A fourth dose of Covid mRNA vaccine is not effective against Omicron infection, preliminary research from Israel has shown. Health Policy Watch has more.
“Despite a significant increase in antibodies after the fourth vaccine, this protection is only partially effective against the Omicron strain, which is relatively resistant to the vaccine,” lead researcher Prof Gili Regev-Yochay, told a media briefing on Monday.
Some 154 health workers at Sheba Medical Center received their fourth Pfizer shot two weeks ago. A week ago, 120 health workers received a shot of Moderna following three doses of Pfizer one week ago.
They were matched with a control group of around 6,000 health workers who have been being followed by the hospital since the start of Israel’s vaccination campaign in December 2020.
According to Regev-Yochay, the third dose resulted in “much higher antibodies, neutralisation and the antibodies were not just higher in quantity but also in quality” than the second dose – but the fourth vaccine did not show significant antibody increase.
“Maybe there are a few more antibodies but not much more compared to the third dose,” said Regev-Yochay.
Last week, she told Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett that there had been a five-fold increase in antibodies in people who took the fourth dose, but she later told a radio station that “the amount of antibodies returns to the level it was after the third vaccine, not more. It’s nice, but it’s not what we expect from a booster”.
In addition, around the same percentage of hospital workers who received the fourth dose caught the virus as those who didn’t get the fourth booster.
With the UKHSA reporting three-dose protection against Omicron at under 50% after 10 weeks, this suggests a limit to what repeated shots of the same vaccine can achieve.
The findings come as Israel experiences a large surge in reported infections and ICU admissions, despite 65% of the country being at least double-dosed, 46% being triple-dosed, and some even quadruple-dosed. It will be interesting to see how this translates into deaths (how many of them are incidental admissions?), and what this might tell us about Omicron and vaccines.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
In New Age the equivalent term to this “manifesting” is “visualisation,” and on the Christian fringe, the “word-faith” movement. I’m no fan of either.
But what is it that sports psychologists drum into elite athletes, apparently with significant results, if not the power of positive thinking? And is it not self-evidently true that what causes armies to succeed is largely belief that they will, and the loss of that belief is the beginning of a rout?
What doesn’t seem to work so well is governments screwing up things in practice, whilst “manifesting” beliefs in economic growth, cheap energy and so on. This rather suggests that confidence only aids the competent.
“confidence only aids the competent”
Brilliant.
Event 201 was part of the Corona Coup and plandemic.
Their agenda in October 2019: How to manage the media, online platforms and the messaging.
This is really what the Americans are good it. Marketing and information manipulation.
There is no ‘bat virus’. You don’t ‘spread’ a ‘virus’ by sneezing.
Your diaper is anti-health.
Your stab is poison (but highly profitable).
It was a test pilot.
Almost everybody lives in fiction, by narratives, by stories. Money works, car drivers will drive on the correct side of the road, my loved ones love me, and so on. We might call these useful fictions because the stories help us live in the world. They guide our actions. In the pleasant sense ‘manifesting’ is like Captain Pickard issuing a command ‘to make it so’. But even though the fiction of Captain Pickard’s competence is ‘useful’ he cannot command or manifest a friendly fleet to appear out of nothing.
And now the Dark Side. As Richard Dawkins says when we communicate with others we are trying to influence their brains (including our own). But if we convince ourselves that we can manifest to fly unaided we may plunge to our deaths. If we convince ourselves that we can manifest social prestige by following some social trend we may do health threatening things. These are dangerous fictions.
Governments used to be (mostly) aligned with useful fictions, trying only to manifest useful outcomes. Now they make a virtue of being able to manifest only useless or dangerous fictions because achievement is beyond them. Government bureaucracy initially helps manifest useful fictions, but bureaucracy grows until it smothers enterprise and manifests only harmful fictions. I guess the poison is in the dose.
Not sure “covid” was much to do with manifestation. It was mainly based on evil and lies. I suppose some people wanted to believe it was real, for their own weird reasons, but a lot of it was achieved by a combination of carrot (pay people to do nothing) and stick (fine people for breaking lockdown rules).
My earliest memory of using ‘manifest’ comes from a hymn whose first verse, being appropriately seasonal, is as follows:
Songs of thankfulness and praise,
Jesus, Lord, to thee we raise,
Manifested by the star
To the sages from afar,
Branch of royal David’s stem
In Thy birth at Bethlehem:
Anthems be to Thee addressed,
God in man made manifest.
This is positively the worst article The Daily Sceptic has ever had bordering on verbal diarrhoea
I beg to differ. Articles by Alexander and McGrogan make my day and this one is ‘up there’