why are vaccinations seeming to drop in effectiveness?

is it the variant or is it the vaccine?

this seems to be a hot question at the moment and the answer is important.

• if delta was just “vax evading” then perhaps one can create a booster for it.

• if the vaccine weakens over time, then you’ll need boosters forever.

in the former case, maybe you can justify the additional risk of another round of vaccine and the associated possibility of bad reactions, illness, serious adverse events, and even death.

in the latter, you have a real problem because you’re going to need 2-3 boosters a year forever and this makes the risk reward unacceptable for nearly everyone.

THIS DATA from israel makes latter case look the more likely.

it looks like vaccine efficacy drops sharply over time, with those vaccinated over 146 days ago showing 2-3X the risk. worse, this probably understates the change as the < 146 cohort has folks 3 weeks in with peak efficacy. i’d love to see the linear decline.

we need to be a bit careful with this result because it is not an RCT, and there could be some sort of time bias in it with those highest risk getting vaxxed first, but i suspect this is not a major confound because, if it were, we’d see this effect drop a lot in lower age groups and the age stratification helps eliminate the issue.

i’m never quite sure how much to trust risk adjustment measures, but they take it to 1.67 to 2.76 depending on and worsening with age.

bottom line is this: if this is true and mRNA vaccines are half to 2/3 reduced in efficacy in 5 months, there is really no future for them. they already show poor risk reward for the young and healthy. this repetition would make them a bad risk for nearly everyone.

this is not high enough quality data to make such a strong claim at this point, but it is good enough data to stir some real suspicions and demand answers to some pointed questions. if these vaccines basically work only when they have massively activated your immune system and rapidly drop off later, then they are not going to be much societal or personal use and the repeated exposure to risk to renew reward another 3-5 months will render them a vast net harm, not a help.

this area needs a lot more study and soon. we need a serious answer here before anyone starts talking about boosters.