The Franklin Reporter & Advocate Eight Villages, One Community
By Mayor Phil Kramer.
I’m writing today because of what I learned at a Somerset County Health Recovery Task Force meeting and now I have a whole new take on booster shots. I was thinking of them as a plus. In other words, I’m vaccinated so I’m good. If I get the booster I’ll be “more good”.
Now I see it as when I got the original vaccine, I was good but as time went on, I was less and less good. The booster, which I received October 30, 2021, will return me to good. I don’t see boosters as a plus anymore, I see them as an imperative.
The evidence is clear. From https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm0620 we see
The x-axis is months since the original vaccination and the y-axis can be thought of as effectiveness. Janssen is the J&J vaccine. As you can see initially, they are all about 90 percent effective. Over time they are less so. Six months later Moderna was about 64 percent, Pfizer was about 50 percent and J&J was 3 percent effective.
You might think another interpretation is vaccines are less effective as the virus mutates. This is refuted by https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02183-8/fulltext
This is not a surprise for Corona Viruses. Natural immunity to the ones we knew in the past was always short-lived. Hopefully after repeated vaccination the effect will begin to last longer.
I now think of the term “fully vaccinated” as a moving target. For me, in February I was fully vaccinated. I got my booster a week ago, so in a week, for the first time in a few months, I’ll be fully vaccinated again.
Please get “vaxxed” and please get boosted.
Other supporting documents
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114114
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114583
Note the papers are from Science, Lancet and NEJM. All highly prestigious publications.
