Jeremy R. Hammond
Data from a recent study suggest that COVID-19 vaccines have a detrimental long-term effect on children’s immune systems regardless of prior infection.
The findings of a study reported in a letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on September 7 include alarming data that belies the authors’ conclusion that children between the ages of five and eleven should receive booster doses of a COVID‑19 vaccine in addition to the primary two-dose series. The authors expressed the view that even children who have already acquired natural immunity should get fully vaccinated plus boosted.
“The rapid decline in protection against omicron infection that was conferred by vaccination and previous infection”, the study authors concluded, “provides support for booster vaccination.”
However, that conclusion does not follow logically from their study findings, which provide yet further evidence of the problem of “original antigenic sin”.
Briefly, original antigenic sin is an immunologic phenomenon in which the first encounter with a pathogen or vaccine imprints the immune response against that pathogen such that, when later encountering a different strain of that pathogen, the immune responses remain fixated suboptimally on the original strain rather than adapting to be more specific to the new strain.
Furthermore, while the “public health” establishment has maintained that COVID‑19 vaccines confer an additional benefit for children who have already acquired natural immunity from a previous infection, the data from this study further suggest that this practice has a detrimental long-term effect on their immune systems.
