BOOSTER SHOTS ANYONE?
Nobody can accuse our experts of having definitive answers about Covid vaccination. Since the beginning of the pestilence, we have been treated to a steady diet of often contradictory “answers” and instructions.
The key excuse is the speed with which the Wuhan bug overtook the world leaving the medical community dead in water. The other key ingredient of the generalized confusion was, and continues to be, the rise of a vocal anti vax movement embracing disparate groups of anti-government activists, religious zealots, personal liberty warriors, and the inevitable social media scaremongers spreading fear and loathing.
Things got even worse thanks to the totalitarian “hard” lockdowns, which continue to be the go-to “solution” for knee-jerk governments despite proof that they do not work, their only success being upending societies, ruining economies, and creating massive psychiatric emergencies.
Now, the next stage in the global Covid madness is the question of booster shots. For the past several weeks the topic has been climbing to the top of Covid news intensifying the confusion that surrounds the “pandemic” mess.
Do we need one? Will we need one? Who knows.
Scientists Say It’s Too Soon For COVID-19 Booster Shots
Facing the threat of a more infectious Delta variant, vaccine makers Pfizer and BioNTech released a statement on Thursday saying it “may be beneficial” for people to get a third dose of their COVID vaccine within six months to a year. But US health officials and other scientists have vehemently disagreed, saying our current vaccines are holding up really well — at least so far.
“Americans who have been fully vaccinated do not need a booster shot at this time,” reads an unusual joint statement from the FDA and the CDC released hours after Pfizer’s announcement. “People who are fully vaccinated are protected from severe disease and death, including from the variants currently circulating in the country such as Delta.”
Holding off on a booster is reasonable, scientists told BuzzFeed News, both because our vaccines are still holding off infections against current variants and because even in the rare cases when vaccinated people do get infected, they’re protected against severe disease and death.
“The dam is still holding, even if there has been some splashing going on,” said immunologist E. John Wherry, director of the Penn Institute of Immunology.
The strength of the vaccines, paired with the fact that Delta has rapidly become the dominant strain of the virus circulating in the US, only increases the urgency that more people get fully vaccinated, health officials said. In some parts of the US, more than 80% of new COVID-19 cases are Delta, and it is linked to surges in the UK and Africa, with a surge feared for Europe by August.
"Preliminary data from several states over the last few months suggest that 99.5% of deaths from COVID-19 in the United States were in unvaccinated people," said CDC chief Rochelle Walensky on Thursday. "Those deaths were preventable with a simple, safe shot."
Clinical trials of the mRNA vaccines last year reported a stunningly good, roughly 95% rate of preventing infections by the original coronavirus strain. While recent studies of the effectiveness of Pfizer’s two-shot mRNA vaccine against the Delta variant in the United Kingdom and Canada have shown a slight dip in the protection the shots offer, two doses still reduce the risk of infections by 79% to 88%. Israel’s health authority announced unpublished results in May suggesting protection against Delta was lowered to 64%, but even then, the shots were 93% effective at preventing severe disease and death.