Boosters do not work in people who have had COVID

A new study from Austria looks at people who had COVID

Observational studies for boosters are biased. Typically, they are biased towards the healthy vaccinee effect, i.e. people who get boosted are otherwise healthier than those who do not. So much of the “booster effect” is actually just being healthier.

That’s why some analyses have reported that boosters lower all cause mortality (95%!) or the unvaccinated have more car accidents and other such implausible things. A good peer review would have stopped these papers, but, peer review doesn’t work well in times of runaway groupthink.

So when an observational study shows that boosters DO NOT REDUCE COVID-19 DEATHS in people who already had COVID that occurs despite the bias to find a benefit. It probably means the obvious: once you have COVID, you have natural immunity against severe outcomes, and further doses are illogical.

Let’s take a look at the paper.

This paper is a population based observational analysis of boosting, but restricted to people who had COVID. Austria has pretty good records and pretty good testing, but not perfect.

First these authors actually report, all cause death, and it is lower in boosted groups. They write, “All-cause mortality data indicate modest healthy vaccinee bias.”

This is in contrast with NEJM’s Israeli authors who omitted all cause mortality data in their paper. They only reported it in a letter, and it clearly showed massive bias. Omitting all cause mortality data in a booster paper is a methodological sin. It is dishonest. All papers on vaccine effectiveness should include all cause mortality and falsification endpoints, such as car accidents.

Next, the authors confirm what we have known— that boosters transiently lower the risk of testing positive, “we observed a small rVE of a fourth vaccine dose with evidence for rapidly waning immunity and reversal of this effect in 2023.”

But be clear: this is a nothing burger. Its such a minuscule and transient effect it cannot justify a vaccine program, and its is like pouring a cup of water on your lawn when the forest fire approaches.

Even the authors know this includes infections of uncertain harm, “positive laboratory tests for SARS-CoV-2 with unclear and prob-ably no adverse consequences for most individuals (even for hospitalized patients) in an endemic phase”

Finally, the authors note the big finding, “we did not observe a significant rVE [vaccine effect] of a fourth vaccine dose for COVID-19 deaths during a time with already very low absolute risk for this outcome.”

And, “No individual younger than 40 years died due to COVID-19. “

In other words, COVID is over when you have COVID. Most of us have had COVID. That’s why my pledge from a prior post was correct.

Finally, the authors put their results in context, “Similarly, data from Qatar suggest that natural immunity confers a very strong protection against severe COVID-19 with no evidence of waning immunity, a conclusion that is supported by a systematic re-view and meta-analyses”

Here is how the authors conclude, “The lack of effectiveness of the fourth vaccination during 2023 in our study is, however, consistent with the notion of rapidly waning immunity by this second, mainly bivalent, booster. Finally, our findings do not apply to previously uninfected individuals, a population group that is vanishingly small by late 2023.”

And in my words: the US FDA and CDC are engaging in a reckless public health campaign to boost people— even babies, children and young men— who already had COVID. They have no good data that this makes those kids better off, or anyone else. Boosting someone who had infection is already implausible.

These data— despite a bias to find a false benefit— find no benefit. FDA and CDC officials should consider resignation if they cannot regulate in accordance with evidence based medicine. Pfizer has 100 billion reasons to run randomized trials, and FDA must demand those studies.

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My conclusion: Boosters do not work if you have had COVID. They are net harmful (due to AEs at time of injection).

Bonus: I often struggle to know what to offer the many readers who subscribe and support this work, so below I found two more interesting gems. Consider this thanks for your support.