The 8 months number was just pulled out of a hat, and coincidentally, happened to be just about how far out we were (at the time) from the last dose for the powerful and influential people who got first crack at the vaccine (Congress). The data from Israel suggested that immunity was waning to the point of vulnerability by 5 months, certainly by 6 months.
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A Moderna half dose still has more mRNA than a Pfizer dose, since the regular Moderna doses have about three times as much mRNA than a Pfizer dose.
Iâd be kinda happy about that because I had a pretty âgoodâ reaction to my second moderna shot.
I think the tricky part is that you have to find/get a Moderna shot that is specifically a booster shot, not a regular shot. For Pfizer it doesnât matter since they are the same.
Is that true? My mom got her third shot of moderna a couple weeks ago at a hospital run clinic. She thought it was just a third one of the regular shot.
There are no available Moderna booster shots at half dose on the market, if you are immunocompromised, you get a third full dose shot. The half dose booster does have clinical data, but no approval yet. https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-announces-submission-initial-data-us-fda-its-covid-19
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there are no real âboostersâ yet. The Pfizer is just a third dose, which is equivalent to the first and second. Ditto for Moderna, at least today. So any place that does a first dose can do a third.
(Note, Moderna has requested approval for a true booster, which would be a half-dose, but they only recently submitted the data for approval, so it may be several weeks for review.)
Well of course most of us would agree with what you wrote, and most of us have probably all read the same articles. I really donât know the effect of mass boosters here on the supply in other countries but regardless of effect on pandemic overall, each individual in undervaccinated countries is as important as each individual in the US.
The point I cared about was that boosters need to be orderly and people need to stop lying to get them out of turn. The first phase for boosters will be the elderly, health care and other front line workers, and people with certain medical conditions, who mostly had their first and second shots the earliest anyway.
Thought Iâd posted here, but apparently not! Got my 3rd vax of Moderna on 9/9. My understanding is that itâs a full dose since the target group includes immunosuppressed folks who may not have received full efficacy. Iâm 60, in active chemo and am on blood thinners for a clotting disorder. According to the CVS enrollment questionnaire, that qualified me on two fronts.
The process was a world of difference from the last time. Only had to drive three miles instead of three hours each way. Got an appointment on the first try.
Side effects were less than with the second vax. Tired the next day, smaller red blob on the arm. My understanding is that the ânormalâ dose for me is three doses and that I would qualify for a booster later. Weâll see how that shakes out.
My younger S lives in a poor central European country that was supposed to get vax from India prior to their own outbreak. They are now getting some Pfizer from the US, but not nearly enough. He flew back here in early July to get vaccinated because he couldnât get it there.
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Congratulations! @CountingDown you are the kind of patient that boosters are so urgently needed for. I hope you feel safer.
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@twogirls I recently asked at a pharmacy and they told me the auto-immune qualification is more or less on the honor system. If you sign the form that you have a condition or are high risk, they arenât going to question it. YMMV.
I will be 8 months out from my second shot on October 4. My kid and her husband hit the 8 month mark on September 5.
None of us are members of congress.
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One must realize that the more people around the most-vulnerable who receive boosters, the better the most-vulnerable are protected. Anyone who is ineligible for a vaccine or whose immune system cannot mount a response to the vaccine (all people on B-cell killing medications, all people with uncontrollable allergic reactions to the vaccine, many persons with leukemia or lymphoma, many people who are on immunosuppressant medications) - they all are better protected if we give boosters to everyone to stop the circulation of the virus. We have plenty of vaccine! The vaccines are very safe, much safer than contracting Covid. There is no reason to ration them, or for our government to waste time arguing, like little boys on the playground fighting over the rules of the game, over who gets to get in line first. When the vaccines first came out, people DIED waiting, as our state governments left the vaccines sitting in freezers, while they moved at a sub-glacial pace trying to figure out how to sort people into categories of who should get the vaccine first (and in some states, like FL, the rich and powerful donors to the governor mysteriously got early concierge access to the vaccine, while everyone else waited, and more and more people died each day).
The data out of Israel is voluminous, and overwhelmingly crystal-clear that booster doses greatly decrease infection and immensely decrease serious disease. Every booster dose given decreases infection rates, helps to protect those who cannot be immunized, and prevents stress on our hospitals. There is absolutely NO reason to limit boosters! The FDA advisory committee failed miserably in their mission. Their claim that the data from Israel wasnât applicable in the US was shameful. What, are Israelis not human beings? Does the data from what is essentially a giant Phase IV clinical trial of 9.2 million people not apply, because theyâre in Israel? âDr. Oliver, the C.D.C. official, questioned attempts to draw a parallel between the United States and Israel, noting that Israel has only nine million residents and is less diverse than the United States.â This ignorant statement is just astonishing. Israel is incredibly genetically diverse, having absorbed well over a million immigrants from North Africa, Ethiopia, all of Eurasia, South Asia, Iran, literally from all over the world, who now have many descendants living in Israel, not to mention the Israeli Arab population, both Christian and Muslim. And when have we ever had a Phase
Fears about safety were touted by the FDA advisors, as if the booster doses were to be given in a world without risk of breakthrough Covid, as opposed to a world where Covid infection, with its potentially grave sequelae, is the inevitable and imminent consequence of NOT receiving a booster shot.
Counting down is hopefully safer. But they, and all other immunosuppressed people would be even safer, if boosters were made universally available.
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I agree with you. What I was saying wasâŠnot everyone who was immunized in the first wave was in Congress or otherwise privileged. Some of us are just normal folks who happened to be fully vaccinated sooner than later.
Iâm patiently waiting for the Moderna booster to be approvedâŠ.and once it is, Iâll be getting it ASAP. I doubt it will be within the 8 month window.
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And thatâs the remarkable thing about time. Yes, as time passes, more and more people get to that 8 month mark! In early August, when the notion of booster shots was first proposed in the US, the only people in the US who were 8 months out from their second dose of Pfizer were those who had received first doses by early to mid December. As I recall, not even front line Covid ICU workers were getting vaccines in early December. Congress got Pfizer as part of very first in the country to receive it, in mid December. Their second dose would have been in the first week of January. The proposal for boosters at 8 months was coincidentally EXACTLY when the most politically powerful people in the US had just reached 8 months (along with the medical workers who were vaccinated in December). But the data from Israel was showing breakthrough infections starting at 5 months. Unfortunately, " One study apparently came too late for the discussion, underscoring the rapid flurry of changing data on vaccine potency. Released by the C.D.C. hours before the committeeâs vote, it found that the Pfizer vaccineâs level of protection against coronavirus hospitalizations dropped significantly four months after the second shot.
Most of us who appropriately got vaccinated as soon as we were eligible are over four months out from the second shot. This is why the FDA should immediately make everyone eligible for a booster dose 4 months after the second dose. People shouldnât have to risk their health and lives.
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I thought the advisory panel suggested 6 months out-?
I think boosters for the general population will invite chaos and make it harder for the most vulnerable to get their shots.
I support phases based on age, occupation and medical status. I have read several times now that there will be other phases. For the most part, the possibly soon-to-be eligible were the earliest to get first and second jabs.
Meanwhile a million have already gotten a third shot. No figures on how many were immunocompromised and how many lied on the pharmacy form.
You appear to still be of the mindset that vaccines are in limited supply. They are not, so there should not be any chaos in distribution, other than the usual burden of reaching out to the extremely elderly and frail. It does not make much sense to withhold vaccines to others, and let doses expire, while we await vaccination efforts towards the most vulnerable-the distribution can and should be simultaneous given the adequate supplies.
More than 2 million have now received booster doses, including some prominent epidemiologists.
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My husband gets a third Pfizer shot this afternoon. He doesnât have a spleen, which supposedly fights only bacterial infections, not viral, but heâs still on the eligibility list so he said why not?
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Hooray! Pfizer released data showing their vaccine is safe and effective in ages 5-11 - no surprise, since 5-11 yr old immune systems are largely the same as 12 yr oldsâ immune systems. In fact 2 yr oldsâ immune systems react much the same as 12 yr oldsâ. I wish the FDA would give emergency approval overnight, but looks as if theyâll take a month or two to crawl toward authorization. Of course, some families are taking matters into their own hands, and have taken their kids who can pass for 12 in for shots, and LIED about their age, so that the kids can be protected from Covid for the same reasons that everyone 12 and up should be immunized.
Anyway, we are likely to have a month-long surge in vaccination after the FDA gives emergency authorization for the 5-11 yr olds. Yet another reason why boosters for all 12 and up who are 5 months out from immunization should be authorized immediately. We may have enough vaccine, but we donât have the delivery capacity to do boosters and the surge of 5-11 yr olds quickly, simultaneously. These days most people getting Covid vaccines are going to pharmacies, which are a highly inefficient method of delivering vaccines, very slow and time consuming, can do maybe a dozen a day at a site (as opposed to the hundreds to even a thousand a day that the mass immunization centers were able to deliver).
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It is a different shot for children (1/3 of the adult dose) and I would expect many parents to utilize their pediatrician for it. Mass vax sites at schools make sense. Given the different dose, I donât think the kids will necessarily overwhelm the retail locations.