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Originally Posted by Monahammer
Obligatory not a Doctor and what I'm typing is very simplified.
The idea of more boosters required for an MRNA style vaccine makes sense to me, intuitively. We know the MRNA vaccines are conferring information about specific parts of the virus (in this case, the spike protein it uses to enter cells) to immune cells. This gives it additional effectiveness in combatting that exact part of the virus. But if the virus is one that mutates quickly, and it mutates in the part of the virus that the MRNA vaccine targeted, maybe your immune system would benefit from some additional instructions. This could also help to explain why AZ+an MRNA vaccine seems to be the most effective combo thus far, your immune system is getting trained in two ways.
As we know that delta variant does have a mutated spike protein it kind of makes sense why the vaccine would become slightly less effective at helping our immune system stop it.
All the data shows that in spite of this the MRNA vaccines absolutely seem to continue to protect people from severe impacts of COVID, even when "breakthrough" infections happen.
Now there may be something to say here in the strategy of what vaccines should be sought after for specific attributes in viruses (i.e. maybe MRNA vaccines are going to be amazing for hard to target viruses with less quick mutations like HIV, but are not as well suited for quickly adapting viruses in a pandemic situation.) But I am not qualified to make actual analysis of that at all.
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Have they said anything about a booster targeting mutations? All I've heard gives the impression it's just a third dose of the original.