In September, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — over the objections of the agency’s own advisors — authorized Pfizer’s COVID-19 bivalent booster on an emergency basis, without any testing or demonstration that the products had any benefit in human beings. The only “emergency” was that collapsing demand for Pfizer’s original shots had caused a lapse in the drugmaker’s windfall profits.
Responding to this embarrassment, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last week published the first data on efficacy of the bivalent boosters. Using the agency’s own data and methodology, we calculate an effectiveness of 9% compared to no vaccine at all. However, inexplicably, the CDC reported an effectiveness in the range of 19% to 50%, depending on previous vaccination history.
Even accepting the CDC’s computation, the FDA’s authorization was illegal because their rules demand a minimal efficacy of 50% for emergency use authorization. It gets more interesting when we look at subjects in the study who were fully vaccinated but did not get the new booster. They did much worse than the unvaccinated. This is more evidence of something we reported in the past: Modest efficacy of the COVID-19 “vaccines” lasts a short while, then falls to zero and continues falling well below zero.