When the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines were first authorized for emergency use by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December 2020, the claim from the entire “public health” establishment was that they would end the pandemic by conferring herd immunity.
Those of us who told the truth, which was that there was no evidence to support this claim that two doses would confer durable sterilizing immunity and so prevent infection and transmission, were censored by Big Tech companies colluding with the government to systematically violate individuals’ right to informed consent.
Even after the truth became obvious, the mainstream media, serving their usual function in service to the state and the pharmaceutical industry, then tried to gaslight us into forgetting how the vaccines were sold to the public on the basis of lies.
Among those lies was the claim from the Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) that the vaccines offer better protection than natural immunity acquired by infection with SARS‑CoV‑2.
At the time of initial authorization of these pharmaceutical products, the CDC was falsely claiming that the available evidence indicated that natural immunity was short-lived. In fact, studies had by then already shown that infection induced both durable humoral immunity, with persistence of neutralizing antibodies, and robust cellular immune responses that would protect against severe disease in the event of reinfection.
Additionally, the evidence indicated that infection induced long-lived bone marrow plasma cells, a known marker of long-term immunity, which was confirmed several months later.
Within a few weeks of the FDA’s emergency use authorizations of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s respective vaccines, the CDC removed that false claim from its website only to replace it with the deceptive claim that the duration of natural immunity remained unknown.
The CDC thus implicitly denied the large and growing body of literature demonstrating that natural immunity was robust, broad, and durable. It was true, of course, that the duration of protection remained unknown, but that was simply because natural immunity was proving durable for as long as observations had been made. And, of course, it was equally true that the duration of protection from vaccination remained unknown.
The effect of the CDC’s statement was thus to deceive people into believing that the vaccines would offer superior and longer-lasting protection.
Then, in August 2021, at a time when the Delta variant of SARS‑CoV‑2 was predominant, the CDC started explicitly claiming that natural immunity was inferior. That claim was contradicted at the time by virtually all of the non-CDC-originating literature and was within several months falsified by the CDC’s own data as reported by its own researchers in its own MMWR journal.
In the fall of 2022, when the FDA granted emergency use authorization for the bivalent COVID‑19 vaccines, which contained mRNA encoding for the spike protein of the BA.4 and BA.5 lineages of the Omicron variant of SARS‑CoV‑2 as well as for the original Wuhan strain of the virus, the promise made to the public was that these shots would “update” people’s antibodies to be more specific to Omicron subvariants, thus enabling better neutralization of the virus. The FDA graphically advertised that you could “recharge” your immunity up to 100 percent with a bivalent booster shot.
A few weeks prior to the FDA’s authorization of the bivalent vaccines, on August 9, I had published a freely available e-book titled The FDA, COVID‑19 Vaccines, and Scientific Fraud, which focused on the agency’s scientifically fraudulent basis for authorizing Pfizer’s monovalent vaccine for infants and toddlers.
In that e-book, I also documented how studies had confirmed that an immunological phenomenon known as “original antigenic sin”, sometimes also referred to as “immune imprinting”, was a real problem with the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines. This helped to explain repeated observations in the medical literature of statistically significant negative vaccine effectiveness following several months of waning immunity post-vaccination.
Based on that knowledge from my research into the medical literature, I predicted that the FDA’s promise that the bivalent shots would shift antibody production to be more specific to the spike protein of Omicron would prove false. Indeed, we now know that this was just another lie from the “public health” establishment complicitly parroted by the media as though a scientifically proven fact.
As ever, what the government and media say science says about vaccines and what we actually know from scientific research are two completely different things.
For instance, a study funded by Moderna found negative vaccine effectiveness within five months of a bivalent booster shot. This is explainable by understanding that superior natural immunity is an opportunity cost of vaccination due to the problem of original antigenic sin resulting from priming the immune response with an mRNA COVID‑19 vaccine.
Another finding of that study was that significant effectiveness was lost even sooner after a fourth dose than after the third. In other words, getting two booster shots resulted in less protection than getting one.
That finding could perhaps be explained by the additional problem of antibody class-switching to the non-neutralizing IgG4 isotype, which is associated with a different immunological phenomenon known as “immune tolerance”. In effect, these antibodies, upon binding to the SARS‑CoV‑2 spike protein, instead of messaging the immune system to attack and destroy, might tell the immune system that there’s nothing to see here.
A study by researchers from Cleveland Clinic in Ohio published on April 19, 2023, in Open Forum Infectious Diseases offers additional evidence for both original antigenic sin and immune tolerance.
The study examined the cumulative incidence of COVID‑19 over time among clinic employees. A key finding of the study that its authors described as “unexpected” was an “association of increased risk of COVID‑19 with more prior vaccine doses”.
It is not clear why they did not anticipate this result since, as the authors themselves point out, theirs “is not the only study to find a possible association with more prior vaccine doses and higher risk of COVID‑19.”
A study in Iceland published in JAMA Open Network in August 2022 had found that people who received two or more doses had a higher odds of reinfection with Omicron than those who received one or no doses.
A study in Qatar published on the preprint server medRxiv in November 2022 had similarly found that people who received three doses of vaccine had a higher risk of reinfection with Omicron than those who received two doses only.
That preprint study was updated on March 20, 2023, with a title that plainly states the significance of their findings: “COVID‑19 primary series and booster vaccination and potential for immune imprinting.” As the authors state in the abstract, scientific evidence “suggests possibility of immune imprinting, a negative impact for vaccination on subsequent protective immunity against SARS‑CoV‑2 infection”. Their own study likewise found that “history of booster vaccination compromised protection against omicron reinfection.”
They noted that this evidence for original antigenic sin with vaccination contrasts with the absence of evidence for this immunologic phenomenon occurring with infection-derived immunity.
Comparing individuals who had an Omicron “breakthrough” infection following receipt of the primary two-dose vaccine regimen with unvaccinated individuals whose immunological priming was with an Omicron infection, they found that the two-dose cohort had a lower cumulative incidence of reinfection with Omicron.
However, the conclusion cannot be drawn from this that so-called “hybrid” immunity is superior to natural immunity since it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison: for the unvaccinated cohort, the reinfection was their second exposure and first natural booster, whereas for the vaccinated cohort, the reinfection was their fourth immune-stimulating event and second natural booster.
That is, the vaccinated group benefited from already having experienced exogenous boosting from their “breakthrough” infection. Therefore, their lower risk of reinfection can be attributed to the immune response to infection as opposed to vaccination.
The exogenous boosting among the unvaccinated also posed no evident risk of severe disease, thus also belying the need for these individuals to obtain “hybrid” immunity by also getting vaccinated. As the authors noted, no reinfection in any cohort progressed to severe, critical, or fatal COVID‑19.
The mild nature of reinfections among the unvaccinated is likely attributable to the robust cellular immunity induced by their primary Omicron infection.
In contrast, individuals who’d received a booster shot prior to experiencing a breakthrough infection were nearly twice as likely as those who’d skipped the booster shot to have a reinfection.
“This finding suggests that the immune response against the primary omicron infection”, the authors noted, “may have been compromised by differential immune imprinting in those who received a third booster dose, apparently consistent with laboratory science data and emerging epidemiological data on imprinting effects.”
Adding to the curiousness of their statement that the finding of an apparent detrimental effect of the booster shot was “unexpected”, the third study cited by the Cleveland Clinic researchers was a prior study of their own, published in December 2022 in Clinical Infectious Diseases, the findings of which further reinforced the conclusion that “natural immunity from prior infection is more robust than immunity acquired through vaccination”.
While the CDC recommended that individuals with natural immunity still get the two-dose regimen of COVID‑19 vaccination, the study found that “receipt of 2 doses of vaccine” following immunological priming by infection “was associated with higher risk of COVID‑19 than receipt of a single dose.”
Commenting on the repeated findings of an apparent detrimental effect of booster shots on immune protection in their study published in April, the Cleveland Clinic researchers explained that:
Immune imprinting from prior exposure to different antigens in a prior vaccine and class switch toward noninflammatory spike-specific immunoglobulin G4 antibodies after repeated SARS‑CoV‑2 mRNA vaccination have been suggested as possible mechanisms whereby prior vaccine may provide less protection than expected.
Earlier this month, the same team of researchers published a study at medRxiv finding that clinic employees considered “up-to-date” on COVID‑19 vaccination according to the CDC’s recommendation—which is receipt of the primary two-dose regimen plus at least one bivalent booster shot—had a higher risk of COVID‑19 than those who were not. The primary conclusion drawn was that “The current CDC definition provides a meaningless classification of risk of COVID‑19 in the adult population.”
Additionally, the authors remarked that they found no evidence of vaccine effectiveness against XBB variants of SARS‑CoV‑2, which are also sublineages of Omicron and have been the predominantly circulating variants in the US so far this year.
They also commented on how the CDC’s definition of “up-to-date” unscientifically fails to consider “the protective effect of immunity acquired from prior infection.”
“It is now well-known”, they pointed out, “that SARS‑CoV‑2 infection provides more robust protection than vaccination.”
They reiterated the lack of evidence supporting the CDC’s policy by stating:
This study’s findings question the wisdom of promoting the idea that every person needs to be “up-to-date” on COVID‑19 vaccination, as currently defined, at this time. It is often stated that the primary purpose of vaccination is to prevent severe COVID‑19 and death. We certainly agree with this, but it should be pointed out that there is not a single study that has shown that the COVID‑19 bivalent vaccine protects against severe disease or death caused by the XBB lineages of the Omicron variant.
The belief that the bivalent mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines currently authorized for emergency use protect against severe disease and death is an “assumption” lacking an evidentiary basis. They further excoriated the CDC by describing its willful ignorance of the effectiveness of natural immunity as “folly”.
Of course, it is not only recent evidence that leads us to the conclusion that natural immunity is superior. Indeed, I wrote a whole series of articles reviewing the overwhelming evidence from the scientific literature that infection results in superior protection than vaccination starting with an introduction published on September 2, 2021—a mere two weeks after the CDC started explicitly claiming the opposite.
I had also been publicly and repeatedly warning about the risk of original antigenic sin with COVID‑19 vaccines and why we must consider natural immunity to be an opportunity cost of vaccination since at least March of 2021.
The conclusion is inescapable that the CDC is more interested in serving the pharmaceutical industry by achieving its policy aim of a high vaccination rate than in serving the public by aiming for good health outcomes among the population. Indeed, in the agency’s ostensible aim of promoting public health, it has failed miserably, and the government’s long record of brazenly lying about vaccine safety and effectiveness clearly demonstrates the complete untrustworthiness of these so-called “public health” agencies.
