Originally Posted by
Moveon
Doctors don't prescribe ivermectin for Covid 19 as it's not been approved for that viral disease. It's used for treating parasites not viruses. Do you know the difference between a virus and a parasite? Mostly ivermectin is used to treat horses for worms and the dosage is much greater than treating humans for a parasite infection. Therefore everyone is not qualified to become a doctor. They screen out people before allowing the smartest ones into medical school for a reason.
Now you may not understand how vaccines work. An antigen is introduced into the body be it a virus or other pathogen. The body's defenses recognize the antigen and make antibodies to attack the antigen. The next time the same antigen is found in the body the bodies antibodies are already primed to react faster and they attack the antigen faster and with more antibodies. This is now it works in most humans. The said that the Pfizer vaccine had a 95% efficacy. Nothing is perfect so in about 5% on average the vaccines are not effective. Reasons can be immune deficiency where the body does not produce antibodies. Certain medicines can cause this effect. Some people undergoing cancer treatments or getting certain steroids won't be able to produce antibodies in response to an antigen introduced into the body. So, 95% get immunity and 5% don't on Average. Now you may or may not know how averages are calculated. The more people who are studied (N) the better the statistical results. Therefore, they had 40,000 people in the phase three trials for the Pfizer vaccine. There are COE and standard deviations that are calculated also. The more people that are studied the better the statistical data. Then there are outliers and other things to consider. You can group the data into age categories as well. What they found is that the older people are not developing enough antibodies due to age and other factors. So, these are the first people that needed a booster shot for the Pfizer vaccine. Now also there are three different vaccines that we have here in the USA. Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson and Johnson. There are other types of covid vaccines too. So, it gets complicated which is why doctors make these decisions not we peons. The Pfizer and Moderna Vaccines are the mRNA types. I'm not sure what the AstraZeneca and others are. I can't recall if J&J is a mRNA type or other vaccine. But there are other vaccines that are not the mRNA types. The mRNA vaccines were developed to fight the original variant of the SARS CoV2 virus. The virus has mutated also. There are several variants out there now and the most prominent is the Delta Variant of Sars CoV-2. Delta is much more transmittable and infects much faster than the original variant of SARS CoV-2. So now we have multiple variables to contend with. And remember it takes a lot of time to develop and test these vaccines before they can be approved for distribution into arms. So we need to answer one more of your questions. No they are not all the same and the order makes a difference. The booster shots don't have as much of the antigen in them as the first and second shots for the Pfizer vaccine. Which is why they call it a booster. The body already has seen the Pfizer vaccine antigen two times before for fully vaccinated people and only needs a small dose of the Pfizer antigen to boost the immune system into making antibodies. Most or 95% of the people are able to fend off the virus after only two shots. Remember they don't call this virus a Novel Coronavirus for nothing. This is a new virus that the world has never seen before so we are learning about it as we go. We have only been seeing this virus for about two years now and it's a moving target as it keeps mutating or changing on us. New studies in Israel showed that our immunity that is produced by the vaccine can wane over time. But remember that it depends on how they test immunity. Which is hard to do. The Israeli scientist found that immunity was slowing down over time (six months after the second dose of Pfizer vaccine and there were some breakthrough infections. So, they started to give everyone in Israel booster shots to protect them better. They are a small country and under constant threat from their neighbors and need everyone healthy to survive so they do it right. Other studies have shown that immunity can wane over time, so booster shots are necessary. We here in the USA decided to give the booster shots to the over sixty-five age group first. Also, people that are more likely to get the virus are included such as first responders and such. Younger people have better immune systems in general and are still protected by the first two shots of the Pfizer vaccine. Notice I an only using the Pfizer vaccine to simply this discussion. Like I said this is a brand-new virus that the world has never seen before and we are still trying to learn how it works and what we can do to fight it. And it keeps changing. 700,000 Americans have already died from this virus and that is more than all the previous World Wars, Korean War, Vietnam War and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.