Booster Effect News Today

Parkland School Shooting. Oh, and shes also said that democrats should be executed. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she is very concerned about the ongoing threats to members of congress and she says now the enemy is coming from within the house of representatives. There are new developments this morning in the effectiveness of vaccines against new coronavirus strains. Earlier results from Drugmaker Novavax show it is 89 effective against the regular strain, but only 60 effective against the var...

>> reporter: now, booster rates are higher among the older, more vulnerable part of the population. that could explain one encouraging trend that hospitals are reporting. so far they say they have not seen a large numbers of older seriously ill patients needing critical care. its a key difference from previous waves, they say, and it is thought that that is the vaccine and booster effect, isa. >> thats very good news indeed. phil, stay with us. i want to go to jim in paris. jim, the situation is...

There is quite a lot of regional variation still. the real risk issue is that we can see that there are so many unusual mutations on this virus that it runs the risk of invading a natural and or vaccine immunity. and we have early studies looking at immune serum from patients whove been ill and been vaccinated to see that two doses of vaccine against symptomatic infection, so we dont know yet about severe disease, but about symptomatic infection, is much reduced. we do know that the booster dose...

Mentioned. cold weather. people going indoors. vaccination potency waning. if we counter all of those, we can stop this. >> now that you are encouraging all adults to get boosters, whats your definition of fully vaccinated? >> you know, right now, officially, john, the definition of fully vaccinated is still two doses of the moderna or pfizer and one dose of j&j. thats the requirement when people talk about what is required for this or for that? but that does not actually contradict the fact tha...

Thats the requirement when people talk about what is required for this or for that? but that does not actually contradict the fact that we are saying, as vaccine efficacy wanes, you need to get that booster to bring you right up. we will evaluate, as we get more data. we -- we dont know now how long the booster effect is going to last. if it lasts for a considerably longer period of time, namely the durability of the booster, allows you to go for a considerable period of time without getting ano...

It could be that all the way to people have severe breakthrough infections. they are going to need to break down that data that how long does the booster effect last? we dont know. is this goingsomething we are g to do every six months? or is it booster and then we are sort of set for a while? we will have to see what they say about that. and finally, how much do boosters really reduce transmission? i find this so interesting, don. we often look to israel, right, because they are -- they are a l...

Degradation of the efficacy of the vaccine, more so than younger people. how long does the booster effect last? thats a big one. are we basically just fortifying the wall really strong for a period of time and then its going to wane regardless? thats going to be something i think the committees going to sort of look at. and then finally, how much do they really reduce transmission? you know, were talking about breakthrough cases. is that really the right metric to be measuring in terms of decidi...

They are surprised that their test comes back positive, to somebody who has significant symptoms. so who are the majority of people with these breakthrough infections? how old are they, what are their pre-existing conditions? that might given a idea of the best population of people to boost if not the general population. how long does the booster effect last? another big question. does it just give you a lot of protection really for a short period of time but then the antibodies wane? that is an...

Two senior vaccine scientists at fda basically said they were going to leave. we subsequently found out it was over this issue of boosters. so i think whats going to happen is there will be four wig questions that are going to have to be addressed there. we sort of lay them out here. how much is immunity really waning? pfizer says the immunity wanes about 6% every two months but stays steady for severe illness. how severe are the breakthrough infections? i think this is a big one. you could have...

Good idea of how theyre going to go ahead of time. im not so sure on this one. there is strong feelings on both sides either to boost or not to boost. let me lay out the four big questions i think they will be dealing with. keep in mind, jim, this is an advisory committee meeting, so they want to look at basically is immunity waning? are people who are vaccinated longer ago, do they have less immunity than those vaccinated more recently. people may test positive, but how symptomatic are they? ho...