All but one of the professors is an MD; the other is a PhD biostatistician. A few also have public health degrees.

No I've been looking for that information but haven't found it. I think it's ridiculous that so many are pediatric MDs though. And the VP of Merck* gets a vote??? Maybe they should have had some pulmonologists, cardiologists, and critical care specialists on the committee instead. *(Merck is currently developing anti-covid drugs, btw, and would benefit from fewer Americans getting boosters)

Also, for anyone who doesn't think political pressure from the WHO had anything to do with yesterday's decision, the anti-booster opinion piece that was published in the Lancet by the two FDA employees who resigned was coauthored by five members of the WHO as well as other coauthors from India, South Africa, Mexico, Jamaica, France, and the UK.

So I decided to look up the credentials of the members of the advisory committee — the vast majority are professors of pediatrics, not vaccine experts. Maybe that makes sense when the vaccines under review are designed for young children, but this committee was voting on boosters for adults (16+). Here are the credentials of the committee that just voted to restrict boosters to over 65s: Professor of Pediatrics, Stanford Medical School Professor of Pediatrics, Tufts Medical Center Professor of Pediatrics, University of Cincinnati Medical School Professor of Pediatrics, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Professor of Pediatrics, Emory University School of Medicine Dean, Chicago Medical School, (Specialty: Pediatrics) Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Duke University Medical Director, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance Professor, Vaccine & Infectious Diseases Division, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Professor, Baylor College of Medicine (Specialty: Vaccines) Associate Dean for Global Health, University of Maryland School of Medicine Government Agency Representatives: Director of Scientific Advisors, FDA Designated Federal Officer, FDA Committee Management Specialist, FDA Chief Medical Officer, CDC Director of Clinical Innovation, NIH Industry Representatives: VP for Medical Affairs, Seqirus VP of Vaccine Research, Merck

I think by next fall we will have several combined covid/flu shots. I really hope Novavax's combo shot is approved by then.

No it's not based solely on one study out of Israel. Data from both Pfizer and Moderna show that antibodies wane considerably over time. Moderna is not even used in Israel. Pfizer has a full biologics license, which means it is perfectly legal for doctors to use it off label if, in their professional judgement, it would be beneficial. The data show that it is safe and beneficial. Nothing illegal or unethical about it. Wanting to reduce one's own chance of catching and transmitting a deadly disease, and possibly contributing to overwhelmed hospitals, IS about "caring for the community." Also, at least half the adult population of the US has health issues that put them at additional risk, plus many have relatives who are high risk, and then there are people like teachers and healthcare workers who have additional risks because of their level of exposure. Why would you assume that the only people who want boosters are selfish low-risk people? Pfizer tested boosters that were specifically targeted against Alpha and Delta, and found that the original vaccine worked just as well once the antibody levels were raised sufficiently. They also felt that it provided the broadest protection against the development of future variants since all variants evolved from the original wild strain that the vaccine is based on.

There IS political pressure on the FDA — to NOT approve boosters. There is political pressure from the WHO, which has nothing to do with the efficacy of boosters. There is the perception of pressure from antivaxxers, in the sense that some committee members fear that approving a 3rd dose will further discourage anti-vaxxers. That also has nothing to do with the efficacy of boosters. There is a reason the committee is called an ADVISORY committee — they provide advice, they do not approve vaccines. The FDA staff then take that advice into account when deciding whether to approve something, but they are free to take other factors into account as well.

I believe that boosters are warranted and intend to get one. If the recommendation is broad enough, or I can find a doctor who is flexible enough, I will also try to get boosters for my kids. Other people are free to make their own choices based on their own assessment of risks and benefits as well as their ability to access a provider who can accommodate their wishes. It seems like you believe there must be a single black/white, right/wrong answer to this question, and you want someone to tell you what to do — or at least tell you which authority you should trust or whose advice you should take. But that's something you're just going to have to work out for yourself.

I've had Prime since it first launched in 2007, and I just think of it as another utility, like wifi or electric or trash pick up. It works out to $10/month and I probably save that much just with the discount at Whole Foods, let alone what I save on shipping.

No one here is suggesting that everyone "should" ignore the FDA on this. I'm sure the vast majority of Americans will follow whatever recommendation the FDA ultimately hands down — and many won't have a choice anyway. One of the biggest issues I have with this is that people with means and connections and the time and energy to find a way to get a 3rd shot off label will get the extra protection, while those with fewer resources will be exposed to higher risk of illness, lost pay, medical bills, etc. As with so many other things in this country, the haves will find a way, and the have-nots will get screwed. The recommendations of the advisory committee are not binding, by the way, and the FDA does sometimes tweak the final ruling. I hope they will at least include more at risk groups (teachers, healthcare workers, essential workers, people with comorbidities, etc.), which will allow doctors a lot more leeway to prescribe boosters for those who want them.

People shouldn't take ivermectin because the science — randomized, placebo-controlled trials — say it doesn't work, and there are known side effects. People should get vaccinated because the randomized placebo controlled trials say it is safe and effective. I believe people should have access to boosters for the same exact reason — the data says that vaccine protection is waning over time and the boosters are safe and effective. I don't think the WHO's political stance should have anything to do with whether Americans have access to boosters as long as the data shows they are safe and they work.

Of course I don't think the main food and drug regulatory body should be ignored, but I don't think there's anything wrong with open criticism. I totally don't understand the mindset of "well they're the experts so we just need to believe them and do whatever they say." They have seriously screwed up on multiple occasions, some of which have had disastrous consequences. And most of their screw ups come from the fact that they are far too often reactive instead of proactive, and I think that is exactly the mistake they are making when it comes to boosters. I think boosters will be approved for everyone at some point, but unfortunately it seems that we will have to endure many avoidable illnesses and deaths before they finally decide to approve them. I will be definitely be getting one at the 6 month mark, and I am hoping the definition of "at risk" is broad enough, and implementation is loose enough, that both my kids can also get boosted before Christmas.

There is a difference between trusting the data and trusting the way other people interpret the data. Whenever I see an article or video or news story about some new study, I always try to locate the original study and read it myself. And then I try to read as many different critiques of the data as I can, from a wide variety of sources. And that goes for personal physicians as well. I have been misdiagnosed multiple times, and had to do my own research and advocate for myself. I was told absolutely unequivocally that my son did not have Lyme disease after a doctor ordered the wrong test. I researched the issue, and found another doctor who ordered the correct test, which came back overwhelmingly positive, and DS spent 18 months on antibiotics. I shudder to think where he would be now if I hadn't "done my own research." I do not trust anyone's "recommendations" without verifying things myself as much as possible.

The people on the committee each filter the data through their own personal biases and opinions. Some have explicitly stated that they are not in favor of boosters for everyone in the US when other countries have not had first shots yet. Others have said that the focus should be on vaccinating the unvaccinated instead of doing boosters. Those are personal political opinions, not scientific ones. And IMO they are extremely naive. The CDC and FDA have screwed up plenty of times in this pandemic. They refused to use the covid tests provided by the WHO and instead decided to develop their own — which were seriously flawed and put us desperately behind when it came to testing. Then when the correct tests were finally available, they were in such short supply that the CDC insisted they could not be used on anyone who had not recently traveled to China or had contact with someone who had tested positive. This was a total disaster and led to huge numbers of illnesses and deaths in the northeast because they completely ignored the possibility of cases coming in from Italy. The CDC and FDA continued to deny there was community spread until a few brave scientists in Washington state defied FDA orders and started testing some flu swabs to see if SARS2 was present — and it was. Had they followed FDA orders, who knows how much longer it would have taken before the government acknowledged we had community spread?

There seems to be some evidence that the SARS2 virus can evade T-cells by binding to the side instead of the center of the "T," which confuses the immune system into attacking the body instead of the virus. If this is true, then having circulating antibodies at high enough levels to knock out the virus before it can get established, and before T cells are deployed in large numbers, may be one of the things that determines whether someone has a "bad cold" or ends up on a ventilator. Also, according to the Israeli data, immunity against serious disease and death do wane, although not as steeply as protection against symptomatic disease. And protection against symptomatic disease may be as low as 50% or less after 6-8 months, not 80%. And we don't know where it goes from there — does protection against serious illness and death keep declining month by month? Do we wait and see how many people who were vaxxed early in 2020 end up hospitalized or dying during the next holiday spike before we decide boosters are a good idea? Or do we choose to be proactive?

On iPhone 8 or earlier, triple-click the home button instead of the right side button. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209517

No one has ever said that. Ever. Anywhere. Why are you making this stuff up? LOL at referring to an FDA advisory committee as "the scientific bosses." The data clearly show that vaccine protection wanes over time, and that a 3rd dose of Pfizer given 6-8 months after the 2nd increases antibodies to even higher levels than they were after the 2nd dose — 5x higher in under 55s and 11x higher in over 55s. There's no debate about that. That's the "science." "Following the science" = filtering that data through personal assumptions and opinions about the role of public health officials, the political cost of pissing off the WHO, trying to outguess anti-vaxxers, etc. So it's not surprising that different people arrive at different conclusions about how to interpret and apply the data. When Fauci "follows the science" he concludes that boosters are worth it because reducing transmission will protect children and the immunocompromised and reduce long covid. Some advisory committee members agree with him, but they were outvoted. Some of the reasons cited by the committee members who voted against boosters for everyone include the idea that it's more important to target the unvaccinated, or that it's inappropriate to give double-vaccinated Americans boosters when people in other countries don't have any. All of these people believe they are "following the science," although they end up in different places. Do you know who else is very impatient about the timing of the roll out? The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children's Hospital Association, both of which have called on the FDA to expedite the process as much as possible. Were you aware that the FDA changed the rules in July, after the trials were well underway and asked Pfizer and Moderna to significantly increase the number of subjects in the trial? Here is an excerpt from the letter the AAP sent to the FDA on August 5th: "We understand that the FDA has recently worked with Pfizer and Moderna to double the number of children ages 5-11 years included in clinical trials of their COVID-19 vaccines. While we appreciate this prudent step to gather more safety data, we urge FDA to carefully consider the impact of this decision on the timeline for authorizing a vaccine for this age group. In our view, the rise of the Delta variant changes the risk-benefit analysis for authorizing vaccines in children. The FDA should strongly consider authorizing these vaccines for children ages 5-11 years based on data from the initial enrolled cohort, which are already available, while continuing to follow safety data from the expanded cohort in the post-market setting. This approach would not slow down the time to authorization of these critically needed vaccines in the 5–11-year age group." Many people here happen tp agree with the American Academy of Pediatrics, but it sounds like you don't? Do you think the members of the American Academy of Pediatrics are not "dedicated to scientific principles"?

The Israeli government recommends one shot for those who have had covid.

Today's NYT vaccination tracker shows 62% of the Israeli population is fully vaxxed (roughly the same as NY and Washington state, and lower than Massachusetts, Maine, or Vermont). The percentage of adults that are vaxxed is higher — according to this article 83% of the adult Israeli population has had at least one shot, and the 17% that haven't had any shots account for 65% of all serious cases.

Those numbers are horrific, but so few people have any grasp of statistics that a lot of them think it actually confirms their belief that covid is NBD: covid has only killed 0.3% of Mississippians — that's a 99.7% survival rate! The Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Vegas also had a 99.7% survival rate, and a 96% chance of not being shot or trampled. But how many people would buy a ticket to a concert if they knew 61 people were going to die and 867 would be wounded?

And yet monoclonal antibodies are still "experimental" and under EUA, while Pfizer is fully approved, and both of them used fetal cell lines in testing (along with most other medications these folk have been taking for years without caring how they were tested). A lot of anti-vaxxers also believe that their odds of dying from the vaccine are higher than dying of covid. There's a widespread claim that of the hundreds of thousands of covid deaths, less than 10K actually died "of" covid and the rest died of something else and just happened to also have covid when they died. Combine that with claims that the government is hiding the "truth" that tens of thousands of people have died from the vaccine, and people literally think the vaccine is more dangerous than the disease — and if they do get the disease they assume that of course they will be in the group that only has mild symptoms, no matter how many comorbidities they have. And then when they or a loved one ends up seriously ill or dying, it's like they've suddenly been transported to a parallel universe and their brains cannot compute how they can possibly be dying of a disease that hardly kills anyone.

So many of these rabid anti-vaxxers who have been spewing lies and propaganda since the pandemic began are suddenly sooo confused and upset when they find out the hard way that covid is not a hoax, that "I Have an Immune System" frame on their profile pic has not protected them, and it's too late to get a vaccine once you're hospitalized. The same pattern happens over and over: months of posting memes comparing mandates to the holocaust, calling Fauci a murderer, claiming vaccines are killing far more people than covid, doctors are killing patients to get the "government covid bonus," blah blah blah, and then comes the post saying "Damn, looks like I got the 'rona, but I'll be fine," followed a few days later by a hospital selfie saying "Whoa, this covid shit is no joke!" — after a year of posting memes they thought were hilarious while 660,000 other people died. All those posts about how they're "lions not sheep," all that bravado and bullshit about how they'd rather die free than submit to the tyranny of mask and vax mandates suddenly evaporates when they realize they are in fact about to "die free." Next comes the tearful prayer request as things go downhill, followed by a post from a spouse, sibling, or friend saying that so-&-so lost their battle with covid, and it was all so sudden and unexpected and unfair. Oh, and here's the GoFundMe because the wife and kids this "lion" left behind are gonna be broke and homeless soon. Some of these people remain unrepentant to the end, some realize too late that they've made a terrible mistake and want to warn others not to be stupid, and some are just really really confused. This one really got to me, because you can see the dawning realization that everything he believed was a lie, and there's no way to go back and do it over. He died a few days after this post.

I prefer an aisle seat, but if both kids are with me, or even just DS (6'7"), I'm usually stuck in the middle seat because he takes up a seat & a half so I sit next to him and put up the armrest and I get half a seat. But within the US we really only fly Southwest, so if it's just the two of us we're often able to get a row with no one in the middle. If all three of us are flying internationally, I try to book bulkhead seats in the same row and we all wear jackets with lots of pockets to hold phones, iPads, chargers, earbuds, snacks, etc., since you can keep a jacket on your lap but any bags have to go in the overhead.

Unvaccinated people ARE keeping us from being able to tamp covid down. I mean that is not even debatable — 85% of cases, 95% of hospitalizations, and 96% of deaths are unvaccinated. If everyone was vaccinated, then the case rate would be vastly lower and there would be very few covid patients clogging up hospitals and monopolizing resources. If everyone was vaccinated, then HCWs wouldn't be exhausted, angry, demoralized and quitting in droves, which is going to have severe consequences for the future of healthcare in this country. If everyone was vaccinated, then people who need those beds for other reasons wouldn't be dying in the ER or postponing critical surgery. If everyone was vaccinated, tens of thousands of children that have already lost, or will lose, one or both parents would not have their lives irreparably damaged. If everyone was vaccinated, schools wouldn't be shutting down for weeks at a time, with children sent home to quarantine and teachers dying. There was an AMA on reddit today with many HCWs who deal directly with covid patients. They talked about not being able to sleep at night because they hear the alarms in their dreams and it constantly wakes them up. They talked about being harassed and yelled at by patients who don't want to believe what's happening and by family members demanding that patients be given treatments they saw on Facebook. One nurse said they have lost a huge percentage of their staff because they are so traumatized they just can't take it anymore — she said they have ICU rooms being used for storage because they can't staff them. One nurse said she throws up every morning before she goes to work because it's like walking into a war zone. Another said they had 13 deaths last week, of which 12 were covid patients and 11 were unvaccinated. They talked about how it feels to look into the terrified eyes of a patient who's about to be intubated knowing the odds of coming off the vent alive are in the single digits, and the emotional toll it takes to hold cell phones and iPads while sobbing families say goodbye. The idea that refusing to vaccinate is a "personal choice" that doesn't affect anyone else is a bald-faced lie. It's a "choice" that is causing PTSD in thousands of HCWs and exacerbating shortages that will have repercussions for decades to come. It's traumatizing children whose lives are forever changed because their parent(s) decided that giving the government a you're-not-the-boss-of-me middle finger was more important than being there to see them grow up. It's costing billions of dollars to treat people whose hospitalizations and deaths were almost entirely preventable, and it's going to result in long-term health problems for a significant percentage of those who survive it. It's selfish, it's based on lies and misinformation, and it's causing irreparable damage that this country may never recover from. Damn right people are mad about it.

No this was just the recommendation of the FDA advisory panel. The CDC meets next Wednesday and Thursday, and then I think there will be an announcement about whether there will be an official EUA for boosters.