Dresden wrote:What I understand from that article is that 2 shots of the vaccines produced few antibodies, but 2 shots PLUS a booster DID produce significant amounts of antibodies against Omicron.
My question for health professionals: why would the booster make such a big difference when the vaccine itself does not? Could it be the time lag- maybe if the vaccines were administered more recently they would have shown protection, so it's really the time factor that is the key element? Or is there something about getting that 3 injection that suddenly makes the difference?
Not in the field (though I did do pharma defense for a couple of years) - but my understanding is that's (1) both can be at play, but (2) it's likely to be much more the former than the latter.
When you get sick - naturally - you show antibodies for a while, but they fade over time. If the same virus comes to infect you again very quickly, your existing antibodies quickly come into play, and production also gets ramped up quickly.
But after a while, that effect goes away - but not the bulk of your immunity, which is from other cells that have, for lack of a better term, "remembered" how to combat the virus (to include how to build the appropriate antibodies - but ramping up production doesn't happen as quickly).
Repeated exposure (to include repeated vaccination) - particularly at the correct intervals - is in some/many ways similar to a person being taught something several times - the reinforcement makes it "more likely to stick." Not in the same way that a human learns (although, frankly, we know less about that and how knowledge is stored in the human brain / nervous system than we pretend to), but at least in something that is reasonably analogous.
Anyway, the reason I say the former much more than the later is that the quick high antibody level response to a relatively minor infection is, extrapolating from the basics (the above, which is consistent with what we know happens with, say, the MMR series that kids get early on - reduced antibodies versus other mechanisms of immunity years down the line), more likely to be due to recent vaccination as opposed to repeat. But that doesn't mean that repeat doesn't factor in at all. And measuring immunity just via antibody response is very much just a partial story.
Edit: the one major caveat that I'd add is it's not like these vaccines were administrated years ago. We're talking months - so the fact that so little antibody response is detected after a two dose series is somewhat concerning re the general effectiveness of the vaccines as to Omicron. And even the antibody response from the booster, while very much increased versus the two dose (or one dose), was, if I recall what I was reading correctly, not nearly as high as compared to the prior variants. BUT... if Omicron is also milder.... may not be a big deal. And what may be a big deal is the multi-spike vaccine being developed by the US Army (see today's NY Post article).
