Dr. Faust, I would appreciate your take on the Cleveland Clinic preprint article ( https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.17.22283625v1.full ) which (among other things) ostensibly showed an increased risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection with a greater number of COVID-19 vaccinations. This perplexing finding is fueling a lot of anti-COVID-19 vaccine commentary.
If you have already addressed it, I would appreciate a link to that Inside Medicine article (or other source in which you have addressed it). Thanks.
Hi--I have only briefly looked at it but it is uninterpretable in terms of greater # of infections because we do not know if people who were more often boosted were more likely to get tested (i.e. very concerned). The authors state that the opposite could be true (i.e., the idea that boosted people might get tested *less because they'd be less worried about getting infected) but I find that to be highly unlikely. So unless they have controlled for testing frequency, the data cannot be used the way people are saying. That said, I do think it is possible that overboosting can lead to a long-term increase in infections in some situations (but not all), depending on immune history such as what variant they were infected with, and when/what boosters they got. But on this small a time frame, it looks like artifact to me. I'll look more, though
Always a treasure of knowledge and solid no hype reading recommendations. Feel like you and Benjy ought to be related as it seems your two brains are quite alike.
Dr. Faust, I would appreciate your take on the Cleveland Clinic preprint article ( https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.17.22283625v1.full ) which (among other things) ostensibly showed an increased risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection with a greater number of COVID-19 vaccinations. This perplexing finding is fueling a lot of anti-COVID-19 vaccine commentary.
If you have already addressed it, I would appreciate a link to that Inside Medicine article (or other source in which you have addressed it). Thanks.
Hi--I have only briefly looked at it but it is uninterpretable in terms of greater # of infections because we do not know if people who were more often boosted were more likely to get tested (i.e. very concerned). The authors state that the opposite could be true (i.e., the idea that boosted people might get tested *less because they'd be less worried about getting infected) but I find that to be highly unlikely. So unless they have controlled for testing frequency, the data cannot be used the way people are saying. That said, I do think it is possible that overboosting can lead to a long-term increase in infections in some situations (but not all), depending on immune history such as what variant they were infected with, and when/what boosters they got. But on this small a time frame, it looks like artifact to me. I'll look more, though
Thank you. I appreciate the reply.
Always a treasure of knowledge and solid no hype reading recommendations. Feel like you and Benjy ought to be related as it seems your two brains are quite alike.
:) Thanks. Benjy is doing great work. The collaboration is extraordinarily productive and fun.