The study “ Imprinted SARS-CoV-2 humoral immunity induces convergent Omicron RBD evolution,” which was published in Nature in December 2022, has been quoted throughout the article. We found out that three were quoted out of context and the fourth one is a preprint (not yet peer-reviewed). Meanwhile, Annie Lab looked into the four academic studies cited in the Wall Street Journal opinion article. where vaccination and booster rates remained some of the highest in the respective regions.īut Sridhar said this was an insensible correlation as “outbreaks often gain pace in urban centers with high population density.” The WSJ columnist made her point by linking the surging XBB subvariant infections in Singapore and the northeastern U.S. “The only difference is that vaccines help diminish death rates in this process,” he added. So even if vaccines did not exist, we would still see antibody evasive variants emerging,” said Sridhar. reinfect people who have been previously infected or vaccinated. “Over time, the virus evolves to do one thing. Sridhar said the virus would constantly mutate, making the emergence of new variants a natural and expected outcome. Siddharth Sridhar, an HKU clinical virologist, said it was “absurd” to imply vaccines could fuel new COVID variants. However, the real purpose of vaccination was meant to reduce severe symptoms rather than prevent infections, especially among elderly citizens, Jin said.ĭr. He said scientists could constantly update vaccine content to catch up with viral mutation. In her article, Finley said repeated vaccinations might make people more susceptible to the XBB subvariant. Jin used the Omicron as an example of how a strain could gain dominance over other variants in the evolution process for its ability to evade acquired immunity from past vaccinations and infections for it to reinfect people. He said it would tend to replicate and mutate less within the system of a vaccinated person. It’s a selective process driving viruses to evolve and adapt to the host in order to survive… Let’s not blame this on the vaccines,” Jin said.Īccording to Jin, mutation would happen after a virus infected a host and replicated itself. “She basically turned things upside down,” Jin told Annie Lab in a phone interview. He said vaccinations would not lead to rapid virus evolution nor an inefficient immune response when being confronted with new strains. Professor Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Hong Kong, rejected Finley’s claims. senator Ron Johnson and a former Australian member of the House of Representatives, Craig Kelly, on social media. The piece was also shared by politicians and vaccine critics, including U.S. It was also discussed among netizens on LIHKG, a popular Hong Kong internet forum, Twitter and Reddit. She also wrote that COVID booster vaccinations, including the bivalent vaccines, had diminishing benefits which might cause individuals to be vulnerable to new variants.įinley is an editorial board member of the paper.Īccording to CrowdTangle, the social media monitoring tool by Meta, the article garnered close to 15,000 interactions on Facebook, including more than 4,000 shares. In the article, author Allysia Finley alleged that repeated COVID jabs could prompt viruses to evolve and escape acquired immunity. That’s obviously wrong,” Ho told Annie Lab. They also seem to claim that vaccination increases infection. “The article is slanted against vaccination, which is not right. Professor David Ho Dai-I, a world-renowned microbiologist at Columbia University and one of the authors for the cited academic studies, criticized the false claims made in the article. The WSJ piece cited four academic studies to back its claims questioning the efficacy of vaccinations, but Annie Lab found that they were quoted out of context and the conclusions in the research papers do not support its claim. The recent emergence of the highly-contagious Omicron subvariant XBB has caused a rapid flare-up of infections in at least 38 countries, according to the World Health Organization, including the U.S., U.K. 1, claiming that repeated vaccinations may make people “more susceptible to XBB”, an Omicron subvariant of the COVID-19, while possibly “fueling the virus’s rapid evolution”. This came after an opinion article, published by the Wall Street Journal’s Life Science column on Jan. newspaper opinion column that repeated vaccinations could be fueling new COVID-19 variants. Virologists are rejecting claims being made in a leading U.S. A Wall Street Journal columnist misrepresented and neglected conclusions of scientific studies to support a hypothesis that repeated vaccinations could trigger rapid virus mutation.
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