5 ms·

Yes, that indeed is a very good point that I overlooked, I agree it weakens the case for (mandating) vaccinating minors even more. Having said that, I've also

• native_samples 5y ago
  I think the issue may be time related. Immediately after a second shot there seems to be some effectiveness but it decays very fast, and can even go negative. This sounds impossible but the UK data shows very clearly that once the vaccine wears off you're nearly 2.5x as likely to catch COVID than unvaccinated people are! This kind of negative effectiveness has happened before and immunologists know about the effect. They call it "original antigenic sin" and it refers to a type of imprinting effect, whereby the immune system misfires when presented with slightly mutated viruses by re-manufacturing the same antibodies it made before. Thus, if you trick your immune system with a vaccine, it learns to fight whatever the vaccine was targeting but that's a now obsolete and extinct 2019 strain of the virus. Then you get hit with the new strains and the antibodies it makes aren't so effective anymore, creating a delay before the body realizes its mistake and spins up new antibodies (or sometimes it seems, it may never do this - gulp). This can cause negative VE when vaccinating against something that can mutate very quickly.