# I am beginning to think that this pandemic won't end --\> now focussed on vaccine booster timing questions **URL:** \ **Category:** The Quarantine Zone\ **Tags:** covid-quarantine\ **Created:** [January 17, 2021, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-am-beginning-to-think-that-this-pandemic-wont-end-now-focussed-on-vaccine-booster-timing-questions/930740 "2021-01-17T16:45:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 52
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2021, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-am-beginning-to-think-that-this-pandemic-wont-end-now-focussed-on-vaccine-booster-timing-questions/930740/52 "2021-01-22T03:09:26Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > Thank you for informing me of the “dangerous nonsense” in my prior post and the degree of shame I should shoulder as my burden. You will perhaps extend the same courtesy to researchers at BioNTech and Pfizer who expressed a [similar concern regarding the delay of booster shots and the unknown impact upon efficacy](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-germany-biontech-idUSKBN2991XX). I’m well aware of the many public health officials who have come out on the record not advising for delaying the second shot and I’m aware of the myriad considerations they have to make (including ones I explicitly pointed out in my post), many of which don’t have to do with public health or immunology. I’m certainly not aware of any public health official whose state reason was anything similar to: > [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > It is not “perfectly likely that a later booster will give just as good long term immunity as 3 weeks”; the point of a booster is to provoke a second, more robust memory B cell response that will provide long term sterilizing immunity (that will stop infection and spread) instead of _protective immunity that will fade in a few months_, allowing reinfection and the potential for sustaining contagion in the population. We know from other vaccines that require boosters that delaying the booster shot significantly results in dramatically lowered long term immunogenicity; essentially, if the ‘virus’ (in the case of a vaccine, the antigen surrogate epitope) doesn’t hang around very long, _the immune system ‘assumes’ that it wasn’t a real threat and doesn’t develop long term response in order to prevent allergic response to what could just be a harmless protein_. Which is not talking about the _current_ vaccine but about historical vaccines for which, when asked for a cite, you wave it off with a blithe > [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > My cite is any immunology textbook written in the last couple of decades. These are not novel insights; it is basic knowledge in the field. When called on it, you try to pull an example out of your ass > [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > However, it is not true that all vaccines have equal or better efficacy with a longer interval between the initial vaccination and a booster. The trivalent oral polio vaccine in particular has [a quantifiable reduction in effectiveness if the booster schedule is significantly delayed](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/657393). This is for an interval exceeding four years, but the point remains that immune response is just not something that can be estimated _de novo_ And you somehow manage to dig up a paper from _1978_ which shows that booster intervals up to 4 years are fine which isn’t remotely in the same universe as “protective immunity that will fade in a few months”. I assumed if your point was so obvious as to be included in textbooks, you could find a more compelling example than this. I am not versed on all vaccines so it’s entirely possible there are one or two out there that function bizarrely in the way you stated but even then, I am extremely doubtful, I’ve never encountered a single explaination for vaccines that sounds remotely like “the immune system ‘assumes’ that it wasn’t a real threat and doesn’t develop long term response in order to prevent allergic response to what could just be a harmless protein” If you can find an immunology textbook written in the last 20 years that specifically states that this is a common way that vaccines work, I will completely recant my statement. But the plain fact of the matter is that for almost all extant vaccines, the primary public health messaging is that booster shots shouldn’t be taken too close together. To the extent that they emphasize timeliness for the next dose, it’s primarily to make sure people actually show up. Almost all of them are not overly concerned about delaying the booster and the advice is to just continue where you left off. What happened is you wrote a bunch of smart sounding nonsense that sounds superficially plausible to a layperson but lives in a completely different universe to the very basics of how vaccines work. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-am-beginning-to-think-that-this-pandemic-wont-end-now-focussed-on-vaccine-booster-timing-questions/930740)._