At first glance, the headline from the January 22 Wall Street Journal column decrying the propagandistic push for the bivalent COVID-19 booster shots gives hope that corporate media is beginning to break ranks on that part of the Pandemic Panic Narrative that pushes mRNA inoculation to the exclusion of all else.
Certainly the lede is nothing short of accusatory regarding the hype surrounding the bivalent booster shots.
You might have heard a radio advertisement warning that if you’ve had Covid, you could get it again and experience even worse symptoms. The message, sponsored by the Health and Human Services Department, claims that updated bivalent vaccines will improve your protection.
This is deceptive advertising. But the public-health establishment’s praise for the bivalent shots shouldn’t come as a surprise. Federal agencies took the unprecedented step of ordering vaccine makers to produce them and recommending them without data supporting their safety or efficacy.
Moreover, the column’s author, Allysia Finley, goes on to highlight research1 published in the New England Journal of Medicine that directly challenges the Big Pharma claims about the boosters.
Boosting with new bivalent mRNA vaccines targeting both the BA.4–BA.5 variant and the D614G strain did not elicit a discernibly superior virus-neutralizing peak antibody response as compared with boosting with the original monovalent vaccines. Limitations of our study include the small sample size and follow-up period of our groups. We also note that the between-group comparisons were not controlled for factors such as age, vaccine type, and health status, which may have had an effect on antibody responses. These findings may be indicative of immunologic imprinting, although follow-up studies are needed to determine whether antibody responses will deviate over time, including after the administration of a second bivalent booster.
The studies’ findings contradict November press releases from Pfizer and Moderna asserting that their bivalents produced a response to the BA.4 and BA.5 variants four to six times that of the original boosters. These claims are misleading. Neither vaccine maker conducted a randomized trial. They tested the original boosters last winter, long before the BA.5 surge and 4½ to months after trial participants had received their third shots. The bivalents, by contrast, were tested after BA.5 began to surge, 9½ to 11 months after recipients had received their third shots.
A likely explanation for the failure of the bivalent booster shots to produce the appropriate antibodies is “imprinting”2—the original mRNA inoculations “prime” the immune system for responding to the original Wuhan strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, to the exclusion of other variants targets in a bivalent booster.
Why did the strategy for significantly increasing BA.4 and BA.5 neutralizing antibodies using a bivalent vaccine fail? The most likely explanation is imprinting. The immune systems of people immunized with the bivalent vaccine, all of whom had previously been vaccinated, were primed to respond to the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2. They therefore probably responded to epitopes shared by BA.4 and BA.5 and the ancestral strain, rather than to new epitopes on BA.4 and BA.5. This effect could possibly be moderated by immunizing people either with BA.4 and BA.5 mRNA alone or with a greater quantity of BA.4 and BA.5 mRNA. Evidence in support of these strategies can be found in Pfizer–BioNTech’s data regarding its BA.1-containing bivalent vaccine, which showed that BA.1-specific neutralizing-antibody responses were greater in persons who were injected with a monovalent vaccine containing 30 μg or 60 μg of BA.1 mRNA or a bivalent vaccine containing 30 μg of BA.1 mRNA and 30 μg of ancestral-strain mRNA than in those who received a bivalent vaccine containing 15 μg of each type of mRNA.
As of November 15, 2022, only about 10% of the population for whom the bivalent vaccine had been recommended had received it.5 By December 2022, the BA.4 strain was no longer circulating, and BA.5 accounted for less than 25% of circulating SARS-CoV-2 strains, having been partially replaced by more immune-evasive strains, such as BQ.1, BQ.1.1, BF.7, XBB, and XBB.1.
Certainly Ms. Finley brings receipts to her criticism of Big Pharma’s gaming of the system to release essentially untested inoculation products onto an unquestioning American public.
Yet it would be premature to conclude that the WSJ has brokent ranks with the rest of corporate media over the inoculations. Quite the contrary, while Ms. Finley is critical of Pfizer and Moderna for their cynical manipulations of the system, she also closes her article with this:
Covid vaccines mitigated severe illness while most Americans gained immunity through natural infection, which substantially boosts protection. There’s a growing consensus that we need better vaccines and treatments to protect those still at risk. But we also need honest public-health leaders.
The shots are still good, in other words, but Moderna and Pfizer just failed to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s on the bivalent booster shots.
This notion of inoculation efficacy, however, has long been debunked and discredited by multiple sources, including this Substack. The epidemiological data alone made it clear by the fall of 2021 that the inoculations failed to stop the spread of COVID-19.
While Ms Finley does call out the level of research done in support of the bivalent booster shots, she does it from the perspective that the monovalent shots are a better choice, because they actually work (no, they don’t).
“Such rapid and simultaneous emergence of multiple variants with enormous growth advantages is unprecedented,” a Dec. 19 study in the journal Nature notes. Under selective evolutionary pressures, the virus appears to have developed mutations that enable it to transmit more easily and escape antibodies elicited by vaccines and prior infection.
The same study posits that immune imprinting may be contributing to the viral evolution. Vaccines do a good job of training the immune system to remember and knock out the original Wuhan variant. But when new and markedly different strains come along, the immune system responds less effectively.
On the other hand, she is very much a defender of the core narrative proposition that the inoculations have been beneficial overall.
Two years ago, vaccines were helpful in reducing severe illness, particularly among the elderly and those with health risks like diabetes and obesity. But experts refuse to concede that boosters have yielded diminishing benefits and may even have made individuals and the population as a whole more vulnerable to new variants like XBB.
Evidence supporting the efficacy of Moderna and Pfizer vaccines in adults, at least at the time they were approved, was also far stronger. Both trials were large and robust enough to demonstrate 95% efficacy against infection with a strong degree of certainty. By contrast, the FDA authorized the vaccines for toddlers based on a comparison of the antibodies they generated to the original Wuhan variant with those in young adults who had received two doses. But two doses offer little if any protection against Omicron infection in adults, and even protection against hospitalization is only around 40% to 60%.
In relative terms, the Pfizer vaccine reduced the probability of infection from 0.88% to 0.04%
While the reduction from a 0.88% probability of infection to a 0.04% probability is indeed a dramatic reduction, relatively speaking, one is reminded of the old joke about having a penny and acquiring another penny: yes, you have doubled your money but you still only have two cents.
Ms. Finley never bothers to critique that aspect of the Pfizer data.
Are Covid-19 vaccines a failure? That’s the view in some media quarters amid breakthrough infections and new virus variants. It’s also false. Vaccinated people are more prone to mild infections than public-health authorities initially anticipated. But the shots continue to provide strong protection against serious disease, and the mRNA vaccines in particular—Pfizer/BioNTech’s and Moderna’s—are adaptable to new variants.
More important, the drama over vaccines has masked a bigger and untold story, which is the vast promise of mRNA technology. Messenger RNA has shown enormous potential for medical applications beyond Covid to other infectious diseases, as well as vaccines and treatments for conditions from cancer to multiple sclerosis. Its development is a tale of scientific perseverance and serendipity that deserves more attention, with a prominent role by an American immigrant from communist Hungary.
One remarkable aspect of the Covid-19 pandemic has been how often unpopular scientific ideas, from the lab-leak theory to the efficacy of masks, were initially dismissed, even ridiculed, only to resurface later in mainstream thinking. Differences of opinion have sometimes been rooted in disagreement over the underlying science. But the more common motivation has been political.
Another reversal in thinking may be imminent. Some scientists have raised concerns that the safety risks of Covid-19 vaccines have been underestimated. But the politics of vaccination has relegated their concerns to the outskirts of scientific thinking—for now.
The increased risk of cardiovascular events following the Covid-19 vaccine isn’t news; it has been known for over a year. Research has identified cardiovascular risks in the general population, and especially among young males following Covid-19 mRNA vaccination:
• A Scandinavian study in JAMA Open noted an increased risk of coronary artery disease after Moderna’s mRNA vaccine, along with an increased risk of cerebrovascular disease after both Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines.
• Findings in the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research suggest that Covid-19 mRNA vaccination could be associated with an increased risk of acute myocardial infarction among Medicare enrollees.
• A study in JAMA Cardiology reported that Covid-19 mRNA vaccination increased the incidence of diagnosed myocarditis in males 16 to 24 by as much as a factor of 18 after the second dose.
• A study completed in Israel and published in Scientific Reports found that Covid-19 vaccine rollout was associated with an increase in acute cardiac events among young people.
Given the existence of these studies, all of which show a significant health risk to mRNA inoculation, that there are not more doctors taking a stand against any further use of the inoculations is a scandal unto itself. That corporate media has worked to silence those doctors who do take that stand is yet another scandal. It is very much to the credit of the WSJ that it has seen fit to publish such contrarian (but scientifically sound) positions.
Yet we should not overlook the paper’s broader reporting of the COVID-19 “pandemic”, and its willingness to further the Pandemic Panic Narrative as a whole. While it is always good when any paper, reporter, or columnist begins to question the “official” narrative and to think critically about the available facts and evidence on any issue, that critical thinking must be carried through to its logical conclusion.
There can be no escaping the question of what role did politics play in the approval of the initial mRNA inoculations, given that politics has perverted the process by which the boosters were approved, and by which the inoculations were approved for young children. If one is questioning the scientific evidence behind the bivalent boosters, one must also question the evidence behind the original inoculations. It is irrational in the extreme to question the integrity of the bivalent boosters and not question the integrity of Operation Warp Speed in its entirety.
These are the questions Allysia Finley has yet to ask. This is the scrutiny the WSJ has yet to bring to the mRNA inoculations. As good as it is for a mainstay of corporate media to be questioning parts of the Pandemic Panic Narrative, until the entire narrative is subjected to critical scrutiny based on the totality of available evidence, the effort remains incomplete.
Allysia Finley has said some of the quiet part out loud regarding the mRNA inoculations. There is still much more that needs to be said, much more that she needs to say if her work is to contain any credibility and integrity.
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thanks for this post, I read a couple different papers, when i saw Finley's opinion piece in the WSJ on 1/1/23 "Are Vaccines Fueling Covid Variants?" I gasped out loud, I really didn't expect a major paper to shift. I wonder where this is going, if it indicates a return to more reasonable discussions which include weighing the pros and cons in medical decisions... you know, in the way we used to.
It’s progress. It’s more cracks in the dam. The Truth will out!
thanks for this post, I read a couple different papers, when i saw Finley's opinion piece in the WSJ on 1/1/23 "Are Vaccines Fueling Covid Variants?" I gasped out loud, I really didn't expect a major paper to shift. I wonder where this is going, if it indicates a return to more reasonable discussions which include weighing the pros and cons in medical decisions... you know, in the way we used to.