By Brian C. Joondeph, M.D.
The expression, “If some is good, more must be better” might apply to chocolate, vacations, and American Thinker articles, but not to everything in life. I speak of COVID vaccines, a hot topic in personal discussions and on social media.
The corporate media and government, including most world health authorities follow a similar quote, attributed to May West, ““If a little is great, and a lot is better, then way too much is just about right!” Is that so? Are an endless series of mRNA “vaccines” really in the best interests of virtually all Americans for whom they are recommended?
I know many individuals who have been fully vaccinated against COVID, and had three additional boosters, including the newest bivalent vaccine, who have come down with COVID. Not hospital or ICU COVID as we saw three years ago, but bad flu-like COVID, the type that lands one in bed for several days.
This is not surprising as viruses mutate to be more contagious and less lethal, independent of vaccines, making the vaccines less important than this natural mutation course. But are they making things worse?
The CDC subscribes to “the more the merrier” approach. From their website, updated a few weeks ago the, “Updated (bivalent) Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine also became available on December 9, 2022 for children aged 6 months–4 years to complete the primary series.”
How at risk are children? CDC data shows fewer than 650 children ages 0-4 years have died of COVID. How many had medical comorbidities such as immunodeficiencies or malignancies versus otherwise healthy children? How many died “with” rather than “from” COVID, testing positive for COVID incidentally while they died of an unrelated cause?
Medical authorities know the difference between “with” and “from”, right? Perhaps not. In Colorado, the deaths of a murder-suicide couple were included in the state’s COVID death numbers, “because the two tested positive for COVID-19 within 30 days before their death.” How’s that for good science?
Are more vaccine dosages of net benefit or harm? Is there any thoughtful discussion among physicians and the medical establishment of the risk benefit ratio, instrumental in any medical intervention recommendation?
Again from the CDC, “The updated (bivalent) boosters are called ‘bivalent’ because they protect against both the original virus that causes COVID-19 and the Omicron variant BA.4 and BA.5.” Are these the COVID variants we need to be concerned about today? Or are they extinct?
The original Wuhan strain, which caused havoc in early 2020, is long gone. As are most of last year’s Omicron variants. The current version of COVID is a variant called XBB.1.5, also known as the Kracken variant, growing “from about 1% of cases nationwide [in December] to 43% as of Jan. 13, according to data from the CDC.”
This means that we are boosting against variants that are or will soon be extinct. This would be like taking the flu vaccine from two years ago, this year, offering some protection against influenza variants of the past, not the present.
Yet health authorities recommend continued boosters. When will enough be enough? When will we have confidence that natural immunity, as most Americans have been exposed to COVID by now, will offer not perfect, but sufficient protection? Are endless boosters making things worse for people?
At this point, I must add the necessary disclaimer that I am not “anti-vaccine”, having been inoculated against COVID in late 2020 and I am not offering any medical advice. COVID decisions should be made in conjunction with your healthcare provider. I am simply observing and asking questions, both necessary in the advancement of medicine and science.
Cleveland Clinic answered the question about endless boosters in a December 2022 paper. It has not been peer reviewed yet, but given its conclusion, most medical journals would likely reject it, preferring to publish “peer reviewed” papers that they had to subsequently retract, as did the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. Peer review may not be all that it’s touted to be.
The Cleveland Clinic paper reached a simple conclusion as summarized by Steve Kirsch in his January 19 newsletter, “Top study shows people with more jabs were more likely to get COVID than people with fewer jabs.”
This study included over 51,000 Cleveland Clinic employees who were followed over a 98 day period. Results were plotted by the incidence of test positive COVID versus number of vaccine doses, ranging from zero to more than three. At the end of the observation period, the differences were statistically significant between number of doses and infection for all groups except the 3 and >3 doses.
Cleveland Clinic is not some right-wing conspiracy theory Q-anon Twitter account but one of the premier medical institutions in the world. These results should be newsworthy, with honest and inquisitive journalists asking Drs Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky to explain this data. Instead, the media is chasing Rep George Santos, leaving it to independent journalists on Substack to actually report these results.
Another Chinese study in humanized mice found that, “Extended immunizations impaired the serum neutralization activity.” While this animal study has not been confirmed in humans, their conclusion was worrisome, to say the least, “We found that the protective effects from the humoral immunity and cellular immunity established by the conventional immunization were both profoundly impaired during the extended vaccination course.”
Alex Berenson, formerly of the vaccine happy New York Times, in his newsletter, offered a concise summary of this paper including this conclusion, “The finding may help to explain why large epidemiological studies keep finding that people who have received multiple boosters are at higher risk for Omicron infection than unvaccinated people.” Although not a human study, the results are similar to the Cleveland Clinic paper on humans.
Both papers are dutifully ignored by the corporate media, preferring to stick to their “safe and effective” narrative despite conflicting data that at a minimum warrants further analysis and discussion
Physicians practice, or at least should, under the mantra “First do no harm”. New data must be considered, and hypotheses and recommendations changed in response to new information. Doing otherwise may lead to harm and erosion of trust in the medical system, which in America has previously been the best in the world.
How will history view those who looked the other way out of fear or hubris, daring not to ask questions and think beyond the pronouncements of government health agencies? And how many Americans will have their lives upended by dutifully adhering to government pronouncements?
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/covid_vaxes__its_not_the_more_the_merrier.html