Biden admin bracing for up to 70K COVID deaths this winter as booster uptake flops | Ars Technica
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If theyâre equally effective to what already existed then itâs clearly not a disaster, but itâs also not great. The administration and the CDC/FDA expended a non-trivial amount of political capital in rushing to get the Emergency Use Authorization for this update and purchase millions of doses, with the very public promise that a bivalent vaccine would be more effective despite a lack of human data and plenty of prominent, well-respected folks like Dr Paul Offit and Dr Monica Gandhi making statements that it was too soon to say that. Fair or not, if they make any claims regarding vaccines that later turn out not to be true theyâre harming their credibility, and not just in the eyes of MAGA anti-VVC nut-jobs.
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They are doing the best they can with what they have, as are we all. Had they putzed around and it turned out this was more effective, they would have been roasted for that too. They made predictions ahead of data that proved too optimistic. But you canât know until that data comes in, and it doesnât come in until you have a few million data points. No, i am not blasting the administration for this vaccine mot being the holy grail.
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All true, but they still could have handled this differently. A lot of people were eager to try an updated booster so they could have done very large scale trials and had no problem signing up many volunteers, thereby generating data very quickly and also allowing the most eager of the public an opportunity to get it. But instead they made confident public statements that the new one was better and told providers that they were no longer authorized to use the old boosters, which were at least a known quantity:
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There are lots of things to criticize about how our govât has approached the covid pandemic. This is just a nothingburger, and not worth the air to gritch about, IMHO.
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Got my latest booster this morning - the Moderna âupdated booster 12+â, according to the Walgreens receipt I got. (It also pointed out that I had no refills remaining 
.)
Iâm running out of room on my COVID vaccination cardâŚ
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We donât know that their predictions are false. We have some early data that hints that the bivalent booster isnât better than the OG vaccine. But we also know titers arenât everything when it comes to vaccine performance. What matters is actual perfomance in patients in preventing infection and blunting suymptoms. We do not have that data yet.
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Agreed, but the whole theory why the new vaccine would perform better was that it was supposed to make more BA.5-specific titers than the old one. It got approved based on the titer levels generated in the lab mice, not based on clinical outcomes. So it would be interesting if it somehow performed better clinically even though it didnât generate superior titers as it was designed to do.
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I just get tired of people cheerleading against the efforts to fight the pandemic.
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Iâm happy that thereâs an option that might improve my protection but will extend my current level as my existing protection wanes before the expected uptick in infections.
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Hereâs the first thing Iâve seen: according to Apoorva Mandavilli, who covers infectious diseases for The New York Times:
We always look at how the flu season has gone in the southern hemisphere before we try to predict what will happen here. And this year, Australia and New Zealand were just walloped. So thatâs not a good sign. Already we are seeing something like a 3 percent positivity rate for flu tests in the U.S., which is higher than usual for this time of year.
However, the vaccine is actually a decent match for the flu variants that are circulating. It should offer a significant amount of protection. So doctors are really urging people to go get the flu shot. Itâs the same as with the Covid vaccines. Even if it doesnât prevent infection, you wonât get as sick â your symptoms will be milder and they wonât last as long.
(From yesterdayâs NYT âVirus Briefingâ newsletter)
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every place i tried to get either the new covid vaccine or the flu vaccine was scheduling me out to november, so i just kind of gave up and figured iâd try again later.
sick in bed now with⌠something unpleasant. perhaps i should have tried a little harder.
of course, maybe itâs rsv
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Also, MAGAts are idiots.
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Anecdotal: kid got vaccine 15 days before positive flu test. Parents got vaccine 14 days before her positive test. We never got sick.
This jives with what the kidâs pediatrician said- the flu is hitting the kids, especially under 11, very hard. But healthy adults seem to be doing alright. The kid wasnât tested for RSV (maybe because she is six?). But we suspect the flu hit so hard because she might have had a concurrent RSV infection. Both are rampant in central Texas right now.
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Maine.
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