[conspire] COVID at the end of 2021

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

[snip that you had Pfizer and the Pfizer booster]

> Now I am wondering if my next booster, whenever that is promoted,
> should be J&J so as to add a different line of defense to the castle
> model.  

Awfully good question.  I'll do you a favour and not give you a poorly
informed guess based on quickly winging it.  ;->

We're all amateur virologists/epidemilogists, at this point, trying to
sort out a lot of ambivalent information and hoping to filter out the
rubbish, and (I'm sure like you) I try to be super-careful, but one way
to increase the chance of screwing up would be to overconfidently just
Web-search a question and post what you find as the answer, without 
a good grounding in the subject.  And I'm going to be properly humble
and say I just don't know enough.

That having been said, if you want to see what the Wisdom of the Web has
to say, Web-search "vaccine mixing".  You'll find a lot of stuff from
reporters quoting seemingly credible medical authorities.  However, what
you mostly find is medical authorities endorsing following up an initial
J&J regime with one of the two mRNA boosters, on grounds of the latter
not coding for the for the exact same part of the spike protein.

Whether informed sources would recommend J&J as a 2nd booster after
three Pfizer shots is unclear.  Complicating that calculation is the
observed fact that the J&J vaccine has never generated as strong an
immune response as the mRNA vaccines.

If you trust your primary care physician's advice, asking him/her might
be a reasonable thing to do.

-- 
Cheers,        "Public health is not private health.  Epidemics are not personal
Rick Moen      diseases, and pandemics are not even national:  They take place 
rick at linuxmafia.com          across the shared immune system of human society."
McQ! (4x80)                  -- Indi Samarajiva, https://t.co/bW2w059PYp