Time For Your Booster

at

HSE CEO Paul Reid

This morning.

The Health Service Executive has said that a third dose of Covid-19 vaccine for those who are immunocompromised will get under way from next week.

Via RTÉ

Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, HSE CEO Paul Reid said contact would be made with people who are deemed at highest risk, saying that risk would be determined by clinical teams.

“It will be a period of five to six weeks to complete this programme,” he said, adding that it will be complex with it focused on the most vulnerable and immunocompromised.

He said identifying the most at-risk would not be a simple process as it is not a list that they can “take off the shelf” but is rather a “complex piece of identification”.

“It does address people who are highly immunocompromised, organ recipients, renal patients, certain cancer patients and certain people on certain medications,” Mr Reid said.

He said if people are not contacted it is likely they are not in that highest risk category.

Third dose for immunocompromised to begin next week – HSE (RTÉ)

RollingNews

Meanwhile…

James Fitzgerald writes:

Surely Bodger must condemn the high rate of vaccination in Waterford as far as I know it was done without hunting down people in the street with vaccine blowdarts…

Fight!

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19 thoughts on “Time For Your Booster

  1. Zaccone

    99.7% of adults being vaccinated in Waterford is about as believable as the Communist party’s regular 95% of the vote election victories in the Soviet Union. There isn’t a hope in hell that Waterford is literally the only place on the planet with every single adult in the county is vaccinated, theres something wrong there.

    (not necessarily a grand conspiracy mind you, I’d just as easily believe government error. Someone suggested to me its down to them using incorrect census data which would make sense).

    1. Sten

      Yes, agreed. It’s likely due to some version of #adults-vaxed-in-waterford/#adults-in-wford with each one taken from a different data source. No reason that people from surrounding counties couldn’t have been vaxed in Waterford & maybe the #adults in Waterford is out of date.

      Still though, it prob does mean that % vaxed there is higher than national average.

  2. SOQ

    You get the vaccine once, you get the vaccine twice

    Just when you think you’re done, they say a booster would be nice

    You do the Wuhan pokey and surrender all you rights-

    Because that’s what it’s all about.

    1. Bitnboxy

      And then you hokey pokey about all day online exuding an utterly misplaced sense of unvaccinated superiority feeling a sense of kinship with some of the world’s biggest charlatans and conspiracy con artists and bigots, because…

      that’s all you’ve got going on.

      Ironic really.

      1. SOQ

        Can you imagine if the inability of a medicine to work is blamed on the people who didn’t take it?

        Oh no wait….

  3. K. Cavan

    The Irish government has never been good with numbers, really & the HSE regularly just makes stuff up, even before they moved out of healthcare into the liquidation business.

  4. just millie

    I wonder if it’s something that an be incorporated into the flu jab programme. They administer it every winter and it’s used to tackle different strands of the flu virus each year.

    I’d take a booster jab over another five month lockdown tbh, and if this is the most efficient way to return to normal then I’m all for it.

    1. alickdouglas

      In theory I don’t think it would be too problematic. The problems more lie with the fact that the traditional manufacturers of flu vaccines for the western world don’t have COVID products. One key question would also be whether you wanted to use the current flu vaccine infrastructure and put a COVID antigen into that, or whether you wanted to put flu antigens into the COVID infrastructure.

      The upside of the current flu vaccines is that the processes are super-optimized and relatively reliable, and hence the vaccines are pretty darn cheap. The downside is that the process uses mind-boggling numbers of fertilized chicken eggs. This means that there is a CO2 problem (it’s really huge) and an animal welfare problem; not only do you need huge numbers of chickens to lay the eggs, but the eggs used in manufacturing are fertilized, so actually you are killing all those chicks also. There have been efforts to make egg-free flu vaccines, but the systems aren’t mature or cost-efficient yet.

      The upside of mRNA COVID manufacturing is that you don’t have to handle viral material, nor mess about with fermentors, so there’s less mess. The process also inherently permits amino-acid level manipulation of the antigen. So in theory one could optimize flu vaccines: they are infamous for their suboptimal (but reasonably ok) effectiveness.

      I don’t think it would be possible to add an mRNA or vectored antigen into the current egg-based flu vaccines for technical and biochemical reasons. And I don’t believe that either Janssen nor AZ are motivated to pursue seasonal flu with their vector platforms. There are some inactivated COVID vaccines like the Sinovac one. Would be interesting to see if Sinovac combine their Flu and Covid vaccine. The main suppliers for Europe are however GSK and Sanofi, with a bit of Sequirus I think, but none of them have Covid vaccines, so I cannot see them doing it.

      So theoretically feasible, but I think in reality some way off.

      1. just millie

        Thank you Alick. Your insight is always appreciated, especially by someone like me, with next to no knowledge of vaccines – except in getting them, of course ;)

        I do think that covid boosters are part of our future, for the foreseeable future (at least for now) especially if we are serious with moving out of lockdowns and covid restrictions.

        Incidentally, I had no idea that vaccines had such a huge carbon footprint.

        1. Man On Fire

          Medicinal production in general has a huge footprint.

          Can’t reuse the waste, strict handling conditions for products and waste.

          Production requires clean rooms running purified air.

          And on and on it goes..

  5. Clampers Outside

    Boosters?

    It’s the opinion of the CDC Chief that boosters are needed.

    Its just an “opinion”, but on e that OVERRULED the CDCs own advisory panel.

    Let that sink in.

    (Above story is easily googled)

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