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

I guess I was right about risk reward for young and healthy:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2215780

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why buy one when you can buy two, for twice the price…

From that article, a negative take on the bivalent boosting approach moreso than any than else.

the results of a study examining levels of neutralizing antibodies against BA.4 and BA.5 after receipt of a monovalent or bivalent booster dose. They found “no significant difference in neutralization of any SARS-CoV-2 variant,” including BA.4 and BA.5, between the two groups.3 One day later, Dan Barouch and colleagues released the results of a similar study, finding that “BA.5 [neutralizing-antibody] titers were comparable following monovalent and bivalent mRNA boosters.” Barouch and colleagues also noted no appreciable differences in CD4+ or CD8+ T-cell responses between participants in the monovalent-booster group and those in the bivalent-booster group.4 Neither research group found the bivalent boosters to elicit superior immune responses. The results are now published in the Journal .

Why did the strategy for significantly increasing BA.4 and BA.5 neutralizing antibodies using a bivalent vaccine fail?

Breaking news - CDC finds risk of stroke correlated to Pfizer’s new vaccines.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/bivalent-boosters.html

investigation of the signal in the [vaccine safety data] raised a question of whether people 65 and older who have received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent were more likely to have an ischemic stroke in the 21 days following vaccination compared with days 22-42 following vaccination. This preliminary signal has not been identified with the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine

The news here of course is that the CDC actually told us - they’d been hiding safety signals on the original vaccines for over a year until they got sued to provide it. Oddly, given this potential risk appears only with PFE and not MRNA’s vaccine,

No change in vaccination practice is recommended

You might recall they were quick to pause use of the JNJ vaccine early on for 6 months when when very rare and often deadly cases of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia (TTS) appeared as a safety signal.

But as I’ve covered, Pfizer gets the kid gloves from the administration so they’re still happily selling doses, soon to be at 4x the original $25-30 cost.

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I also read it as against boosting in general for the “healthy”

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The Food and Drug Administration ordered the vaccine makers in June to update the boosters against BA.4 and BA.5 and rushed in late August to authorize the bivalents before clinical data were available. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the bivalents for all adults without any evidence that they were effective or needed.

Vaccine makers could have performed small randomized trials last summer and early fall that tested the bivalents against the original boosters and a placebo group. Results could have been available by the end of September. But the public-health authorities didn’t want to wait—and now we know why.

The CDC published a study in November that estimated the bivalents were only 22% to 43% effective against infection during the BA.5 wave—their peak efficacy. As antibodies waned and new variants took over later in the fall, their protection against infection probably dropped to zero.

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Agreed. Initial shot had SOME value, boosters are dubious at best for most healthy folks. FDA agrees. so to answer OP… Never.

These agencies need to talk to each other:

There’s always the myocarditis boost. :sunny:

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PFE and MRNA’s new covid boosters were approved by the FDA. They updated them to include something with the latest strain of Omicron.

As far as I could tell, they did no human testing on these - just some mice that generated antibodies against the new spike (and we still dont have great evidence that antibody levels lead to better health outcomes from the disease either). But don’t let that bother you - the media is rolling out some extra Covid Fear, even tho cases are only up marginally and deaths are low and lower than last year. Get those shots, some needs to make billions off them!

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78+ y.o Parents got them this week+flu shot. No side effects

They’ll get RSV+Pneu. next week.

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