ABC News Gets ‘Original Antigenic Sin’ Completely Wrong

Introduction

Months before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first issued “emergency use authorization” (EUA) for COVID‑19 vaccines, I was already warning about the risk of a detrimental immunologic phenomenon known as “original antigenic sin”. I authored General Assembly document A/HRC/45/NGO/43, for example, which was published on September 14, 2020 (three months before the first EUA), in which I explicitly warned of this potential risk of any future COVID‑19 vaccine.

As I summarized therein, “Priming the immune system with antigen components of the influenza vaccine could potentially cause a mismatched antibody response to strains that the vaccine is not designed to protect against, thereby increasing the risk of infection as compared to an immune response in which naive T and B cells are instructed to fight off the infecting virus.”

I warned of the potential for COVID‑19 vaccines to similarly cause this problem. As I had been repeatedly pointing out in my writings and interviews, mass vaccination with these experimental products (EUA status is specifically for FDA unapproved products still considered investigational) could have the opposite of the intended effect, resulting in a prolonging of the pandemic and worsening of long-term outcomes due to the opportunity cost of superior natural immunity.

Naturally, the mainstream media have been almost totally silent about the risk of these pharmaceutical products causing people’s immune systems to become fixated on a suboptimal immune response relative to the immune response induced by infection.

The first and only mention of original antigenic sin that I saw in the New York Times was an article on January 6, 2022, which failed to properly explain this phenomenon much less to communicate its true significance in the context of the global mass vaccination campaign that had been underway for over a year.

The way the Times described it, “original antigenic sin” refers simply to a mismatch between the antigen component of the vaccine and circulating variants of the virus. That is wrong because there can be a mismatch without the occurrence of original antigenic sin. The Times failed to explain that original antigenic sin is when the immune system fails to adapt its responses to be more specific to the newly infecting variant.

The Times also failed to explain to its readers that the immunity acquired by infection is superior to that induced by COVID‑19 vaccines. As I explained in my June 22 article “‘Original Antigenic Sin’ Is a Real Problem with COVID‑19 Vaccines”, studies have shown that natural immunity is robust, broad, durable, and adaptive. The immune system learns to update its responses in the event of reinfection to be more specific to the newly infecting variant. As I also documented in that article, this is not the case for immune systems instead primed by COVID‑19 vaccines.

Instead, the immune systems of vaccinated people remain fixated on generating antibodies specific to the spike protein of the original Wuhan strain of SARS‑CoV‑2, which is now extinct outside of laboratories, with limited cross-reactivity to the spike protein of presently circulating variants.

I further explained how attempts to modify COVID‑19 vaccines to induce immune responses more specific to circulating variants had failed because of original antigenic sin. This failure has been acknowledged by Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), which has made recommendations for the FDA to authorize or approve COVID‑19 vaccines for various populations.

The FDA therefore knows about this problem, yet it has proceeded to authorize COVID‑19 vaccines containing Omicron components anyway, without any safety or efficacy data from human clinical trials. This new “Omicron” booster is being sold to the public on the explicit or implicit grounds that it will broaden the immune response to be more specific to the circulating Omicron subvariants, which is a scientifically fraudulent claim.

We have been presented with zero data to support that marketing message, and we can anticipate from data already available in the scientific literature that what these booster shots will do is merely increase antibodies specific to the original Wuhan strain with limited cross-reactivity to the Omicron spike protein, as opposed to adapting vaccinated people’s immune responses to become broader and more specific to the Omicron subvariants.

Apart from the Times’ misinformative acknowledgment of original antigenic sin, the media have remained silent about this demonstrated problem with COVID‑19 vaccines. Another rare exception was published last week by ABC News. The article, published on September 7, is titled “What you need to know about ‘original antigenic sin’ with fall COVID boosters around the corner”. The subtitle says, “Experts are split on the role this will play in the fight against COVID.”

Naturally, though, the article utterly fails to inform members of the public what they need to know about it. Instead, the message delivered by ABC News is completely ridiculous.