One may recall how top establishment experts and media “fact-checkers” insisted during the past two years that Covid is a deadly disease that everyone who can breathe should be at least wary of whenever they are in public. Any mention of the data showing that Covid is, in fact, much less deadly for the overwhelming majority of relatively healthy Americans, or that it will be endemic, was deemed “medical misinformation.”
Not anymore. Top Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials, including Commissioner Robert Califf, explicitly argue that Americans will now have to accept Covid as another seasonal respiratory disease, akin to seasonal influenza. That likely means, among other things, submitting to seasonal Covid vaccinations, which also will become a part of “the new normal.”
In their article titled “COVID-19 Vaccination — Becoming Part of the New Normal,” published on May 2 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) Peter Marks, the FDA’s Principal Deputy Commissioner Janet Woodcock, and Robert Califf, write,
It is time to accept that the presence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is the new normal. It will likely circulate globally for the foreseeable future, taking its place alongside other common respiratory viruses such as influenza.
That admission comes as a major departure from what Americans were led to believe by public-health officials in 2020 and 2021. In October 2020, for example, President Biden’s chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, insisted that President Trump’s comparisons of Covid to the flu were erroneous.
“It is not correct to say it’s the same as flu,” Fauci said, adding, “Even if you are a healthy person with no underlying conditions and you get infected and you are without symptoms, you should not consider yourself in a safe vacuum where what happens to you doesn’t impact others.”
In their article, the FDA officials praised medical advancements that presumably allowed people to mitigate Covid risks.
“Widespread vaccine- and infection-induced immunity, combined with the availability of effective therapeutics, could blunt the effects of future outbreaks,” they wrote.
The issue is, however, that vaccinated and boosted people can not develop an effective immunity against Covid as can the unvaccinated who have recovered from Covid, as shown by a recent study published in the prestigious journal Cell. Apparently, vaccination that results in a phenomenon called “original antigenic sin,” or antigenic imprinting, does not prevent people from getting Covid, and this can lead to an endless cycle of reinfections.
Then, the idea that the coronavirus vaccine causes antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), which exacerbates the outcomes of every consecutive reinfection — something predicted by non-establishment scientists back in 2020 — has just found mainstream scientific confirmation.
Therefore, if high-profile scientists were intellectually honest, they would echo the advice of Idaho physician Dr. Ryan Cole to forgo any additional doses of the vaccine, which are not only ineffective in warding off infection but may damage one’s immune system.
Yet the FDA experts say the opposite, i.e., by accepting Covid as another seasonal disease, the public will probably need to vaccinate against it seasonally, too. Just like the flu shots, Covid shots will have to be reformulated to address new dominant strains.
“It likely will require similar annual consideration for vaccine composition updates in consultation with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC),” per the article.
While admitting that the effects and durability of the protection granted by third and fourth doses of the vaccine have not been thoroughly studied, the authors suggest that boosters are more helpful than not, at least for older people: “However, robust observational data from Israel with a large sample size showed additional protection [provided by a fourth vaccine dose] against hospitalization and death in that population [over 50].”
The FDA experts further argue that Covid will likely become a threat to many older Americans, especially those who are unvaccinated and not “up-to-date” with their Covid shots. That will happen, the authors believe, due to “(1) waning immunity from prior vaccine or prior infection, (2) further evolution of SARS-CoV-2, and (3) seasonality of respiratory virus infection, waves of which are generally more severe in the fall to winter months when individuals move their activities indoors.”
Giving additional boosters to people between 18 and 50 years of age who have already been vaccinated and boosted “is not likely to have as marked an effect on hospitalization or death,” they noted, saying that vaccinating the unvaccinated, including children, and those who are late on their boosters, “may be” beneficial to them.
By this summer, the authors say, the FDA will work out the recommendations on who should receive another dose, and on its formulation. They also stated that administering fresh Covid boosters along with seasonal flu shots “has the potential to protect susceptible individuals against hospitalization and death.”
The authors conclude that vaccination will remain a public-health measure of paramount importance for the “normal” functioning of the country, and that “It is important to recognize that the fall season will present a major opportunity to improve COVID-19 vaccination coverage with the goal of minimizing future societal disruption and saving lives.”
It was reported last week that the White House was preparing for as many as 100 million Americans to get infected with Covid during this fall and winter if Congress does not provide new funding needed to purchase more tests and new formulations of vaccines.
All of the vaccine manufacturers that are allowed to market their Covid shots in America — Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J — have previously announced their work on Omicron-specific boosters.
