The reporter whose article you are quoting, Apoorva Mandavilli, wrote an earlier article at the end of June about the notion that boosters won’t be needed and the original 2 shots may even give lifetime protection. I think her brain is still stuck on that and that she may be, to some extent, defending her earlier article against the new reality. I thought that June article was rather speculative at the time and that she was overselling the idea based on thin data.
Immune cells are still organizing to fight the coronavirus months after inoculation, scientists reported.
www.nytimes.com
The experts she is relying on in the article include Dr. Paul Offit who spent the summer telling people that we probably wouldn’t need a booster until another “3 to 5 years”.
Dr. Paul Offit, the coinventor of the rotavirus vaccine, told Insider that his best guess is that booster shots won't be needed for years.
www.businessinsider.com
Offit, and this latest NYT article, frame this around the idea that the need for vaccines is driven by preventing hospitalization and death and that prevention of infection and even mild to moderate symptomatic infection are not all that relevant in their opinion.
Part of this hinges on how readily infected but vaccinated/non-boosted people can spread the virus to others. Various studies give conflicting answers and make varying assumptions around the infectiousness implied by PCS test results in vaccinated people. As far as I can tell, the risk of actually passing on the virus by such people is lower but still substantial and plenty of 2-shot vaccinated people infected with the virus are passing it on to others in households, prisons, and other congregate living settings.
I suspect part of what is going on is that, historically, most vaccines aren’t all that great at preventing infection whereas the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are showing that they can provide strong protection against infection, at least for a few months.
www.cnbc.com
