You do realize that over time the protection provided by the vaccine wanes.
You become more susceptible to serious illnesses. As such it makes perfect sense to go through the slight inconvenience of getting booster shots as recommended by the evolving science.
We hear that the booster is 30-40% effective against Omicron infection, and so it helps reduce your risks of transmission, and therefore it helps protect the people you love and community you live in. So, right off the bat you’d be doing something good.
If Kyle got his second mRNA shot more than 8-months ago, he has almost no protection against transmission of Omicron.
He also has declining protection against severe outcomes of the virus, which he probably wasn’t at risk of to begin with. The booster does bring that protection back up, maxing out around 70% for Omicron based on what we know.
More importantly for him, there’s a pretty good chance we’ll all get COVID if this lasts a couple months and we don’t isolate (I’m not isolating).
In that case the booster might be the difference between a Joe Rogan COVID experience, and an experience with anything from (seemingly) permanent loss of smell and taste to lung damage, without being severe enough for in-patient treatment. That could mean sick days, lost productivity etc.
Even if all that was still not worth his 15 minutes, we also know that the science table uses vaccine uptake as a metric for the recommendations they give to Ford. So, getting a booster is also a good way to contribute the data Ford will inevitably dangle as bait for not adding more restrictive measures, or lifting restrictions altogether. But maybe Kyle likes lockdowns…
It would also make sense for Ford to put expiries on vaccine passports. And once again, a booster will probably mean he’d get to keep playing with the normal people, which is definitely worth 15 minutes of my time.
I imagine if he has a job with any kind of vaccine mandate, that he may find he’ll need to get one for that.
And for travel…
For a number of reasons, as time goes on vaccines become less effective. So how do researchers calculate how well vaccines are working?
theconversation.com