Data shows Covid booster shots are 'not appropriate' at this time, U.S. and international scientists

[BumRushDaShow]

18. I think everyone is now seeing that the "scientific community" is rarely "unanimous" about anything

This has been the case forever. You will always have disagreements over what any "facts" and "evidence" actually "mean".

In this case, you have experts who operate in different "lanes" (medical personnel vs epidemiologists vs virologists) and sometimes there will be a clash of opinions. And in the case of a respiratory virus that primarily spreads through airborne transmission, you can add in another group of experts who deal with airflow dynamics and particle movement.

The clashes a year ago regarding "droplets" vs "aerosolization" was a perfect example of scientists and medical personnel "assuming things" outside of their areas of expertise. And in a number of cases, some were loudly making bad "black or white conclusions" that had an impact on masking decisions that should have had enough "shades of gray" to allow time for other experts to have a chance to look at the data and provide some input.

Having listened to both CDC's & FDA's Committees when they streamed their meetings/discussions the past year, you will often find a couple out of the majority of participants, who will disagree, sometimes vehemently, but they usually have some reasoning behind "why". But in general, they have all been working in tandem.

In the case of a "booster" - one of things brought out in their last meeting was use of the term "booster". A number of members insisted that use of the term itself was a misnomer and believed that the way it is being described/formulated *should* have it considered to be a "3rd dose" (or a "3rd in a series" for the original "2-dose" regiments) vs a "booster dose". Since a large number of vaccines are initially used in children, many of the Committee physician members actually work in the pediatric field and have become accustomed to how vaccines are characterized for that demographic.

This is a "techie" issue that is sadly playing out in the lay community. It hearkens back to a similar "technical" dispute between the NWS, the media, and the lay public revolving around Hurricane Sandy and its "technical" (per past definitions and practice) "type change" from "Hurricane Sandy" to "Super Storm Sandy", with its "tropical" nature "technically" stripped at the latitude of landfall, thus "technically" no longer qualifying as a "hurricane" (which is a tropical system), but had transitioned into a "non-tropical cyclone". But the outrage was palatable because everything else about it was "hurricane like". The bitterness a decade later persists because of that as the terms have different meanings, particularly when it comes to insurance claims, among other things, and changes were made to try to rectify these "technicalities" due to public reaction.

I think there are a myriad of issues here that they have had to deal with that are literally unprecedented - the virus itself (and its mutations), the vaccines (and how novel they are - particularly the mRNA ones), the scope of the pandemic (something not seen since 1918), and the politicization of how to handle moving on and combating the the impact of infections.