Will you be taking a booster?

I would say and outside of hardline anti vaccine types or I always do what I'm told types it's because the data is contradictory, and there's a lot of data. Earlier in the thread we had a poster who has been vaccinated and has recovered from mild covid two months ago being told ah sure you need get a booster. That's a complete medical and scientific bloody nonsense. His covid infection was a booster. Near countless studies by top people in the field published in highly respected outlets have consistently demonstrated that the vast majority of people after infection or vaccination or both show an active immune response to this pox at the eight month stage. Indeed studies into J&J, AZ and "natural" immunity shows immune system memory B cells increased over that time.

Now you will always have outliers. Just as you will see breakthrough infections even deaths among the fully vaccinated, you will also see deaths among "active healthy" individuals, or the under 40's, but while tragic on a personal level these are outliers. After nearly two years since somebody coughed in China the overall realities are clear: Covid 19 is the single least deadly pandemic in modern history. The vast majority of Covid 19 deaths are in those over 65s. The average age of death for Covid 19 is within months of the average age of death full stop. The chances of dying or being hospitalised with Covid in the under 40's are small, in the under 20's they're so small as to be barely countable and those that do die are almost entirely those with serious pre-existing conditions*. Vaccination has massively reduced deaths in the old and vulnerable and treatments for those that do end up hospitalised has come on too.

Other realities are: we don't have a health service fit for purpose and have feck all spare capacity and this was blindlingly bloody obvious long before this pox showed up. Hospital corridors bunged up with the sick and dying on trolleys especially in the winter was an all too bad joke for decades and remains so. Helath services across the modern western world have been caught out by this, but especially here in Ireland.

We'll have to re-evaluate the phrase "avoid like the plague" because people very often don't. We will always have the anti vaccine types, just as we'll always have those who will bypass critical thinking and defer to experts. We have to account for both, but especially the former. Experts are often wildly contradictory even in the face of other expert's consistent data. QV the early advice on masks, the ridiculous notion that closing down gatherings at midnight will do a damn thing about case numbers, the active blindspot around transmission in schools. The list is long.

*as an aside, IMHO we've become too complacent in the face of modern medicine regarding many of these serious conditions. Obesity and type 2 diabetes for example. Over half of Irish men are overweight or obese. Irish women are less likely to be overweight, but about as likely to be obese. In the over 35's those percentages go up. One in five Irish kids is overweight. Maybe this pox will have us re evaluate things and put down the forks, but I doubt it.

Indeed and note again it's Pfizer in the mix. Like Ireland Israel went all out for the Pfizer vaccine. And both are now gung ho for boosters of same.

I would like to see a breakdown of vaccines and efficacy over time in the real world. I'll bet now that some do better than others and Pfizer isn't one of them.

You've essentially been "immunised" twice. Once by natural infection and then a "booster" of the vaccine on top later on. I've linked to studies earlier in the thread that demonstrates that the vast majority of people well north of 90% have a robust immune system memory at 8 months after recovering from Covid and one that actually increased over that time, even though antibody levels dropped. The same was seen with J&J.

"Dose" is hardly descriptive. If you recover from a common cold and a month later walk into a house of people suffering from same with snotters everywhere you won't get another "dose" of it. There's a difference between exposure and infection. If you recover from covid and a month later walk into a covid isolation ward, unless your immune system is compromised, it's extremely unlikely that you will catch covid again in that scenario.