Another Omicron Booster Shot Study Reveals Original Antigenic Sin

In my October 31 article “Omicron Booster Shots and Original Antigenic Sin”, I observed how the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had saved Pfizer and Moderna the trouble of incurring both the expense of potential liability of falsely advertising that receipt of their reformulated mRNA COVID‑19 booster vaccines would “provide better protection against COVID‑19 caused by the omicron variant”.

The Omicron booster shots, the FDA advertised, would “update” people’s antibodies to be more specific to the spike protein shared by Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 and thereby “recharge” people’s immunity—up to 100 percent, according to the graphic included in one of the FDA’s propagandistic advertisements.

Mainstream media outlets like the New York Times, of course, have served their usual function of propagating government-sanctioned disinformation, as though the FDA’s claims had been demonstrated in human clinical trials despite knowing perfectly well that the FDA authorized these booster shots with no data on their effects in humans.

As I anticipated in my freely available e-book The FDA, COVID‑19 Vaccines, and Scientific Fraud, which I published in August shortly before the FDA issued its emergency use authorization for the Omicron booster shots, the boosters would fail in their stated aim. Why? Because, as I document in the book, studies had already shown that the immunologic phenomenon of “original antigenic sin”, sometimes also known as “immunological imprinting”, is a real problem with COVID‑19 vaccines.

This wasn’t unknown to the FDA. In fact, one member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee, Dr. Paul Offit, had publicly acknowledged the problem of original antigenic sin, noting how this phenomenon had impeded development of variant-specific vaccines.

Whereas natural immunity is broader and more adaptive, truly enabling “updated” immune responses to be more specific to newly infecting variants that are capable of escaping the neutralizing antibodies induced by primary infection, studies had shown that the COVID‑19 vaccines result in a fixation of immune responses on the original Wuhan strain of SARS‑CoV‑2.

As I wrote in my free e-book:

A critical unanswered question the FDA appears uninterested in learning the answer to is whether any increase in neutralizing antibodies from booster shots containing Omicron components would represent antibodies specific to Omicron or whether the antibodies remain specific to the Wuhan strain and merely happen to cross-react with the spike protein of Omicron.

Given what scientists already know about original antigenic sin, we can anticipate that modified booster vaccines will not actually do anything to broaden immune responses to be more specific to any of the Omicron subvariants.

In my Halloween article, I reported on a study published on the preprint server bioRxiv on October 24 titled “Antibody responses to Omicron BA.4/BA.5 bivalent mRNA vaccine booster shot”, which showed that individuals given a bivalent booster shot did not develop higher levels of antibodies capable of neutralizing the Omicron subvariants than those given the original monovalent formulation of the vaccine.

As I remarked in my article,

Although the study didn’t further investigate, this finding might be explainable because the antibodies induced by Omicron boosters are still specific to the original Wuhan strain with some cross-reactivity against the Omicron subvariants, as opposed to the shots “updating” the immune responses of vaccinated individuals to be specific to Omicron. Otherwise, it would be expected that neutralizing titers against Omicron would be higher among those receiving the Omicron booster than among those receiving the original formulation.

As the study authors further acknowledged, their findings “may be indicative of immunological imprinting”. They could have confirmed that by also comparing neutralizing antibody levels among unvaccinated people with an Omicron subvariant reinfection, but alas.

Unknown to me at the time I published that article, another study by a different team of researchers arriving at the same conclusion was published at bioRxiv on October 25. Titled “Immunogenicity of the BA.5 Bivalent mRNA Vaccine Boosters”, the authors state in the abstract, “Our data show that BA.5 Nab [neutralizing antibody] titers were comparable following monovalent and bivalent mRNA boosters.”

The authors mistakenly describe the bivalent boosters as “approved” despite emergency use authorization being a status specifically for FDA unapproved products, but setting that aside, they note that the immunogenicity of the shots was “unknown”, a tacit acknowledgment of how the FDA authorized the shots without data on their effects in humans.

They consequently compared humoral (or antibody) and cellular immune responses between individuals who received the original monovalent formulation as a booster and individuals who received the bivalent booster intended to “update” antibodies to be specific to the Omicron subvariants.

While this study, too, failed to include a comparison of vaccine-induced immune responses with the effects of natural exogenous boosting from an Omicron reinfection among unvaccinated individuals, the authors did characterize the binding nature of the resulting antibodies, once again indicating the problem of original antigenic sin.

As they remarked, “Both the monovalent and bivalent mRNA boosters led to preferential expansion of WA1/2020 Nab titers and lower BA.1, BA.2, and BA.5 Nab titers.” (Emphasis added.) In other words, just as I had anticipated, instead of adapting the humoral immune response to be more specific to the Omicron subvariants, the antibodies resulting from administration of the Omicron booster tended to remain specific to the original Wuhan strain of SARS‑CoV‑2.

This indicates that the failure of the bivalent shot to induce higher levels of antibodies capable of neutralizing Omicron subvariants is likely due to the antibodies being more specific to the spike protein of the Wuhan strain, now extinct outside of laboratories, with limited cross-reactivity against the spike protein of Omicron subvariants—as opposed to inducing antibodies specific to the Omicron subvariants.

In addition to failing in this stated aim of the bivalent booster shot, both monovalent and bivalent vaccines increased cellular immune responses “only modestly”. The authors reiterate that both shots “did not substantially augment T cell responses.” This includes both CD4+ or “helper” T cells that play a critical role in coordinating immune responses and CD8+ or “cytotoxic” T cells that play a critical role in inducing death of infected cells.

As has been recognized by immunologists since before COVID‑19 vaccines were even available, while neutralizing antibodies are important for preventing the virus from being able to enter and replicate inside of host cells, it is cellular immunity that plays an even more vital role. As researchers from La Jolla Institute for Immunology observed in September 2020, “the bulk of evidence” pointed toward “a much bigger role for T cells than antibodies” in the prevention of severe disease. While playing an important role in preventing cells from becoming infected, “antibodies don’t seem to play an important role in controlling acute COVID‑19. Instead, T cells and helper T cells in particular are associated with protective immune responses.”

In fact, while the “public health” establishment touts a high level of neutralizing antibodies as the desired outcome of vaccination, scientists have observed since the start of the pandemic that with natural immunity, higher antibody titers are actually associated with more severe COVID‑19, and this association exists independently from age. In short, individuals with mild or no symptoms tend to have very highly effective cellular immune responses and to develop lower levels of antibodies, whereas individuals with severe disease tend to develop very high levels of antibodies while having dysfunctional cellular immunity.

Despite claims from the “public health” establishment that everyone needs to get the primary series of COVID‑19 vaccines plus one or more booster shots to be protected from severe COVID‑19, the totality of scientific evidence to date indicates that the government’s mass vaccination campaign has been a disastrous failure.

The shots were initially sold to the public based on the lie that two doses would induce durable sterilizing immunity, stopping infection and transmission and thereby bringing the pandemic to an end by ushering in herd immunity.

Accompanying that deceitful vaccine propaganda was the false propaganda claim that natural immunity was weak and short-lived, which was a fallacious conclusion premised on the observation of a completely normal and expected rapid decline of antibodies from peak levels following recovery from acute infection. Deliberately withheld from the public was the knowledge of how antibodies were observed to persist at an adequate lower level in nearly all infection-recovered individuals, how infection induced long-lived immunologic memory, and how cellular immunity played the more important role in protecting against severe disease.

Once the accumulated data exposed the deceit of the propaganda claim that the vaccines would stop transmission, the ridiculous “public health” establishment exposed its own duplicity by suddenly discovering cellular immunity and reassuring people that, even though vaccinated people can still get infected, getting the shots would still protect against severe disease due to T cell responses.

This resulted in the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) having to adopt two completely different criteria by which to recommend boosting by vaccination. Illustrating how CDC policy is based on the policy goal of achieving high vaccine uptake rather than on science, the CDC told those whose immune systems were primed by infection that they needed to get vaccinated to prevent reinfection, which ignored the continued protection against severe disease from cellular immunity and how reinfection would serve as a natural exogenous booster, whereas those whose immune systems were primed by vaccination were told that they needed to get a booster shot to protect against severe disease.

Further demonstrating the superiority of natural immunity, a study published on November 7 in Nature Communications showed that triple-vaccinated people who become infected have an equivalent viral load as unvaccinated people within 10 weeks of their booster shot. In contrast to “the rapid waning observed for vaccinated individuals”, viral load levels “remain low well beyond 18 months, and does not reach the baseline level of the unvaccinated even after extended periods of time”.

The “public health” establishment has completely failed to take into consideration the fact that natural immunity is an opportunity cost of COVID‑19 vaccination, which, given the observation of “original antigenic sin”, means that the mass vaccination campaign will have done more harm than good over the long-term. It means that vaccinated individuals are likely to be more vulnerable to COVID‑19 throughout their lifetimes relative to unvaccinated people with natural immunity, which makes the recommendation for individuals who are at low risk from COVID‑19 to get fully vaccinated and boosted insane.

We can nevertheless expect the “public health” establishment to completely ignore the implications of the available scientific evidence and go on myopically pushing vaccines as being necessary for everybody, including children, based on “the science”. This simply demonstrates how the establishment serves the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry at the expense of public health. As ever, what the government, mainstream media, and medical establishment say science says about vaccines and what we actually know from the scientific literature are two completely different things.

For documentation of how this is equally true with the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine schedule, and how public vaccine policies result in the systematic violation of individuals’ right to make their own informed choices about vaccinations, read my book The War on Informed Consent.