Should you get a second booster if you’re over 60?

Here are the numbers from the Israeli study on second boosters for those over 60.  You can read the entire paper here — https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1478439/v1.

A few points:

First:  the paper is a preprint and hasn’t been peer reviewed, edited or revised due to requests from the editors and reviewers at one of the Nature Journals.  So everything in it must be regarded as provisional.

Second: the Israeli source is impeccable and everything it has published has stood up.

Third: the numbers are large; 328,597 people over 60 getting two booster shots and 234,868 getting one. Big numbers mean reliable statistics

Fourth:  The study is very short term; only 40 days.

The numbers:  92/328597 people getting two boosters died

232/234868 people getting one booster died

Fifth: while the results are impressive, they mean that those getting one booster had only a 1 in a thousand chance of dying, while those getting  two booster had a 1 in 10 thousand chance.

Personally, I’m going to pass on the second booster.  I can live with a 1 in a thousand chance of dying from the pandemic virus with my one shot.

Sixth:  I may change my tune assuming followup continues and more and more people in both groups become infected, but the data at 40 days are not convincing for me

Thanks to Shanghai we’re about to get excellent information on just how sick the current omicron variant is likely to make you.  Shanghai has 27 million people, half of which was locked down Monday 28 March.   They are planning to do the most accurate test we have for the virus — PCR for viral nucleic acid — according to the following article — https://www.shine.cn/news/metro/2203303748/

Some 8 million people have already been sampled.  We should know the extent of the asymptomatic infections soon.

Unfortunately my worries about what would happen to China are coming true.  I wrote a post about it 15 March.  Here’s the link — be warned, it’s rather long.  https://luysii.wordpress.com/2022/03/15/china-will-be-near-collapse-due-to-covid19-heres-why/