Friday, June 10, 2022

Last night I received another humbling honor associated with the honorary doctorate in science that I received from Rockefeller University in New York City. I could not attend in person because of scheduling conflict and so I taped my acceptance speech. However, last night there was a black tie affair in which individuals presented the life work of the degree recipients. Jeffrey Ravetz did an amazing job in presenting my story going back to my early days in Brooklyn. At the end of his presentation Rockefeller President Rick Lifton was very generous in his praise for me and pointed out that the audience at the celebratory dinner was giving me a standing ovation, which I could not see since I was connected to the affair by Zoom. It has been an extraordinary spring with all of these wonderful honors that I have received. This will have been my 58th honorary doctorate. Major issue that I am involved with regarding the choice of the 4th dose boost in the Fall. Everyone is trying to decide what 4th dose boosts will be given to the entire population in the Fall. A recent study by Moderna showed that there was a modest advantage of the bivalent omicron plus ancestral strain vaccine boost over ancestral strain alone when one measures antibodies against omicron. They are pushing this now to be the candidate for the 4th dose boost in the Fall. However, there is no Omicron (BA.1) around right now and even though BA.4 and BA.5 are emerging, by the time we get to the Fall we will have already peaked and declined with BA.4/5 and so we will have a vaccine that is directed against a variant that very likely will not be present in the fall and winter. We have hundreds of millions of doses of ancestral strain vaccine and in order to get a new bivalent boost available we would have to make a decision in July or August to get it ready for October or November or later, which actually might be too late. If we do not use those hundreds of millions of doses of ancestral strain they will go to waste and have to be thrown away. And so as far as I'm concerned the ancestral strain boost may not raise the titers against different variants to a very high level, but it does keep them within a protective range so I would make an argument then rather than waste millions of doses and invest in a candidate that might not do anymore of protection against a given variant in the fall and winter, we should go ahead and utilize the ancestral strain vaccines that we have which might do just as good a job against any future variants. I will try to make that case as we talk about future plans for boosters. PRESS: Zoom wih Clara Lussich of El Pais (Uruguay); Radio interview with Marc Siegel Sirius Doctor Radio;