Is Paul Offit a Sitting Duck for ADE?

Read his position on why he won't be taking the bivalent "booster". CDC's data suggests he might be in a group of people who could be in trouble. Let's hope not.

According to MedPage Today, Dr. Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, a well-known vaccine zealot and well-known apologist for aluminum toxicity against evidence, has decided that he’s had enough of COVID-19 vaccines. He won’t be getting another booster or the updated, bivalent vaccine. Yes, you read that right.

Medpage Today quotes him thusly:

“I have received three doses of the ancestral strain vaccine and contracted a mild case of COVID in May. As a result, all the evidence suggests that I have high frequencies of virus-specific memory B and T cells, which should protect me against severe disease this winter.”

Offit continues:

“I do not plan to get another dose of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines until it is clear that people who have been primed, boosted, and naturally infected are nonetheless at high risk of serious illness when encountering the virus.”

Here’s the question:

How do you tell the difference between vaccine failure and disease enhancement, as in antibody-dependent enhancement? Answer: with vaccine failure, you get asymptomatic disease.

With ADE, you get severe illness.

When Offit sees the data from CDC, he is going to find that people who have been primed and boosted may be susceptible to increased risk of hospitalization if they are infected with newer variants, due to ADE.

According to CDC, as of Sep. 07, 108,953,688 Americans had received a booster, or 48.6 percent of the country's fully vaccinated population.

Also according to CDC, 75.5% of adult Americans have been “fully vaccinated”.

According to math, 48.6%  of 75.5% = 36.69% are, at this time, boosted

The reports that 44% of those hospitalized were boosted (e.g., WebMd citing CDC data) does not bode well for the booster program, and here’s why:

At COVID-19 vaccine program effectiveness = 0, the rate would be 36.7% of the hospitalized were boosted. But instead, it’s 44%. HIGHER than expected.

This implies negative effectiveness.

This is the full report with the concerning results that support negative effectiveness of boosting.

I’m not sure yet how those who also, like Offit, had a SARS-CoV-2 infection will fare, and will of course I hope everyone, injected or not, does well this winter, I suspect many will not. Perhaps (and I hope) Offit’s immunity from the SARS-CoV-2 infection will have provided him with diverse B- and T-cells to antigens other than the spike protein.

It seems likely given Omicron’s R0 (ease of spread) that nearly everyone who has been vaccinated likely by now has also had an infection. This “silent boosting” in the vaccinated via natural infection was reported years ago by Japanese medical researchers in Japan.

Here’s Dr. Vinay Prasad discussing some of the problem. He does a good job calling out a doctor (Robert Califf, Commissioner of Food and Drugs of the FDA) for claiming on Twitter that the bivalent vaccine will protect people with zero data from humans in the second sentence of Califf’s tweet.

But Prasad does not seem to recognize the implications of CDC’s data showing negative effectiveness; he thinks Califf’s first sentence is a-ok. And he reports Offit’s refusal of the bivalent booster near the end, too, providing 11 reasons why an annual COVID-19 “booster” is not like an annual flu shot.

NB: I need everyone on Twitter to Tweet this with #BringBackJack. Let Califf and Twitter know that by shutting down my account, they have activated the masses.

NB2: The artwork used in this Substack article involves a doctor duck image. In no way is this meant to imply anything about Dr. Offit other than the potential self-imposed risk of ADE implied by the title of this article.

Related:

Spike-Only Vaccine a Colossal Blunder: Michigan State University Shows SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine Escape is Due to Vaccination

Who Gets More COVID-19? Vaccinated or Unvaccinated? Here's How to Tell.