How Good Are Boosters? Delta-plus in Norway

The Good News

(updated)

I got my Moderna booster jab Nov 9th. Now I feel less "old fart vulnerability," but how much less? 

I had not seen stats on how the “boosted” crowd is doing. Are we now bullet proof?  Slightly, somewhat, very? Googling the question, I found this New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) piece which is a thorough analysis of Israeli data on their experience with the Delta variant in their highly, and early, vaccinated population. Delta knocked the straw out of Israel.

August 2021


So they went full barrel with Pfizer booster shots, with their over-65s first. Then they did an excellent job of tracking booster effectiveness. The study has this exciting headline:

(Link to the study)

Bottom line of the research? Boosters do super.  Twelve days after your jab, you are eleven times less likely to get infected compared to a fully vaccinated peer, and 19.5 times less likely to get a serious case.
You develop way more "neutralizing antibodies" than even after the second shot.

I hadn't heard about the effectiveness of boosters against Delta, but there it is and it sounds very promising. Good news indeed.


But of course...There's always something.

The scary news is from the northernmost city in Norway, Tromsø, which is having a spike…


Uh Oh

...and it’s nearly all the “Delta-plus” variant. ["The virus infecting people in Tromsø is a new descendant of the Delta variant of Covid, named AY.4.2, by some called “Delta Plus.”]  To my semi-scientific mind that means Delta-plus is out-competing Delta in infectiousness, head-to-head in an island city, reachable by one bridge and one tunnel, sort of a controlled experiment setting. 

Here's the report on Tromsø 

Tromsø is over 85% fully vaxxed  That makes most of the cases “breakthrough”. Since the little city is north of the Arctic Circle, it’s also a lab of indoorness, soon to affect even Texas and Florida. If Delta-plus starts outcompeting Delta, we sure better have our boosters running at their full force.

Curse you, Delta-Plus!!    :Snoopy




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