Florida’s new surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, is spot-on with his observation that the best form of prevention from COVID-19 is for persons to have an infection because this will provide the best immunity. I am aware that he is correct because of a recent experience with a member of my family. He had a severe infection from COVID-19. He is past that now and is completely immune — not only for COVID-19 but flu and other respiratory infections as well. Dr. Ladapo’s recommendation works. Of course we are burying this family member next week.
If you follow Eric Topol that is pretty much what he is complaining for the last 6-9 months - the US can’t “beat” covid if they don’t collect all necessary data in a way that it helps us to make key decisions. Part is a horrible decentralized, old, underfunded system, part are states who undermine any efforts so they can continue downplaying covid and its consequences.
This sarcastic letter to the editor in the Tampa Bay Times is “spot-on”, to use the writer’s expression.
And then the FDA and CDC can’t correctly interpret the data they do have correctly, or if they interpret it correctly they share it with the public in a way that’s easy to misunderstand, like “the unvaccinated are 11 times as likely to be hospitalized or die,” or they phrase it in an insanely misleading way, like “at least 90% of infections are not from surfaces.”
There are more papers coming out which might indicate that also the T-cell response is waning after about six months with Pfizer vaccine (and most likely also with Moderna one)
Interesting. Thanks. This is the first I’ve heard anything about T-cell immunity declining. I’ll want to read more about that, corroborating or disagreeing with this article.
I would think that the Moderna shot would be more durable in all respects relative to the Pfizer, given that it contains over three times as much mRNA. We shall see.
In any case, since I’m on the list now, I plan to get a third Pfizer dose as soon as I can schedule one in. I want to wait for at least a month after my flu shot, though, even though most things I’ve read recently say you can get them together. So for me that will be later this month.
With millions and millions of people fully vaccinated, it’s ridiculous that we don’t have real-world data about what percentage have gotten breakthrough infections, been hospitalized, and died that we could use to compare the vaccines’ effectiveness over time.
This article is tangentially related to your post, and the bioRxiv article that Honkman posted:
If Moderna goes with a half-dose booster (50 mmg), recipients will have received a total of 250 mmg of mRNA. People who get the 30 mmg Pfizer booster will have had a total of 90 mmg, and would need another five 30 mmg booster shots to catch up with the total Moderna dose.
Unfortunately the US and CDC since the beginning of the pandemic (even under Biden) haven’t a clear data capture plan, testing plan (the US is ridiculously behind to many other western countries on wildly available easy to use test) or tracing plan - all three are equally important to end the pandemic.
It feeds in the even bigger, more fundamental picture far beyond just covid that there are many things broken in the US (and covid just accelerate how clearly it is now seen across the world). Goof read:
I haven’t seen a study of vaccine effectiveness over time based on solid data from another country yet, either.
Most of the delta related papers all come out of Europe as they capture much more data than the US especially tracking variants, their outcome etc. Research paper are in general rarely just about overall vaccine effectiveness but just covering certain aspects which are easier and faster to track. And if you look for those types papers in the databases there are a lot European papers (often with US collaborations but the actual data comes from Europe (often England which are at the forefront of genetic tracking of covid etc)
After all the not so great news over the last few months around covid we got at least today some quite promising news from Merck today which could be a game changer to get to an endemic stage wrt covid
Now, this really is good news. I hope it goes though all of the necessary hoops successfully and gets an emergency use authorization.
A treatment that leads to a 50% reduction in the need for hospitalization is a big deal.
And Merck is doing the right thing by setting up agreements with generic drug manufacturers to lower the cost, with plans for distributing the drug to a hundred countries that need them the most.
Finally a solid study of vaccine effectiveness over time, though only of Pfizer.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02183-8/fulltext
In short, while there is reduced effectiveness against getting any level of infection, protection against the need for hospitalization is still very high for at least a half year after the second Pfizer shot.
Although waning effectiveness against hospital admissions was not observed in our study population to date, this possibility should be carefully monitored.
No decline in protection against hospitalization and death, and reduced protection against infection does not seem to be due to the Delta variant.
So from an epidemiological perspective, we should vaccinate the rest of the world before giving booster shots here.
I completely agree, but the gate has been opened and most 2-dose Pfizer recipients in the qualified groups will probably get boosters. If a small fraction of these recipients choose not to get booster shots for the reason in your quote above, it’s not going to advance overall world-wide vaccination by more than a tiny epsilon. I think that the majority of people aren’t thinking in terms of the importance for world-wide vaccination, and few will decline boosters as they become eligible.
At least third Pfizer doses have not been approved for the entire, general population.
I mostly don’t see much benefit to living in Berkeley except weather, food shopping, and being next to Oakland, but I was happy to hear this.
Thing is, there’s no good reason that same 93% couldn’t have applied to the entire country by now, but for the vaxx resistance.