(I’ve been busy researching Berenson v Biden – I appreciate your patience, but this was too important not to write.)
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A Centers for Disease Control advisory committee is meeting now to discuss the recommendations for the updated Covid shots that the Food and Drug Administration approved yesterday.
Spoiler alert: The committee will likely push the punches on most adults, and possibly even children. The group is nominally independent, but Dr. Nirav Shah, the CDC’s deputy director, telegraphed that plan to The New York Times. two weeks ago:
Covid can still be nasty even if it doesn’t put you in hospital. A booster hit will reduce its power. Shah argues that children (over 6 months) should also get a Covid vaccine this fall, even though their own risk of Covid is very low.
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Which makes this chart, which the CDC buried on page 17 of an 18-page submission to the committee this morning, all the more impressive.
About nine out of 10 Americans over 75 hospitalized this year for Covid have received the mRNA injections. (No with covidfor (Covid.) Similarly, five out of six Americans aged 65 to 74 hospitalized for Covid had been attacked, according to the CDC. And even among adults under 50, two out of three had been vaccinated.
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(DID YOU MISS ME? BECAUSE YOU MISSED ME.)
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(Orange, are you glad you didn’t get a shot? Orange means unvaccinated. Blue means at least two shots, possibly with a booster. The bottom graphic is just a more focused view of the top.)
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The few mRNA fanatics will still claim that these numbers are evidence that the bivalent boost worked last fall, because about 45% of people over 65 received the bivalent and only about 20% of hospitalizations.
But healthy vaccine bias (the fact that Covid boosters, especially the most recent ones, are taken by a self-selected group of people who are afraid of Covid and generally neurotic about their health) probably explains this gap.
The key finding here is that apparently two or even three mRNA traits do, depending on the population nothing to help people avoid not only Covid infections but hospitalizations.
The proportions of hospitalized people are virtually identical to the overall jab rates: despite healthy vaccine bias, which should make them look better. (The CDC claims that about 93 percent of adults have received at least one mRNA hit, but that estimate seems off exaggerated because states and the agency misclassify a large number of boosters as new traits. (Self-reported data show that about 25 percent of adults have not had a stroke.)
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Meanwhile, booster dose studies show that its impact on Omicron variants is minor and transient, lasting at most a couple of months. On the other hand, the long-term impact of repeated doses of modified mRNA is unknown.
So why on earth, other than cushioning Pfizer and Moderna’s profits or a simple unwillingness to admit defeat, would anyone recommend more shots?
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