HACKER Q&A
📣 NicoJuicy

Could Omicron boosters create an overfitting problem?


In ML there is a term: overfitting ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting )

There is currently a lot of booster talk and it seems it protects ~ 10 weeks.

I'm fully vaccinated ( Pfizer), if I plan to have the booster now then it's reasonable to assume I will get one again after 2-3 months.

In that scenario:

- Vaccine ( = 2 x )

- Booster 1 ( January)

- Booster 2 ( March)

Then in March, the Omicron booster will be ready so it's reasonable to assume I'll receive one again in June. If Omicron protects ~3 months against reinfection and the peak of infection is end of January in Europe.

In the scenario that there becomes a Omicron variant that is more infective and more dangerous, it's not unlikely that it will spread around March-April pretty fast. Before the next booster in June.

Could the human body have an overfitting problem because I was vaccinated too much against the previous variant ( that protects against Omicron, so is used against Omicron too)? This is in the scenario that I haven't received a Omicron booster and there is no "new variant booster" available.

Or is this not how the body works?

I'm curious about any related resources or research based opinion to this hypothesis ( it is a hypothesis, there are many variables that could change it and that's not what i want to discuss/find answers to. ).

Note: I'm just wondering how the human body works in this scenario and I don't know where i can ask my question. HN is a diversified crowd with people more knowledgeable about this.


  👤 josephcsible Accepted Answer ✓
I think the term you're looking for is "original antigenic sin".

👤 opwieurposiu
Omicron is a weird variant. It has evolved to defeat three different therapeutic monoclonal antibodies.

Antibodies are like the immune systems classifiers, a function that takes in a object and returns a probability that the object is a specific pathogen. If the antibody binds to the pathogen for a long time, then P_pathogen is high, if it quickly unbinds or does not bind at all, P_pathogen is low. Brownian motion is constantly bumping around all the tiny objects in the warm soup of your body, so each antibody function can be evaluated thousands of times per second.

In ML terms Omicron is like one of those adversarial image attacks that tricks a classifier into thinking a gun is a duck.

The interesting question is, was Omicron trained by nature or by man? https://bprice.substack.com/p/lab-leak-20


👤 nodemaker
Not an expert but please take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_antigenic_sin

👤 randomopining
I don't see the point of vaccinating against a lesser variant. They should save the powerful mRNA effectiveness for deadlier variants.