New Covid Shots Recommended for Americans 6 Months and Older This Fall

silence7@slrpnk.net to News@lemmy.world – 122 points –
New Covid Shots Recommended for Americans 6 Months and Older This Fall
nytimes.com
24

Is there newer vaccines than those in uh 2020-21?

Yes, they've been updating the vaccine every year to match currently-circulating virus strains. This is about an additional update coming out this fall.

Pretty much the same thing is done with flu vaccines, where you need a periodic update for it to be effective.

Yup. Updates every year, just like flu vaccines. The virus mutates and immune wanes over time.

Do we have a new one yet?

No, not yet. There will probably be one in September or October.

Perfect timing for our kids to bring home the latest variants and infect us before we get the updated vaccine. Idiotic.

Idiotic? Lol

Do you have a better strategy?

Make the updated vaccine available in August maybe?

There are plenty of vaccines that kids are required to have before entering a classroom. I’d say this one is a good candidate to add to that list.

Scientists look at the historical peaks from the last years, then they work back from that targeted date by adding in the many months needed to do trials, manufacturing, etc. Good thing is that, with mRNA technology, that time window is actually much better that it used to be for the older tech we’ve used for flu viruses in the past.

It’s never going to be perfect, but as long as you had last year’s booster, as the article mentioned, you’re much less likely to get seriously ill.

Predicting when next year’s peaks will drop is like predicting next years rainfall. You can get close, but it’s never going to be perfect. (Not the greatest analogy, since rain doesn’t mutate, and umbrellas don’t require months of human trials. Ohh well)

These are smart people working on this stuff. If they could have had an updated vaccine ready to go for any unexpected peak, they would.

Make the updated vaccine available in August maybe?

This is kind of like saying the police should shoot the criminal before it commits a crime, and before they know who the criminal is.

It's not idiotic to do the best alternative when the ideal thing to do is impossible.

Make the updated vaccine available in August maybe?

This is kind of like saying the police should shoot the criminal before it commits a crime, and before they know who the criminal is.

It's not idiotic to do the best alternative when the ideal thing to do is impossible.

It sucks that we're unlikely to get a vaccine targeting a difficult to change part of the virus by the established mRNA makers. We would probably need a new entity to do it.

The vaccines initially did just that, it just turns out it was able to adapt anyway or they were wrong.

I don't know whether they even had any data on change difficulty. I think it was more like - we needed a vaccine yesterday and Moderna and BioNTech had the mRNA technology just ready to be able to spin up a vaccine quickly. And that was good enough to save a lot of people from severe disease.

They definitely had something, I remember reading about it at the time. it might have involved what they knew about previous coronavirus's as well. Whatever they had though it ended up being wrong.