The Monday 6 - September 27, 2021

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday overruled a recommendation by an agency advisory panel that had refused to endorse booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine for frontline workers. It was a highly unusual move for the director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, but aligned C.D.C. policy with the Food and Drug Administration’s endorsements over her own agency’s advisers.

…vaccines help protect you in two ways. First, you develop antibodies to the virus, which are immediately available to protect you if you’re exposed. Second, you produce memory cells, which remember how to produce antibodies if you need them later. The initial antibodies stick around for a while but not forever, but the memory cells remain.

A booster shot — literally, a third dose of the same vaccine — has two possible uses. First, for people who are immune-compromised (say, cancer patients), a third dose of vaccine may be necessary to prompt a strong immune response. There is widespread agreement for using boosters this way; one way to think about it is that this group should have been on a three-dose regimen initially.  

For everyone else, who likely had a robust immune response initially, the value of a booster is less clear. The booster will prompt more antibody production, increasing immediate protection, but it isn’t clear that that’s necessary to improve protection against severe disease. Which is the point of the vaccines in the first place. This isn’t a straightforward trade, and reasonable people differ.

My first reaction upon hearing that boosters were rejected was to ask the same thing: would these same “experts” say that, because the vaccines are still effective without boosters, vaccinated persons don’t need to wear masks and can resume normal life? Of course not. They use the criterion “prevents hospitalization” for evaluating boosters (2a) but switch back to “prevents infection” when the question is masks and other restrictions. What about those that are willing to accept the tiny risk of side effects to prevent infection so that they can get back to fully normal life? The Science ™ tells us that one can’t transmit the virus if one is never infected to begin with.

The biggest problem with public health professionals continues to be (1) elevation of their own normative value judgements — namely that NPIs [non-pharmaceutical interventions, e.g., social distancing, masking, quarantine, etc.] are no big deal no matter how long they last — which have nothing to do with scientific expertise, (2) leading them to “shade” their interpretation of data to promote their preferred behavioral outcome rather than answering positive (non-normative) questions with positive scientific statements, (3) thus undermining the credibility of public health institutions (FDA, CDC) and leading to things like vaccine hesitancy.

They cross-pollinated these old varieties with modern, high-yielding ones, trying to combine the best traits of old and new spruitjes. It took many years. But it worked. “From then on, the taste was much better. It really improved,” Sintenie says.

A close-up look would reveal that it was camouflage for Boeing’s Plant No. 2, where thousands of B-17 bombers were produced.

The “neighborhood” was completed in 1944 and removed a year after the war.