If they had Pfizer, they should be able to get a Pfizer booster now. If they had Moderna or J&J, they may need to find a doctor who will do a Pfizer booster off label, or else wait for those boosters.

I doubt that will be available before next fall at the earliest, they are planning to test it "over the next 6-12 months." They also have an RSV vaccine in development and are hoping to eventually market a single shot that would cover flu, RSV, and a covid booster.

I know this was a preprint and hadn't been peer reviewed, but how in the world did they miss the difference between 32,000 and 800,000??? This preprint has caused so much damage — and even though it's been retracted, antivaxers will keep referencing it and claiming it was "suppressed" by government and Big Pharma. <smdh>

I'm so sorry, Dawn (((hugs)))

Yes and no. The EUA for Pfizer boosters is strictly limited to those who have had Pfizer. But it is also legal for doctors to prescribe Pfizer off label, so if you can find a doctor who will do it off label you can get one. It may be more difficult to get it from a Walgreens or CVS or whatever if they want to see proof of your previous vaccines. If you already had Moderna, I'd probably wait and see if Moderna boosters are approved in the next month or so. Moderna seems to last longer anyway — which raises an interesting question of whether they will just approve all boosters at 6 months for the sake of consistency, or follow the data and possibly use a longer interval for Moderna. I don't know what's going on with J&J or why they've sat on the data so long — they ran 1 & 2 shot trials in tandem and I suspect they have known for a long time that 2 doses were more effective. Maybe they were just waiting until the mRNA vaccines required boosters, so they could keep the "one & done" marketing angle as long as possible. Although it does look like there will now be boosters for J&J, to be honest if I'd had J&J I would get an mRNA vax for the second shot instead of another J&J. In the UK they found that AZ + Pfizer was more effective than two shots of AZ, and I would imagine J&J would be similar since they are both adenovirus vaccines.

Just got this notice from Amazon: "Starting October 25, 2021, delivery orders from Whole Foods Market in your area will include a $9.95 service fee. This service fee helps to cover operating costs so we can continue to offer the same competitive everyday prices in-store and online at Whole Foods Market." Paying a $10 "service fee," on top of a generous tip and higher prices overall, makes Whole Foods delivery no longer worth it to me. The part about how they need to do this so they can keep their prices low is a joke. Prime is still worth it to me overall, but I'm bummed about losing this perk. And I'm extra bummed because DS was finally starting to eat healthier foods instead of living on frozen pizza and mac & cheese, and he has been relying on WF delivery since he doesn't have a car there.

They may consider that a feature not a bug — make the requirements as loose as possible so basically anyone who wants one can get it, while presenting it internationally as "we're only boosting the elderly and most vulnerable." It was just announced that the US will be ordering an additional 500 million Pfizer doses — bringing the total we have pledged to donate to 1.1 billion, more than every other country combined. I think the timing of that announcement in conjunction with the booster recommendations is not coincidental.

CDC votes to approve shots for 65+ as well as 18-64 with underlying medical conditions — but NOT people like teachers or HCW who are at higher risk of exposure but not higher medical risk: "Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recommended a third dose of Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine for people 65 and older as well as others at a high risk of severe illness. The committee's unanimous vote to allow older adults and long-term care residents to receive an extra dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was announced after two days of presentations reviewing scientific evidence on the safety and effectiveness of a third vaccine dose. The committee, in a 13-2 vote, also recommended that people 50 to 64 years old with underlying medical conditions get a third shot. It also endorsed people ages 18 to 49 who have an underlying medical risk access to another dose. The panel split 9-6 on this point but settled on advising that these people consider their individual benefit and risk, possibly in consultation with a medical provider, before they get a Pfizer booster shot. In what might've been the most contentious deliberation, the committee said people 18 to 65 who work in a job or other setting where they are at high risk of exposure to COVID-19 should not yet be allowed to receive an extra Pfizer dose. Committee member Dr. Matthew Zahn, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist, expressed concern about the difficulty of implementing such an action. Another member, Institute for Health Research investigator Dr. Matthew Daley, said he was worried that the potential guidance would be "broad enough that it could limit access to other groups." https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/09/23/1040078971/cdc-covid-19-pfizer-boosters-adults-guidance

Congratulations!!! I'm so happy for you!

You might want to ask the vet if they do clay paw prints. A friend suggested that to me when I lost my little Bella, and I was very glad that we ordered them — each of my kids wanted one, so we got three. DD put hers in a shadow box with Bella's collar and some photos, and I hang mine on the Christmas tree every year. If there's somewhere close by that sells kits, you could always do it yourself before you take her in, but we didn't have time for that so I just ordered them and the vet tech did them after she had passed. I picked them up a few days later.

Keep in mind that Moderna seems to last longer than Pfizer; I think protection against symptomatic disease was still as high as 84% at 5 months, and protection against severe disease was much higher than that. So you could wait until, say, mid-November to get a Moderna booster, to ensure maximum protection through the holidays. OTOH, if you want to go ahead and get Pfizer sooner, it's also worth noting that the Pfizer booster raised antibody levels MUCH higher than the original shots did. So Pfizer isn't just getting people back to where they were after the 2nd shot, it's boosting antibodies 5-11x higher than even the post-2nd-dose peak. Hopefully starting off with much higher levels leads to longer lasting protection as well. Personally, I am planning to get a Pfizer booster in mid- to late October, when I'll be 5.5-6 months past the second shot. So full protection from the booster should kick in in early November and at the very least keep me well protected through the holidays and any post-holiday spike in January & February.

I haven't heard of it before, but in googling around, it seems both promising and very difficult to manufacture at scale. As far as I can tell, the only method they have so far is genetically modifying tobacco plants, but they only get like 10-12 doses per plant. I found this article, published last year by three researchers at Duke, suggesting a different method that could potentially produce larger volumes at lower cost by using modified e. coli bacteria. But that seems to be just a suggestion based on lab experiments, not something any manufacturers are actually doing. If you come across anything about griffithsin going into commercial production, I'd love to see it.

But it's perfectly legal for doctors to prescribe Pfizer off-label, including for boosters, so there's no reason for someone to assume you lied vs assuming your doctor felt it was warranted. It may be more of an issue with Moderna if the FDA issues an EUA for boosters before they grant the full biologics license; we'll just have to wait and see how the timing of that goes and how flexible the booster eligibility criteria are. But either way, I don't think any employer is going to question the why and when of an employee's vaccine doses.

What really jumped out at me from the Texas prison data was that more than two-thirds of the breakthrough cases were in people who had been vaccinated with Pfizer 4-6 months before the outbreak — 83 of 122 cases. They started vaccinating with Pfizer in January, beginning with over 65s and those with the highest risk factors, so the vast majority of Pfizer recipients were not only vaccinated more than 4 months ago, they were also more likely to be older and to have obesity, hypertension, and a history of smoking. All Moderna shots were given less than 4 months before the outbreak, and the breakthrough rate for those was only 40%. They don't provide enough data to calculate a case rate for people who got Pfizer less than 4 months before infection, but the total case rate for all prisoners who were vaxxed between 2 & 4 months was 44%, so the rate for Pfizer recipients in that time range may have been similar to Moderna. The very small difference in case rates between fully vaccinated prisoners (70%) and the 6 partially vaccinated prisoners (67%) was not statistically significant (p = 1.0).

He's also not a doctor, in any discipline. He has a masters in engineering and computer science and has started several tech companies. He has no background or experience whatsoever in medicine, virology, epidemiology, or any science other than computer science.

I don't think he was invited — members of the public were allowed to speak at the hearing, just like they are at school board meetings or town council meetings or whatever. ETA: he said in a tweet that he had to talk fast because he only had 3 minutes, which suggests that he was just some random member of the public, not a specialist who was invited to speak

NIH announces the RECOVER study on Long Covid: https://www.science.org/content/article/study-40-000-people-will-probe-mysteries-long-covid "Long Covid, or what NIH calls postacute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC), can include pain, fatigue, “brain fog,” trouble sleeping, headaches, shortness of breath, fever, chronic cough, depression, and anxiety that linger or appear more than 4 weeks after an initial infection. Sometimes the symptoms are so severe that a person can’t work and struggles through daily tasks. The Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention estimates 10% to 30% of COVID-19 patients develop Long Covid. Possible explanations include a hidden reservoir of SARS-CoV-2, a misfiring immune system, or a metabolic problem triggered by the infection, Collins said. But, he acknowledged, “We don’t know.” NIH outlined its initial plans for a Long Covid research program in February, after Congress approved $1.15 billion over 4 years to study the condition. The program’s centerpiece study announced today, the Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative, is funded with a $470 million grant to New York University (NYU) Langone Health. NYU will make subawards to more than 100 researchers at 35 institutions who will enroll patients using a common protocol. Starting in October, the program will aim to enroll between 30,000 and 40,000 volunteers over 12 months from diverse populations in all 50 states. Although some people who already have Long Covid will be studied, the majority will have acute infections—that is, they will have just fallen sick with COVID-19, said NYU Grossman School of Medicine cardiologist Stuart Katz, the study’s principal investigator. The study will include hospitalized patients as well as those with milder COVID-19 cases—it’s not clear whether being sicker initially leads to more Long Covid. Using electronic medical records and providing participants with wearable devices that monitor heart rates, sleep, and more, the study will compare the health of those who quickly recover with others whose symptoms persist, looking for risk factors and biological clues that may explain the different outcomes. Researchers will also explore questions such as whether getting a COVID-19 vaccination eases Long Covid symptoms, as some anecdotal reports suggest. About one-half of those enrolled will be children, including some newborns, NIH officials hope. Even though children with COVID-19 usually have mild or no symptoms, concerns about long-term effects are growing because the number of cases in children is now “the highest it’s been throughout the entire pandemic,” Diana Bianchi, director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said on the Zoom call. The study won’t itself test new treatments for Long Covid, Katz said. But its leaders will try to identify proteins or molecular processes that play a role in Long Covid and could be blocked with an existing drug. NIH hopes to find those targets within 18 months and then launch treatment trials using its remaining congressional funding for Long Covid research."

So I've been googling this guy, and he is an antivax activist who claims the vaccine has killed more than 150,000 people in the US, that more people die from the vaccine than covid, that it causes infertility, and that the spike proteins are "cytotoxic." He also believes that ivermectin cures covid. He seems to be an engineer, with no medical expertise. Anyway, in trying to find where that 1-in-317 statistic came from, I found the tweet below, and read the paper he linked. That study doesn't even include 16-17 year olds, and 25 of the 32 cases of myocarditis they found were from Moderna, not Pfizer! The overall rate for Pfizer was 1 in 2500, and for Moderna it was 1 in 625. All the cases resolved quickly, with no long term effects. Also, this study simply says "this many people were vaccinated and this many had myocarditis" — there is no control and no comparison to the normal background rate in the population, so they are not expressing the increase in risk of myocarditis after vaccination. Here is the study: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.13.21262182v1

This article has a good comparison of Door Dash, Instacart, and Postmates. DD occasionally does Postmates and Instacart to pick up some extra money, and it works well with a college schedule. We live in a metro area and she drives a Prius, so she doesn't drive far and doesn't use a lot of gas. She chooses jobs carefully and usually gets good tips. She said Costco is the best Instacart gig because the orders are really large and she gets paid well for them. https://www.bizcatalyst360.com/doordash-vs-postmates-vs-instacart-which-one-is-right-for-you/

Doctors can already prescribe Pfizer off label — they can vaccinate underage kids and do boosters for anyone of any age — because of the full biologics license that was granted last month. The "approval" of boosters for over 65s will be an EUA, though, and medications or vaccines under EUA technically can only be used for the limited purposes described in the EUA. So there's a bit of a conflict there between what's authorized by the EUA and what's allowed by the biologics license. From what I've read, though, I don't think the EUA on boosters overrides a doctor's right to prescribe the vaccine however they see fit based on their own professional judgement. Maybe it will make a difference to insurance companies, who might decide to cover it for over 65s but not under-65s since it's not FDA authorized? I don't know. I think people with the time, money, and connections to find a sympathetic doctor will likely be able to get a booster regardless of age, but it may be more difficult for under-65s to just walk in and get it from a pharmacy or vaccine clinic. I think a lot will depend on how loosely the EUA defines "higher risk," and how strict various pharmacies and clinics are. As we've seen with the EUA for a 3rd shot in the immunocompromised, some pharmacies are giving third shots to whoever wants them without asking for proof, and others are being extremely strict and refusing anyone whose illnesses and medications are not on a very short list.

There is no evidence at all for the prion disease claim. The paper that made this claim, which was widely cited in RW media, was written by J. Bart Classen, a well-known antivaxxer who also believes that covid is a "bio-weapons attack released in part by individuals in the United States government." It was not published in a reputable journal (the publisher, SciVision, charges authors to publish their work and there is no actual peer review), and it has been debunked by multiple scientists and organizations. Please do not let false information like this influence your decision about the vaccine. Even if you still choose not to get it, I hope that knowing this is totally false at least allays your fears that this is something that could happen in the future to your loved ones who have chosen to get vaccinated.

Um, that case had a HUGE amount of publicity and not only do I remember it well, it was back in the news recently because the murder part of the conviction was just thrown out, although the manslaughter charge still stands and Mohamed Noor will still serve time for that.

Must be a slow day under the bridge...

Blaming the vax mandate for the nursing shortage also ignores the number of HCWs who are quitting because they're exhausted, burnt out, and traumatized by watching unvaxxed patients die in droves, while also being verbally and sometimes physically abused by antivaxxers.

Did you know that having medical power of attorney for someone legally gives you prescribing rights for that person, and healthcare providers have to do whatever you say? I saw some seriously crazypants posts the other day, in which a woman described calling the ICU 4-5 times a day demanding that her husband be given food, Sprite, and megadoses of intravenous Vitamin C and zinc. She said the nurses kept lying to her that he couldn't have anything by mouth due to the risk of aspiration and the doctor could not prescribe megadose vitamins, and she just kept yelling that she had power of attorney so they had to do whatever she said. And of course when he died it was the fault of the evil healthcare workers who illegally defied her orders. Because he totally would have made it if he'd just had a sandwich, a can of Sprite, and 50 grams/day of Vitamin C!