“… Hopefully Moderna and Pfizer will have a full BLA and immediately issue an addendum for a Delta-specific shot by then. That would be far more effective than simply giving another dose of the existing vaccines…”
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Well, sometimes “you snooze, you lose”. We fight today with the weapons we HAVE TODAY. And the very best weapon we have today is the Moderna vaccine. That was shown clearly by the recent study that showed that Moderna’s protection against detectable COVID-19 infection (compared to unvaccinated/Placebo controls) dropped from last November’s 90% to July’s 76% while Pfizer’s dropped from 90% to 42% in the same time period.
One UNTESTED factor not mentioned was the likelihood that a substantially larger (but unknown) percentage of the unvaccinated “control” group would have natural immunity (as a result of exposure to the virus that causes COVID-19) in July 2021 than the November “control” group had last year.
That might explain much of the change from 90% protective to 76% protective for Moderna’s vaccine. Of course there’s no way it can explain away most of the Pfizer vaccine’s plummet from 90% to 42% protective. There’s something more going on with Pfizer’s vaccine.
Moderna is clearly the best vaccine we have in our current arsenal to deploy against the virus in all its current forms.
I agree that it appears to be the best we have in hand right this second, but the BLAs are coming for both Pfizer and Moderna very soon. And if you’re talking about booster in September/October, I wouldn’t be surprised if the “booster” is actually a Delta-specific modified shot. That’s all I’m saying.