>Well, one advantage for working people is that they could schedule the booster before their day off from work. But the illness itself can not be scheduled in such a fashion, forcing them to use sick days or even potentially having to go to work when they are sick.

I get how this is a benefit, but I've never heard a doctor promote a vaccine primarily because it allows you to better schedule your symptoms.

Also, there is the issue that this study only last 3 months. If the CDC is looking to move to a yearly booster model (which seems like a good possibility based on a number of data points), the real question is what does it do over a 12 month period, especially because we know that the protection granted by the monovalent booster waned with time.

I mean, if getting the vax gives you symptoms right away and then you still get symptomatic COVID 6 months down the road, is that better than just getting COVID in 2 months?

To be fair, we don't know if this is how it would look. Maybe it gives you significant protection for the full 12 months. Maybe the people that don't get it catch COVID twice in that period instead of once. The point is that we don't have the data to say with any certainty.

>And this is granting that the side effects are comparable, which seems unlikely for a vaccine without a live virus or adjuvant.

The problem is that there are factors that would tend to skew the cost/benefit analysis both for and against the booster. One of the biggest ones highlights one of the complaints people have with reporting relative effectiveness but not absolute numbers, and can probably be best illustrated by an example.

The rate of vaccine side effects applies to everyone that got the vaccine. So if 300M people get the vaccine, we end up with ~150M people with experiencing systemic side effects.

Ok, now how much symptomatic illnesses are actually prevented in that 3 month period. Some people would look at it and say:

>Well about the same number. ~48% effectiveness at preventing symptomatic illness times 300M people means ~150M symptomatic illnesses prevented.

The problem with that is that the 48% is a relative effectiveness. That means that the hypothetical calculation above that would say it prevented ~150M symptomatic illnesses only works if all 300M people would actually get symptomatic COVID in the 3 month period without the booster.

In reality, CDC reporting only shows something like ~40M cases over the past 3 months. The math is more complicated, but to simplify for the purpose of a reddit discussion, that means we are looking at a ~20M reduction in symptomatic illness over the 3 month period if everyone got boosters.

Even if the side effects of the vax skew more mild than the symptomatic diseases prevented, it would seem to be overwhelmed by the fact that vaxxing everyone would result in having ~130M more instances of symptomatic side effects from vaxxing everyone compared to reduction in illnesses prevented in the 3 months we are looking at.

The fact that not all cases are reported to the CDC would serve to prop up the "vax benefits" side and the fact that side effects are under reported would serve to prop up the "vax costs" side. How much this impacts the final analysis isn't know.

This lack of data and transparency this far into the pandemic is a major problem.