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The new "Omicron-specific" mRNA Covid boosters are WORSE than useless (substack.com)
A new paper says people who got them actually generated FEWER antibodies to Omicron than those who got the older shots as a booster - and FAR fewer than people who had a natural Omicron infection
So much for the Omicron boosters.
Updated mRNA booster shots from Pfizer and Moderna - okayed for human use on the basis of data from a handful of mice - actually produce fewer useful antibodies against Omicron than a fourth jab with the original formulation.
Don’t take it from me. Take it from a paper released Monday from Dr. David Ho, one of the world’s top virologists.
Worse, newer Omicron variants evade both types of boosters with particular ease, the report found.
The report helps explain why Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control, was infected yet again last week with Sars-Cov-2 just a month after receiving her newest booster.
Given that the original fourth dose appears to provide at most a few weeks of partial protection against Omicron infection, the booster dose may well offer NO protection at all against the new variants.
(Positive for Covid, unconfirmed case of a bad spray tan!)
The report strongly suggests anyone who received mRNA shots should hope the next Sars-Cov-2 variants remain mild as the current Omicron variants, because those folks will have very little protection from future Sars-Cov-2 variants going forward.
In other words: immune imprinting and original mRNA vaccine antigenic sin are real, and they’re spectacular (spectacularly bad).
About the only good news in the study actually comes from vaccine failure. People who had three shots and then were infected with Omicron had markedly higher antibody levels than people who received either booster.
See how the purple lines in the chart below are higher than any of the others? Those are people who had three shots and then a breakthrough Omicron infection; they have better protection going forward than anyone who received a fourth booster.
Also see how within each chart the line on the far left is higher than the next seven? The line on the far left marks antibody response to the ORIGINAL strain of Sars-Cov-2, called D614G; the others are all Omicron variants.
Note that the trend holds even for the orange graph, the people who received an “Omicron-specific” booster for the fourth shot. In other words, giving people an Omicron booster did not change their tendency to produce antibodies that work very well against the original variant of Sars-Cov-2, not well against Omicron.
The only difference is they produce fewer of ALL the antibodies.
Aside from that, everything is fine. No wonder Pfizer and Moderna are in such a hurry to disclose data from the human trials of these new boosters!
