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Medicine

Three Large Studies Show COVID Vaccines Fight Omicron - With Booster Shots (go.com) 282

"Three studies released Friday offered more evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are standing up to the omicron variant, at least among people who received booster shots," reports the Associated Press: They are the first large U.S. studies to look at vaccine protection against omicron, health officials said. The papers echo previous research — including studies in Germany, South Africa and the U.K. — indicating available vaccines are less effective against omicron than earlier versions of the coronavirus, but also that boosters doses rev up virus-fighting antibodies to increase the chance of avoiding symptomatic infection.

The first study looked at hospitalizations and emergency room and urgent care center visits in 10 states, from August to this month. It found vaccine effectiveness was best after three doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines in preventing COVID-19-associated emergency department and urgent care visits. Protection dropped from 94% during the delta wave to 82% during the omicron wave. Protection from just two doses was lower, especially if six months had passed since the second dose. Officials have stressed the goal of preventing not just infection but severe disease. On that count, some good news: A third dose was at least 90% effective at preventing hospitalizations for COVID-19, both during the delta and omicron periods, the study also found.

The second study focused on COVID-19 case and death rates in 25 states from the beginning of April through Christmas. People who were boosted had the highest protection against coronavirus infection, both during the time delta was dominant and also when omicron was taking over...

The Journal of the American Medical Association published the third study, also led by CDC researchers. It looked at people who tested positive for COVID-19 from Dec. 10 to Jan. 1 at more than 4,600 testing sites across the U.S. Three shots of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were about 67% effective against omicron-related symptomatic disease compared with unvaccinated people. Two doses, however, offered no significant protection against omicron when measured several months after completion of the original series, the researchers found.

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Three Large Studies Show COVID Vaccines Fight Omicron - With Booster Shots

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  • by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 ) on Saturday January 22, 2022 @12:42PM (#62197079) Homepage

    What we really need is to have specific vaccines tied to specific variants. Unfortunately, things have been much too slow, so we never got a Delta booster approved until after Delta was already mostly over. And we aren't going to get an Omicron booster until after that's approved. The FDA and other bureaucratic aspects are just moving too slowly to really deal with this at the speed they should be. The mRNA tech allows very fast retooling of the vaccine proteins. But instead we're stuck with a version of the spike protein that hasn't been around for months.

    In the US also, we're really failing badly at testing. The Trump administration did a really poor job there, but Biden then kept doing the same essential thing. Now that we're finally getting tests sent out it is only 4 to a household, and the website has terrible headaches so that a lot of people have had trouble getting their tests .It will likely be an example for years to come for software quality assurance of how not to do a roll-out.

    At least in other aspects we're doing better. Remdesivir and Paxlovid are both really effective at reducing death totals. Unfortunately, there's a heavy coalition of people, primarily anti-vaxxers who are often proponents of other treatments, especially HCQ, ivermectin, and no quercetin, have decided that Remdesivir and Paxlovid are somehow bad. There are a lot of reports of people coming in and actively refusing Remdesivir and/or refusing to ventilation. This means that a lot of people are going to die or have life-long complications where we could otherwise prevent it.

    • What we really need is to do chill out and roll covid into the yearly flu shot. And then we need to make getting the yearly flu shot as friction free as possible by removing health insurers from the process of getting it. Yes, its really that simple.

    • I don't understand why anti vaxxers are so invested in those unproven and toxic prescription drugs. My anti vaxx uncle says it's because big pharma wants to make money and they can't do it with generic drugs. That argument makes sense to me, but only if people are paying out of pocket for the shots and prescriptions. If it's not billed, why would you care?
      • Eh, the toxicity level of all three of them is pretty low. HCQ and ivermectin can be bad in really large quantities, but they aren't in general taking them to that extent. And quercetin is really harmless. But it seems like part of this is really just tribal reactions. They've decided that anything which is establishment must be bad. Their choice of claimed drugs is essentially seeing this as a tribal signaler, rather than an actual evaluation of what works.
      • I don't know what's in that vaccine!

        Says the person who smokes a few packs a day and shovels fast food into their mouth.

    • by mark-t ( 151149 )

      The FDA and other bureaucratic aspects are just moving too slowly to really deal with this at the speed they should be.

      This, exactly, The virus isn't evolving faster than science can keep up with mutations, but what is the point of mRNA tech allowing fast retooling in the first place if idiotic bureaucratic nonsense won't let us actually take advantage of that?

      • The virus isn't evolving faster than science can keep up with mutations,

        Ok you can update the antigene generated by mRNA vaccine quickly but you still need to do some safety testing and it takes some times. No way I take a non tested updated vaccine, it is not bureaucratic nonsense, it is science.

    • by hey! ( 33014 ) on Saturday January 22, 2022 @02:54PM (#62197515) Homepage Journal

      We're no longer quite in the crisis we were 18 months ago. The current vaccines even without boosters actually still meet the original effectiveness goals of the vaccine program even against omicron, and boosted are almost as effective as they were against ancestral COVID. The problem is the number of people who just won't take them.

      It's harder to justify an EUA for a new vaccine when we have existing vaccines that have been proven safe and effective after billions of inoculations. How does the risk/benefit analysis favor something like that?

      Modern molecular biology takes a lot of the trial-and-error out of the vaccine development process. It doesn't take a decade or more to develop a novel vaccine anymore, and our regulatory system needs to adjust to that. But it may be a while before we can go from discovering a virus to mass inoculations in under a year, except in dire circumstances.

  • Noooo! (Score:2, Informative)

    by quonset ( 4839537 )

    Stop using facts. It completely disorients [imgur.com] and confuddles [imgur.com] the covidiots [imgur.com].

  • if the last dose was 14 days ago?
    How does the protection compare to 3 doses?

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Worse, but better than nothing. You should be able to get the 3rd shot within 3 months or so.

  • And let me get on with mine. The power trip is over, the danger is clearly gone.
  • It was always going to be 4 shots. We are on wave 3 of 4.

    It's also curious how America's northern border is closed up all tidy and scrutinizes vaccines/testing for passage, but the southern border is still wide open.
  • The CDC study is using data from 300k emergency and urgent care visits. Yet only one half of one percent of that is related to Omicron and positive instances in each category are in low to high double digits (14-86).

    Why I don't put much stock in hospital centered vs population centered studies is the baked in selection bias and unexplainable to mortals statistical methods used to account for that. To demonstrate this in action if you take their figures and couch them as percentage of "encounters" not hosp

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