Boosters

Vaccine boosters will probably come in for the elderly and vulnerable, kind of like the "original" vaccine plan.

But then again, as we have seen, plans change.

In my own opinion there shouldn't be any requirement for boosters for the fit and healthy as things currently stand. For vaccinated healthy and fit folks - of which many have already contracted covid both pre-vaccine and in some cases post-vaccine, there should be a strong immune response to any further infections as the body "knows" what to do to ward it off.

Something NIAC should be looking into is the Valneva vaccine which is reputed to be "variant" proof owing to how it is made. If this gets approval and lives up to it's reputation then work on getting that out as "a booster". Our stockpiles of other vaccines could then be used to help third world countries.

All a waste of time tbh

Flatten the curve and let everyone get infected eventually was always they way out of this and will continue to be so.

A paper was released 2 days ago that is astounding.

I actually had to read the numbers a few times and re-read the paragraphs to make sure I wasn’t misreading it was so shocking.

They are saying previously infected but unvaccinated people were 27 times likely to have symptomatic COVID than vaccinated non previous infected naive persons

They might as well leave the kids get Covid now unvaccinated like chicken pox and not bother vaccinating them as they gonna get infected either way

Its really bad news for countries like New Zealand, Australia etc. They tried really hard to suppress now looks like vaccination won't be enough they gonna have to keep certain restrictions in place until they have some good natural immunity.

If it's correct and looks it to me, then the narrative that vaccines offered more protection than natural infection has been absolute bullshit from the start, 27 times more likely is incredible, with 27 times more likely we should have been encouraging young healthy to get exposed to create herd immunity over the last 18 months and the curve would have been flattened big time.

Yes we will be fine here in terms of hospital numbers if we can control the spread, but we can't go mad either as not enough natural immunity exists in this country to let everyone get exposed, as the current 2% CHR ( case hospitilisation rate ) and 2000 cases a day is 40 hospital admissions a day at present and if that increases to 3,000-4,000 cases and 60-80 hospital admissions that isn't sustainable and our hospital cases will rise to 1,000 very quickly and we will be in trouble.

We should be fine though, it won't be a nice winter, hospitals will be busy, surgeries will be cancelled, but we will survive

Countries like Australia and NZ are absolutely bollox'd though, no natural immunity and they have a vaccine that's 27 times likely to have prevent symptomatic COVID than natural infection.

They will have to control transmission big time, even when everyone is vaccinated, they can't just let it rip.

2% CHR, a vaccine so so at preventing infection and no natural immunity at all is a disaster. Good luck to them

It's the only way out

You, me, your family, your friends are all gonna get infected eventually, no escape from it.

Moving the goal posts there astro

Symptomatic covid prevention was how the vaccine's were measured eg 95% and what they study looked at, severe disease is much harder to track as you need a massive pool of data that might not even be accurate ( in hospital with covid or from covid )

Our own data shows severe illness in CHR rates

CHR ( which is severe illness imo as your in hospital with Covid, but you can argue in hospital with covid or from covid ) is 9% for over 65's at present who are vaccinated, it was over 20% pre vaccines

Now something like 20% of daily cases are fully vaccinated and less than 0.5% are re-infections ( 40 times less )

That data is months old

If it was 100% effective in preventing severe illness no one would ever end up in hospital with Covid

Half of the 320 in our hospitals are fully vaccinated, so it's not 100%, not even close

9% of covid cases over the age of 65 who are fully vaccinated end up in hospital, that's a fact

Data is on the HSE site.