Covid vaccine boomerang: Experts in US warn of risks of booster vaccines fuelling surge in Omicron infections

Covid vaccine boomerang: Experts in US warn of risks of booster vaccines fuelling surge in Omicron infections

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As scientists and mainstream media sounded the alarm this week about a new Covid-19 variant sweeping through the Northeast, in the United States, the author of an opinion in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) suggested Covid-19 vaccines could be fuelling new variants.

In her January 1 opinion piece, Allysia Finley – a member of WSJ’s editorial board – cited new research suggesting the virus appears to be evolving in ways that “evade immunity.”

Finley also pointed to research showing people who received Covid-19 boosters are more susceptible to infection than people who received the primary series but were not boosted. Meanwhile, public health officials and scientists continue to call for global mass vaccination against Covid-19.

Since the Covid-19 Omicron variant emerged in November 2021, its descendants have been predominant. The latest Omicron variant, XBB.1.5, evolved from the XBB variant – itself a fusion of two Omicron subvariants – found in at least 70 countries.

There is no evidence that XBB is more lethal than other Omicron subvariants, but several recent studies indicated it is more transmissible and evades protection offered by existing vaccines and monoclonal antibody treatments.

XBB.1.5 has a key mutation known as F486P, which according to the Bloom Lab, is tied to immunity escape because it changes the part of the virus targeted by antibodies from vaccination or previous infection. The predecessor XBB strain had the same ability to evade antibodies.

The new mutation in XBB.1.5 also allows the virus to bind more tightly to human cells through the ACE2 receptor — the doors the virus uses to enter human cells — making it more transmissible. The XBB.1.5 subvariant, first detected in New York and Connecticut in late October, appears to have developed in the US.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that XBB.1.5 nearly doubled in proportion to other variants each week in December. It now accounts for about 40 per cent of new Covid-19 infections in the US and 75 per cent of new infections in the Northeast according to the CDC’s Covid Data Tracker.

In her opinion, Finley outlined several recent studies on how the Covid-19 virus evolves to evade immunity, leading her to ask if the vaccines are responsible for the evolution of new variants.

Finley cited a study published in Nature in December showing the evolution of Omicron has led to the rapid, simultaneous emergence of many variants that are more transmissible and more likely than the previous subvariants to evade antibodies produced by vaccines and monoclonal antibody treatments.

The study hypothesised that immune imprinting – which occurs when initial exposure to a vaccine or virus limits a person’s future immune response against variants of that virus – may be driving viral evolution.

The first Covid-19 vaccines focused the immune system response on the ancestral spike protein. The bivalent vaccines that target the ancestral and the Omicron BA.5 spike proteins prompt the immune system to produce antibodies that target the viral regions the two strains have in common.

According to the study, the new XBB subvariants evolved to elude the antibodies induced by the original and bivalent vaccines and breakthrough infections. The researchers concluded that “current herd immunity and BA.5 vaccine boosters may not efficiently prevent the infection of Omicron convergent variants.”

Finley also cited a study published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine that also provided evidence of vulnerability from immune imprinting. The researchers investigated neutralizing antibody responses against Omicron variants, including XBB, among people with monovalent and bivalent boosters.

Neutralizing antibodies among all research subjects were lowest against the XBB subvariant. The neutralizing antibodies of those who had received the bivalent booster showed some neutralization against Omicron subvariants, but they were 26 times as high against the original ancestral variant as they were against XBB and 4 times as high against XBB as they were against the BA.5 Omicron variant.

Another study forthcoming in Cell found that recent BQ and XBB subvariants demonstrated a dramatically increased ability to evade neutralizing antibodies, including among recipients of the bivalent vaccine and immunized people who had a breakthrough Omicron infection. The study also found that these new subvariants are resistant to monoclonal antibody treatment.

In August 2021, when vaccine expert, Prof Geert Vanden Bossche, independent virologist and vaccine expert, warned that vaccines could lead to new, more infectious viral variants becoming increasingly dominant, he was attacked and accused of spreading misinformation.

In his widely circulated article, Vanden Bossche argued universal mass vaccination would prompt dominant propagation of highly infectious, neutralisation escape mutants, and naturally acquired – or vaccinal neutralizing antibodies – would no longer offer any protection to immunised individuals.

Vanden Bossche wrote, “Every further increase in vaccine coverage rates will further contribute to forcing the virus into resistance to neutralising, S-specific Abs [antibodies]. Increased viral infectivity, combined with evasion from antiviral immunity, will inevitably result in an additional toll taken on human health and human lives.”

Vanden Bossche’s hypothesis has since been partially supported by studies such as those cited by the Wall Street Journal and by other research published in 2021 in Scientific Reports, suggesting vaccinated people may play a key role in helping SARS-CoV-2 variants evolve into those that evade existing Covid-19 vaccines.

In an interview last year with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, on “RFK Jr The Defender Podcast,” Vanden Bossche said: “If you cannot stop the infection of the virus and the transmission of the virus, all you will do is give variants that are able to overcome this immune pressure – you will give them a competitive advantage.

“And as the transmission continues, these variants will just be enriched in the population, up until the point where they become dominant.”

Kennedy, Children’s Health Defense chairman and chief litigation counsel, responded, “What we’re doing is we’re creating a reservoir that is constantly producing what we call escape variants. In other words, variants that are designed under evolutionary pressure. They’re being selectively bred to escape the impacts of the vaccine, and each one now will become dominant in the population.”

  • A Children’s Health Defender report / Staff Writer
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