We really need to get on the ball with a booster vaccination campaign. Just anecdotally, my extended family is 100 percent vaccinated, no hesitancy, got the shot as soon as eligible. I asked a number of them about boosters this weekend. Less then half going to do a booster including most of the 60 plus crowd.
The communication regarding boosters has been terrible. Nobody outside of the super high info people like us knows that they can or should get the booster.
Yes I think a lot of people think they arenāt eligible when itās lol eligibility. They are waiting to be told their age group needs boosters.
Yeah it was super frustrating trying to walk through why they needed boosters.
This whole group of people will get them if fully vaccinated for activities/travel means three shots mandated. They probably will get one if a vaccinated friend gets sick with a breakthrough.
As of now get a lot of āboosters are optionalā āI donāt know what to takeā ālook once the kids are vaccinated this is basically overā āI already did my partā argle bargle.
IMHO the messaging needs to move towards āthis is a three shot vaccine like many other vaccines that you takeā and, as Dan says, that boosters are necessary. I think thereās so little trust in government and such a desire by those in charge to be post COVID that it is going to be difficult and we just accept a lot of illness and death instead.
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I was hoping the Biden Administration would have gotten a really charismatic person to be the face of the fight against the coronavirus. That person could take the lead, rather than Biden trying to do it, and could have positioned himself or herself to be a possible Presidential candidate in 2024. Instead we get Xavier Becerra and Andy Slavitt? Even Mayor Pete would have been a better choice for the role. I think there are a lot of great potential leaders of the type Iām thinking of, but they just never step forward and enter the public sector because the political life is so unbearably distasteful.
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Would be a fun role. Get death threats against you and your family from heavily armed brain damaged idiots.
I cant even imagine running for school board type positions in a lot of places at this point. If thereās another wave that requires mitigation or shutdowns the executions are coming.
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Update
Definitely felt pretty fatigued about 3 hours post shot. Arm soreness was definitely worse than the previous 2 pfizers.
Went to bed at 8 oclock and slept 11 hours and feel like shisha.
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I was talking with a supplier of mine yesterday and mentioned I was getting the shot today. He didnāt know you could just make your own appointment, thought someone would contact him about it. Heās older, overweight and has to travel a lot for work, basically a prime candidate to get the thing.
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Gf got Pfizer #3 yesterday. Sore arm kicked in after a couple hours, chills and body aches after ~12 hours. Had a rough night but woke up feeling a bit better.
I got my 2nd Moderna back in April and hope to schedule my booster soon, before Thanksgiving. Iāll probably get a 3rd Moderna.
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Tom Hanks might have been really good in this role. Heās obviously an A-list celeb, considered serious and trustworthy.
I guess heās leans Democratic (endorsed Obama and Biden) but he still has an aura of gravitas and calm reasonableness that would work for most people.
Plus he and his wife were among the very first celebrities to get covid so heās already sort of associated with the pandemic.
Edit: I also just realized that Hanks canāt help but be associated with WWII and the collective sense of shared sacrifice and coming together to fight against a common enemy. Things might have been very different with him as the messenger of the government response. 
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I think the booster messaging was doomed by the way the original shots were talked about. Part of the work of cajoling people to get the vaccine was hyping up how well they worked. People who were listening got that message, which is a little bit different from the message that vaccine efficacy fades and especially from the message that J&J never worked very well with a single dose.
Itās also tough because some of the booster calls are obvious, whereas others are very complex. Itās extremely, extremely important that old people and immune compromised people and people who got J&J get boosters. Itās a lot less obvious that younger, healthy people who are overweight should get a booster when vulnerable people in other countries are still unprotected. But the only categories we have are forbidden and ārecommended,ā which is too impoverished a language to communicate the reality.
I think Bidenās original plan on boosters (everyone get them very soon) was not optimal, but it was really bad that he got rolled on it by FDA and CDC. This fetish for āfollowing the scienceā on complex political questions is disastrous.
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I agree somewhat, but I think the problem is that our nominal leaders lack credibility, not charisma. Thereās a world of difference between having your leaders tell you whatās going on and what the plan is, which is what we need, and flaks telling you what they think itās useful for you to hear, which is what we have.
I believe this is correct. However, it is possible that some people might be more efficient in creating the protein from one sequence than the other. So for that reason, it might make sense to diversify. But I guess that part of the process is even before the immune system is involved.
But I agree with the overall point is that the difference is negligible. Iād probably need a bit more than $50 to make a different choice, but not that much more.
MrsWookie has published a paper on this sort of thing (but not in humans), and this has some merit, even if the effect figures to be smallish.
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They will probably get Travis Scott to push the booster.
I think thereās a selection bias here in that many more vaccinated people caught COVID but never tested positive, likely due to mild or nonexistant symptoms. At least, I hope thatās the explanation.
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I think Travis Scott has been involved in enough pushing recently.
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If 97% of covid cases are the unvaxxed and I was already like 90% not to have serious effects from covid and the vax is 90% effective at preventing those effects if I do get covid, how important is getting a booster?
Still pretty important afaik, because these arenāt constants:
This could change for future variants
This decreases over time after youāve been vaccinated
++ potentially reducing your transmission to others
People who have been vaccinated but still test positive are surely at a much higher than normal risk of dying from COVID.