Will you be taking a booster?

The vaccines were and remain a fantastic positive as they are the single best prophylactic against serious illness and death and by a huge margin and have saved countless lives, but given 93% of Irish adults have been vaccinated and 50% are boosted and it's still flying through the population at a fair lick and a fair number of the vaccinated and boosted are still symptomatic it's not doing a great job of stopping contagion. Yes they reduce it, which is good, but it's pretty clear not by much and they're extremely leaky particularly with the omicron variant being far more infectious so the contagion aspect is a good way down the list of positives.

At this point going by my friends and family and even work circles(all but two of whom are vaccinated and most are boosted too) they've either got it themselves or are close to someone who has and most are in the former group.

If someone isn't vaccinated at this stage then do so FFS, but boosters for those who aren't in the vulnerable demographics? Not really seeing the point tbh.

Unless they're singular outliers their elderly relatives are almost certainly already vaccinated and boosted. They've already got their protection against infection unless the vaccines and boosters are seriously below par in reality. They very much have protection againts serious illness and death. That's the main thing by a country mile. And their non elderly relatives are also almost certainly vaccinated and over half of them are boosted. If so many are having Christmas severly disrupted by covid/omricon - and it seems they are as I've a very similar personal experience to yours - with 93% of the adults population vaccinated and over 50% boosted it strongly suggests protection against contagion is pretty shíte, boosted or no.

These vaccines are life savers, but they were always leaky. They reduced transmission, but not nearly enough to be able to ringfence outbreaks. This was far less a problem with Alpha and Delta which was harder to spread and catch. Now add in omricon which is significantly more contagious but thankfully much milder, in real terms it doesn't seem to really matter if you're only infectious for two days versus four. You are going to be exposed to this variant.

Going on my anecdotal stuff excluding their kids, the covid positives and symptomatic are over 40 and all(but 2) vaccinated and most are boosted(and one guy who got such a bad reaction from his first jab, he never got any more). The only two I know who have been definitely exposed and more than once, possibly positive* but not symptomatic are me and one other guy, vaccinated but not boosted. Though maybe this posited "super immunity" is in play there. We're the only ones who had confirmed covid early this year and then got vaccinated in late summer, him with pfizer me with J&J.

However beyond the anecdotal, positive tests are going through the roof with omricon. And these are symptomatic people in the majority of cases and going by the stats the majority will have been vaccinated and a large percentage of them will have had boosters on top.

*I've had a few postives in antigen tests, but all my PCR's came back negative, so feck knows. No symptoms, beyond a thumping headache the saturday before last when I tested antigen positive, but it was gone by sunday and by Tuesday my PCR said nope.

At least that's what I see. For the sake of clarity, are you denying that boosters reduce incidence?

Not at all, but my feeling is not by that much. And at this stage with omricon in full flow in the population - and a population that's one of the most vaccinated and boosted in the EU - the water is filling the boat faster than we can hope to bail.

However I don't see that as a bad thing necessarily. If omricon is as mild as it looks and the vast majority of the vulnerable are protected from serious illness and death, omricon will "vaccinate" the population worldwide soon enough. And if the research into super immunity coming from having caught covid on top of being vaccinated plays out this omricon variant could be the very thing that takes us out of this pandemic.