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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

From the article: this translates into vaccine effectiveness estimates against symptomatic Omicron infection of between 0% and 20% after two doses, and between 55% and 80% after a booster dose

What I'm wondering is: Is this due to the timing of a booster, since most boosters have been given in the last few months? Or is there some kind of cumulative impact on the immune system?

Eg, If I got a booster early, am I still as protected as they state above?

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The booster dose increases antibody titers significantly above what they were after the second dose (or first in the case of J&J) so someone who is boosted should be more protected than someone who got their second dose at the same time. Additionally, through the process of affinity maturation, the antibodies you have after a booster will be more likely to recognize Omicron because your immune system has learned to recognize more features of the virus spike protein and is more robust to mutations.

Maybe recency is not the sole factor: https://i.imgur.com/OzznuBa.png

edit: source: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.14.21267769v...

No one is going to trust a random imgur link. Source or it didn't happen

Another question would be, what if someone got their first dose 6 weeks ago and their second one 2 weeks ago?

Or, another hypothesis, your immune system is busy dealing with the vaccine and just ignores the omicron virus in your noes and this stops the spread?

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