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Originally Posted by opendoor
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.
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Sorry I should have clarified against infection as I was talking exclusively about infection in my post. For severe illness it remains to be seen if effectiveness wanes after time but so far it does provide a noticeable benefit against severe illness which is definitely a plus. Older people should most definitely take a 4th shot.
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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.
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https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-re...l-studies-mrna
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“Collectively, these preclinical results, combined with our clinical data collected to date, continue to support the promise and validity of our mRNA-based vaccine program against SARS-CoV-2 and selection of the BNT162b2 candidate, which we believe has the potential to prevent many millions of COVID-19 cases,” said Kathrin U. Jansen, Ph.D., Senior Vice President and Head of Vaccine Research & Development, Pfizer. “We are encouraged by the data thus far and confident in our progress towards developing a safe and effective vaccine candidate to help address this current pandemic.”
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Vaccine studies on animals has always been a staple of vaccine testing and was a significant factor for testing that gave us our current covid vaccines.
Needless to say, the results specific to animal testing with Omicron were disappointing comparatively. We have yet to see the results of the human clinical trials. The results may be positive news, or may confirm what was seen in animal testing.
https://www.reuters.com/business/hea...ns-2022-03-30/
Main point being, that covid will remain with us and there is no silver bullet for its current iterations which means we will continue to get infections as new variants continue to arise. That we still heavily negated hospitalizations and deaths with vaccines and continue to do so is a significant win.