Boosters with the original vaccine recipe will give about 2 months of sterilizing protection against Omicron, so unless you want to force EVERYBODY to get a shot EVERY 2 months, we are mopping with the faucet wide open.
Listen, after listening to MANY lectures from MIT to Stanford, to docs from all over the world, it has become clear to me that we pretty much KNEW already that sterilizing protection against a coronavirus doesn't last much longer than 6 months after natural immunity, although protection against severe disease lasts much longer. Here is a fantastic in depth explanation about viral immunology.
Michel Nussenzweig: "Viral immunology" (9/29/20) - YouTube
It shows how infection with a particular virus will create a range of antibodies, some of which bind perfectly, but some that are just a little different. Your body keeps them around in ever decreasing numbers, but the recipe is there. When a variant arises that is different enough from the original strain so that the perfect match ABs for the original don't fit anymore, chances are there ARE some ABs that DO fit if the variant is not TOO different. Your system can then ramp up production of the ones that fit perfectly, plus again a range of course for potential future variants.
Bottom line is, in the middle of October we already had more than 10 thousand fully vaccinated Americans who had died of Covid anyway; if the vaccine efficacy against death is 99.9% as it seems (a little more maybe), that means we had already had 10 MILLION breakthrough infections. IN OCTOBER, before Omicron.
Just found this from ABC News: "While federal data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is incomplete, only accounting for a subset of states, the analysis found that between April and November, more than 16,700 vaccinated people had died -- the vast majority since the start of the delta variant's surge, earlier this summer." This was BEFORE Omicron.