Covid-19 “reporting in Rhode Island is shamelessly biased toward unquestioning pro-vaccine advocacy, i.e., the confessed Ricci Rules for RI media, which disqualify “negative reporting” on vaccines (or masking).
Today’s G. Wayne Miller Projo “backgrounder” on the new “bivalent” covid-19 vaccine boosters is yet another sad example of this genre of pseudo-journalism cum vaccine advocacy. The cursory, “what and why” section of Mr. Miller’s report ostensibly about booster “development,” states only.
“They are a new ‘bivalent vaccine, meaning that they target two strains of COVID-19,’ according to the Rhode Island Department of Health. ‘The bivalent COVID-19 boosters from Pfizer and Moderna target the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 and the omicron variant, which is the strain causing most current cases.’ The BA.5 omicron subvariant is far and away the dominant strain in the United States.”
This very pruned summary by Projo’s Mr. Miller has a glaring—indeed disqualifying omission of fact—what satirical poet Ogden Nash described as “equally bad in the eyes of all right-thinking people, from Billy Sunday to Buddha,/And it consists of not having done something you shuddha.” The only data CDC (Centers For Disease Control and Prevention) has released till now, despite approving the bivalent booster and aggressively promoting its use, are findings from ~10 vaccinated mice—all of whom got infected despite their vaccination (and the meaningless claim of “better protection”)! [slide p.22; h/t Igor Chudov] [slide p.22; h/t Igor Chudov]
[slide p.22; h/t Igor Chudov]
Acknowledging (somewhat) this extreme paucity of even non-human data, Science conceded,
“The data on the updated boosters are limited, however, and the impact they will have if greenlit is unclear.”
Finally even heavily (vaccine) industry-supported researcher, and vaccination zealot Dr. Offit of Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, recently questioned the need for covid-19 vaccine boosters, given their inability to stop SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Offit, is one of two FDA (Food and Drug Administration) vaccine committee members who voted against asking companies to make Omicron-specific boosters. He argued unlike measles and rubella which have a much longer incubation period, allowing for vaccines to effectively prevent transmission, the incubation period for SARS-CoV-2—the time between getting infected and becoming infectious to others—is too short. Thus levels of neutralizing antibodies conferred by the vaccine (or booster) are not high enough for the immune system to have time to recognize and fight off the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the few days between exposure and when someone sheds enough virus to infect others. Offit concluded, regarding SARS-CoV-2, “even if 100% of the population were vaccinated and the virus hadn’t evolved at all, (covid-19) vaccines would do very little to stop transmission.”
Axiomatically, Projo’s Mr. Miller made no reference to Dr. Offit’s recent observations either.
