To each their own, but I'll happily pay the $10 or so to reduce the likelihood of getting sick over the next few months. I hate being sick so much. I would be worth it even if it only prevented a mild case of sniffles.
I got COVID just a few months ago and I've had a worse flu but it's definitely comparable. The worst of it was over in a few days but the general feeling of sickness stayed for the next 3 weeks. I'll happily take anything to avoid that again.
I got Omicron twice. The first time was pretty much what you described: a sore throat and minor fever for four days followed by a month of tiredness.
Second time was far milder. I was fine after a week. It felt like a cold. It guess COVID-19 is bound to become similar to the other coronavirus which would make sense. At that point why risks injecting a whole population with a barely tested booster?
Two points: the booster wasn't barely tested, it was excessively tested. I don't think you realise how (comparitively) little testing goes into normal drug testing.
Secondly, people need boosters because immunity wanes to both the vaccine and natural infections. In about a year, you will get just as sick again if you get a natural infection, so why wouldn't you get a booster that will give you mild discomfort for a day at most.
> Two points: the booster wasn't barely tested, it was excessively tested. I don't think you realise how (comparitively) little testing goes into normal drug testing.
I’m sorry: you can’t call a vaccine tested for six months excessively tested. None of of the Covid vaccines were properly tested.
It was fine. The urgency required it. This is not the case for the booster.
> Secondly, people need boosters because immunity wanes to both the vaccine and natural infections. In about a year, you will get just as sick again if you get a natural infection
Immunity wane but we have no data which would allow you to affirm that. We know that reinfections can reoccur quickly with milder symptoms. We don’t know how long this ability of your immune system to fight more efficiently last.
There are very little data suggesting that a booster for omicron is actually useful. There is a reason European countries don’t recommend them to healthy adults.
...not getting as sick? We've had the annual flu vaccine around for decades and not a peep about "value propositions" because it was obvious. Same will go for COVID.
There's different approaches to the flu vaccine. Flu doesn't seem to be quite as widespread most years as covid has been these past two years.
For me personally, the flu vaccine usually means a few days of feeling lousy in return for maybe not getting the flu that I don't know if I've ever had to compare (flu testing has never been something I could access). Otoh, a couple incidents of maybe flu and smaller reactions to the flu shot over many administrations make me intend to get it every year.
Testing positive for COVID this summer was icky and disruptive, I'm going to get the new booster and hope it helps, cause I don't want that again.
For a significant time, the vaccine showed strong evidence of reducing hospitalization and fatality rates, esp for at risk populations. Did that change? I thought the main thing that changed was it stopped being effective at reducing transmission.
As the variant distibution changed, nearly all benefits of vaccines disappeared.
These facts are slowly trickling into the larger public knowledge, but it's been well understood within the medical research community for a while now.
You understand this is a liability for the cruise line and has almost nothing to do with your parents? If there's an outbreak on the cruise and someone dies from COVID, they have liability.
I listen to TWiV, and the prominent virologists there are suggesting that we don't actually know. In some of the latest episodes, they discuss frankly the fact that yearly boosters may or may not actually have any meaningful impact for normal healthy folks. They get into the details of why we know annual influenza boosters are effective, and that we really don't know whether COVID boosters will have the same effect.
This is correct: the current position of the medical establishment is that we simply don't have enough data to make an extremely strong argument for vaccines for healthy people.
And nobody knows enough about the flu vaccine currently yearly formulation in every year of the last 50+, but it was still recommended and administered to 40+% of US adults. Covid-related antivaxxism is just latent antivaxxers finally coming clean.
The narrative around the vaccine flip-flopped so often that it is pretty unclear what it is actually doing. Our health minister (Karl Lauterbach/Germany) actually said that it accelerates symptoms, so they stay at home earlier than those without. It's just so versatile it does everything and the opposite at this point.
You said anti-vaxxer which encompasses all vaccinations, but especially in Germany it makes no sense. In Germany most people are vaccinated[1] against something, so they are not oppossed to vaccines necessarily. This illustrates the blind crusade against people that do not want to participate in the mRNA therapy study that is still being conducted.
The effects are extremely small for variants that arose recently. If there is a new round of vaccines that work on current and future variants, it would make more sense to get vaccinated.
(yes; this is recent news; everything I'm describing above is about the previous round of viruses. The new vaccines are in only limited availabiltiy right now)
Even boosters are a bit of a question in my mind. I had forgotten they were already approved recently. There really ahsn't been much discussion at UCSF about it other than
"it's available we're still evaluating data before making recommendations".
What I should have said was "nobody should take the pre-bivalent boosters with any expectation of seeing a reduction in infection chances, or severity of disease, based on our current understanding of omicron, while bivalent boosters seem promising, even though we have extremely limited data and won't know for sure until after the winter cycle."
I believe those were approved a couple months ago and become available very recently. I was expecting Denmark to resume once that was available (they actually shut down the vaccine problem back in the spring with the plan to restart in the fall with the new booster).
But, as I understand it, does not affect how contagious the person is.
Given that, reducing the severity of the illness is arguably counterproductive, as it reduces the odds that the person will go out and about as opposed to staying at home away from others.
Note: I'm a scientist and work with/talk to medical researchers at top institutions (UCSF) all the time about viruses, vaccines, and other health areas.
My beliefs are a synthesis of what I hear from experts, and my own reading and thinking. I'm not overtly concerned by myocarditis risk - I just see this as reasonable and straightforward decisionmaking based on the data that is available and the unknown details that aren't.
