Cleveland Clinic Study Finds Efficacy of Pfizer Bivalent Booster Is a Mere Thirty Percent and That the Likelihood of Reinfection INCREASES with the Number of Prior Doses
A study released 19 December by the Cleveland Clinic has shown that the real-world efficacy of the bivalent booster shots is a puny thirty percent – far below the figure of fifty percent efficacy then-commissioner of the FDA Stephen Hahn promised us way back in August of 2020. How long even this paltry effect lasts is an open question, given that the boosters were made available just last September, and the maximum follow-up time was ninety-eight days.
Perhaps more disturbingly, the likelihood of contacting COVID-19 after the bivalent booster INCREASES with the number of prior shots, in a step-wise, dose-dependent fashion. Those who got the bivalent shot after three or more prior doses had three times the likelihood of subsequent infection as those who had none. Normally this sort of thing is considered proof of a cause-and-effect relationship.
In fairness, it ought to be pointed out there may be potential confounders here. It could be that individuals who got the most prior doses were the ones most at risk for COVID-19. However, the researchers themselves nixed the idea, noting that the majority of subjects (all of whom were Cleveland Clinic employees) were young and all were eligible to have received at least three or more doses, and all had ample opportunity to do so. The researchers also noted that such individuals probably are more likely to engage in risky behaviors than their fully-vaxxed counterparts – and yet their rate of infection was lower.
How can this be? Thomas Francis, the scientist who first isolated the flu virus, found that when subjects are exposed to a particular strain of the virus, the antibodies they produce bind most strongly not to that particular strain but to the strain that was most prevalent when the subject was a child. It was as if, once the immune system is trained to “see” a particular strain of the virus, it can “see” only that strain and no other. He called this phenomenon “original antigenic sin.”
Since then original antigenic sin has been documented for a variety of viral infections, not just in humans but in animals as well. How this happens is nowhere near as important as that it happens, but one possible explanation is that when the novel strain of pathogen invades the body, the memory B-cells produces antibodies which bind to the pathogen, but only weakly. These memory B-cells than are stimulated to divide and produce more cells which produce more antibodies which bind weakly, while other B-cells that might have done a better job never get a chance to do so.
On the other hand, there already was ample evidence that the risk of myocarditis (probably the most common and best-documented toxic effect of the vax) rises with the number of doses (click here and here for details).
It remains to be seen whether these findings will cause government regulatory agencies to temper their calls for repeated booster shots.