booster, the booster for Pfizer is a full dose while the Moderna booster is a half dose (relative to each manufacturer's original first and second shot doses).

Worth noting that Moderna uses a larger dosis then Pfizer for the first and second shot.

And at half dose of Moderna is still larger than a full dose of Pfizer

Probably because Moderna’s original shot was already a higher dosage than Pfizers.

According to this source https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/02/comparing-the-covid-19-v... the original Pfizer dose was 30 micrograms of vaccine, while Moderna's was 100 micrograms.

If that is correct, then Moderna's booster would still be more vaccine (50 micrograms) than Pfizer's original dose.

Of course more is not necessarily better!

One wonders if another full dose of Moderna would provide even better protection, given that a correlation has been found with the dosage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28580745

It almost certainly would. But with all vaccines, there is a balance between enough and too much immune response.

Though in this case I suspect more was better. At least that’s my hypothesis for why moderna vaccine immunity held up better against delta than Pfizer

Moderna had more time between doses too.

3 Pfizers is basically 1 moderna...

Thinking seriously about this, I will ask, were these different dosages a work of collusion between these companies and the government because they were so unsure of the reaction and efficacy at a specific dose? Was it, in effect, a huge "clinical trial"?

Between Pfizer and Moderna what is the difference other than dose? Didn't they use the same mRNA? So what was the science behind them choosing different doses? Were they guessing or were they colluding?

If someone could answer my question with a logical response instead of just down voting it I would appreciate it because it is a serious question I am trying to understand about the vaccines. I am debating on getting a booster but I have a risk profile that makes this more of an issue for me.

So, what was the science behind the different doses? Does anyone know if Pfizer and Moderna used different mRNA?

They did not use the exact same mRNA sequence: https://github.com/NAalytics/Assemblies-of-putative-SARS-CoV...

The different doses were guesses made to balance effectiveness with severity of side effects. (Earlier Moderna trials, at least, had included even higher doses, which could cause pretty severe side effects.) Their choices had to be locked in early, based on very limited preliminary trial data, in order to run their phase 3 trials as quickly as possible, to actually bring the vaccines to market quickly in 2020. They just made somewhat different bets. I think it's as simple as that.

NYTimes has some pretty great explainers:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/health/moderna-covi... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/health/pfizer-biont...

I don't think they are paywalled. Worth a read.

Yes.

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