Booster Shots: When will you get a booster (3rd) shot of the vaccine?

So you really have to ask? In my area, they just sent out health emails saying you can get your new shiny bivalent booster and they’ll be discontinuing all the old ones.

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No, not really. Just curious of any thoughts on this.

Can it be an emergency in 2 more years? 5? 12?

Does it become like bird flu, swine flu etc at some point? ie mostly forgotten.

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For a lot, dare I say a majority, of people it’s already at that point. My feeling is that there are tons of drugs for countless diseases currently in trials, that have more argument for being given a EUA than yet another version of COVID vaccine. But a EUA isn’t even being considered for any of those.

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for diabetics here

https://www.mdlinx.com/news/metformin-drastically-reduces-covid-hospitalization/2dENMUZxKpv5YhtI01Ehmp?utm_campaign=COVID-News_090322_A90&tag=Evening&utm_medium=email&ipost_environment=m3usainc&utm_source=iPost&iqs=9z2z3i3vmko7g5aaa5vke1vr95er31hn1g1ik6vn3m8

also
pfizer-covid-pill-showed-no-benefit-in-younger-adults

https://www.mdlinx.com/news/study--pfizer-covid-pill-showed-no-benefit-in-younger-adults/5kcyZg0TMpAXC1wsjmsqpj?utm_campaign=COVID-News_090322_A90&tag=Evening&utm_source=iPost&ipost_environment=m3usainc&utm_medium=email&iqs=9z2zlcn6o1tgh0njdlgkplhv4j7v7894u4m4fafq4po

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Yeah, Paxlovid is indicated for high risk people. Broadly speaking, non-elderly adults aren’t likely to be hospitalized from covid, so a pill that tries to prevent that isn’t going to see any / much benefit. Sure there will be a few high risk cases, but if you don’t separate them out, your sample stats will be inconclusive.

As for metformin, that’s supposed to be generally good for you, not just if you’re taking it as a (pre)diabetic. Here was their paper

https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2201662

It seemed like they only has 1200 or so people sliced up into 6 subgroups, so each drug and pure control was only 200 vs 200, more or less. I think this was intended to cut costs and try out all the possibilities of the 3 drugs they tried, but it may have compromised their ability to reach statistical confidence on any of them.

Here’s some other background on metformin

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We got the “updated” shot this morning.

Our trip to Chile is in two weeks, and they test randomly at immigration. Despite being about done with all of this, it’s been about 10 months since our last shot and so I figure it’s a cheap insurance policy, similar to the flu shot. Ended up getting Moderna this time, so we are 3x Pfizer and 1x Moderna now.

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The new Omicron BA4/5 bivalent new boosters had mouse data. How much mouse data?

https://www.science.org/content/article/omicron-booster-shots-are-coming-lots-questions

For the BA.4/BA.5 boosters, the companies [PFE and MRNA] have submitted animal data. They have not released those data publicly, although at the June FDA meeting, Pfizer presented preliminary findings in eight mice given BA.4/BA.5 vaccines as their third dose.

Last time they refused to release the data on boosters, it was PFE hiding the fact that people who had covid got no benefit from getting a boost. Kinda inconvenient for getting booster mandates approved, so they only reported the aggregate outcomes even though they knew and had the data for people who’d been infected vs not.

Not exactly engendering a lot of confidence this time around either.

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could be worse, could have picked 3 blind ones :wink:
Any adverse early human reports?

Good article part that explains why the vax are good to keep you out of hospital (if you have health issues but not transmission etc.

That’s because the incubation period for COVID-19—the time between getting infected and becoming infectious to others—is too short, he says. Unless levels of neutralizing antibodies are already high, the immune system doesn’t have time to recognize and fight off the virus in the few days between exposure and when someone sheds enough virus to infect others. Diseases such as measles or rubella have a 2-week incubation period, which means a vaccinated person’s immune memory cells can ramp up production of enough antibodies in time to prevent them from passing it on.

That’s why measles and rubella vaccines can halt the spread of those diseases, Offit says, whereas in the case of COVID-19, “even if 100% of the population were vaccinated and the virus hadn’t evolved at all, vaccines would do very little to stop transmission.”

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feel any difference so far? MRNA is supposed to be higher dosage

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.372.6547.1138

I’m not repeating this as often as the govt, media, movie stars, athletes, singers, et al., but I must remind you …

As we’ve been told repeatedly by everyone who can get in front of a camera … The vaccine is perfectly safe and effective.

If PFE’s side effects are like getting hit by a car, Moderna’s is like getting hit by a bus.

I’m definitely feeling this one more than the other three Pfizer injections. Fatigue hit about 5 hours after receiving the dose, then the joints started a few hours later. Things seemed to improve until I woke up at 2:30 this morning feeling very warm and feverish, and as a result, couldn’t get back to sleep for a bit.

Now I just feel tired, probably because I couldn’t sleep well. Maybe a little achy as well, but no longer feverish.

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I’m sorry for the side effects and hope that all comes out well, BUT …

Dude! The covid19 vaccine(s) and booster(s) are perfectly safe and effective. You can be assured that EVERYONE involved in the designing, testing, double blind studying got passing grades in their women’s studies curriculum.

Additionally, everyone involved in the marketing, proselytizing, evangelizing, lobbying, and 10% kick-backing to the big guy were tops in their classes, whether those classes were at Ivy League institutions of renown, or the academically tougher Barksdale’s Corners school of hard knocks and 9mils. :smiley:

You forgot to also give credit to the mice used to justify the latest booster’s approval.

The most important (and only unresolved) question is what gender those mice have chosen to identify as…

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Oh, to be abundantly clear, this was a decision on my part because I felt that the benefit of decreasing my chances of testing positive on vacation and being put in some Chilean quarantine facility was worth any side effects. All side effects were gone about 24 hours after the shot and I now feel fine.

If I were not going on vacation, I would have been pickier and waited for an injection of Pfizer to be easily available. I’m glad it was my decision to make, and I’m glad the option was given to me.

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You mean you used some critical thinking to consider your circumstances and determine what was best for you at the time? Heresy, I tell you!

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Boosters? We don’t need no stinking boosters …

Two antibodies produced by people infected by the Wuhan original version were utilized against the variants.

“According to our findings, the effectiveness of the first antibody, TAU-1109, in neutralizing the Omicron strain is 92% and in neutralizing the Delta strain it is 90%. The second antibody, TAU-2310, neutralizes the Omicron variant with an efficacy of 84%, and the Delta variant with an efficacy of 97%,” said Freund.

The two antibodies, cloned in her Tel Aviv University lab, were sent for tests to check their effectiveness against live viruses in laboratory cultures at the University of California San Diego and against pseudo-viruses in the labs of the Faculty of Medicine of Bar-Ilan University. The results were identical and equally encouraging in both tests.

In other, completely unrelated news, Pfizer has asked President Joseph Robinette Biden for emergency authorization of a “completely new” almost completely developed, booster which will counteract two “dangerous” antibodies that are known to spread disinformation and which are anti-science based. FDA approval is expected as quick as a kickback.

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Good recap of what is known vs not for these new Wuhan Classic + BA5 boosters.

In short, human short term safety data on BA1 showed no difference between this booster type and the old ones, and BA5 is very similar to BA1. Antibodies were increased somewhat vs the new O, unclear how much that matters.

Good review of how waning immunity vs infection seemed to mostly due to variant changes rather than natural antibody decline. However, immunity vs hospitalization did not decline much at all, suggesting T cell responses were good enough from any vaccine to prevent nearly all of the worst cases.

Concludes that it’s a personal choice, with factors weighing towards the booster if you’re older, high risk healthwise, or otherwise concerned about infection. Factors against would be younger, healthier, and/or already having gotten a recent O infection.

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Parents got it. I’m younger, healthier, and already having gotten a O infection, but almost a year ago. How recent?

Mom has some nausea a few days after booster :frowning: Could be coincidence She had O infection in May.

that far back would have been one of the early O variants, not the current ones. For sure if you had the current one, like I did recently, I wouldn’t be getting a booster for the same thing you just had.

If you got BA1/2, you can still get BA4/5 - reinfection is common but chances reduced by half or so by cross immunity. Depends how much you’re worried about another infection. There are some studies I saw that show reinfections increase the risk of complications, but then again, I don’t know if/how that’s biased towards selecting people with bad immune systems since many people wouldn’t know they were sick after the first time.

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