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This new C19 booster vax the FDA just approved seems like a money making scheme for pharma with possibly very little increased efficacy from the original recipe....especially considering the side effects for those at low risk. Likely worth it if you are high risk or get a paid day off to recover. https://khn.org/news/article/new-omicron-targeted-vaccines-authorization/ The updated booster vaccine formulations are identical to the original covid vaccines except for a tweak in the mRNA code to match the omicron BA.5 virus. Studies by Pfizer showed that its updated omicron BA.1 booster provides a 1.56 times higher increase in neutralizing antibody titers against...

BA.5 just wiped me out for 12 days. Why did doctors let me get sick instead of giving me Paxlovid?I knew right away that it was going to be bad. It was a hot, humid night — almost 90 degrees — but my body was freezing. Putting on a sweatshirt and diving under a blanket couldn’t warm me up. My head, on the other hand, was on fire. I had a temperature over 100 degrees and needed ice packs piled on my forehead to cool down. The coughing wouldn’t stop. I didn’t need a test to tell me that I...

COVID-19 vaccines get their first update since the pandemic began. Here's what you need to know about them 30 AUG 20223:20 PMBYGRETCHEN VOGEL A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 377, Issue 6610. Download PDF Update, 31 August, 1:30 p.m.: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced today it has granted an emergency use authorization for Moderna’s and Pfizer-BioNTech’s updated booster vaccines, which target the BA.4/BA.5 coronavirus subvariants. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Vaccine Practices is scheduled to discuss recommendations for who should receive the vaccines and when at their meeting on...

The U.S. authorized the first major makeover of the Covid-19 vaccines this week in an effort to stem an expected tide of infections and hospitalizations this fall. But it’s unclear how much protection the new booster shots will provide. The Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cleared the shots without any data from clinical trials that are testing the reformulated doses in humans. The new boosters, authorized for people ages 12 and older, target the highly contagious and immune-evasive omicron BA.5 subvariant that has caused a wave of breakthrough infections over the summer. The...

After the failure of the mRNA vaccines to prevent infection and transmission of COVID-19, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday it has granted emergency use authorization for boosters that target the predominant omicron variant.The FDA said it is authorizing a "single booster dose at least two months following primary or booster vaccination."The "updated boosters," the agency said in a statement, contain "two messenger RNA (mRNA) components of SARS-CoV-2 virus, one of the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 and the other one in common between the BA.4 and BA.5 lineages of the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2."The reference is to two,...

COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness for all age groups has been much worse against the Omicron virus variants than earlier strains, particularly the currently dominant subvariants, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data presented on Sept. 1. The data, much of which has never been published before, shows that the protection against both symptomatic infection and severe disease is not as strong against the Omicron, which emerged in December 2021, and its subvariants. Data from the CDC’s Increasing Community Access to Testing, a no-cost testing program, showed that vaccine effectiveness for a booster compared to a primary series...

Long COVID may be one of many reasons why in a recession, labor paradoxically still remains scarce. When the original strain of COVID-19 arrived in spring 2020, a pandemic soon swept the country. By far most survived COVID. But hundreds of thousands did not. American deaths now number well over 1 million. Amid the tragedy, there initially was some hope that the pernicious effects of the disease would all disappear upon recovery among the nearly 99 percent who survived the initial infection. Vaccinations by late 2020 were promised to end the pandemic for good. But they did not. New mutant...

The FDA and vaccine makers say they are confident that shots targeting Omicron subvariants will work safelyThe Food and Drug Administration is expected to authorize new Covid-19 booster shots this week without a staple of its normal decision-making process: data from a study showing whether the shots were safe and worked in humans.The shots, modified to target the latest versions of the Omicron variant, won’t have finished testing in humans when the FDA makes its decisions.Instead, the agency plans to assess the shots using data from other sources such as research in mice, the profiles of the original vaccines and...

New COVID-19 booster shots are set to be authorized this week by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and will be available to most Americans before human testing has even been completed. The shots have been modified to target the latest Omicron variant, but won't have finished testing in humans when the FDA makes the decision. Instead, the FDA is relying on data from other sources - like research in mice and older vaccines, the Wall Street Journal reported. 'Real world evidence from the current mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, which have been administered to millions of individuals, show us that the...

Google employees are receiving regular notifications from management of Covid-19 infections, causing some to question the company’s return-to-office mandates. The employees, who spoke with CNBC on the condition of anonymity, said since they have been asked to return to offices, infections notifications pop up in their email inboxes regularly. Employees are reacting with frustration and memes. The company began requiring most employees to return to physical offices at least three days a week in April. Since then, staffers have pushed back on the mandate after they worked efficiently for so long at home while the company enjoyed some of its...

It’s getting harder to keep the populace in a state of panic (and therefore attempt to justify mass mail in voting and other election security diminishments) now that Covid is following the path of most other viral epidemics. The virus evolves into a less lethal form (that doesn’t kill off the hosts, in other words) that spreads even more easily.

Most people infected by the omicron variant of COVID-19 were not aware they had it, according to a new study. “More than one in every two people who were infected with omicron didn’t know they had it,” the study’s first author and an investigator at Cedars-Sinai Sandy Y. Joung said in a media release. “Awareness will be key for allowing us to move beyond this pandemic.” Investigators conducting a study examining COVID-19 and the effect of vaccines identified nearly 2,500 blood samples from patients just before and after the start of omicron’s surge – identifying 210 people who likely had...

Here's the net - 'vaccines" kinda work, but there is no need to continue with successive boosters, and there is good science to support this.' because of how the COVID "vaccines" work, the more you are 'vaccinated' and boosted the more likely you are to be infected, reinfected, and transmit COVID-XX. The article doesn't recommend against the initial vaccine, except for young people, but does present the logical conclusion : "There is no need to continue with successive boosters." This is actual peer-reviewed science, published in the peer-reviewed SCIENCE journal and medrxiv. The two studies supporting this conclusion are: (1)...

Experts say the transmission rates of the BA.2.75 variant are showing an exponential increase, particularly in India, where it is competing with BA.5. As the U.S. battles the rapidly spreading BA.5 omicron subvariant, a new mutant that could compete with the highly contagious strain is on the horizon. Scientists say the variant – called BA.2.75 – may be able to evade immunity from vaccines and prior infection. The latest mutant has been spotted in several distant states in India and appears to be spreading faster than other variants there. It’s unclear whether it could cause more serious disease than other...

The Omicron BA.5 subvariant has become the dominant coronavirus strain in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While this variant is fast-spreading, it appears to be less severe than early versions of the virus, and its symptoms are similar to those of other Omicron subvariants, experts say. Symptoms of Omicron infections are typically coldlike, including a sore throat, sneezing, and a runny nose. Symptoms like fever, chills, and cough are still seen sometimes in Omicron cases but not as frequently as in earlier variants of the virus. Like past variants in the Omicron lineage, BA.5...

Is America prepared for a new COVID-19 variant and the wave of infections it’s causing? Will vaccines hold up against it? More to the point, it’s already upon us … and doesn’t appear to be creating any new issues.That’s not to say that everyone’s sanguine about it. The teachers-union leader that fought to keep schools closed for the better part of two years declared that “Covid isn’t over” (via Twitchy):The arrival of subvariant BA.5 should be a reminder that Covid isn’t over. https://t.co/2AZQjqLpDG— Randi Weingarten ☮️🇺🇦 (@rweingarten) July 8, 2022The Washington Post editorial board declared that the arrival of the...

Short answer: Probably not.Longer answer: Probably not, and even if it has, it might not be dangerous enough to do real damage given how much immunity the population now has.I wrote about the new Omicron subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5, a few weeks ago. Early indications are that they’re more contagious than the current dominant subvariant in the U.S., BA.2.12.1, which is more contagious than the original Omicron, which was itself insanely contagious. Worse, because natural immunity from Omicron appears to last only a few months, a prior infection is no real defense to BA.4 and BA.5. In fact, the two...

Covid sufferers who caught the Omicron variant will not be protected from catching it again, according to scientists at Imperial College London. The investigators say Omicron and its evolutions could explain why Covid cases remain higher than predicted in the UK. Earlier studies found that past illnesses with Covid provided some immunity against re-infection - but the latest research indicates that is not the case with the Omicron variant, The Telegraph reports. Prof Danny Altmann from the Imperial College's Department of Immunology and Inflammation, said: 'The message is a little bleak. Omicron and its variants are great at breakthroughs but...

Immunity against the omicron coronavirus variant fades rapidly after a second and third dose of Pfizer and BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine, according to peer reviewed research published in JAMA Network Open on Friday, a finding that could support rolling out additional booster shots to vulnerable people as the variant drives an uptick in new cases across the country. KEY FACTS * Levels of omicron-specific “neutralizing” antibodies—which can target the virus and stop it from replicating—decline rapidly after a second and third dose of Pfizer’s shot, according to the Danish study of 128 people who had received two or three doses. *...

China faces an omicron “tsunami” that could overwhelm hospitals and kill more than 1 million people if it abandons its “zero-Covid” strategy, according to a new study published in Nature Medicine on Tuesday, as officials double down on the controversial policy despite worsening social and economic damages of such strict lockdowns.