Booster Shots: Who Needs Them?
Navigating the coronavirus pandemic has never been easy for people, corporate people, governments or, uh, deer. But the cocktail of vaccines and variants makes it more befuddling than ever.
For the unvaccinated, the answer is obvious: Get vaccinated. But what about kids who are too young to get vaccinated? And with the delta variant, the vaccinated have to start asking themselves 2020 questions all over again. Should you hang out with friends? Eat in a restaurant? Wear a mask? Fly 650 miles to meet a TikTok date? It depends! It doesn’t take long for your decision tree to just turn into one big, only less smiley.
A big problem is how full of mysteries and riddles Covid information often is. For example, is Israel a massive vaccination success story? Yes. Is Israel suffering a massive new wave of Covid cases? Also yes. What is this necromancy? Apparently the delta variant is making it harder for vaccinated people to fight off infections. This may not be as alarming as it sounds. The vaccines still keep most people from getting very sick. But it’s scary enough that Israel has started offering booster shots, and President Joe Biden’s administration is now pushing them in the US.
But are boosters necessary? Faye Flam argues there’s not much science to back up the idea. As far as we can tell, the vaccines are still doing exactly what they should be doing. And getting a third shot of a drug that was designed to fight off Original Formula Covid may not be any more effective at fighting delta than what your vaccine-juiced immune system could cook up on its own. A more effective use of our spare shots might be getting them in the arms of people who have had zero shots so far. Or not!
Bloomberg
