Cleveland Clinic: More Boosters? More Likely to Get COVID-19

A study conducted on the effectiveness of the bivalent COVID-19 vaccine has surprised many at the Cleveland Clinic. The organization studied its employees to determine how the new bivalent vaccines stack up against some of the more prevalent COVID strains in circulation. The results weren’t what they expected.

The study’s authors admit their surprise that the risk of COVID-19 increases with the number of vaccine doses you receive. They acknowledge that their testing population was primarily young people eligible to receive at least three doses of the shot by the time the study started. Almost half of the individuals in their study chose not to receive more than three doses of the vaccine, and as per Cleveland Clinic, that makes them risk takers; people who failed to follow CDC guidelines, failed to fall in line, and therefore were more risky with their behavior—leading to the assumption that they would be more likely to contract the virus, not less. Despite all of these “risky” behaviors—things like spending time with friends and family unmasked, going out to social events, and not getting vaccinated and boosted, this cohort was less likely to contract COVID than those in the study who were diligent in following orders.

The group that followed orders was more likely to receive all COVID-19 boosters, were more likely to mask and social distance, and were more likely to follow CDC guidelines to a “t,” thus, the assumption would be that they are less likely to be infected, not more.

And the Cleveland Clinic study isn’t the only one that came to this conclusion. In their analysis, the authors even cited three other independent studies that reached the same outcome; the more shots you get, the more likely you are to contract COVID. Commentary about one of the other cited studies reads: “During an Omicron wave in Iceland, individuals who had previously received two or more doses were found to have higher odds of reinfection than those who had received fewer than two doses of vaccine.” It also references another study that found “…in multivariable analysis, that receipt of two or three doses of an mRNA vaccine following prior COVID-19 was associated with a higher risk of reinfection than receipt of a single dose.”

Far be it for the authors to tempt the fates with any definitive claims, they conclude the analysis by saying, “This study found an overall modest protective effect of the bivalent vaccine against COVID-19 while the circulating strains were represented in the vaccine and lower protection when the circulating strains were no longer represented. A significant protective effect was not found when the XBB lineages were dominant. The unexpected finding of increasing risk with increasing number of prior COVID-19 vaccine doses needs further study.”

The Highwire has been reporting on the negative efficacy of the shots for as long as we have had the data to do so.

It’s worth mentioning that the initial bivalent series and boosters for those inoculated for the early virus strains did not undergo testing for efficacy or safety in human trials. The pharmaceutical companies relied on existing data that claimed safety and efficacy to just tinker with the formula to get the approval and needles into as many arms as would have it, including the arms of children. A lawsuit by ICAN demanding the study data pharmaceutical giant Pfizer used to gain its EUA has revealed catastrophic safety issues and problems. Another successful suit to access the CDC’s “V-Safe” data exposed even more concerning issues with side effects and injury. Even knowing all of this, the FDA happily obliged in recommending the shots.

This even caused some uproar on the advisory panels determining approval for the boosters, especially when the data was available earlier than represented and not presented to the panel advising on approval. The data in Moderna’s study showed the booster shots to be ineffective against new variants.

Still, however slow the wheels of justice turn, some high-level representatives at the Cleveland Clinic seem to be carefully treading around the study results. Dr. Michael Roizen, Chief Wellness Officer at the Wellness Institute of the Cleveland Clinic, was interviewed by radio host Mike Opelka this week and had this to say about it:

“…Once you’ve gotten the third booster, the fourth booster seems to act like an allergy shot which activates the immune system suppression of the other immune responses. So it activates what’s called a fourth immune process that impedes the others. We think that by August, that won’t be true. This is me, not the official Cleveland Clinic position, but this is my individual position, would be that you should delay getting the next booster until at least five months after the last one, preferably a little longer, and that the booster that comes in August or September, and we will go through that then, when the data come out, will be a very useful booster in preventing the winter spike that’s expected. I would hold off on another booster until you discuss it with your practitioner, and don’t get it—in my mind—until August or September. And by the way, Michael, just to add one more thing, we will probably recommend a different vaccine type than has been common, meaning it may not be the mRNA vaccine that’s recommended in the Fall, but we will keep people updated.”

For as far as we have come, it still seems that those embedded in establishment medicine, no matter the data, may never learn.