Two outgoing vaccine regulators opposed COVID-19 booster shots in an article published Monday in The Lancet, a British peer-reviewed medical journal.
The article is seen as a snare to the Biden administration’s plan to begin a booster rollout this month, according to Politico.
In the article, Marion Gruber and Philip Krause of the U. S. Food and Drug Administration say that while boosters might provide some additional protection, they would not be dramatically more effective than the current two shots.
Joining in authorship of the article are 16 other experts from the FDA, World Health Organization and worldwide academic institutions.
Both Gruber and Krause are retiring, reportedly due to frustration with the Biden administration’s promotion of booster shots.
The Lancet article says COVID vaccines were not designed to prevent infection or transmission of the virus; rather they were to reduce hospitalizations and deaths. They are, for the most part, succeeding in that, despite the delta variant, the authors indicated.
Instead of booster shots, the public interest would better be served by educating and vaccinating those who are not vaccinated, the authors said. And, instead of doing a booster shot, the vaccines should be exported to countries where there have been no available vaccines.
Essentially, they are not needed in the U.S.
Only if a future variant threatened to kill or hospitalize vaccinated populations should there be a booster shot, they wrote. Otherwise, a booster shot would be a mistake.
“Careful and public scrutiny of the evolving data will be needed to assure that decisions about boosting are informed by reliable science more than by politics,” the Lancet article authors wrote.
These experts are not the only ones raising caution about the booster shots. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say data are inadequate. One key CDC official said the emphasis should be on heading off intense sickness, hospitalizations and death instead of attempting to entirely stamp out COVID, according to Politico.
The cautions fly in the face of the Biden administration’s attempt to launch booster shots beginning Sept. 20.
“This will boost your immune response. It will increase your protection from COVID-19. It’s the best way to protect ourselves from new variants that could arise,” President Joe Biden said in a recorded statement several weeks ago.
“The plan is for every adult to get a booster shot eight months after you got your second shot. Pending approval from the Food and Drug Administration, [and] the CDC’s committee of outside experts, we’ll be ready to start … this booster program during the week of Sept. 20, at which time anyone vaccinated on or before Jan. 20 will be eligible to get a booster shot.”
Politico interprets the Lancet article as undercutting Biden administration booster efforts just before an external advisory committee meeting at the end of this week regarding the introduction of boosters for individuals aged 16 and older.
The article’s authors say the lack of data may compromise not only faith in the boosters, but in the overall COVID vaccination program and vaccinations in general, Politico reported.
The boosters need to be deemed safe, especially since there are serious side effects in the current vaccination program, including incidents of Guillain-Barré paralysis and myocarditis heart issues, they wrote. Mess this up, and “there could be implications for vaccine acceptance that go beyond COVID-19 vaccines.”
Yet, there may be some individuals with weakened immune systems who could be aided by booster shots, the authors said, according to Time magazine.
Nevertheless, the Time article slightly expressed some hesitancy — if not actual questioning — regarding the rollout of COVID booster shots, an unusual tone for the establishment media in its relentless cry to vaccinate.
The Biden administration’s premature push for booster shots — despite opposition from medical experts within his own federal agencies — is evidence that politics, rather than medical science, is being applied.
Of course. As Joe Biden has said, “This is not about freedom or personal choice.”
Whether due to crushing censorship regarding dissent over COVID treatment and vaccination or not, some are beginning to raise questions — questions that should have been raised a year ago.
It’s sad that not only have we gotten to the point where we cannot believe our government and the news media. It’s been obvious through the COVID events of the last year and half that many of our public health officials have also betrayed our trust — even though they wrap themselves in the flag of “the science.”
How’s this for a new motto: It’s not science when there’s censorship.
The Western Journal has published this article in the interest of shedding light on stories about the COVID-19 vaccine that are largely unreported by the establishment media. In that same spirit, according to the most recent statistics from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Effect Reporting System, 7,653 deaths have been reported among those who received a vaccine, or 20 out of every 1,000,000. By contrast, 652,480 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported by the CDC, or 16,101 out of every 1,000,000. In addition, it must be noted that VAERS reports can be filed by anyone and are unverified by the CDC. Thus, as the agency notes, “Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem.” The decision of whether to receive a COVID vaccine is a personal one, but it is important to consider context when making that decision. — Ed. note
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
