Covid vaccine failure is widespread: Why the health establishment did not see it coming
Study: Clinical trials tested efficacy mostly on healthy people
Over the past year, some public health officials and scientists have begun to grudgingly admit that mRNA vaccines do not effectively prevent transmission of the virus that causes Covid-19 — a fact scientific papers are underscoring — and now there’s some evidence that the experimental drugs are failing to prevent severe disease in those with underlying conditions, helping to explain why so many vaccinated people are being hospitalized and dying.
The study suggests a major reason why the public health establishment did not see the failures coming: Vaccine clinical trials did not include high-risk constituencies most at risk from the virus and more vulnerable to vaccine failures.
The government’s surrender on the vaccine’s efficacy against transmission first came last August, when CDC director Rochelle Walensky bluntly acknowledged it in an interview with CNN:
Our vaccines are working exceptionally well. They continue to work well for delta, with regard to severe illness and death — they prevent it. But what they can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.”
The CDC subsequently tried to walk that statement back, but, with each new variant, the data shows less and less protection against transmitting infection. For example, an early study of Covid-19 transmission, “Effect of vaccination on household transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in England” found that even a single dose of vaccine reduced the likelihood of household transmission by 40-50 percent. The secondary attack rate (SAR) was only 6.2 percent among household contacts.
But then came the delta and omicron variants, and the figures changed. In one Danish study, “SARS-CoV-2 Omicron VOC Transmission in Danish Households,” scientists found that omicron was 2.7 to 3.7 times more infectious than the Delta variant among vaccinated Danes.
“Surprisingly, we observed no significant difference between the SAR of Omicron versus Delta among unvaccinated individuals,” the study stated. “This indicates that the increased transmissibility of the Omicron VOC (variant of concern) primarily can be ascribed to immune evasion rather than an inherent increase in the basic transmissibility. … [A]lthough we showed that booster vaccines did offer some protection against household transmission, the reduced level of protection means that vaccination is less likely to be sufficient to curb transmission within a population.”
What’s more, the researchers warned, the duration of the protective effect was unknown, and the rapidly waning effectiveness of the second dose against the Omicron VOC as well as data from neutralization assays raised concerns about the longevity of the booster response:
This means that the current vaccines are unlikely to mitigate the spread of the Omicron VOC to the extent that has been achieved for previous variants on the long term.
In a February paper published in health care professionals’ journal BMJ, journalist Chris Stokel-Walker reported that preliminary data from Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases indicated that patients infected with omicron shed viral particles for longer compared with those infected with other variants. Stokel-Walker quoted Anika Singanayagam, an academic clinical lecturer in adult infectious disease at Imperial College London, who said the main point of the vaccines was not to prevent transmission:
The main reasons for vaccines Covid-19 is to prevent illness and death. Damping down on transmission is not a particularly easy thing with omicron.
Most recently — though the evidence goes on — an April 3 study, “High rate of BA.1, BA.1.1 and BA.2 infection in triple vaccinated health care workers,” reports that the incidence rate among fully vaccinated and boosted health care workers with one of the variants was 22 percent, and only 10 percent remained asymptomatic:
We report high incidence of omicron infections despite recent booster vaccination in triple vaccinated individuals. Vaccine-induced antibody titres seem to play a limited role in risk of omicron infection. High viral load and secretion of live virus for up to nine days may increase transmission in a triple vaccinated population.
But …