Rephrase the purpose of the booster from disease prevention to blocking all kinds the infection moves the endpoints of the vaccination campaign. Some experts believe this is justified, given all the problems the vaccination has faced: slow deployment, stubborn resistance to the shots, controversy over masks and mandates, and hospitals crowded with seriously ill unvaccinated people. “If you reduce transmission even a little now that community transmission is so high, you could affect the course of the pandemic,” Badelia said. But if the community’s levels of immunity improve, it continues, protecting people from infection as well as serious illness, “may not always be our ultimate goal.”
One of the reasons boosters feel controversial is that they have been charged as boosters– unforeseen additions to the schemes tested in clinical trials in 2020. However, those pressure trials that may need a vaccine as soon as possible may never examine how many doses would provide optimal protection. What real-world data on weakened immunity can show us is that Covid vaccines must always have been a longer series.
Among children’s vaccines, this would be equal to the course. Many of the first vaccines we receive — against hepatitis B, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis, Haemophilus influenzae B, pneumococcus, and polio — arrive in three and sometimes four doses. They are at intervals of months or more to allow the immune system to build maximum defenses before the next dose stimulates it again.
The government’s communication on the pandemic was so confused – masks are meaningless, masks are essential; surfaces are dangerous, no, wait, airborne particles are the real danger; boosters are for everyone, well, maybe not – that changing more messages feels like a risk. But some experts believe that reformulating mRNA vaccines as a series of three doses would make more sense. This would normalize the current supplement, making it an expected part of the vaccination process. This may prevent those who are hesitant about the vaccine to feel it another shot is forced to them. And that could allow a reassessment of the amount of time these three shots were given, a change that could increase the protection they offer without adding more photos to the mix.
“I feel very strongly that we need to rethink the timing of injections,” said Monica Gandhi, a physician and professor of infectious diseases at the University of California, San Francisco. She points out that both Canada and the United Kingdom have chosen to delay the second dose in order to achieve partial protection of the first dose in as many residents as possible. This gambling paid off: Researchers in British Columbia and Birmingham found that delaying a second dose for 12 weeks, compared with the three weeks reported in clinical trials, produced much higher levels of antibodies thereafter.
This may seem controversial: Because the pace of the first dose is slowing so dramatically in the United States, it may seem too late to rethink the way we place or deliver the footage. But in fact, a whole new vaccination campaign is about to begin. Approval for vaccination of children under 12 may arrive by mid-November, and in many surveys at least 40% of parents have said their children will receive the photos.
“This is exactly the time to start discussing distances on how to achieve the best efficiency,” Gandhi said. “It’s not too late to change, in the sense that we still have this whole group of people we need to vaccinate.”
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