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Originally Posted by Firebot
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No benefit? That's an odd takeaway given that the study found that 60+ year olds with 4 doses had rates of severe disease approximately 75-80% lower than 60+ year olds with 3 doses. That's a massive improvement. I'm baffled how you could come that conclusion.
Good thing we're not macaques or mice. Animal studies can be useful, but using them to suggest that there's no benefit to updated vaccines is ridiculous when we haven't seen the results of any human trials. Particularly when basing that solely on antibody titres and ignoring the length of protection. There are tons of possibilities still:
-humans will respond differently than animals (human tests showed prior variant-specific vaccines being effective)
-antibody titres might be similar between the old vaccine and the new one, but duration of protection and cellular immunity will be better and broader with the Omicron booster (which will help against Omicron offshoots)
-given how different Omicron is from the ancestral strain, it might take multiple exposures (either 2 doses or an infection and a dose) to get adequate protection.