What the failure of boosters may be telling us.

more support for mucosal based vaccines .. from an unlikely source.

Dr Paul Offit is a member of the FDA’s VRBPAC Committee, and as one of the 2 dissenting voices ( the committee voted 19-2 to add an Omicron related sequence to booster shots):

https://www.statnews.com/2022/06/29/fda-dont-rush-to-change-covid-19-vaccine-composition/

Dr Offit is clearly on team “vaccinate everyone” yet in this article he makes the argument that any Omicron strain related booster is likely a failed exercise right from the start.

Firstly, it’s not just the Wuhan strain that is extinct. Even the BA.1 Omicron strain that is being mooted as the source of the Omicron strain addition is already well underway to becoming extinct itself with more than 50% strains already being replaced by BA.4 and BA.5 ( and by the time the boosters are ready this extinction will most certainly be complete.)

Also he asks:

“Moderna and Pfizer executives have claimed that the Omicron vaccines will be protective for longer. That may be true, but how long is longer? A few weeks? A month or two?”

also:

“Because no one can predict how SARS-CoV-2 will further evolve, there’s no way to tell whether one or more Omicron-based boosts over the next year would be beneficial against what may emerge. What is known is that the increasingly prevalent BA.4 and BA.5 variants are even more resistant to neutralizing antibodies, typically by three- or four-fold, than the now-vanished BA.1 variant on which the Omicron vaccines are based. The trend toward greater resistance of neutralizing antibodies may well worsen.

and:

“If an Omicron-based booster provides little advantage over the vaccine stocks that already exist, is it worth the switch?”

Ok, so that raises the question: Is “vaccination” itself a valid approach to this disease?

Why is it that, as he says:

“The resulting neutralizing antibody response doesn’t appear to depend very much on whether the boost was with the original sequence, the Beta sequence, the Delta sequence, or the Omicron sequence — all are about equally as good at reawakening immune memory cells.”

and

“The Omicron vaccines also seem to elicit some neutralizing antibodies that are unique to that variant and that make a minor contribution to the overall response.”

This sounds a lot like a case for original antigenic sin or immune imprinting that Geert Vanden Bossche flagged ( and I became concerned about in mid 2021).

He also asks a great question:

“Would the country be better off ….” with “ vaccines that can be delivered into the nose, a route that may provide stronger protection against infection?”

Dr Sucharit Bhakdi and others have pointed out that without mucosal immunity with the generation of mucosal IgA, the idea of prevention of infection was always a non starter with the current approach. It is getting support from unlikely sources.

I am also increasingly questioning whether any benefit from the gene therapy experimental jabs ( especially when talking about the prevention of infection or transmission) was always the result of non specific, temporary, boosts to innate immunity and that the whole of the current antibody fixation is misleading and unhelpful as these are not the antibodies we need to prevent infection and transmission.