Thread by @celinegounder

1/ There's good evidence that to protect against severe disease, hospitalization, & death, the following would benefit from an additional dose of COVID vaccine:
- immunocompromised persons
- people 60-65+ (? 40+)
- residents of long-term care facilities

nytimes.com/2021/10/25/hea…

2/

3/ What should our goal be with the vaccines?
- Prevention of severe disease, hospitalization, & death
- Prevention of symptomatic infection (which means trying to prevent ALL infections since we can't always predict who'll be symptomatic)

4/ The current vaccines don't provide sterilizing immunity, so we won't be able to prevent ALL infections.

But even if want to prevent MOST infections, what would that take?

5/ It helps to acknowledge what the vaccines can & can't do (which I think many still don't understand):

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/w…

theatlantic.com/science/archiv…

6/ If we want to prevent ALMOST ALL infections, we'll need to consider:
- frequent (yearly?) COVID vaccine boosters
- complementing injectable COVID vaccines with mucosal COVID vaccines
- layering additional protections: masking, testing, ventilation, air filtration