01-03-2022, 09:23 PM
(01-03-2022, 07:46 PM)danbrotherston Wrote:(01-03-2022, 07:32 PM)plam Wrote: I don't believe that 100% of people will be infected, and likely not with omicron; people are saying numbers like 50% to 80%. 50% is a lot of people, and if it happened all at once it would crash our health system, but it's not everyone.
It's also worthwhile to delay as much as possible, because treatments improve.
McMaster is working on a spray vaccine, which one would think could work better (because it's near the sites where one picks up the virus). More boosters is still possible, but again, it's people like the Pfizer CEO who are most enthusiastic about that.
This doesn't make sense with my understanding of how the immune system works. AFAIK vaccines are not a localized response, but a systemic one, it shouldn't matter where the vaccine is administered. My understanding of the "spray vaccine" was for chicken shit folks like me who don't like getting needles (you know, mostly children).
It's also not the case that vaccinated folks have "nothing" to worry about. Young, healthy people probably will be fine (but some won't), vulnerable people will again die. So this "lets just let everyone get it" is just a way of saying you don't really care if my grandma dies. I was sick of this attitude in March 2020, my opinion of it has not improved.
Immunology is super complicated and nothing is binary in that world---dangerous for software people to think about. Lots of people are working on nasal sprays though. Something about local responses and killing the virus before it gets a chance to multiply. I think the antibodies would be faster to form in the nose and throat. See for instance https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shot...han-a-shot (old, but has the most detail I could find).
Your grandma is better off than in March 2020 having received the vaccine, but yes, still at substantially higher risk than you are.