What's that sound?
Is it a penny dropping? Is it the tide turning? Two years too late but are The Experts™ finally, unapologetically admitting failure just as the experts predicted all along?
I believe we should stop trying to prevent all symptomatic infections in healthy, young people by boosting them with vaccines containing mRNA from strains that might disappear a few months later.
Why did the strategy for significantly increasing BA.4 and BA.5 neutralizing antibodies using a bivalent vaccine fail? The most likely explanation is imprinting.
The immune systems of people immunized with the bivalent vaccine, all of whom had previously been vaccinated, were primed to respond to the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2.
They therefore probably responded to epitopes shared by BA.4 and BA.5 and the ancestral strain, rather than to new epitopes on BA.4 and BA.5.
Commentary from Dr Paul Alexander:
Bollocks. This guy, whose committee voted 16-2 AGAINST boosters for people less than 50 in the U.S. well over 2 years ago, already knows the answer. The vaccines were never worth a large, shiny, softened-by-the-sun, turd. I don't know much about epitopes and such, but I know BS when I smell it.
I’ve said it before. Offit is a malignant menace. This is pure theater and CYA in anticipation of what’s coming.