At current pace you have 1-2 months before the peak, and the booster takes a week to work. There's basically no chance as a non-prioritized person you'll be able to get an Omicron booster in that time frame.
This seems right, but also interested in whether boosters might be net-harmful v.s. nothing.
Does original antigenic sin also mean that e.g. your body would have a harder time fighting off omicron if infected, because rather than developing new antibodies it would just keep trying to deploy the old ones?
If we have data that boosters reduce severity for omicron, that would seem to answer this. But do we?
Thanks, I've seen a number of experts suggest that people get booster shots ASAP, but without any explicit reasoning attached. To push back a bit on this, it looks like Omicron will soon become the dominant variant almost everywhere, so subsequent variants will probably branch off it. So it might be worth taking additional precautions during the Omicron peak, and then get an Omicron-specific booster when it comes out to be better protected against future Omicron-branch variants. As mentioned in another comment, I'm waiting for some additional data to come out before making this decision.
I wonder if it may make sense for some to even forgo Omicron and wild-type strain boosting altogether. If Omicron looks as though it's becoming dominant and it continues to look as though illness is mild (and you are sufficiently low risk) maybe it's best to wait and reserve boosting with an "upgrade" for a strain which is perhaps more virulent down the road. Seeing as this virus is highly mutable, premature and perhaps excessive serial boosting may be unwise per the cited article.
Unfortunately radvac won't be valid when it comes to vaxpass type policies.
https://radvac.org/press-release/
Summary: We predict the extensive variation of Omicron will reduce the effectiveness of Spike-based vaccines, and substantially reduce the effectiveness of RBD-based vaccines and antibody therapeutics (other than GSK sotrovimab), yet have little impact on RaDVaC vaccines.
Unfortunately radvac won't be valid when it comes to vaxpass type policies.
It's possible to take RaDVaC for the actual protection and then take the offiically recommended vaccine to get your vaxpass.
I’m not an immunologist so can’t talk of the efficacy of various vaccine strategies which seem unclear at the moment, but I ask myself - what is the opportunity cost of not getting a booster now? If we assume that omicron boosters will be available in (at best) 3-4 months, and then given to elderly or immunocompromised people first, the chance of me getting an omicron booster in the next 6 months is low. Weigh that against the chance of getting omicron covid in the next 6 months. Looking at the data, we can already establish that omicron is more contagious and looking at increases in infection rates in Europe over the last few weeks along with the fact that omicron will (probably) soon become the dominant strain, I’ll take a small increase in immunity now over a potentially larger one in 6 months when the omicron wave may be over. That’s just my risk calculation though - I got moderna booster yesterday. YMMV
The open hypothesis is that getting the booster against the alpha-spike-protein might increase the "original antigenic sin" dynamics and reduce the effect of the Omicron booster.
My current thinking is to wait at least a couple of weeks, for data to come out regarding how effective current 2-shot vaccines are against Omicron, and how much the current boosters help on top of that.
Please fix the formatting of the post ; as is, it looks like "This suggests" is a quote from the paper! You likely need a new line to break out of the quote. Also the url to the paper doesn't work because of the ":" at the end ; could you add a space before the ":"?
Wai Dai writes over in the comments at Omicron Variant Post #1: We’re F***ed, It’s Never Over:
Given that this is an important question for many of us, I consider it useful to have the conversation on the top level instead of only in the comments of the other thread.