January 24th, 2022
New data published on Friday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that booster shots with mRNA vaccines made by both Pfizer and Moderna are effective in preventing infections with the highly contagious Omicron variant. Apoorva Mandavilli says boosters are even better at keeping infected individuals out of the hospital:
The extra doses are 90 percent effective against hospitalization with the variant, the agency reported. Booster shots also reduced the likelihood of a visit to an emergency department or urgent care clinic. The extra doses were most effective against infection and death among Americans aged 50 and older, the data showed.
Over all, the new data show that the vaccines were more protective against the Delta variant than against Omicron, which lab studies have found is partially able to sidestep the body’s immune response.
The evidence shows just how much protection against Omicron is boosted by the third dose:
Vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization with the Omicron variant fell to just 57 percent in people who had received their second dose more than six months earlier, the authors found. A third shot restored that protection to 90 percent.
What is unknown is just how long protection lasts after that booster dose. Will COVID boosters become an annual ritual the way flu shots have become? It makes sense when one considers that we are still living with the remnants of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Quentin Fottrell believes that like the flu, COVID is here to stay:
COVID-19 will always be with us, Dr. Gregory Poland, who studies the immunogenetics of vaccine response at the Mayo Clinic, told MarketWatch[…]
“So let me make a prediction, which will be hard for any of you to hold me to because we will all be dead by then, but your great-great-great-grandchildren will still be getting immunized against coronavirus,” he added. “How can I even say such a thing? If you got your flu vaccine this fall you were immunized against a strain of influenza that showed up in 1918 and caused a pandemic.”
How close can we get to eradicating SARS-CoV-2? Sophie Mellor discovered there are five stages to a pandemic. Infectious disease experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci believe we are still in phase 1:
The first phase of the pandemic—or the “the truly pandemic,” according to Fauci—is “where the whole world is really very negatively impacted as we are right now,” he said Monday at the World Economic Forum’s Davos Agenda online conference.
The following four steps are deceleration, control, elimination, and finally eradication.
There is good evidence that the number of new cases of Omicron is now decelerating in much of the U.S. after December’s meteoric rise. If the trend increases and we aren’t smacked with another new and highly contagious variant, chances are we will find ourselves in the control phase:
The next phase, following deceleration, is the control phase of the pandemic—or what some are referring to as endemicity. That means that COVID-19 would become integrated into the broad range of infectious diseases we commonly experience, like the flu or the common cold.
“Control means you have it present, but it is present at a level that does not disrupt society,” Fauci says.
The control phase may be the best we can hope for, allowing us to finally get on with our lives without fearing the infection. Eliminating COVID from various regions around the globe, in the same way polio has been effectively eliminated in most countries, is possible, although widespread availability of vaccines and the development of new treatments may make that goal unnecessary in the long term.
Can we vaccinate ourselves out of this pandemic and into a more manageable, endemic situation? Yes, absolutely, but the longer it takes us, the higher the risks are to our health, our economy, our children’s education, and everyone’s mental well-being. For now, it looks like everything is pointing to a future where COVID is something we’ll all have to learn to live with:
The last stage, eradication, is nearly impossible to reach. Fauci notes smallpox was the only infectious human disease that has ever been eradicated, and he said outright that regarding COVID, “That’s not going to happen with this virus.”
