Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the U.S. FDA’s vaccine advisory committee, has written in the New England Journal of Medicine, the world’s top medical journal, calling for an end to the mass vaccination of anyone at low risk from the virus. In an op-ed titled “Bivalent COVID-19 Vaccines – A Cautionary Tale”, Dr. Offit writes that Covid boosters are “probably best reserved for the people most likely to need protection against severe disease”.
“I believe we should stop trying to prevent all symptomatic infections in healthy, young people by boosting them with vaccines containing mRNA from strains that might disappear a few months later,” he writes.
Dr. Offit, who is Professor of Vaccinology and Professor of Paediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, goes through in detail the process that led to bivalent vaccines being recommended in the U.S. for everyone over five years of age with no relevant data from humans. He is clearly very unhappy about it.
On June 28th 2022, researchers from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna presented data on their bivalent vaccines to the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (of which I am a member). The results were underwhelming. Bivalent boosters resulted in levels of neutralising antibodies against BA.1 that were only 1.5 to 1.75 times as high as those achieved with monovalent boosters. Previous experience with the companies’ vaccines suggested that this difference was unlikely to be clinically significant. Safety data were reassuring. At the time of the FDA presentation, BA.1 was no longer circulating in the United States, having been replaced by more immune-evasive and contagious Omicron subvariants. But winter was around the corner. The FDA advisory committee, sensing the urgency of responding to these immune-evasive strains, voted to authorise bivalent vaccines with an understanding that they would target Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, which at the time had accounted for more than 95% of circulating strains.
A series of rapid-fire policy decisions followed. On June 29th 2022, the day after the advisory committee meeting, the Biden administration agreed to purchase 105 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s bivalent vaccine containing BA.4 and BA.5 mRNA. One month later, on July 29th 2022, the administration agreed to purchase 66 million doses of Moderna’s bivalent vaccine, intending to offer both vaccines in the fall and winter. On September 1st 2022, the FDA withdrew its emergency use authorisation for monovalent vaccine boosters and the CDC recommended bivalent vaccine boosters for everyone 12 years of age or older. On October 12th 2022, the CDC extended this recommendation to include everyone five years of age or older. At that point, no data from humans, including immunogenicity data, were available for comparing the relative capacities of the monovalent and bivalent vaccines to protect against BA.4 and BA.5.
On October 24th 2022, David Ho and colleagues released the results of a study examining levels of neutralizing antibodies against BA.4 and BA.5 after receipt of a monovalent or bivalent booster dose. They found “no significant difference in neutralisation of any SARS-CoV-2 variant”, including BA.4 and BA.5, between the two groups. One day later, Dan Barouch and colleagues released the results of a similar study, finding that “BA.5 [neutralising-antibody] titers were comparable following monovalent and bivalent mRNA boosters”. Barouch and colleagues also noted no appreciable differences in CD4+ or CD8+ T-cell responses between participants in the monovalent-booster group and those in the bivalent-booster group. Neither research group found the bivalent boosters to elicit superior immune responses. The results are now published in the Journal.
The likely reason the bivalent vaccines failed is immune imprinting, Dr. Offit explains.
The immune systems of people immunised with the bivalent vaccine, all of whom had previously been vaccinated, were primed to respond to the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2. They therefore probably responded to epitopes shared by BA.4 and BA.5 and the ancestral strain, rather than to new epitopes on BA.4 and BA.5.
When epidemiological data did become available, they showed very poor protection.
On November 22nd 2022, the CDC published data on the effectiveness of the BA.4 and BA.5 mRNA vaccines for preventing symptomatic infection within two months after receipt of the booster dose. For people who had received a monovalent vaccine two to three months earlier, the extra protection associated with the bivalent booster dose ranged from 28% to 31%. For those who had received a monovalent vaccine more than eight months earlier, the extra protection ranged from 43% to 56%. Given the results of previous studies, it’s likely that this moderate increase in protection against probably generally mild disease will be short lived.
The bivalent vaccine had very poor take-up and the variants it was targeted against were quickly gone.
As of November 15th 2022, only about 10% of the population for whom the bivalent vaccine had been recommended had received it. By December 2022, the BA.4 strain was no longer circulating, and BA.5 accounted for less than 25% of circulating SARS-CoV-2 strains, having been partially replaced by more immune-evasive strains, such as BQ.1, BQ.1.1, BF.7, XBB, and XBB.1.
It’s welcome that Dr. Offit is breaking ranks and expressing dismay about the poor process and the lack of data, and calling for the end of the mass vaccination campaign. The intervention is particularly significant because it denotes a failure of the central U.S. biosecurity strategy of trying to use fast-track mRNA vaccines to provide a lightning response to an emerging biological threat. It is thus likely that his conclusions will be strongly resisted by those who are invested – financially, psychologically and politically – in this strategy.
That Dr. Offit is only doing so now, and not with any recognition of any safety problems, is less welcome, of course. Still, he will likely not be thanked by his paymasters, and it is in the right direction, so he should receive credit for that.
We still await the acknowledgement that the benefit of these vaccines was never favourable for people at low risk from the virus, who never needed them, and that their safety profile is far worse than the companies and regulators have led the public to believe.
Stop Press: CNN reports that Dr. Offit is “angry” that Moderna failed to include unfavourable infection data in its submission to the FDA last year. “I was angry to find out that there was data that was relevant to our decision that we didn’t get to see,” Dr. Offit said. According to CNN: “The data that was not presented to the experts looked at actual infections: who caught COVID-19 and who did not. It found that 1.9% of the study participants who received the original booster became infected. Among those who got the updated bivalent vaccine – the one that scientists hoped would work better – a higher percentage, 3.2%, became infected.” Does it make you wonder what else they’re not telling you, Dr. Offit?
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I don’t care about his views on the bivalent jabs, Offit is a vax zealot and signed off the monovalent shots for use on children.
Oh and look…a 45 year old had a stroke. There appears to be one important detail missing from this story though. Again.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-64261533
https://rumble.com/v24xe7a-what-have-we-done-dr.-paul-offit-fda-vaccine-committee.html
My thoughts exactly. It may be bias confirmation, but it feels like there’s a LOT of “younger folks” dying, or having serious issues at the moment. Chatted to a guy today who is in his 40s, always been healthy, but had pneumonia over Christmas. And he also said 2 other friends also had it.
Again, one has to be wary of bias confirmation but anecdotally, there’s so much to be worried about. And my family are all vaccinated so I really do worry.
I used to be totally conscious of confirmation bias and I’d even post on here that assuming everybody dying suddenly had been jabbed and that that was the cause was as foolish as the opposition listing anyone who’d died within 28 days of a positive PCR as a ‘Covid death’, even if they’d been ran over by a bus or had dementia.
However, seeing as the excess deaths are actually increasing, more teens and working age people are succumbing to cardiac arrests, dying in their sleep/from “cause unknown”/SADS etc, and these articles almost always omit the fact they’ve either been jabbed or they haven’t, plus Peter McCullough and Aseem Molhotra’s stance that it’s the jab until proven otherwise, I’m siding with these two experts personally. It’s up to the family members to disclose the jab status of the deceased and I’m really dumbfounded as to why none of them do. It’s not like when a person gets injected they’re signing some non-disclosure, official secrets document or something. If I had a loved one die out of the blue I’d be letting all and sundry know their vax status either to defend the jab ( if I were a zealot ) or to warn others if they had been jabbed. Either way you’d want people to know wouldn’t you? In this current climate of excess deaths from people who should not be dying unexpectedly it should be made public, that’s my opinion anyway.
Carbon copy of my thoughts.
Yes, I look at the number of reports of athletes and celebrities dying of heart attacks and it seems up on a number of years. I remember 2016/7 was a bad time for celebrity deaths, but they seemed to be cancers and other longterm illnesses – David Bowie, for example. Now it’s coronaries. If this is the number of prominent people dying suddenly from heart attacks and the like seems substantial, how big must the toll be among ordinary people?…
Agree totally with your viewpoint. Perhaps the silence surrounding the deceased’s ‘vaccination’ status is a function of guilt? The relatives realising they could have argued more strongly against taking the poison and thus are culpable for the death?
Absolutely, my Partner’s son has just been diagnosed with pneumonia having been ill over Christmas with a “mysterious” ailment. He’s a fit and healthy mid forties bloke always doing outdoor sporty things. Obviously being a teacher he’s vaxxed up to the eyeballs. Nothing to see here though – of course . He got quite shirty when my Partner asked him his vaccination/booster status.
My work colleague and I both came down with a cold-type bug just before Christmas (same day, so we didn’t give it to each other). I’m unjabbed … I had 3 days of feeling a bit grotty/ She’s younger than me, jabbed to the max and was admitted to hospital on Xmas Eve with pneumonia …. a 10 day stay.
Although I might be experiencing confirmatory bias myself I can’t help but noticing that the MSM stories (notably the BBC) tag on to the end of this type of story a welter of background information about what factors affect likelihood of strokes and heart attacks in the general public. Sometimes this spreads to the lifestyle of the actual deceased. Factually these may be correct, but I can’t help feeling that the editor is trying to distract me. It’s similar in law courts, where the side with a flawed argument introduces all manner of factually correct but irrelevant distractions to draw the jury’s attention away from the fatal flaw and perhaps bore them to death.
Yes I agree, it’s their tactics in trying to normalize this sort of thing. Similar to how they did with kids and young people having heart attacks, and they brought out ridiculous adverts about this didn’t they? As if kids collapsing while playing sports is to be expected. Basically everything they do has a psychological element which is geared towards manipulation of the masses. I’m 100% distrustful after all of this time and as a result anybody dying or collapsing out of the blue, the clot shot did it, in the library, with the candlestick, until proven otherwise.
Obviously not important enough to not have had the real thing. Just pot luck I guess.
Strange is it not, that no one of any influence – ie of the TRPTB, seems to have suffered any coincidental incidents.
Almost enough to re evaluate the immutable laws of statistics…
Yes I’ve said the same thing and it’s been on my mind a lot too. Many must be wondering the same. One hypothesis, which is based off of Jikkyleaks’ revelations ( which Chris Martenson did a video covering on YT recently ) is that all of these politicians and others in authority are having jabs from the batches which have no deaths or other adverse event reports associated with them. I don’t know if you saw the video but it revealed that Pfizer staff were selecting batches to be jabbed with which had no reports listed. The ”hot lots”, with deaths associated with them, were being purposely shipped off to institutes for people with learning disabilities.
Actually here’s the extended video on Rumble because he can say more on that platform. Well worth a watch.
https://rumble.com/v230jdk-australian-covid-released.html
It is certainly well worth a watch! If you don’t have 45 min to spare, here is a one-minute summary, re-phrased as questions for legal reasons.
My question is totally different: why were our politicians and “investigative journalists” not asking this sort of question of the experts? Instead they were asking who had leaked photographs of lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street, or why vaccine-sceptical material was being removed by social media editors.
A friend who works in the music industry & has done so since the 80s has lost 8 close friends in the last few weeks. All died suddenly & unexpectedly. All were in their 50s & 60s. All had conformed so that they could continue to work. My friend did not conform.
Interesting that he suggests that it is due to immune imprinting.
This is also called Original Antigenic Sin (OAS). When this was raised as a risk by independent scientists many many months ago it was filed under ‘conspiracy theory’. I’m not expecting there to be any official apologies for this misinformation.
The full consequences of OAS in the vaccinated are not yet known.
I should add that there might be OAS after natural infection, although natural infection results in an immune response targeted at the likely site of infection (the lungs), with multiple immune mechanisms (not just antibodies) and the whole of the virus not just the spike protein (other parts of the virus are less likely to mutate than the spike protein). Thus OAS in the case of natural infection where the individual’s immune system had no vaccine priming should offer some increased resistance to immune escape mutations.
Hopefully OAS will be only a minor problem for us all to deal with.
Offit is an out and out hypocrite who is obviously getting itchy feet and attempting to reverse-ferret. How can he talk about stopping vaxxing young people with the mRNA crud when he approved the monovalent same crud for kids that are at statistically zero risk from Covid?! He’s trying to U-turn and I am not accepting this at all, he needs to be held to account.
Or is he, along with the other actors speaking against the bioweapon injections who have previously conformed with promotion of them, part of a planned Great Reveal? Purposely telling the population that they’ve been duped, poisoned & their children poisoned to incite a backlash sufficient to introduce martial law? Purposely undermining the faith in the current systems of health, government etc to create a problem to which a “solution” is presented which fulfils the wet dreams of the cabal?
My sceptical antenna are very twitchy as I’ve learned just how mendacious the government et al are. None of these actors who are permitted to speak in the MSM domain have apologised for their role in promoting the Narrative.
So that the information is coming out is good in so far as it gives folk the option of using it to inform their consent, but nothing is allowed in the MSM if it doesn’t serve/fulfil an agenda.
Now that is one heck of an elaborate theory! Actually I’ve never even heard of a ”Great Reveal” so I feel I should go off and research to clue myself up a bit, I’m out of the loop.
They won’t be able to ‘build back better’ if what was there before isn’t removed.
I remember this tweet from Gabor Erdosi when he posted it on 5th October 2021 (15 months ago)
https://twitter.com/gerdosi/status/1445325641558155270
It takes weeks to switch from original spike to e.g. Delta spike in vaccines. Variant boosters won’t work (OAS) and that’s why you don’t even see animal studies that test 2-3 original Wuhan doses + a ‘variant’ booster. It seems everyone knows this except for the general public.
Better late than never, but as the story says, it sure came late. I wonder why he held out so long and what changed his mind now. And will other dominoes fall?
Better late than never, or too little too late?
To me it seems that the boosters laid bare the sofar better hidden medium term toxicity of the poison- we see serious illnesses in our elderly friends and family members exploding since the autumn. Add in the German lg4 antibody study and the smarter villains are now scrambling to do some CYA.
It is mind-boggling that the people were so willing to be Guinea pigs.
The scandalous lack of any toxicology studies was well known too and absolutely no secret, and that particular chicken is now seemingly coming home to roost.
https://brownstone.org/articles/biontech-brazenly-dodged-safety-testing/
Yes, curious why now to advise against young, healthy getting any more jabs. Don’t think we’ve reached the tipping point yet, though maybe we’re getting closer–every day the news reports 2 or 3 people who died suddenly. I have low-level anxiety because all family members and good friends have taken the jabs. I forwarded this advisory to my 20-yo, who I hope was disorganized enough to not get any more boosters.
“Safety data were reassuring.”
Because it was printed on the same piece of paper Pfizer used to wrap the stack of 100 dollar bills they gave me.
“…containing mRNA from strains …”
Strains – not from the wild, but invented by Pfizer and Moderna in their computer models. Strains which they believe might appear in the future.
FFS!
Another Tory suspended. It would seem that if you side with Bridgen you’re also for the chop. What does this say about the great British ‘free and democratic’ society? Not happening with WEF-installed puppets penetrating the cabinet, that much is evident!
“On a public Facebook page, Stevenson, who represents Greater Heanor on Derbyshire County Council and Shipley Park, Horsley and Horsley Woodhouse on Amber Valley Borough Council, said he “stood with” Bridgen.
Cllr Stevenson said his colleague “did not compare the vaccine to the Holocaust” but that it was the worst crime to humanity “since” the Holocaust, claiming this is “totally different”.
He said: “Andrew Bridgen MP told the truth regarding the injuries and deaths from these vaccines. I have personally met these people.”
Stevenson told The Local Democracy Reporting Service: “Many people are dying and suffering as a result of taking this medical intervention.”
https://www.gbnews.uk/news/covid-tory-councillor-suspended-after-defending-andrew-bridgen/423933
The Local Democracy Reporting Service that is funded by the BBC. Sounds as undemocratic as the Trusted News Initiative.
I don’t want to be unrealistic but to quote a famous politician from the past – this might not be the beginning of the end but it may be the end the beginning
I sense the bastards are going to be on the run soon
You think this hasn’t been thought through?
The people behind this will never be punished.
Some minions will be “sacrificed”, but won’t suffer any remotely appropriate punishment, just early retirement
I expect some have thought it through, others not so much. I think there are too many variables for anyone to stand a high chance of controlling it. But what do I know? Meantime we’ll all keep chipping away in whatever manner we are able to.
On 19 March 2020, Paul Offit had an interview with Zubin Damania (aka ZDoggMD) in which he said:
Remember, this was March 2020…
Source: Dr. Paul Offit On Our COVID-19 Response | Dr. Paul Offit is a leading vaccine researcher (he co-developed the rotavirus vaccine) and legendary rationalist. You may not agree with everything he… | By ZDoggMD | Facebook Quote from around 2:46
So why was there an INSANE plan to ‘vaccinate’ mass populations around the world, most of whom did not need any intrusive medical intervention?
You just need to follow the $$$$$$
“A cautionary tale?” Bit late now you’ve infected 85% of the western world with it!
“Shhhh, Shhhh
It’s, oh, so quiet
Shhhh Shhhh
It’s, oh, so still
Shhhh Shhhh
You’re all alone
Shhh Shhh
And so peaceful until…”
You admit the truth yer yer!….
it’s starting , oh so quiet, but I can just here it, listen… , the deafening sound of experts squirming on their self forged hooks!
“
” But what’s the use…scream scream…. of vaccing again?
Climbing off the bandwagon on the leeward side so no one sees you!
This trickle will become a flood!
The first of the turncoat traitors!
Calls for end of mass vaccination – is that because he’s seen the light…or the shadow of the rope?
Too little too late Offit, you scumbag.
He – and others – are pulling back as seems the beta test cull is going to plan. Once the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty and the IHR are in place and any and all jabs mandated internationally, then we’ll see real harm being done. Billyboy must be so pleased.