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Dontshootrude

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Posts posted by Dontshootrude

  1. Large study on vaccine efficacy waning out of Qatar published hours ago: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114114

    The bad news: They report only a 20% efficacy against infection 6 months after the second shot, with efficacy against symptomatic infections being slightly higher.

    The good news: "Meanwhile, BNT162b2-induced protection against hospitalization and death persisted with hardly any waning for 6 months after the second dose."

  2. 7 hours ago, midtown said:

    Agreed.   Is there a single trial on boosters?    I'd say the booster is possibly adding to the anti-vax hesitancy where even someone as pro-vax as I am looks at the vaccine now as a constant money maker pushed on a public where scientists and the FDA don't agree about a booster. 

     

    There are multiple trials on boosters.  Israel already published a massive one.  UK has released data and I suspect we won't be that far behind.  

    By the end of the month we should have safety and efficacy data from mixing different shots as boosters.  That's going to be really interesting.

  3. 8 hours ago, Satoshi said:

    https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736(21)02183-8
     

    Protection against hospitalization at 6 months still 93% but effectiveness against infection drops to 47% at 6 months. 

    I'd like to remind everyone the original efficacy against infection cutoff was 50% when the vaccine development and trials started back in spring 2020.  I find it really funny that after waning immunity we are still around the initial target efficacy and people are acting like this is some sort of failure.

     

    93% VE against severe illness after six months is amazing by any measure.

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  4. 9 hours ago, Bevo said:

    I don't know anything about the poster, but the article is good.

    https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02046-8/fulltext

     

    Although the benefits of primary COVID-19 vaccination clearly outweigh the risks, there could be risks if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects (such as myocarditis, which is more common after the second dose of some mRNA vaccines,or Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been associated with adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccines. If unnecessary boosting causes significant adverse reactions, there could be implications for vaccine acceptance that go beyond COVID-19 vaccines. Thus, widespread boosting should be undertaken only if there is clear evidence that it is appropriate.

    Current evidence does not, therefore, appear to show a need for boosting in the general population, in which efficacy against severe disease remains high. Even if humoral immunity appears to wane, reductions in neutralising antibody titre do not necessarily predict reductions in vaccine efficacy over time, and reductions in vaccine efficacy against mild disease do not necessarily predict reductions in the (typically higher) efficacy against severe disease. This effect could be because protection against severe disease is mediated not only by antibody responses, which might be relatively short lived for some vaccines, but also by memory responses and cell-mediated immunity, which are generally longer lived.The ability of vaccines that present the antigens of earlier phases of the pandemic (rather than variant-specific antigens) to elicit humoral immune responses against currently circulating variants indicates that these variants have not yet evolved to the point at which they are likely to escape the memory immune responses induced by those vaccines. Even without any changes in vaccine efficacy, increasing success in delivering vaccines to large populations will inevitably lead to increasing numbers of breakthrough cases, especially if vaccination leads to behavioural changes in vaccinees.

    To date, none of these studies has provided credible evidence of substantially declining protection against severe disease, even when there appear to be declines over time in vaccine efficacy against symptomatic disease.

     

    Conclusion:

    If boosters (whether expressing original or variant antigens) are ultimately to be used, there will be a need to identify specific circumstances in which the direct and indirect benefits of doing so are, on balance, clearly beneficial. Additional research could help to define such circumstances. Furthermore, given the robust booster responses reported for some vaccines, adequate booster responses might be achievable at lower doses, potentially with reduced safety concerns. Given the data gaps, any wide deployment of boosters should be accompanied by a plan to gather reliable data about how well they are working and how safe they are. Their effectiveness and safety could, in some populations, be assessed most reliably during deployment via extremely large-scale randomisation,17 preferably of individuals rather than of groups.
     
    Thus, any decisions about the need for boosting or timing of boosting should be based on careful analyses of adequately controlled clinical or epidemiological data, or both, indicating a persistent and meaningful reduction in severe disease, with a benefit–risk evaluation that considers the number of severe cases that boosting would be expected to prevent, along with evidence about whether a specific boosting regimen is likely to be safe and effective against currently circulating variants. As more information becomes available, it may first provide evidence that boosting is needed in some subpopulations. However, these high-stakes decisions should be based on peer-reviewed and publicly available data and robust international scientific discussion.
     
    The vaccines that are currently available are safe, effective, and save lives. The limited supply of these vaccines will save the most lives if made available to people who are at appreciable risk of serious disease and have not yet received any vaccine. Even if some gain can ultimately be obtained from boosting, it will not outweigh the benefits of providing initial protection to the unvaccinated. If vaccines are deployed where they would do the most good, they could hasten the end of the pandemic by inhibiting further evolution of variants. Indeed, WHO has called for a moratorium on boosting until the benefits of primary vaccination have been made available to more people around the world.18 This is a compelling issue, particularly as the currently available evidence does not show the need for widespread use of booster vaccination in populations that have received an effective primary vaccination regimen.

    That is a good article. This one is pretty good too.

     

    https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2320

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  5. 5 hours ago, pearlandhorn said:

    I’ve got a weird situation. I had Covid in January, second shot in April. 33 and very healthy. Seriously wondering if I’ll need a booster in December or before thanksgiving. I’ll probably just wait for more data to come out.

    My folks had their third moderna shot about 3 weeks ago.

    People in your situation have demonstrated the most robust immunity of any group.  The reported breakthrough cases for recovered and vaxxed are the lowest of any category.  There have been several studies that show you are not only able to defeat COVID, but a couple of the cold like coronaviruses and even the original SARS virus.  At this point I don't see any reason for you to get a booster.

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  6. 7 minutes ago, Radical Larry said:


    I think people place too much emphasis on their careers. I wish we could all live in the mountains at high altitude. That’s where I see myself in five years.

    Oh, I agree. I just like to go with the flow. See where it leads me.

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  7. Interesting MMWR published today.

    https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7038e1.htm?s_cid=mm7038e1_w

    Key table:

    E_gQtvjUYAIVYgC.thumb.jpg.0a6d87b5de8e5e6185c3712cbb2dbf8f.jpg

     

    Moderna dominance continues.

    This is in 21 hospitals.  It is good news, but Jesus, the UK and Israel are making the US public health system look horrible.  Our data sets are small, inconsistent, and fragmented.  It is really difficult to get good large scale data sets in the US in a timely fashion.  The pandemic has really exposed how vulnerable and unorganized we are.

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