From what I have gathered you probably have an ever so slightly better response by mixing than getting 3 of the same. I believe the data shows it’s pretty negligible though. Smarter people than I can correct me if I’m wrong.
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Just got boosted myself about 45 minutes ago, got Moderna #3. I spent like an hour trying to find an appt at a commercial pharmacy and the best I could do was 12/30 and about 50 miles away. Then I called my doctor’s office and they referred me to a pharmacy down the hall from them and I walked right in and got it. Anyone in Portland wanting a booster check out Credena Pharmacy, suite 222 in the Providence building at 5050 NE Hoyt
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Any difference between any combination of the mRNA vaccines is likely to be small, but maybe mixing and matching is a little better from what we’ve seen so far? I wouldn’t go out of my way at all or delay getting my booster to mix and match, but I was at the clinic and they gave me the option with both on hand. So basically what Tilted said.
Heh, I’d be on my way if I hadn’t just gotten my shot. I was only seeing appointments around here come available at the start of the month, for a month or more out.
https://twitter.com/alexbolze/status/1466523746538119176?s=21
We’ll have to turn to one of the many other publicly available sources of SGTF data for USA #1…
Have there been any studies on when your booster is fully kicked in? Does it take 2 weeks like the second shot, or maybe less? I don’t recall seeing anything along those lines.
That would have been what I thought as well, but according to the guy who posted the Gauteng hospital data that Huehue posted here, this is not necessarily the case.
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1466480140305719299
Now this guy is a data scientist, but he says in comments that he talked to a bunch of experts in the field who made this point. The explanation is that vaccines induce antibodies to a broader range of epitopes within the spike protein, so their antibody coverage is more robust against mutation. He linked this as evidence:
The vaccine-induced antibodies targeting the RBD had a broader distribution across the RBD than that induced by the natural infection… mutation panel assays targeting the SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern have shown that the vaccine-induced epitope variety, rich in breadth, may grant resistance against future viral evolutionary escapes, serving as an advantage of vaccine-induced immunity.
I have no idea what the probability is of this being the case in the real world, but at any rate it looks like you can’t just make armchair arguments about vax vs real-world immunity. Turns out to be complicated, like everything else about the pandemic.
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Governor and Mayor of NY(C) doing a press conference to walk through 5 individual cases of Omicron. Seems weird that we are doing this considering the likely huge increase that is to come. Reminds me of the early days of Covid.
My younger sister, her husband, and 2/4 kids tested positive today. Her and her husband are both fully vaccinated, the kids are not.
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The new Gov and Mayor want everyone to fawn over them like they did Cuomo in the spring of 2020.
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It was DeBlasio, and Hochul doesn’t quite strike me as being like that (to the extent that a politician can be non-sociopathic). But I do think that there’s an element “politicians trying to be seen as being ‘on top’ of the situation.”
I also chuckle a little at everyone talking about how mild the cases are, 2 or 3 days after a positive test, when we know that’s not really how COVID works.
Is there any reason why the vaccines can’t cover more than 1 strain? (Essentially make 2 or more antigens).
Seems worth considering in the current case. Just add omicron specific into the existing formula.
??
Also appears that Germany is going to put the unvaxxed in lockdown essentially.
139k COVID cases today so increasingly likely cases going down entirely a holiday reporting issue and the wave now continues.
Vermont shattered the all-time high for a single day today.
Testing, and the rate of mutations, mainly. Flu vaccines are usually multiple strains, because flu changes a ton more than coronaviruses, and also, when these were made and tested, there was only one, and that one is really effective against subsequent strains.
I think we’re only all that likely to see a two strain vaccine if we see a pi or rho variant emerge in the next couple months that does not completely supplant omicron. We might see a Wuhan/omicron if delta and omicron both hang around (say omicron infects the vaccinated but delta wins in the unvaccinated), but I think that is less likely that one of omicron or delta winning.
There’s a mystery Omicron case in NSW now, so looks like it’s out and about in Australia too.
Mystery case in Iceland now too, the person had not been overseas and doesn’t know how they were exposed. Iceland sequence all positive PCR tests. Also this person had recently had a booster and is in hospital.
So, this headline is at least possibly pretty bad news, but it’s also a good way to illustrate what I was saying earlier about how we have some room to give on vaccine efficacy before we all panic about the omicron variant:
That threefold number in the headline is mainly there to scare you, and the study is limited in scale and needs further corroboration. But, for the purposes of illustration, let’s say that prior infection is 80% effective at preventing the next infection (putting aside hospitalization and death for now) of Wuhan through delta, an effectiveness perhaps a shade worse than what someone doubly vaxxed with Moderna 6 months ago might expect. If it is true, as stated, that the risk of reinfection with omicron now is 3x higher, then that would be due to an observed triple the percentage of the population that got reinfected with omicron compared to reinfected prior strains, suggesting a vaccine efficacy of just 40%, something comparable to a flu shot in a year where they whiffed on what strains went into the flu shot. That’s not great at all.
However, let’s consider a vaccinated case. A 2x Moderna population might have 85% efficacy relative to unvaccinated, but we’re seeing 86-90% effectiveness of boosters relative to double doses. That would suggest a better than 98% efficacy of boosted people relative to unvaccinated. Tripling the infection rate in this scenario leaves the boosted population with just over 93% effectiveness against omicron infection. That’s still comfortably inside of miracle territory, although, granted, probably not enough for eradication given the high transmissibility of delta and, likely, omicron.
So, bottom line, the risk to the population in the degree of escape of the omicron strain is not just a function of omicron but also of the baseline of protection that’s already there. A fairly high degree of escape, like a 3 fold increase, is pretty bad when the protection is currently mediocre, but it’s easier to fade when highly protected. So, get your boosters. Get everyone around you their boosters. Get your boosters even if you’ve had covid. Get people around you fully vaccinated if they’ve been relying on past infection for “immunity,” and then get them boosted in their time.
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