LogFAQs > #960973246

I'm a couple of days out from getting my Moderna booster. Definitely was the lowest impact of the three. I didn't feel even slightly ill the whole way and my arm had some soreness and tightness that's already almost gone. Good stuff.

On another note, I've been doing some further reading regarding the implications of Omicron and as far as I call tell the key universal aspect to it is just how amazingly infectious it is - to the point that avoiding exposure to it, especially with the landscape of capitalistic ambivalence to the threat, is going to be exceedingly difficult. For example the R value for Omicron in the UK presently is estimated at between 3 and 5. Delta was somewhere between 1.1 and 1.2.

I also firmly believe at this point that the message going around about the Omicron variant being more mild is... true in a relative sense, but false in an absolute sense. By that I mean that the indications are coming out of South Africa that compared with earlier variants, it seems to cause disease as severe as in the past in individuals who have not acquired either natural or induced (vaccine) immunity. The key difference is that the baseline population (or control) has been changing steadily over the course of the pandemic. It's getting uncommon to actually find people with no protection at all. T cells (especially CD8+ T cells) do a huge amount of heavy lifting in protecting against severe infection.

This is related to the seeming drop in 'efficacy' of the vaccines versus hospitalization. We've seen the Pfizer vaccine decline from 98% against D614G/Wuhan (the original) to 91% against Delta to 70 against Omicron. It may seem like that indicates outcomes worsening against the virus but if you have a population with greater immunity already as the control, the relative benefit from vaccination declines. But it doesn't mean the vaccination itself becomes useless because boosters are also out there jumping the efficacy back into the 90s and greatly cutting the risk of transmission by raising antibody titres.