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Medicine

Fourth Pfizer Dose Is Insufficient to Ward Off Omicron, Israeli Trial Suggests (bloomberg.com) 173

Posted by BeauHD from the better-than-nothing dept.
A fourth dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was insufficient to prevent infection with the omicron variant of Covid-19, according to preliminary data from a trial in Israel released Monday. Bloomberg reports: Two weeks after the start of the trial of 154 medical personnel at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv, researchers found the vaccine successfully raised antibody levels. But that only offered a partial defense against omicron, according to Gili Regev-Yochay, the trial's lead researcher. Vaccines which were more effective against previous variants offer less protection with omicron, she said. Still, those infected in the trial had only slight symptoms or none at all.

Israel started rolling out the fourth dose of the vaccine to the over-60s and immunocompromised in late December amid a surge in cases. Since then, more than half a million Israelis have received the extra dose, according to the Health Ministry. The decision to give the fourth vaccine to the most vulnerable was the correct one, Regev-Yochay said at a virtual press conference, since it may have given additional benefit against omicron. But she added the results didn't support a wider rollout to the whole population.
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Fourth Pfizer Dose Is Insufficient to Ward Off Omicron, Israeli Trial Suggests More

Fourth Pfizer Dose Is Insufficient to Ward Off Omicron, Israeli Trial Suggests

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  • The fifth dose (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    should do it.

    • Short term vaccine boosters are makeshift in nature. The proper vaccine should be a single dose fix.

      Covid19 was a tricky one from the start - https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]

    • Make it 6th, 7th, 8th, Shove it up your arse and recite a holy prayer. Do it every month. IT WILL STILL NOT WORK. As a vaccine IT DOES NOT WORK against Omicron and was not particularly good against Delta. Statement of the fact.

      When a vaccine DOES NOT work it DOES NOT work. And Pfizer DOES NOT work for anything after the first few strains. One look at the curves could have told you that a month ago. In fact, I posted it a month ago here and dumfuck cretins sh*theads which cannot do elementary maths did not

    • More doesn't equate to better.

      If your body is already primed to look out for particular protein strains. Telling your immune system to look out for these again isn't going to do too much.
      Omicron is a mutation, so it has different characteristics that will make your bodies immune response to take some extra effort into recognizing and fighting it off. That said, it still has a fair amount of similarities so the Vaccines are effective, and normally your body can fight it off much faster than those who don't

    • should do it.

      Ongoing support will require a Pfizer 365 subscription (formerly known as Vaccine Assurance).

  • I'll settle for staying out of the hospital (Score:4, Insightful)

    by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Monday January 17, 2022 @05:50PM (#62182287) Homepage Journal

    1, 2, 3, or even 4 shots can keep me from taking up a hospital bed that someone else needs on a day when the local hospitals are full or nearly full, it's worth it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      Some people say the firefighters that died on 9/11 were heroes. I say fuck that. The real hero is people like davidwr.
      Ladies - if you're taking notes, this is where you want to throw your panties, that is if you can still get them off when they're soaking wet.

    • Re:I'll settle for staying out of the hospital (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 ) on Monday January 17, 2022 @06:39PM (#62182463)

      1, 2, 3, or even 4 shots can keep me from taking up a hospital bed that someone else needs on a day when the local hospitals are full or nearly full, it's worth it.

      And fortunately the vast majority of people feel that way. If this pandemic has shown us anything, it has cast a bright light on that ~15% of people who don't care about anyone but themselves.

      And we will remember who they are.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        and also that they play by different rules. While the vast majority of people have a basic respect for truth, facts and honest dialog, that ~15% of people will lie about anything. That is why our problems are so intractable, social media has enabled liars to broaden their reach.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I'm conflicted on this. People who get indoctrinated into cults are usually seen as victims, people we should help. Is anti-vaxx a new kind of cult, based around Facebook? A kind of stochastic cult where you can't point to specific leaders or organizations, but it's effective none-the-less.

        On the other hand, I don't want to get COVID so I have very little tolerance for such people being around me.

        • Victims, sure I get your point. Cult members tend to be people with poor critical thinking skills. Cults can be dangerous though, not just to the "victims", but also to society in general. If the victims are a threat they still need to be treated as such.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sloppy ( 14984 )

        What makes you think those people care about themselves?

    • Re:I'll settle for staying out of the hospital (Score:4)

      by burtosis ( 1124179 ) on Monday January 17, 2022 @06:46PM (#62182473)
      Polio takes a course of 4 shots to be optimal, why should covid be any different?
      • Shh, don't even start to tell people about DTaP. If you're 50, you've likely had it 10 times

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        Polio takes a course of 4 shots to be optimal, why should covid be any different?

        Twinrix (Hep A and B) is a two dose course with boosters at 20 years.

        Tetanus is every 10 years.

        In fact it's rare to have a vaccination that lasts your entire life from a single shot. I think that MMR and Yellow Fever are the only two I've had an Yellow Fever is optional (recommended if you travel to South America or Asia though). Here is the vaccine schedule for an Australian [health.gov.au].

        The main reason we don't need boosters for many of those is the fact we have almost eliminated many of those diseases in t

        • So, if I understand you correctly, 50 years ago medical science had advanced to the point where we could produce a vaccine that conferred immunity for 10 years, and today our vaccines confer partial (not complete) immunity for six months or less.

          And to top it all off, now they're saying the vaccines won't prevent someone from getting the disease, or spreading it, but only reduces the risk of dying from a disease which already has less than a 2% mortality rate?

          How exactly is this progress? And why would

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

            years ago medical science had advanced to the point where we could produce a vaccine that conferred immunity for 10 years, and today our vaccines confer partial (not complete) immunity for six months or less.

            Those vaccines still work fine and we still use them. They have not gotten weaker.

            How exactly is this progress?

            Well for starters, 50 years ago we had no idea how to make a vaccine for a Coronavirus at all. It took 20 years to develop the first Polio vaccine, and it wasn't very good. Whereas today, not only can we develop a vaccine for a coronavirus, we developed 6 different Covid vaccines in less than a year (J&J, Moderna, Pfizer, Astrazeneca, Sputnik, Sinovac) and distributed them throughout the world. Another form of progress

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rikkards ( 98006 )

          I got an MMR booster a couple years ago. It might be because of age and when you got it can't remember. EIther way I still would have got it.

  • Headline is clickbait BS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday January 17, 2022 @05:52PM (#62182297)
    It literally says right in the summary that it offers partial defense. All vaccines offer partial defense. There's no such thing as a perfect vaccine. This research is more useful in the sense that it shows that another booster this early isn't going to help. Meaning there's no reason to put additional strain on the vaccine supply to do fourth shots Because by the time it would be worth doing that we will likely have an omicron specific vaccine.

    The 24/7 news cycle has well and truly borked our entire national discourse. It means that whoever gets their headlines out first and flashiest is the one who reaps the rewards. As a result I have read a 50/50 mix that omicron is nothing to worry about and that we're all going to die sometime later this week. And as long as the clicks keep coming it's all good.

    Keep calm. Wear your mask. Wear the best mask you can get. Remember that the best mask is the one that you will wear. And get your three shots. Don't go looking door knobs and don't go to clubs and parties. If you're going to hang out with people hang out with people who are also vaccinated.

    Remember that if nothing else the first two variants and the flu are still out there and people can still get sick from them especially people who refuse to get vaccinated and if you can avoid giving those fools the virus maybe you can keep a few more people out of the hospital while we wait for this surge to abate. I just read a story about a doctor having to take a critical cancer patient who is probably going to die out of the ICU to make room for an unvaccinated covid patient. Yeah the cancer patient was going to die but they could have had a slim chance at life and maybe a more comfortable death. I can't get those people vaccinated for bumping people out of ICU beds but I can't at least prevent a few people from getting covid should I happen upon it myself in my thrice backed state of being.
    • Are the vaccines to date just not properly targeted for Omicron? Or is this the maximum level of defense that our immune system has to offer even if it is fully prepped?

      The Omicron wave does pass after a couple weeks, which means most people aren't immediately getting re-infected with it, or failing to clear it from their system in the first place.

      • Re:Headline is clickbait BS (Score:4, Informative)

        by ShadowRangerRIT ( 1301549 ) on Monday January 17, 2022 @06:17PM (#62182391)
        Omicron mutated enough that the antibodies developed against the vaccine (and earlier variants) are much less effective. There's no reason to believe an updated vaccine would not produce more targeted defenses, but, like Delta, Omicron might reproduce so rapidly that it wouldn't be as effective vs. infection when antibody levels declined (ramping them back up would take longer than it took to develop the infection), even if it reduced deaths and hospitalizations dramatically (because memory B cells could pump out the antibodies reactively much faster than the weeks it takes to become hospitalized or die).
      • All of the vaccines to date I’m aware of, all that are available for public use in America anyhow, are all geared to the original strain and not even alpha much less delta or omicron. Typically noticeable reinfection only occurs with a different variant either after vaccination or getting sick the hard way. Note however that the most effective vaccines actually provide more and additional benefit to natural immunity through infection so it’s best to get vaccinated.
    • There's not much to go on but I found this additional info that suggests the fourth shot didn't perform measurably better than the control group:

      Regev-Yochay noted that only slightly fewer people who received the fourth dose caught coronavirus than those in a control group, who were fully vaccinated with two shots in the last two months or three shots.

      No numbers were shared during the briefing because the infections were so close to receiving the fourth dose; "they do not shed light but are only confu
    • Exactly. If you're going to get Covid, you only want to get it from someone vaccinated, otherwise you're part of the problem.
  • There you go, we're fucked. Cya on the dark side

  • But now they're here.
    We laughed (and cursed) when that guy got dozens of COVID-19 vaccine shots, and now ...
    Nah, he's still a jerk, and I guess we need to look to updated vaccines, results of testing on what benefits, if any, supplements like Vitamins C&D, the mineral Zinc, and Vitamin K2, have had, and the testing on the effectiveness of supplementary drugs, both old and the bleeding edge ones just getting released.

    Nobody of note is likely, imo, to suggest what some of us may have been thinking, that t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ghoul ( 157158 )
      Omicron sounds like it was engineered. It is highly unlikely to get 30 mutations naturally.

  • What's good for M & M Enterprises will be good for the country.

    Now eat that cotton!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • Last I checked, vaccine efficacy was defined in terms of the rate of infections prevented not in terms of hospitalization prevented. So first of all, we are lowering the bar a lot.

    Secondly, if vaccines do little to prevent the spread of the disease then getting vaccinated is mostly a personal decision. Forcing other people to get vaccinated will not lower your probability of ending up infected or in hospital.

    Thirdly, even if the vaccine reduces your chances of landing in hospital you have to remember that a

    • Which statistically significant effect a study protocol is built around will vary from drug to drug, vaccine to vaccine. It depends on the particulars of the illness and what it does. For nasty, fast growing organisms, the efficacy threshold may be just that you prevented death. You could write a protocol around preventing fever if you wanted but you'll have trouble building cohorts around that. But in terms of cost, no, vaccinating everyone is much cheaper than dealing with the percentages that would e
  • The lead researcher on this project has his roots as a medical doctor. Since then, he has studied epidemiology as well as genomics and bioinfomatics which makes him an uncommonly diverse researcher with a very rare and useful set of skills. Mathematically, combinatorics and set theory would identify him as one of the most qualified candidates for research programs such as this.

    But there is something clearly missing here.

    A dumbed down article sharing common knowledge about omicron : https://www.medicalnewsto
  • Yet another story trying to frame good news about vaccines as bad because clickbait. Vaccines work incredibly well & are saving 100,000s of lives. The bigger problems here are vaccine hesitancy & science denial. If you get vaccinated, you're a lot less likely to get permanently ill or die.

  • All our currently approved vaccines are based on the original strains - specifically the spike proteins. Every mutation decreases the likelihood the vaccine will provide adequate immunity. Omicron has 36 mutations on the spike. Unfortunately this virus is mutating too fast for us to create new vaccines at a time when they are needed. Let's look at it this way. Someone trains facial recognition to you. You grow facial hair, change your haircut, put on a mask, etc. How likely will that facial recognition matc

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