COVID-19 vaccines may be fueling new variants, latest data suggests

The author of an op-ed published this week in the Wall Street Journal suggested COVID-19 vaccines could be fueling new variants — a theory posited as far back as August 2021 by vaccinologist Geert Vanden Bossche.

In her Jan. 1 opinion piece, Allysia Finley — a member of WSJ’s editorial board — cited new research suggesting the virus appears to be evolving in ways that “evade immunity.”

Finley also pointed to research showing people who received COVID-19 boosters are more susceptible to infection than people who received the primary series but were not boosted.

Finley cited a study published in Nature in December showing the evolution of Omicron has led to the rapid, simultaneous emergence of many variants that are more transmissible and more likely than the previous sub-variants to evade antibodies produced by vaccines and monoclonal antibody treatments.

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In August 2021, when vaccine expert Geert Vanden Bossche, D.M.V, Ph.D., independent virologist and vaccine expert, warned that vaccines could lead to new, more infectious viral variants becoming increasingly dominant, he was attacked and accused of spreading misinformation.

In his widely circulated article, Vanden Bossche argued universal mass vaccination would prompt dominant propagation of highly infectious, neutralization escape mutants, and naturally acquired — or vaccinal neutralizing antibodies — would no longer offer any protection to immunized individuals.

Vanden Bossche’s hypothesis has since been partially supported by studies such as those cited by the WSJ and by other research published in 2021 in Scientific Reports, suggesting vaccinated people may play a key role in helping SARS-CoV-2 variants evolve into those that evade existing COVID-19 vaccines.

Despite this danger, Vanden Bossche said he was guardedly optimistic as he sees natural immunity succeeding against the new viral strains, despite the ineffectiveness of the vaccines.

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Several new studies also indicate that people who have been vaccinated and boosted may be more likely to be infected with COVID-19 than their unvaccinated counterparts.

A Cleveland Clinic preprint study, also cited in the WSJ op-ed, studied approximately 50,000 healthcare workers in the Cleveland Clinic healthcare system to evaluate the efficacy of the bivalent boosters.

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The study found the bivalent boosters offered moderate (30%) protection against infection while the BA.5 variant was spreading.

It also found that workers who received more doses of the vaccines were at higher risk of getting sick: Those who received three doses were 3.4 times as likely to get infected as the unvaccinated and those who received two doses were 2.6 times as likely to get infected.