> because thats the only thing we are told to do.

No, this is the only thing we have at the moment that is working well enough against delta and omicron. We have to wait another 2 months at least to get omicron specific vaccines.

Current vaccines are incredibly good at reducing hospitalizations after booster. If everybody already had their booster, there would be nothing to have meaningful discussion about - there would be no meaningful stress on hospitals.

> Pfizers new antiviral drug with over 90% efficacy

Is there large enough supply of it? Is there enough diagnostic capacity to confirm the every potential case within 5 days range from symptoms onset? It is an answer but not definitely a simple answer. Also there are side effects of the drug and it is systemic, please do not forget that.

I completely welcome oral anti-virals and I hope these become a game changer.

> natural immunity

Natural immunity does not appear from thin air. How all the people who mention it seam to forget that you must have the infection with all its risks to acquire it? For me everyone that brings up "natural immunity" is automatically marked as "potentially as anti-vax weirdo who has very limited understanding of the situation and is highly biased and potentially completely crazy". Why? Because there is very high correlation between saying "natural immunity" and complete nonsense that follows and I must pay attention that conversation is continuing in good faith.

> The only political, myopic stance here is yours: “repeated boosters seem like the answer”.

There we go. GP especially mentioned that there is simple criteria - COVID19 damage prevented vs vaccine damage caused. If the vaccine causes more damage, we don't boost. If COVID19 causes more damage, we boost.

Latest study from Israel hints that current vaccine from Pfizer has reached its upper limit but that study was small and did not include the most vulnerable age groups and there is possible long term effect that is not counted in here because early UK study displayed that immunity against omicron from Pfizer vaccine wanes relatively quickly while the same from Moderna vaccine is more stable. So we actually do not know yet all the answers.

And it does not take into account omicron specific boosters that most likely will arrive a little late but perhaps not - omicron appears to be fairly resilient and there is at the moment very high probability of another variant emerging from it after it has entered India.

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Now to the part of the comment that has more substance.

I am looking currently at data from one country (that I could not mention, sorry, I value my pseudo privacy here) that is comparing previous delta wave and current omicron wave.

It is stratified by vaccination status and previous infection. Completely naive are the baseline here. Fully vaccinated (by 2 doses) had about 2.25 times smaller infection rate during previous delta wave followed by convalescents who had about 4 times smaller infection rate than that.

Finally on about the same level were both boosted(one does after vaccination or infection) - about 3 times less than convalescents.

Yes, we knew this already way before that previous infection gives good immunity and boosting it improves it even more and it was not very amusing to follow this silly argument in US that felt completely political in nature.

In current wave double vaccinated are complete toast when we talk about infection rates. There is about 10% difference in infection rates (protection against hospitalization is still very, very good, mind you!). Immunity from previous infection is still better but the difference is much smaller - 15-20%.

There is now clear difference between boosted fully vaccinated and boosted convalescents - 50% in favor of fully vaccinated. Difference between convalescents and boosted convalescents is another 50%. In total there is about 3 times difference between naive and boosted fully vaccinated.

In addition the difference is growing because infection rates are rising at different speed, so I expect that difference at the top of the wave would be much more pronounced.

Having about 3 times smaller infection rates is not perfect situation but if we also take info account huge difference in hospitalization rates, there would be no epidemic to talk about if everyone was by now fully vaccinated and boosted (or previously infected and boosted by one dose).

Now would 4th dose make any meaningful difference at the moment? No idea, really. If everyone would get boosted by now, it would be great deal already. If the 4th does not reduce infection rates by much then it would probably not make much difference but it is too early to be too confident about this.

I personally do not think that there would be another booster with the same vaccine in this country.