Biden's Vaccine Talk

News in late August that Joe Biden will ask Congress for money for another vaccine should have people rolling their eyes.

Probably more people than rolled their eyes the first time around.

In an outdoor gaggle of reporters, a C-Span clip showed the president appearing lucid when he told the group this would be a vaccine “that works” and that he anticipated that he would likely recommend the shot for everyone regardless of an individual’s circumstances.

This begs the question, did we learn anything from our experience with the pandemic and the vaccine?

“The vaccine that's about to come out in a couple of weeks is targeting the XBB 1.5 variant, which at the time the vaccine was approved might have been predominant, but a couple of weeks ago, it only accounted for less than 5% of the current infections, and by the time the vaccine is actually rolled out, it'll probably be down to 0%,” Dr. Andrew Bostom said on the Washington Watch program on Aug. 31. “We’re just chasing our tails with this.”

Bostom continued,

“You really have to take a lot of these numbers with a grain of salt. We’re heading into the fall of flu season. We're seeing a slight uptick. There's no stress on the system whatsoever. We have this huge pool of people who've been infected multiple times, which confers the most robust and enduring and flexible immunity. Frankly, I think it's much ado about nothing.”

The CDC in August said it was seeing an increase in infections and hospital admissions, but that overall levels remained low, Reuters reported.

In his few seconds with reporters, Biden didn’t mention masks or stay-in-place orders and if those would be recommended by his administration.

The CDC’s current level of concern seems a long way from such drastic measures. It’s tempting to relax with the idea that masks and lockdowns were ideas that we’ve tried and that failed to eradicate the virus. Perhaps they slowed transmission at some level, but they didn’t take the virus away from our communities. It had to run its course.

I’m no doctor, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, but my guess is, running that course meant immunity through a combination of previous infections and the vaccine.

The vaccine decision is one that should be made under the care of a personal physician.

Bostom finds the vaccine useful in certain situations. He’s not a proponent of widespread use.

“Both Influenza and COVID are really risk stratified. They target the frail, particularly the frail elderly. If you're going to apply it at all it should be to a niche group that's at the highest possible risk, and broad recommendations are really absurd,” Bostom said.

The problem, Bostom says, is simply the nature of mRNA vaccines, such as those used against the flu and COVID.

The mRNA vaccines teach the body’s cells to produce a protein that generates an immune response once the body is infected, infectious disease specialist Tobias Hohl wrote in 2021.

“You can fault if you want the manufacturers, the government, but it's just the nature of mRNA vaccines. They mutate wildly,” Bostrom said. “We have almost a half century of data on the flu vaccine. It’s very ineffective and certainly doesn't confer sterilized immunity where you get immunized, and you won't transmit to other people. It’s not particularly effective at preventing hospitalizations or deaths.”

So, to hear Biden talk about his “likely” recommendation that all Americans take the new vaccine is disturbing.

The original vaccine wasn’t mandated in the sense that SWAT teams kicked in doors and pinned down screaming Americans on their living room couches and gave them the shot.

However, public life was very different for the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. It was one thing to show a proof of vaccination card. It was something else to show a negative COVID test result no more than three days old when trying to gain entry to an event.

And if there’s a vaccine recommendation from the White House what would the numbers have to look like before the recommendation became a mandate for federal employees and the military?

It’s hard to think about the dark days of the virus when we’ve returned to such freedom of movement in society.

Moving around maskless and attending sporting events, concerts, and school plays … these are the pre-COVID things we remember, and we’re there again. Could we lose it all again?

The idea seems far-fetched, but only if you’re willing to trust the administration to apply logic and reason to the decision-making process.

And is that really a safe approach for a group that refuses to admit there’s a problem when men dress as women and read stories to children at public libraries or when biological males set records and win championships while they compete in girls’ sports?

(Editor's Note: This blog is an adaptation of a news story Parrish co-authored for AFN found HERE.)