Boosters

The effectiveness is not "nearly gone" or anything like it Wotz. And what people seem to be missing from the headlines rather than the studies is that the studies looked at a drop off of antibody levels. What they found is that men's antobodies dropped off more rapidly than women's(testosterone tends to damp down the immune system, oestrogen revs it up. It's one reason why women tend to suffer more from autoimmune conditions). Antibody reduction was most seen in the elderly(which makes sense as immune response dips with age). In real world results what they found was a reduction in protection against symptomatic infection, but protection against serious illness, hospitalisation and death remained strong(including against the Delta variant) Antibody levels dropped the most with the J&J vaccine, but again protection against serious illness, hospitalisation and death remained strong and that was a study of only 100 odd men average age 61, over half with underlying conditions. J&J's own research and that of Harvard medical school showed the most benefit from boosters across the board for that vaccine was at eight months not three.

Here's a link to a recent Israeli study

A separate study published in October of more than 3 million people found the Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness against coronavirus infection dropped from 88% during the first month after complete vaccination to 47% after five months. A similar decline was found among delta variant infections.

Yet, as is the case with all available COVID-19 vaccines, protection against severe illness remains strong.[emphasis mine]

Here's a US based study that gives the back and forth.

Again among the talk of declining antibody levels we have this:

The trio of studies published by the CDC show that vaccines do continue to be effective in reducing the risk of severe disease, hospitalization and death. The vast majority of so-called breakthrough cases, in which fully vaccinated individuals test positive for COVID-19, have been mild or asymptomatic. [emphasis mine]

TL;DR? If you're older or immunosuppressed, or chronically ill, the three demographics most likely to be hit by this pox anyway, resistance is much more likely to decline and you're more likely to get a positive infection, but protection against severe illness, hospitalisation remains very high. So a bit of a different picture from the panic stations we're hearing from some in the media, government and the nervy on social media.

The messaging about boosters in general has been quite shocking; a product that seems to lose its potency 3-5 months after being administered and then needs to be given to everyone again is not exactly a good product.

That's the thing though, antibodies drop and they lose some protection against infection, but retain protection against serious illness and death and the older or more medically fecked you are the more of a reduction you see. Not exactly earth shattering news. If you got a measles vaccine tomorrow and they measured your blood for antibody levels, you'd see an upward spike as your body responded to the vaccine, ditto with an actual dose of measles itself. Take your blood six months down the line and those antibodies will have dropped off. If you catch a cold your body will produce antibodies against that virus and again in time the levels will drop off. However the "muscle memory" of your immune system would be ready to produce antibodies to measles or the cold at the drop of a hat should you be exposed again. If your body kept antibodies at infection levels for life for every dose you've caught in your life your blood would be like treacle by the time you were ten 😁

They have and more than once. Before the talk of the need for boosters, that mostly came from Israel and mostly Pfizer and mostly in the elderly, J&J released their study into the efficacy of their vaccine over time(eight months from phase 1 human trials to July/August) and over half a million subjects in different parts of the world and including against Delta and found protection against serious illness and death remained strong and improved over time. This was backed up by other studies too. The three month J&J thing came from a tiny sample study of already half fecked American men, which the authors acknowledged had limitations, but for some reason that's the one that's been jumped on by politicians and the media. On the booster side J&J stated that the best interval to get the highest antibody levels with their vaccine was to boost at eight months not three. The American CDC state that all the current vaccines give long term protection against serious illness and death, but an increasing risk of breakthrough infections, even though in the vast majority they're mild too.

Put it another way; if J&J is so much of a dud, why did the Irish government spend a few milllion quid on gifting half a million doses to Nigeria in the same week Varadkar expressed "profound concern" over the efficacy of the same vaccine? A tad contradictory no? I'd love to know what the Nigerians thought when they read that.

Bingo. It was another reason I chose the J&J over the others particularly the mRNA versions. While it had more clotting issues, albeit in a tiny number of people and didn't give as much intital protection against serious illness and death, it's a viral vector that seems to stimulate actual infection in a more "natural" way* and studies demonstrated it showed a more stable and longer lasting effect on the immune memory mechanism and got stronger over time. As your link notes:

It’s still early, but Collier thinks the dynamics might look a bit different for people who got a single dose of J&J. Her recent work shows that their antibody levels start significantly lower than mRNA recipients’, but that eight months out from vaccination, the numbers have stayed stable, and have, perhaps, even gone up, shrinking some of the gap between brands. “I liken them to a fine wine,” Collier told me. “They get better over time.” Still, antibodies aren’t everything. J&J’s success might come down to how those antibody levels behave further out, and how the rest of the immune system behaves in concert.

And this seems to be reflected in the real world with all the vaccines too. Yes we're still under restrictions here in Ireland but we're significantly more open than in the first lockdowns. The mad traffic in towns and cities would tell us that. We're also more lax in general compared to earlier in this pandemic. And positive tests are indeed going up, but hospitalisations are pretty stable and at least half of those are unvaccinated and I'd bet the farm the vaccinated percentage are much more likely to be the very old and/or the very health compromised whose immune memory is going to be compromised anyway. I was reading recently that the age demographic in hospitals has shifted a bit. In that there are more younger patients than in the first stages of this pox, again most likely down to the unvaccinated and this was happening before the booster rollout. The vaccines work and work for a long enough time.

*I don't mean natural in the hippie dippy ballsology sense. I mean in the sense that it apes infection by the real thing more than slices of mRNA because it uses an actual virus. The problem with viral vectors can be with boosters if there are more and more required. The immune system can reject them precisely because it's seen them before.

Flu vaccines and the reasons for them are quite different and even there they're primarily aimed at the elderly, immuncompromised and otherwise vulnerable, or those around them like medical staff and carers. They're required in those groups because the virus mutates more and variants are more likely to partially or entirely bypass previous immunity, so tweaked vaccines need to be delivered.

So far the existing vaccines cope with the various covid variants, including it seems omricon. The annual tweaked flu vaccines do little to stamp out the flu seasons every year. People still catch flu on the regular. Plus for the vast majority of people the flu is mild, that is doesn't require hospitalisation and we should be increasing overflow capacity anyway like I suggested for covid, which would help with the flu, pneumonia and similar in the winter months.

As it stands we already live with the influenza virus as IMHO we should with covid, so long as the already vaccinated exhibit asymptomatic or mild symptoms and a massively reduced incidence of serious illness and deaths that impacts our overloaded and under capacity health services. Again it is my opinion and I'd bet the farm virologists would agree with me that we've almost zero chance of making covid 19 extinct by any of the current means at our disposal. It's far more likely to mutate itself into extinction. What we can do and are doing is reducing it to a disease we can live with, by protecting those that need protection and the current vaccines do that, boosters for the vulnerable and long term immune memory responses for the rest of us that reduce the risks of serious illness and death. Hell given the actual real world risks of serious illness and death before vaccines for the under 40's was daftly tiny, if all we did in the future was vaccinate the over 40's and the health compromised we'd have a fair chance of living with this pox. Just like we currently do with influenza.

For me that's a far far better aim than trying and failing - and we will fail IMHO - to wipe it out, or even get close to that. We've wiped out smallpox and we're nearly there with polio, but comparing either of them to covid 19 is for lots of reasons futile.