Do you have a source for the claim that this is a relevant consideration for the makers of the vaccine?
If you live in a place with a decent healthcare system that can manage cold chains I would be surprised if a significant amount of mRNA doses get messed up.
a. At a population level, should the healthcare system prioritize first shots or both shots. And obviously that’s first shots, the chance of the cold chain failing, etc is low.
b. Am I going to personally risk my life based on the math in the OP? The answer is I wouldn’t, so I got the second shot before leaving quarantine. This is because even if the chance of a messup is tiny it’s no consolation if I happen to be the victim. (while the risk of 2 small independent events happening in series would be the event squared, so if the chance of a mistake is 1⁄500 it would be (1/500)*(1/500), or small enough that its not a risk worth considering as the risk of a vaccine breakthrough is much higher)
Not getting the shoot because you don’t trust the calculation in the OP is completely different then not getting the shot because not trusting cold chain messups.
1⁄500 is lower then the uncertainty in the effect size of the vaccine.
I was saying you should get the second shot just in case your immune system didn’t develop a robust response the first time (biology is stochastic and not a digital system) or because the cold chain or manufacturing chain rushing the shots had an error.
Even if on paper the gain is either 0 or marginal.
For administrators planning vaccinations of a populance, of course the evidence strongly says first doses first, you shouldn’t even start with second does until all willing individuals have their first.
Similarly, the effect of the second dose might be to maintain the high initial effectiveness for a longer period of time, by “reminding” your immune system not to relax too soon.
Note that the second dose serves another purpose. The mRNA vaccines are fragile, something might have gone wrong with dose 1.
Do you have a source for the claim that this is a relevant consideration for the makers of the vaccine?
If you live in a place with a decent healthcare system that can manage cold chains I would be surprised if a significant amount of mRNA doses get messed up.
So there’s 2 different aspects here:
a. At a population level, should the healthcare system prioritize first shots or both shots. And obviously that’s first shots, the chance of the cold chain failing, etc is low.
b. Am I going to personally risk my life based on the math in the OP? The answer is I wouldn’t, so I got the second shot before leaving quarantine. This is because even if the chance of a messup is tiny it’s no consolation if I happen to be the victim. (while the risk of 2 small independent events happening in series would be the event squared, so if the chance of a mistake is 1⁄500 it would be (1/500)*(1/500), or small enough that its not a risk worth considering as the risk of a vaccine breakthrough is much higher)
Not getting the shoot because you don’t trust the calculation in the OP is completely different then not getting the shot because not trusting cold chain messups.
1⁄500 is lower then the uncertainty in the effect size of the vaccine.
I was saying you should get the second shot just in case your immune system didn’t develop a robust response the first time (biology is stochastic and not a digital system) or because the cold chain or manufacturing chain rushing the shots had an error.
Even if on paper the gain is either 0 or marginal.
For administrators planning vaccinations of a populance, of course the evidence strongly says first doses first, you shouldn’t even start with second does until all willing individuals have their first.
Similarly, the effect of the second dose might be to maintain the high initial effectiveness for a longer period of time, by “reminding” your immune system not to relax too soon.