Well, it looks like the Wall Street Journal finally came to the party, why do I say this, simple the top of the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section yesterday finally asks the obvious question that are journalists should be asking: “Are Vaccines Fueling New Covid Variants?”

The op-ed begins by noting the new, fast-spreading XBB variant, then, citing a study from last year, and finally dropping this “red pill” 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. |

Yikes, that can’t be good for the bottom line, right Big Pharma? But the WSJ wasn’t done, no they went full Tyson on their readers alluding to the fact that the 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”

That’s a fancy way of saying, the pharmaceutical interventions may not be as “safe and effective” as originally touted! Ru-oh!

Then it cited two different recent studies confirming a very interesting fact about the possible 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, for the record the folks that run these publications nor the publications themselves ascribe to science denial, spreaders of misinformation or fountains of anti-vaxx sentiment.

The op-ed said the NEJM study found evidence of immune imprinting in injected 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 demonstrates is that injected folks are fruitlessly mounting much stronger responses to the original Wuhan variant than they are against the new variants, which to those of us that truly “follow the science” would support the idea 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 injected 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.”

Stated another way, injected folks’ immune response to XBB is 1/145th as good as their response to the now-obsolete OG Wuhan strain, and the stellar, new-and-improved “bivalent booster” doesn’t really improve much on the performance. Which might explain why, the uptake on bivalent boosters is anemic.

Now back in 2020, before the “speed of science” some epidemiologists, while they were still free to say so, were warning that mass-use of a “non-sterilizing” vaccine may lead to antibody-evading variants in short order. They weren’t hypothesizing, apparently this phenomenon has been known to those who practice “actual science” for years but seemed to have been “memory holed” by experts, that is, until now, the point of “possible no return!”

This further highlights the primary actual, factual difference between coronaviruses and other viruses like measles and polio against which vaccines have been proven to have lasting durability. The reason for this is because viruses such as measles, are genetically stable and don’t mutate or evolve much. Unlike coronaviruses, which include the common cold, who are well-known to rapidly evolve, making the prospect of a developing an effective vaccine a never-ending wild goose chase. To date we’ve not eradicated the “common cold or flu” have we?

I’ve included a link to the WSJ’s non-paywalled version of the Op-Ed. https://www.wsj.com/articles/are-vaccines-fueling-new-covid-variants-xbb-northeast-antibodies-mutation-strain-immune-imprinting-11672483618?st=tsf89b834ryetrr&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink