There are many additional variables though. How much time since your last shot, which vaccine, how long between jabs, which variant of the virus you are exposed to, the state your immune system is in.
If you’ve had two jabs, spaced 3 weeks apart, last jab was 6 months ago, and you get exposed to omicron, it is a much worse scenario than “20% more likely to get symptoms”. So there is a rational push for boosters right now.
my first 2 shots were fine, but my booster f'ed me up. I was in lots of body pain for 36 hours. 5 weeks later I caught omicron. I imagine by some point this year Ill be considered not fully vaccinated, but right now my desire to get another booster is very small.
right now we know that even the booster provides little ability to stop you from getting omicron. likely by the next mandated booster the variant of the time will also easily surpass the booster.
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?
I totally agree with that assessment. What I am weighing, though, is that I would not be eligible for any potential omicron-specific booster for several months if I get a booster now. It's a risk/reward calculation.
It's a matter of antibody levels. Antibody binding is worse for Omicron, so you need more of them. Booster shots provide you with such increased antibody levels.
Are they still gonna be high enough after a few months? Good question. Afaict, nobody knows yet.
(And this of course leaves aside the whole matter of T-cell immunity still providing protection against severe disease.)
Boosters are not currently around 6 months. Can you get second booster now? Nope, even when you got yours 6 months ago.
Pfizer CEO also for sure is well aware that his companies vaccine did not make any meaningful difference after 4th shot against omicron and better strategy would be to make a strain specific vaccine.
I am not sure if this could be feasible. Omicron pushed through the world like wildfire. There was no meaningful time to produce or even develop a vaccine before it was already everywhere and circulating deep in community.
Omicron was very different from the cluster of previous variants. When something pops up from another direction like this then there would be probably no meaningful time to react to it.
Perhaps a little too pessimistic view. Maybe set of multiple antigenes from the cluster outer ring does the job or a vaccine against inner machinery of the virus - this should be more stable in time.
In ML there is a term: overfitting ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting )
There is currently a lot of booster talk and it seems it protects ~ 10 weeks.
I'm fully vaccinated ( Pfizer), if I plan to have the booster now then it's reasonable to assume I will get one again after 2-3 months.
In that scenario:
- Vaccine ( = 2 x )
- Booster 1 ( January)
- Booster 2 ( March)
Then in March, the Omicron booster will be ready so it's reasonable to assume I'll receive one again in June. If Omicron protects ~3 months against reinfection and the peak of infection is end of January in Europe.
In the scenario that there becomes a Omicron variant that is more infective and more dangerous, it's not unlikely that it will spread around March-April pretty fast. Before the next booster in June.
Could the human body have an overfitting problem because I was vaccinated too much against the previous variant ( that protects against Omicron, so is used against Omicron too)? This is in the scenario that I haven't received a Omicron booster and there is no "new variant booster" available.
Or is this not how the body works?
I'm curious about any related resources or research based opinion to this hypothesis ( it is a hypothesis, there are many variables that could change it and that's not what i want to discuss/find answers to. ).
Note: I'm just wondering how the human body works in this scenario and I don't know where i can ask my question. HN is a diversified crowd with people more knowledgeable about this.
We don't know if and when there will be an omicron-specific jab, and a mRNA 3rd dose cuts your chances of bad outcome (severe illness, hospitalisation) from omicron or previous variants to a lot lower than 2 doses ever did.
The immune response to the booster isn't linear relative to the response to the earlier shots.
The every six months thing doesn't apply until there's actually a government recommendation to get a 4th shot. I think there is enough chance that there will be, but there's also a pretty good chance that there won't be (because we are actually getting to the point where ~everyone has been infected or vaccinated).
One hypothesis I have seen around is that is not so much the time since the last shot, but the longer time span between shots that slows for more robust antibody response
Seems reasonable, as many of the booster doses for more established vaccines are spaced months to a year apart. There hasn’t really been enough time to study this comprehensively for the coronavirus vaccines
I'm double-vaccinated, I'm just not boosted. (I'm similar to someone else in this thread in that I was waiting for more information before getting boosted and caught Omicron first). I think boosters are a good idea for the general population, I just think that there might be a difference between 2 doses once and repeated activation of the immune system. Also there's a difference between the risk posed by the original variant or Delta vs. Omicron.
Plus to be completely blunt, "not likely to trigger an MS relapse or have any impact on long-term disease progression" isn't language to inspire confidence. To be fair, I think we understand the vaccines pretty damn well, it's MS that I think we might not understand well enough here.
I recently pondered the should I bother boosting thing. I had covid in 2020 and 2x pfizer. I decided to get a pfizer booster - seems a bit less side effecty than moderna, and while I wasn't really worried about getting omicron myself I figured I'd be less likely to pass it to family at Xmas (I'm in London with crazy infections presently). Also it renews the vax pass thing so it should be ok for summer in the EU who are talking about a 9 month validity from the last shot. Anyway... maybe get a pfizer booster.
(Random aside - it took me till now to figure my past injections hurt because I tensed the muscle - if you relax it you feel way less)
Does anyone understand why a third dose of the same vaccine improves immunity to Omicron?
I'm willing to believe the empirical evidence that boosters make a meaningful difference, but I can't figure out intuitively why the same mRNA a third time helps to address this new spike.
That's fine but the booster has shown that it likely incurs much longer term stability to immune resistance to all current strains that we know about, including omicron. If you look up the history of vaccinations you will see similar results and why some are carefully spaced apart at certain intervals as they train the human immune system
You compound risk with repeated exposures. In this case through boosters because the vaccines don't work well enough. It's one thing to get a one time shot that lasts for life than getting 6 shots over 3 years.
I received my first booster at the end of 2021, and then I got Covid (presumably Omicron) over the summer. I'm certainly not anti-vax, but I'd be annoyed if I were mandated to get the bivalent booster after recently getting Covid. For both my 2nd and 3rd shots my reactions were pretty strong (was down for the count for 48 hours with high fever, headache and chills), so I wouldn't be looking forward to wasting a weekend feeling miserable for exceedingly marginal benefit.
My understanding is that if you've had a two-shot series you should get a third shot within 12 months of your second in order to extend immunity for a significant period of time. I'm hoping boosters are offered for Pfizer & Moderna soon, because most people I know are fully vaccinated but also aware that COVID is basically endemic at this point.
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.
If you’ve had two jabs, spaced 3 weeks apart, last jab was 6 months ago, and you get exposed to omicron, it is a much worse scenario than “20% more likely to get symptoms”. So there is a rational push for boosters right now.
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