Sure, let's critically evaluate the guidance put forward by our public health institutions, but quoting a statement from Norway's equivalent institution without the backing evidence doesn't make the US "wrong". If the evidence available on the efficacy of vaccines for kids is so ridiculously wide that it goes from -99% to +370% risk of infection, then surely Norway is _also_ drastically overstating its case when it says (about kids) "previous infection offers as good of protection as the vaccine against reinfection" esp since it _also_ seems like the protective effect of prior infection is both uncertain and changing.
How about flatly declaring that guidance was "wrong" about school closures because minority and poor kids did markedly worse at math? Obviously these decisions are complex trade-offs, and one can't conclude that the choice was "wrong" simply by pointing out one of the costs.
How about quoting a CDC scientist, who cannot possibly have strong evidence when making the prediction "CDC guidance worsened racial equity for generations to come. It failed this generation of children." Generations to come? Show us the data that lets this scientist predict the far future with such confidence.
I get that it's deeply unnerving when these institutions make sweeping recommendations based on less firm data than we would normally demand. But not recommending anything, or not taking decisive action because of the limited data would _also_ have been irresponsible. When schools first closed, we didn't know a lot of things, but it would have been pretty reckless if agencies said "well this is putting a lot of people in the hospital and spreading fast, but we don't have the data to give definitive guidance yet, so you're on your own. Depending on the range of things your communities choose, maybe in a few months we'll have the evidence to say something."
The protective effect of prior infection is not uncertain, nor is it changing. There have been dozens of papers now, all saying the same thing: natural infection is at least as protective (if not more so) than even 3 doses of the current vaccines. If you are hearing otherwise, you are being misinformed. Full stop.
Here's the latest paper in a long line of consistent evidence, last week in the NEJM:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2203965
> No discernable differences in protection against symptomatic BA.1 and BA.2 infection were seen with previous infection, vaccination, and hybrid immunity. Vaccination enhanced protection among persons who had had a previous infection. Hybrid immunity resulting from previous infection and recent booster vaccination conferred the strongest protection.
Norway is saying what it is, because we know that most people -- vaccinated or previously infected -- will eventually get re-infected. But even if you are re-infected, you will be well-protected against severe illness.
What I don’t understand is how vaccination and boosting using an mRNA vaccine that contains only spike protein from the original SARS2, and which is almost completely evaded by the BA.4 and BA.5 variants, can confer protection against severe illnesses caused by those variants.
What is the biochemical process that provides that protection?
EDIT: Is this protection just a happy mantra, or is it actually that there is no protection against the new variants, but the intensity of the disease from them is far less than from the original variant (and our treatment is getting better)?
At a very high level, this is the explanation: the spike protein in Omicron has many differences from the vaccine strain spike, but it's still largely the same protein. The immune system is chopping up the protein into chunks, and T- and B-Cells are specializing to recognize those chunks. This kind of immune response (the "cellular immune response") is slower to ramp up than the antibody response that many people have fixated on, but it's a much more robust defense mechanism; B- and T-Cells are very good at providing generalized antigen recognition. There have been at least 2-3 papers I'm aware of where labs have directly demonstrated that vaccinated people are producing robust immune responses to Omicron proteins.
I'd have to dig these up again, and they're not exactly comprehensible by non-specialists, but the executive summary is that we have laboratory and clinical and epidemiological data that the vaccines are still very effective against severe disease.
What the vaccines don't do anymore, is protect against infection. That was probably never a realistic goal for a respiratory virus, but it's definitely not practical with a vaccine that produces antibodies that target a very old spike protein.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742...
Here's another:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04460-3
> Between 70% and 80% of the CD4+ and CD8+ T cell response to spike was maintained across study groups. Moreover, the magnitude of Omicron cross-reactive T cells was similar for Beta (B.1.351) and Delta (B.1.617.2) variants, despite Omicron harbouring considerably more mutations. In patients who were hospitalized with Omicron infections (n = 19), there were comparable T cell responses to ancestral spike, nucleocapsid and membrane proteins to those in patients hospitalized in previous waves dominated by the ancestral, Beta or Delta variants (n = 49). Thus, despite extensive mutations and reduced susceptibility to neutralizing antibodies of Omicron, the majority of T cell responses induced by vaccination or infection cross-recognize the variant.
I may have read a third, but I can't find it easily, and these two should be more than enough to back up what I wrote / get you started.