Bivalent booster increases COVID-19 infection risk by up to 43%, study
Setting the pandemic science record straight, one comment at a time
I just submitted another response to a published article, “COVID-19 Infection Rates in Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Inmates: A Retrospective Cohort Study” by Luke Ko and four co-authors, published earlier this month of September 2023 in Cureus, a journal that is “Part of Springer Nature Group”.
My simple comment seems to have appeared immediately underneath the article. As a backup, I am pasting a screenshot here.
In short, the authors found that boosted inmates in California prisons were more likely to get “infected” than their completely unvaccinated peers. The authors emphasize how minuscule the absolute differences are, while all but concealing that those differences point in the wrong direction altogether! And the relative metrics are actually quite substantial: When dividing the difference by the baseline unvaccinated value, we find that the intervention (bivalent booster) coincides with a 19% higher infection risk overall, 30% higher risk in inmates 50+, and 43% higher risk in inmates 65+ (though the unvaccinated subgroup in this oldest age range was too small to obtain a statistically significant result).
It’s kind of funny how this article brings back memories from late 2020, when I first wrote about “… Relative vs Absolute Risk Reduction”. At that time, some of us noted that Pfizer and Moderna reported 95% vaccine efficacy from their trials as a relative risk reduction, while the absolute risk reduction was a mere 0.6% or 0.7%. Thus, the title of this post is a winking payback…
The Ko et al. article also recycles other concepts, which I thought were long forgotten. Take ‘herd immunity’. They seem quite confused by the very low overall infection rates and attempt to explain these by “A combination of monovalent and bivalent vaccines and natural infections [which] likely contributed to immunity and a lower level of infection rates compared to the height of the pandemic. It is possible that a degree of 'herd immunity' has been achieved.” In 2023. Hallelujah!?
At the same time, they cite none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci with his paper “The Concept of Classical Herd Immunity May Not Apply to COVID-19”. I am more familiar with another one of Fauci’s anti-vax articles, which we summarized in “Is Fauci a Covid vaccine skeptic now too?” But I sincerely thought we were about two years beyond thinking that SARS-CoV-2 could ever be controlled by ‘herd immunity’.
The authors of the Cureus article also do not seem to be familiar with the emerging literature on mRNA vaccine harms and present no substantial explanation of their “perplexing” results. I guess they don’t prepare high school students for studying at “YouTube University”? Because that’s what the first author is: a student in the Biomedical Sciences Pathway Program, California High School, San Ramon, USA. Kudos to Luke for publishing this article though; he may have set a foundation for becoming a real scientist, one who conducts studies and shares their results without (fully) bowing to the prevailing winds.