From 'Coffee & Covid' - Jeff Childers
The top of the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section this morning finally asks the obvious question: “Are Vaccines Fueling New Covid Variants?”
The op-ed begins by noting the new, fast-spreading XBB variant. (Curiously, Ethical Skeptic reported this morning that although XBB is spreading, national case counts are falling. He was rubbing his hands anticipating the CDC is running out of places to bury excess deaths.) Then, citing the same new study I discussed last year, it dropped this truth bomb on WSJ readers:

Growing evidence also suggests that repeated vaccinations may make people more susceptible to XBB and could be fueling the virus’s rapid evolution.
Well, THAT can’t be good for business. But it got even more real when the article noted that vaccines might be making people get sicker, not better protected:

The same study posits that immune imprinting may be contributing to the viral evolution. Vaccines do a good job of training the immune system to remember and knock out the original Wuhan variant. But when new and markedly different strains come along, the immune system responds less effectively… current herd immunity and BA.5 vaccine boosters may not efficiently prevent the infection of Omicron convergent variants.
Uh oh. In other words, the jabs are neither safe nor effective. Dang.

Then it cited two different recent studies confirming a very interesting fact about so-called immune-imprinting, which refers to training the immune system to an archaic variant so that it gets stuck in a rut, and can’t make antibodies to new variants very well. The new studies included the Cell study plus another one in the New England Journal of Medicine — neither considered fringe anti-vaxx sources.

The op-ed said the NEJM study found evidence of immune imprinting in jabbed subjects, especially when it came to the new dominant variant XBB:

A New England Journal of Medicine study published last month provides more evidence of the vulnerability caused by immune imprinting. Neutralizing antibodies of people who had received the bivalent were 26 times as high against the original Wuhan variant as they were against XBB and four times as high as they were against Omicron and the BA.5 variant.
What this shows is that jabbed people are uselessly mounting much stronger responses to the original Wuhan variant than they are against the new variants, which is strong evidence that their immune systems have been “imprinted” with the archaic version of the virus. Then the article cited the even newer Cell study finding much worse performance by jabbed people against XBB:

Similarly, a study this month in the journal Cell found that antibody levels of people who had received four shots were 145 times as high against the original Wuhan strain as the XBB variant. A bivalent booster only slightly increased antibodies against XBB. Experts nevertheless claim that boosters improve protection against XBB. That’s disinformation, to use their favored term.
Another way to say it is jabbed people’s immune response to XBB is 1/145th as good as their response to the now-defunct original Wuhan strain, and the super-duper, new-and-improved “bivalent booster” doesn’t really improve much on that poor performance. It’s so weird how people aren’t sprinting to the pharmacy to get their bivalent boosters.
[wsj.com]