A doctor with cancer (lymphoma) has a rapid sudden progression of his cancer after getting a covid booster. He has a scan of the cancer before the booster, and got the booster before beginning treatment since the chemo would weaken his immune system and make him less likely to benefit from the booster and more at risk to covid. The next scan shortly after the shot showed things had gotten much worse.
Since his immune system T cells were the source of the cancer, he speculates that the vaccine ingredients intended to stimulate stronger T cell reactions to the spike protein also caused those cancerous ones to grow and spread more rapidly.
[the vaccines] rev up those [T] cells with extra oomph. Now Michel began to wonder whether that oomph could, in ultrarare cases, turn out to be a liability. Perhaps the shots gave such a jolt to his helper T cells that they went berserk. If they were prone to forming tumors, or if they were already cancerous, then overstimulation could have made the problem even worse.
as a longtime immunologist and medical innovator, he’s still considering the question of whether a vaccine that is saving tens of millions of lives each year might have put his own in jeopardy. He remains adamant that COVID-19 vaccines are necessary and useful for the vast majority of people. But he wants the discussion about vaccines to be transparent.
Around the time of his February follow-up, Michel received a message from a doctor who had read his self-referential case report. The doctor’s mother had been diagnosed with the same subtype of lymphoma that Michel has following a COVID booster shot. More recently, he got an email from a woman whose sister had been vaccinated and received that diagnosis the following month. Again, these could be coincidences. Or maybe they are the second and third data points in a growing set.
Not clear these O+Wuhan bivalent boosters are any better than the old Wuhan ones.
Boosting with a new bivalent mRNA vaccine targeting both BA.4/BA.5 and an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 strain did not elicit a discernibly superior virus-neutralizing antibody responses compared to boosting with an original monovalent vaccine. These findings may be indicative of immunological imprinting5, although follow-up studies are needed
so they’re a win for PFE who is discontinuing the old ones. I’m sure if necessary, the friendly administration will pass something requiring these shots to be “covered” by your insurance, ie billed to you via premiums whether you want it or not.
MRNA cancer shot had good results and Stock is up 20% today. I think this tech has promise and I’d take that shot (cancer) but not C19 knowing what I know now.
From that article, a negative take on the bivalent boosting approach moreso than any than else.
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 neutralization of any SARS-CoV-2 variant,” including BA.4 and BA.5, between the two groups.3 One day later, Dan Barouch and colleagues released the results of a similar study, finding that “BA.5 [neutralizing-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.4 Neither research group found the bivalent boosters to elicit superior immune responses. The results are now published in the Journal .
Why did the strategy for significantly increasing BA.4 and BA.5 neutralizing antibodies using a bivalent vaccine fail?
investigation of the signal in the [vaccine safety data] raised a question of whether people 65 and older who have received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent were more likely to have an ischemic stroke in the 21 days following vaccination compared with days 22-42 following vaccination. This preliminary signal has not been identified with the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine
The news here of course is that the CDC actually told us - they’d been hiding safety signals on the original vaccines for over a year until they got sued to provide it. Oddly, given this potential risk appears only with PFE and not MRNA’s vaccine,
No change in vaccination practice is recommended
You might recall they were quick to pause use of the JNJ vaccine early on for 6 months when when very rare and often deadly cases of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia (TTS) appeared as a safety signal.
But as I’ve covered, Pfizer gets the kid gloves from the administration so they’re still happily selling doses, soon to be at 4x the original $25-30 cost.
The Food and Drug Administration ordered the vaccine makers in June to update the boosters against BA.4 and BA.5 and rushed in late August to authorize the bivalents before clinical data were available. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the bivalents for all adults without any evidence that they were effective or needed.
Vaccine makers could have performed small randomized trials last summer and early fall that tested the bivalents against the original boosters and a placebo group. Results could have been available by the end of September. But the public-health authorities didn’t want to wait—and now we know why.
The CDC published a study in November that estimated the bivalents were only 22% to 43% effective against infection during the BA.5 wave—their peak efficacy. As antibodies waned and new variants took over later in the fall, their protection against infection probably dropped to zero.
PFE and MRNA’s new covid boosters were approved by the FDA. They updated them to include something with the latest strain of Omicron.
As far as I could tell, they did no human testing on these - just some mice that generated antibodies against the new spike (and we still dont have great evidence that antibody levels lead to better health outcomes from the disease either). But don’t let that bother you - the media is rolling out some extra Covid Fear, even tho cases are only up marginally and deaths are low and lower than last year. Get those shots, some needs to make billions off them!
