Yes, but it’s unclear if that’s due to dosage.
Right but they are basically the same shot with tiny differences. So there are two possibilities, one that those tiny differences are actually significant for durability, or two that the dosage makes the difference.
We don’t know for sure but it seems to me like a pretty sturdy limb to go out on.
The fats, being the means by which the mRNAs are protected and enter cells, are different and would be my first hypothesis.
How would you think that would make a difference, though? The end result is the same right? The mRNA gets into the cell and then works.
Could be due to dosage. Could also be due to the length of time between the first two shots. Could also be due to who knows? There’s no real studies controlling for this.
Holy shit the updated booster is hitting me harder and faster than any of the previous shots. 6 hours later, starting to feel pretty lousy and my arm is on fire.
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Even from a simple dosage perspective, if Moderna has a 50 ug dose, but only 40% of that is taken up by cells for translation, but Pfizer’s 30 ug dose is taken up by 95% of cells, can you see how that might make an impact? For one, mRNA is a fragile molecule to begin with, and for two, cells aren’t really in the business of taking up random mRNAs and translating them. In fact, it’s generally in their self-interest not to, and they have defenses against doing just that.
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To those who have already taken the bivalent booster, or plan to currently, what are your expectations for its efficacy?
Based on the murky data we have from the last round of vaccines, if I had to set a line it seems like a reasonable expectation may be for someone who hasn’t had Omicron a 20% less chance of contracting the virus if exposed and a 40% less chance of death/serious morbidity if infected, where the benefits last approximately 4-6 months. And pretty much no benefit for someone that recently has been infected with an Omicron variant due to natural immunity.
Has anyone thought about this at all? Does this seem optimistic/pessimistic?
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For vaccinated people? It is hard to estimate the efficacy of the new booster for vaccinated people, because the percentage of the people who are vaccinated and boosted and then who get sick with a serious illness or who die is still pretty small. The statistical confidence in the efficacy may not even be all that great even if we know exactly how many people out of some 200000 person subset in the next 6 months will be hospitalized or die after having 3-4 of the original shots vs how many with 3-4 o.g. shots plus a bivalent booster.
I have had only 3 shots. Given that we only have mouse data on what we are getting this time, I think it will be a while before we have especially good data about just how much better the new shots are. That said, every indication is that the the new ones are almost certainly better and also almost certainly not worse. It’s the precise quantification that is difficult.
I hope it’s significantly better than that. We’re still drawing live to something like the 95 percent efficacy against infeciton we had with the original one. Maybe we won’t get that, but maybe we will. Then it’s just a question of how long that lasts and how long till the next variant.
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Alright, that makes sense then, and that part is proprietary, right?
What do you mean by this?
I’d be absolutely shocked if we got that efficacy against infection and, if we did, would even more floored if the virus didn’t mutate around it reasonably quickly.
Do expect we will get at least a short term boost of some sort against infection, good protection against severe acute outcomes, and some sort of incremental reduction against long COVID.
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Seems a bit pessimistic. Most confident thet it is pessimistic on the severe outcome front (both magnitude and duration of protection). Probably pessimistic on the incremental immunity front Vs natural infection. Would bet provides a bit more infection immunity for at least some period of time, but least confident about that.
The fats are public, including their chemical structures for the novel ones, but I’m not aware of any public uptake data, so while we might know what the difference is, we don’t necessarily know what the difference means. But just to make my position clear based on what we know, I booked the first appointment I could, and it was Pfizer. If they happen to have both when I walk in, I’ll take Moderna, based on the efficacy numbers we’ve seen for it w.r.t. omicron BA.1. If they don’t, I’m happily taking Pfizer. If there is all of a sudden an appointment one day later for a Moderna shot, I’m not waiting. And one thing to bear in mind is, even given that we have seen that Moderna’s original shots are a bit better against omicron BA.1 than Pfizer (despite Pfizer being slightly better against earlier strains), that’s not necessarily true against BA.4 and BA.5, and it’s not necessarily true for the new shots against BA.4 and BA.5. Biology is really fucking complicated, and the best efforts to conduct experiments to nail down precise rules are often thwarted by weird exceptions that are difficult to explain.
That is a thing to remember, though. Pfizer shots were looking ever so slightly better than Moderna when shots were first coming out. Then omicron BA.1 flipped them a bit putting Moderna ahead for it, and there was some slight but inconclusive evidence for mixing and matching for your booster better than 3 Moderna shots. That’s really hard to explain via micrograms of mRNA in the shot.
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My recollection is that Pfizer had slightly better efficacy for people over 60 or 65 and Moderna was slightly better for people under that age, with regard to the og strain.
I think the sight difference in the antigen they’re using or whatever probably accounted for Moderna doing better against variants, and the dosage impacted durability. Not sure we’ll ever know for sure, though.
Probably not quite this bad on a relative basis. USA prolly has very high proportion of old and/or obese people.
Plus there are probably big chunks of the world population with very poor or very dishonest Covid accounting. (Which would probably make Covid deaths worldwide an even bigger fraction).
500 is still a fucking joke.
Do we have a good global accounting of “excess deaths”?
Edit. WHO says 15M vs 5M reported through 2020 and 2021. So 3X.
People in the comments mentioned that doesn’t even include some states
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It’s all relative. US undercounts somewhere in the 1.5-1.8x I think.
I’m mostly being a data and numbers nit. The top line easy to present comparison of 17% of deaths vs 4% of population has some huge biases that would seem to close the game.
Relative reporting accuracy could be about half the gap. I have no clue on relative factors like age, obesity, diabetes, etc. heck housing old people together probably increases the death rate (though vaccine access and medical capability tilt the other way when compared to global means.
Just like most car crashes occur near home just means that most miles are driven near home. Not that home miles are inherently more dangerous than away miles.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.