Hardly Anyone Is Buying Biden’s Bivalent Boosters The administration has oversold vaccines for two years, and Covid is less lethal now anyway.By Allysia Finley
Marketing 101: Don’t puff up your product. When it doesn’t live up to the hype, the public won’t trust what you’re selling the next time around. That’s the problem the Biden administration faces as it tries to peddle “bivalent” booster shots for Covid-19.
Vaccines have served a useful purpose by reducing severe illness among the vulnerable and seniors. But many Americans who rolled up their sleeves for the original two-doses and even third ones were led to believe the vaccines would prevent them from getting sick. Many nevertheless fell ill. Some were knocked out for days with flulike symptoms—exactly what they were trying to avoid by getting vaccinated and boosted. Can you blame them for not buying the administration’s pitch that the new and supposedly improved bivalent boosters will “protect” them and their families?
The Health and Human Services Department has been running ads during the World Cup: “As we know, immunity doesn’t last forever. Updated vaccines offer additional protection against Omicron. Don’t miss the game.” Such a misleading statement might get a vaccine maker sued for deceptive advertising.
Omicron has been supplanted by numerous distant relatives. The bivalent vaccines target the original Wuhan strain as well as BA.4 and BA.5 variants—grandchildren of Omicron. Those variants predominated when the Food and Drug Administration directed vaccine makers to produce the bivalent boosters this summer, but they now make up less than 15% of viruses sequenced.
The administration flogs a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that supposedly provides real-world evidence that the bivalents boost protection. According to the study, previously vaccinated and boosted individuals who got the bivalent booster were between 19% and 43% less likely to develop Covid-19 symptoms than the unvaccinated.
Seniors who got five shots including the bivalent were only 23% less likely to get sick this fall than the unvaccinated. That’s hardly anything to boast about. The bivalents also fell well short of the 50% efficacy standard the FDA set for authorizing Covid vaccines in 2020—a time when the virus was more lethal and fewer Americans had natural immunity.
These figures probably represent the bivalent boosters’ peak efficacy since the study tracked infections only during the first several weeks after most had gotten their shots. Antibodies and protection against infection rapidly fall a couple months after vaccination, as we saw with the two-dose formulation and boosters.
Recall that the original vaccines were initially found to be about 95% effective against infection based on randomized controlled trials. Protection then waned as antibody levels fell and the virus mutated. As so-called breakthrough infections became more common, administration officials insisted that the vaccines still protected against severe illness.
For many Americans, that was beside the point. Healthy nonelderly people are at low risk of hospitalization. Many got vaccinated to reduce their risk of passing on the virus to vulnerable friends and family. President Biden said in April 2021 that getting vaccinated will “protect your community, your family, your friends, and your neighbors.”
But by last fall it was clear that vaccinated Americans were catching and spreading the virus. Then the administration rolled out third doses it claimed would strengthen individual and collective protection.
To many Americans, the boosters came as a bait-and-switch. They’d been led to believe vaccines offered a lifelong warranty against infection. Public-health officials at the outset should have set more realistic expectations.
The administration likely feared that providing these public disclaimers would undermine its vaccination campaign. Not doing so, however, had the same result. Public-health officials compounded this mistake by overselling the boosters.
Last December, Anthony Fauci insisted that “our booster vaccine regimens work against Omicron” despite evidence that the new variant evaded vaccine antibodies. Studies later showed that the original boosters were 75% effective against symptomatic Omicron infection in the first several weeks after inoculation, but protection rapidly receded and vanished against Omicron’s progeny.
The CDC’s website in September showed that, since April, Americans who got the original boosters were testing positive at higher rates than those who had only two doses. These data were recently removed from the website when case data were added for the bivalent booster.
Even as administration officials pump the bivalent boosters, they insist that the original vaccines protect against severe illness. “The real danger is in the people who have not been vaccinated,” Dr. Fauci said at a Nov. 22 press briefing. “If we’re going to see a problem this winter, it’s going to be among those people.” If that’s true, who needs another booster?
The immunocompromised and elderly who mount poor vaccine responses would benefit more from new treatments than getting shots every few months. An estimated half of those dying with Covid can’t take the antiviral Paxlovid for medical reasons, which limits the drug’s utility for the highest-risk patients. As for everyone else, here’s the public-health message the administration should be relaying: The best way to protect yourself from getting sick with Covid or any other respiratory illness is by getting enough sleep, nutrition and exercise.
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