Have you had your bivalent Covid booster yet? My wife and I have, but will it give us better protection from Covid infection?

To hear it from the Biden Administration, the answer is unequivocally yes. To emphasize the importance of getting the new booster, the Health and Human Services Department is running radio ads warning that if you’ve had Covid, you could get it again and experience even worse symptoms. To avoid this scenario, they recommend you get the new booster.

Allysia Finley, writing in The Wall Street Journal, says this is deceptive advertising. But she says we shouldn’t be surprised that the public health establishment is praising the new vaccine boosters. Federal agencies took the unprecedented step of ordering vaccine makers to produce them and recommending them without data to support their safety or efficacy.

No one is surprised that a new bivalent vaccine was developed to help stay ahead of the ever-changing virus variants. We do the same thing every year with the influenza vaccines. The idea of updating mRNA Covid shots every season originally held great promise. One advantage of this new mRNA technology is that manufacturers can tweak the genetic sequence and rapidly produce new vaccines targeting new variants. The new bivalent vaccines were targeted for the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron variants, as well as the original Wuhan strain.

But Finley reports three scientific problems have arisen.

• First, the virus is evolving much faster than the vaccines can be updated.
• Second, vaccines have hard-wired our immune systems to respond to the original Wuhan strain, so we churn out fewer antibodies that neutralize the new variants specifically targeted by the new boosters.
• Third, antibodies rapidly wane after a few months; although cellular immunity lasts much longer.

Two studies in the New England Journal of Medicine recently showed that bivalent boosters increase neutralizing antibodies against the BA.4 and BA.5 variants, but not significantly more than the original boosters. In one study, antibody levels after the bivalent boosters were 11 times as high against the Wuhan variant as the BA.5 variant. The authors opine that immune imprinting “may pose a greater challenge than is currently appreciated for inducing robust immunity against SARS-CoV-2 variants.” This isn’t unique to Covid or mRNA vaccines, though boosters may amplify the effect. Whenever you are first exposed to a virus, such as children with the flu, your future response is affected.

All this is not alarming, though it does contradict November press releases from Pfizer and Moderna asserting that their bivalent vaccines produced a response to the BA.4 and BA.5 variants four to six times that of the original boosters. In hindsight, these claims were misleading as these recent studies reveal. Neither vaccine maker conducted a randomized trial. They tested the original boosters last winter, long before the BA.5 surge and four to six months after trial participants had received their third shots. The bivalents, by contrast, were tested after BA.5 began to surge, nine to eleven months after recipients had received their third shots.

What is alarming is that this shows us once again that our public-health officials are more interested in promoting conformity to their recommendations than they are in giving us scientifically tested information. Finley says the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered the vaccine makers in June to update the boosters against BA.4 and BA.5, then rushed in late August to authorize the bivalents before clinical data were available. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended the bivalents for all adults without any evidence that they were effective – or even needed.

The CDC actually published a study in November, (long after they promoted the bivalent vaccines) which estimates the bivalents were only 22% to 43% effective against infection during the BA.5 wave – their peak efficacy. As antibodies waned and new variants took over later in the fall, their protection against infection probably dropped to near zero. Another CDC study in December reported that seniors who received bivalents were less likely to be hospitalized than the unvaccinated, and 73% less likely than those who had received two or more doses of the original vaccine. But neither study controlled for important confounding factors – such as the small minority who got bivalents were probably also more likely than those who hadn’t to follow other Covid precautions or seek treatments such as Paxlovid.

We have learned from the release of emails from the White House that they used their director of digital media, Rob Flaherty, to promote the White House public-health policy agenda by intimidating social media companies including Facebook, Twitter, and Google (YouTube). (see White House Censorship) It is not a stretch of the imagination to believe the same pressure was put upon the FDA and CDC to promote these bivalent vaccines before there was clinical evidence of their safety and effectiveness.

Am I sorry I got the bivalent vaccine? No, but I am sorry our public-health officials are determined to push the White House public-health policy agenda, regardless of whether or not it is scientifically based and clinically proven to be safe and effective.