Cool Cats
I EXPECT DOUGHNUTS
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Yup, we're back to that "cutting the line thingy" again.
• 4 reasons ineligible Americans shouldn't sneak a COVID booster — yet
• Booster Bandits Are Walking a Fine Line
Americans who have gotten a third (or, for people who got the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, second) shot before they’re eligible—let’s call them booster bandits—have considered the risks to their body and their conscience and concluded, Hey, it couldn’t hurt.
Like the people who crossed state lines or lied about their job to get a first shot in the winter and early spring, they are blurring the truth and fudging the rules. The careful dance of morals and personal peril involved in booster banditry is far more complicated than the obvious ethical dumpster fire of taking a first dose from an essential worker or a cancer patient. But, even though the line-jumpers are loud and proud this time, the illegitimate third doses aren’t always quite as innocuous as they seem to think.
1. The risk of getting really sick is still very low — and it may be getting lower.
2. The risk of getting someone else sick is low, too.
3. To get more bang for your buck, consider waiting a bit.
Timing is an underappreciated element of the booster equation. Even now, older and more vulnerable Americans aren’t supposed to get a third dose until six months after their second — roughly the point at which Israel observed some waning.
Why? Because “if you get all three shots at the same time, or really close to each other, you may not be doing what you set out to do, i.e., train the immune system to remember (how to fight a virus) for many years,” Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco, recently explained. “The immune system generally does better in terms of ‘remembering’ if you wait a few months before the last shot.”
Dr. Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington, told the Atlantic that overstimulating the immune system can even have a negative effect (as opposed to just a neutral one) by making your body less adept at fighting off certain infections — something Dr. Pepper often observes in her work on malaria. "Your immune system needs some time and space to calm down in between seeing one infection and the next one so that it can hone its pathogen-detection skills."
4. The more people who fake their way into a booster, the harder it is to understand when the rest of us really need them.
That’s because every time someone lies about being unvaccinated or immunocompromised or “high risk” in order to get a bonus shot, the more it skews government data on who’s been vaccinated and how well the vaccines are performing. Without a clear picture of that, it’s hard to know for sure when effectiveness is really waning and when universal boosters should finally roll out.
• 4 reasons ineligible Americans shouldn't sneak a COVID booster — yet
• Booster Bandits Are Walking a Fine Line
Americans who have gotten a third (or, for people who got the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, second) shot before they’re eligible—let’s call them booster bandits—have considered the risks to their body and their conscience and concluded, Hey, it couldn’t hurt.
Like the people who crossed state lines or lied about their job to get a first shot in the winter and early spring, they are blurring the truth and fudging the rules. The careful dance of morals and personal peril involved in booster banditry is far more complicated than the obvious ethical dumpster fire of taking a first dose from an essential worker or a cancer patient. But, even though the line-jumpers are loud and proud this time, the illegitimate third doses aren’t always quite as innocuous as they seem to think.
1. The risk of getting really sick is still very low — and it may be getting lower.
2. The risk of getting someone else sick is low, too.
3. To get more bang for your buck, consider waiting a bit.
Timing is an underappreciated element of the booster equation. Even now, older and more vulnerable Americans aren’t supposed to get a third dose until six months after their second — roughly the point at which Israel observed some waning.
Why? Because “if you get all three shots at the same time, or really close to each other, you may not be doing what you set out to do, i.e., train the immune system to remember (how to fight a virus) for many years,” Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco, recently explained. “The immune system generally does better in terms of ‘remembering’ if you wait a few months before the last shot.”
Dr. Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington, told the Atlantic that overstimulating the immune system can even have a negative effect (as opposed to just a neutral one) by making your body less adept at fighting off certain infections — something Dr. Pepper often observes in her work on malaria. "Your immune system needs some time and space to calm down in between seeing one infection and the next one so that it can hone its pathogen-detection skills."
4. The more people who fake their way into a booster, the harder it is to understand when the rest of us really need them.
That’s because every time someone lies about being unvaccinated or immunocompromised or “high risk” in order to get a bonus shot, the more it skews government data on who’s been vaccinated and how well the vaccines are performing. Without a clear picture of that, it’s hard to know for sure when effectiveness is really waning and when universal boosters should finally roll out.
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