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Comment by denimnerd42 | Hacker News Reader

i think i'm done with current level vaccines. I've had 3 mrna. The second and third each took me out for 2 days. I don't see any reason for more unless a better one comes out. I do think 3 are important though.

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Apparently, booster efficacy wanes after about 10 weeks[1].

If you think the 3rd shot is important, why not the 4th, 5th, ad infinitum?

Genuinely curious, not trying to be difficult.

[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Being sick for 2 days. I'm not signing up to be sick 2 days every 2.5 months. Pounding headache, fatigue, nausea, heart pain.

I agree with you that the risk/reward matrix varies greatly per individual; there are many like you who have had similar reactions.

I was just wondering what data your "3 is important" statement was based on.

Why the first booster but not the rest, or why the first booster at all?

I'm the exact same as parent comment. For me, I was a bit pressured into getting the booster. I also thought it was 3 and done, it wasn't clear that it could potentially be recurring. I also thought maybe the reaction wouldn't be as bad as after the 2nd shot, but it was. Also, I've read more about myocarditis and don't really want to keep exposing myself to that risk.

Is having your heart hurt a normal side effect? A lot of anecdotes mention it as a symptom. How many of them actually go to get diagnosed?

I think the length between 1 and 2 was too short. I think 3 gives more overall robust immunity. I'll keep an eye on the research coming out though.

3 is probably just the amount of downtime OP was willing to put up with before throwing in the towel.

I actually believed we'd be able to go back to having normal mask free existence with 3. As of now that's not proven to be the case so I'll continue to wear an N95 as I have family to protect. Hope it will burn itself out and my under 5 child and older family can have a better idea of the risks in time.

My favorite part is where the referenced document doesn't say that. It literally shows that a third shot of Pfizer-Biontech is still 90+% effective against the Delta variant after 10+ weeks. And close to 50% against Omicron after 10+ weeks. The only significance of 10 weeks is that was where their data ended, because boosters haven't been generally available that long.

I'd definitely consider 50% efficacy against the most prevalent variant (by far) after 10 weeks to be "waning".

That might change if we ever get a booster targeted toward Omicron specifically, but we don't have one, and by the time we do, I'm sure there will be other variants around.

From the linked article, the vaccine effectiveness of 10 weeks factoid you mentioned is a bit incomplete. It only talks about effectiveness against symptomatic infections. The effectiveness is dropped to about 40% around 10 weeks for people with AstraZeneca and then Pfizer or Moderna booster, or Pfizer and then Pfizer booster, and to about 70% around 9 weeks for people with Pfizer and then Moderna booster.

There was insufficient data to estimate the effectiveness against severe disease.

Yeah, after contracting COVID in January 2021, and now 3 shots (including a booster), I'm just tired of the whole thing. If I'm not immune "enough" after all that, so be it.

I’ve gotten my flu shot yearly for my entire living memory. I don’t really understand why a booster vaccine for a pandemic that’s killed an order of magnitude more people than the flu does per year is some serious burden.

The covid vaccines make me seriously sick for at least a day or two.

If you didn't get sick from it (current formulation or perhaps new ones in future), would you just take it and move on?

Known downtime of a day or two (and not feeling well) is, to me, still a tradeoff to make compared to the potential of being intubated in an ICU. Each Pfizer shot I've had I've had somewhere of 8-18 hours of being really knocked out, usually starting around 24 hours after injection. I usually have milder (but some) reaction to flu vaccine each year (usually up to 8 hours of fatigue/headache/etc) within a day or so.

Risks/reward still moves to me take the shots.

if I didn't get sick or there was a new one that's better of course I would take it. I think t-cells are still robust long term so I'm safe from severe disease. That's what I've read so far in the news but I'll keep monitoring.

> compared to the potential of being intubated in an ICU.

Comments like this are only intelligible if one considers the probability of each outcome.

Deterministically (probability 1) getting unpleasant vaccine side effects vs. deterministically ending up intubated in an ICU? Sure, give me a booster every month. But that's not actually the relevant calculus -- your probability of ending up in an ICU is already extremely low after two shots.

Because there's no evidence more boosters have any efficacy. And there are side-effects, despite people trying to downplay them. My SO had a legit allergic reaction to an mRNA vaccine...

"no evidence". The first round of boosters have shown strong efficacy. Why would a second round of boosters not have any efficacy? It seems that you've chosen the wrong null hypothesis.

Show a study, any study (and not just a news article that links to another article claiming 'studies' show blah) where they reduce the risk of serious infection or transmission versus only 2 doses.

Simply pumping up antibodies for a couple weeks isn't the same as efficacy.

First off, I need to point out that you are committing the logical fallacy of selective rigor. An increase in neutralizing antibodies is not the same as a clinical trial proving efficacy, but I'm pretty sure that increases in neutralizing antibodies STRONGLY correlate with vaccine efficacy, across different diseases. So you've already called out your own bias.

So, here is a pre-print that does show real-world effectiveness (as opposed to efficacy). https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.15.21266341v... And of course I know that you will apply your selective rigor by pointing out that it is a pre-print. But less-biased people will realize that science can only work so quickly.

My second shot made me feel more ill than I have any other time in the last half decade or so aside from a bout with dengue. It’s likely I’ve also had COVID within that stretch and it barely registered (had a slightly sore throat for a few days after confirmed exposure).

I’ve also had the flu shot most every year, even though I really have never been seriously ill from the flu, because it’s an easy preventative measure without side effects. If the booster for COVID regularly makes me more sick than the disease it protects against that’s definitely a burden, a rather large one. Just because it’s killed vulnerable people doesn’t mean the calculus for me or others with strong immune systems is the same.

The lethality of influenza is grossly overexagerated to sell vaccines. This started in the 90s when pharma realized there was an untapped market of aging Americans they could scare into creating demand for their product.

Flu shot never made me more than uncomfortable for a day. Second shot of Moderna took me out of commission for 5 days. 2 of them being with 38C fever. I am done with the these shots. Did not get booster but did get Omicron over the holidays, it was like a weak cold that dragged on for a few extra days.

For all vaccines, neutralizing antibody titers decrease over time. This is why boosters exist in the first place.

From what I've seen so far the antibodies don't really last long enough. I'll rely on long term t-cell protection. At least that's what I think so far.

No vaccine has ever had an efficacy dropoff as steep and rapid as the current crop of Covid vaccines.

"The current crop of Covid vaccines" all of which are engineered based on the original variant. Ignorance like this has contributed to the virus mutating, and obviously the newer variants have increased fitness against whatever immune response the original one provokes - otherwise it wouldn't exist.

If you look at the history of vaccinations against other diseases like measles, mumps, rubella, polio, smallpox, etc. you won't see untying like what we're seeing now - those were all able to be largely or completely eradicated.

What we appear to have with COVID-19 is akin to influenza - endemic, will never be eradicated, and thus it will mutate regularly and require new vaccines/boosters. Given that, people understandably want to treat it like the flu and get back to normal life.

> Ignorance like this has contributed to the virus mutating

Ignorance contributes nothing to the virus - it doesn't care if you have knowledge or not. This virus was going to mutate faster than we could produce vaccine no matter what we did.

No vaccine has ever had its efficacy measured in terms of infection detectable by PCR test.

It's always been understood that antibodies wane over time. That's why other cells in our bodies 'remember' viral infections and essentially are primed to create antibodies again when infected (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z)

Why do you think 3 is enough but not 4. That's not rational, its just psychologically comforting

the reasoning is 3 provides robust long term immunity due to the several month gap between 2 and 3. While 4 won't add much benefit except to boost antibody count for a short while.

so just like 3

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