4th Dose Covid mRNA Vaccines’ Immunogenicity and Efficacy Against Omicron VOC | Hacker News Reader

4th Dose Covid mRNA Vaccines’ Immunogenicity and Efficacy Against Omicron VOC

medrxiv.org

21 pointsluu12 comments

We really need nasal vaccines for boosters since those would confer mucosal immunity - first line defenses are in the mucosa.

yes! some nasal/inhaled vaccines are in trials in other countries, but i am not aware of such progress in the US. it will really help PREVENT infections and not just reduce the severity of symptoms.

It's not a vaccine, but there are existing nasal sprays [0] with iota-carrageenan, which has anti-viral properties and has been shown in-vitro [1] to be effective against covid:

[0] https://www.betadine.ca/nasal-spray/

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Can you cite any sources on differences in tissue response from route of administration?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/02/health/covid-vaccine-nasa...

Archive didn't like that link and it's paywalled

Got any scholarly sources about this topic?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33329607/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27063-4

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-39...

This continued focus on antibody titers really makes no sense. We can't boost our way out of the pandemic. Over the long run cellular immunity is far more important.

https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/

I'm curious what we'll call this one. Afterburner sounds cool.

Healthcare workers seem to be a poor study group - the 'value' is in their constant re-exposure to the virus and its descendants, wouldn't that also affect their immune response.

As others have noted, the duration of protection is conspicuously absent.

Unfortunately, we don't yet know how long the protection will last. From the paper's Discussion section (top of page 10):

"Overall, these data raise the possibility that the fourth dose does not boost immunity but simply restores it to peak levels. It is yet to be observed whether the waning of this fourth dose will be at a similar rate as that observed after the third dose and whether it will differ between the two mRNA vaccine groups."

Yeah. My read on the paper was that a fourth dose might be useless. You get the immediate antibody response for a few weeks, and then you're back to same as after three doses, which is memory cells.

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