Israel recommends fourth Covid-19 dose for people over 60 | Hacker News Reader

Israel recommends fourth Covid-19 dose for people over 60

cnn.com

7 pointsbryan06 comments

The shortened time between doses is concerning. Would it be more appropriate to stop calling them vaccines and instead "mitigants" or something? Obviously they're essential to keep people out of the hospital, but if we're administering 3x/year, I suspect people will assume they're ineffective* if you have to keep getting doses.

*ineffective in terms of the class "vaccine", which I would guess most people remember as 'fire-and-forget' solutions (even if that isn't technically correct).

You are clearly wrong about "fire and forgot". It may feel to you like this because you do not recall that for most vaccines multiple shots are needed for sufficient immunity and most of the viruses do not mutate away like SARS-Cov-2.

Flu vaccine is that kind of type but it is far from super effective having efficiency somewhere between 10-60% (still saves lives and productive days) and we normally do not have flu pandemic and even when we do, it has never been really infectious compared to Delta or Omicron.

Current vaccines appear even effective against sever case of Omicron, though not that much against mild cases. There would be no need for this forth shot if this Omicron did not appear out of the blue.

Given that most of India and most likely Africa will become "vaccinated" either by Delta (SAR and India mostly already are) or Omicron then how much potential is there left for one more surprise variant?

My statement was not about whether vaccines are or are not actually 'fire and forget'. It was about whether an average person believes them to be.

Just in case the headline is changed on the article later, yes cnn’s headline really does say “4th Covid dose”.

But more seriously not only is this bad because they have data that 3 doses are not enough, but they’re also reducing the time between doses.

The title is now "Israel begins fourth Covid-19 dose vaccine rollout for people over 60 as Omicron cases surge". It is still butchered.

They try to learn from experience with Delta - better early than late - it will save lives.

If 3 doses does not give enough protection against Omicron then it would be stupid to wait more.

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