Whoa wait - I’ve only had 5 and I thought I had all the ones that were offered and recommended for my age group. My most recent was this past September, I guess I should look into when I’m due for #6. Thanks!
Woah seven? If you dont mind, what's your condition that calls for that many?
I'm staying current on flu, but multiple physicians have advised me that the most recent COVID vaccine isn't applicable for normal, healthy folks
Edit: I'm not furthering an antivaxx perspective here, I've had 4. I was curious where in the world, or under what conditions 7 is the current recommendation.
This is probably preaching to the choir, but long covid is pretty nasty stuff. If you are able to regularly get vaccinated against covid and the vaccines are also effective at lowering risk of long covid, then get vaccinated.
I'm traumatized after seeing the effects of long covid on a family member. The covid infection itself wasn't great, mind you, but the after effects have been awful.
It's been 2 long and difficult years since the initial covid infection. There was a point when things were on the right trajectory in terms of recovery, but if I'm actually being honest with myself, it was false hope. The person I used to know isn't ever really, fully coming back. It's traumatic for them because they know they aren't the same. It's traumatic for me because I lost the caring, intelligent, thoughtful, loving, empathetic person I used to know while also watching them suffer from delusions, depression, and all manner of issues while fully realizing that something is wrong without knowing what or how to fix/change it.
"Today rates of long COVID have dropped, likely thanks to increased immunity, milder variants and improved treatment." I've been listening to TWIV (This Week in Virology) since March of 2020. I don't think they would agree with all of that statement. 1. Increased immunity makes sense given we've been exposed to the disease itself and/or vaccines. 2. Milder variants - every time this idea comes up, someone on TWIV will cite data (morbidity and mortality) showing it's just plain not the case. 3. Improved treatment - perhaps, but not much has changed since Paxlovid, Molnupirivir were introduced in late 2021. Prevention, that is, Handwashing, Masking, Distancing, and in the case of infection Isolation all help to break the chain of transmission. These are behavioral changes, that anyone can choose to do. And they are effective, just take a look at rates of influenza in 2020, when everyone was being cautious, the rates were extremely low. When we got bored with prevention the numbers came back up, e.g. 2021, 2022, and 2023. And there's a 5th measure, Jala Neti, or Nasal Rinsing, typically with salt water, mechanically removes the virus particles, and bacteria. Adding a small amount of 1% Baby Shampoo to the Neti solution does a lot to inactivate viruses, and kill bacteria.
Interesting, was just wondering about that, as a separate thing I'd seen was that repeated exposure to COVID seemed to actually increase your chances of experiencing Long COVID. I still wonder how that factors into it, even if you have been vaccinated multiple times, will it help with repeated exposure to COVID over time (likely we won't know for awhile, but this seems to suggest it would)?
Yet another thing that vaccinated people can point to that shows we were right and the antivaxxers were wrong, though obviously they'll not bother to care about this new data point if they've not cared about it before, but at least they'll have that Long COVID to keep them company.
Most reinfection studies were done on people who contacted it more than once in a year IIRC, and COVID suppresses T cell levels for nearly a year, or sometimes even more.
I'm not sure we can say more infections = higher risk per infection, but each additional infection is another roll of the dice in any case.
I'd be interested to see whether this holds for all the COVID variants. Especially since the virus is now endemic and will continue to mutate. Obviously, they'll keep researching and we'll see in time.
I have seen multiple other reports that said getting vaccinated raises the risk for long COVID and now I don't know what to believe, although this sounds better.
We still have quite some way to go before we fully understand long COVID and the lowered levels of long COVID could simply correlate with lowered levels of COVID related hysteria.
Before you downvote, I'm not saying long COVID isn't a real phenomena, I'm saying that correlation doesn't always equal causation.
The fact of the matter is that there is a 100% fatality rate for the set of people who have had even one mRNA vaccine. There is an identical fatality rate for the set of people who have had zero mRNA vaccines, but that isn't important.
Also I should mention the timespan for the fatality rate: 150 years, but I won't.