Didn’t articles about the DoD vaccine mention that testing was slowed by the difficulty of getting volunteers who were both unvaccinated and willing to participate in a vaccine trial? Unvaccinated people in the US at this point are probably mostly refusers or people who are hard to reach by medical and public health to begin with. Also, many people also have had COVID-19 by now, which could also confound results if not accounted for.
So don’t get your hopes too high for trials to go as quickly as with the first vaccines.
“Let’s get a simple place where home testers can report positive results…”
Just not realistic and of little/no value. Self-reported anecdotes is not data. Positive tests without a denominator doesn’t get you much. Not to mention, who is to stop those with an agenda to build some reporting bots to skew the numbers to fit their agenda?
“where is the will collect data on a grand arse big scale…”
Even if there is/was the “will”, not sure the feds have legal authority to enforce it, absent Congressional action.
I know of many folks who would be very interested in reporting a positive home test. As to there being ‘no value’ we will agree to disagree.
‘Not to mention, who is to stop those with an agenda to build some reporting bots to skew the numbers to fit their agenda?’
Well that’s an umbrella that covers the whole last 22 months…who is to stop ‘them’ from doing something to the numbers to make ‘them’ look good by making ‘us’ look bad.
Could to into way to many examples. but that’s veering into the ‘no-no’ category.
Per the military contributors on the SA forums, the Army vaccine is expected to take about a year to market, so not quite as fast as everyone is hoping.
Thanks for that information. If it does what they say it’s capable of it is certainly going to be a game changer and one year isn’t a bad timeframe from a historical perspective.
At this point, the virus is mutating faster than we can name these variants. By the time the next booster comes out, we’ll have herd immunity to it already. It’s like betting on a game that played a week ago.
I didn’t read the article but one summary said: “0.46% of cases resulted in severe illness in those with 3 shots. ~0.14% of cases resulted in severe illness 12+ days after the 4th shot. With the numbers so small, it seems the absolute difference is important to consider.” I can’t see that .3% absolute reduction in serious illness makes it worthwhile to go for a 4th vaccine. (One of my high school friends has. He was the first person I knew to get a 3rd too. No health or vocation reason, he just wanted to. I prefer to go with the FDA/CDC approval.)
Any thoughts on 4th vaccine doses? I think I’d rather wait for a different type of booster at this point.
Perhaps of more value would be a booster designed specifically for the most contagious variants (Omicron and Delta).
Even if the Omicron wave passes, will the next highly contagious variant be more likely to be similar to the ancestral virus, or be a variant mutated from an already highly contagious variant like Omicron or Delta?
I’m not interested in a 4th shot right now either. I am, however, extremely interested in not dying. Severely reducing the risk of dying is an attainable goal. Eliminating the spread of the virus altogether doesn’t seem to be. I’d prefer to stop the virus in it’s tracks, but if I can have the benefit of not dying while we try to figure out how that might be done I’ll be happy to take it.
While a new variant is more likely to be closer to Omicron or Delta than it will be to the ancestral virus*, there is no assurance that it will be that close to Omicron or Delta, since each person infected by a given variant reduces its evolutionary fitness by making that person more immune to that variant.
*The ancestral virus and variants close to it (e.g. Alpha) are well defended against by vaccine-derived immunity, since the vaccines directly target the ancestral virus. So a new variant needs to be different enough to at least partially escape immunity from both vaccines and previous variant infections, as well as being contagious enough.
Of course there’s no assurance. No one knows for sure, but Omicron has so many mutations likely because the virus was able to multiply unimpeded in people who had little immunity. There’s no reason that it couldn’t happen again. Since a pandemic is once-in-a-hundred-year event, we really don’t have the experience or the knowledge to be certain of anything regarding the viruses that cause pandemics.
Regarding getting a second booster of current vaccines (against the ancestral virus), it seems like the use cases for that would be:
If it has been long enough since your last vaccine that your antibodies are at maintenance levels, and a new wave comes based on a variant that is partially mismatched to the current vaccines (i.e. so that maintenance level antibodies are not enough, but high levels shortly after vaccination do prevent infection because they are not mismatched to a large enough degree to be completely ineffective), so you may want to get an mRNA shot for another booster.
If you have previously had only mRNA shots and want to boost your T-cell response with a J&J shot.
