When Health Canada on Tuesday approved Moderna’s updated Spikevax vaccine – designed to target Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5 – health officials avoided labelling the latest shot a ‘booster’ during a technical briefing. Here’s why they say they’re dropping the word.
“The idea is that we’ll get to a place where it may be much like the flu vaccines, where people may be on a regular schedule getting an updated vaccine,” she said. “So I think there’s more benefit just talking about the latest vaccine or the updated vaccine rather than going back to years ago when we were talking about your very first two doses or speaking about boosters.”
Don’t care what it’s called. I think what most people just want to know are:
- How effective is it?
- How safe is it?
- What is the risk without taking it?
Maybe skip the semantics
- more than not
- safe as the 17 other vaccines you took in your life.
- death.
The risk with taking it is death, but not as likely because the COVID risk is reduced.
Look. You can trust the experts or you can vilify them. Our PHA isn’t paid to push drugs. They get paid whether you in particular take the vaccine or not; and if you don’t, it’s a vaccine - and maybe a house and a job - that’s given to someone else after you.
So if I take it I die at some point and if I don’t I also die at some point - I am not getting out of this alive, am I?
We all die at some point
Thats what they were getting at
During the early pandemic the anti-reality folks said that the Covid vaccine wasn’t actually a vaccine since you didn’t need boosters with a real vaccine like the polio vaccine. I pointed out that the polio vaccine primary series required three boosters. No, no, they said…those were part of the vaccine, not boosters. I pointed out that each subsequent dose boosted the immune response so they were, in fact, boosters. No, no, they said. They were part of the primary series of the vaccine, not boosters. I then pointed out that in some recipients the immune response from the primary series wasn’t strong enough and that they required, “additional boosters”, according to the description of the vaccine. “You shut your porky mouth, they said.”
Whether it’s called a booster or a vaccine doesn’t matter to me. I’m going to get it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
When Health Canada on Tuesday approved Moderna’s updated Spikevax vaccine – designed to target Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5 – Canadian health officials also avoided calling the latest shot a booster during a technical briefing later that day.
Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, likened the new language around updated vaccines to the same language public health agencies use when referring to the flu shot each year.
Dr. Supriya Sharma, chief medical adviser with Health Canada, added that the language shift came about from a series of conversations with regulators about creating standardized, international terminology for the vaccines.
As part of that conversation, she said, Health Canada and other regulators also decided to stop referring to “primary series” doses – the initial COVID-19 vaccine doses a previously unvaccinated person receives.
Dr. Matthew Tunis, executive secretary to the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI), explained during the technical briefing Tuesday that the new phrasing also falls in line with how drug manufacturers are talking about the vaccines in their own official monographs.
Tunis and Sharma both agreed it isn’t wrong or inaccurate to continue call the seasonal jabs “boosters,” since they boost the body’s immune response to SARS-CoV-2, but said the official language is nonetheless evolving.
The original article contains 404 words, the summary contains 205 words. Saved 49%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Strange, just heard a radio commercial here over in Germany to check, if you’re qualified to get another booster. I have to say it was a commercial by biontec!
