Bob Unruh found another COVID vaccine-related study to mislead about in a May 31 WorldNetDaily article:
A study done during the COVID pandemic, preliminary at the time, charged that people actually were more likely to get COVID if they’d had multiple vaccine doses.
But it was dissed widely by political leaders and health industry officials because it had not been peer-reviewed.Now it has. And it is delivered the same stunning verdict: “The risk of COVID-19 … varied by the number of COVID-19 vaccine doses previously received. The higher the number of vaccines previously received, the higher the risk of contracting COVID-19.”
It was Joe Biden, among others, who tried to shame and coerce Americans into taking the experimental shots.
It wasn’t until the 10th paragraph of his article that Unruh got around to quoting from the actual study:
The results documented by Open Forum Infectious Diseases said, “The association of increased risk of COVID-19 with higher numbers of prior vaccine doses was unexpected.”
It suggested a “simplistic” explanation is that those who got more doses were more likely to be at higher risk.
But, it said, “the majority of subjects in this study were generally young individuals and all were eligible to have received at least 3 doses of vaccine by the study start date, and which they had every opportunity to do. Therefore, those who received fewer than 3 doses (46% of individuals in the study) were not those ineligible to receive the vaccine, but those who chose not to follow the CDC’s recommendations on remaining updated with COVID-19 vaccination.”
It continued, “One could reasonably expect these individuals to have been more likely to have exhibited higher risk-taking behavior. Despite this, their risk of acquiring COVID-19 was lower than those who received a larger number of prior vaccine doses.”
Much of the rest of Unruh’s article quoted from an unhinged commentary at the right-wing PJ Media, which insisted on calling vaccine supporters “COVIDians,” whined about the “sponsored-by-Pfizer media” and ranted that “The pharmaceutical companies’ ill-gotten blanket immunity from damages caused by their products needs to be retroactively revoked because they were granted on fraudulent premises.” Unruh couldn’t be bothered to talk to one of the actual researchers about the significance of that finding, like a fact-checker did:
Incorrect claims about the paper have been circulating since before it was peer-reviewed and published. Recently, a widely viewed social media post jumped to the conclusion that the study shows that “a higher number of COVID-19 vaccine doses received increases the risk of infection with COVID-19.” Another widely viewed post sharing the study results incorrectly concluded that the vaccines were a “failed experiment.”
The original COVID-19 vaccine series was initially very effective against infection and without question “saved a lot of lives,” co-author Dr. Nabin Shrestha, an infectious disease physician at the Cleveland Clinic, told us. Determining whether getting more doses of the COVID-19 vaccines can later cause greater susceptibility to infections “wasn’t the point of the study,” he said.
Shrestha said he did not know the explanation for the findings. The paper mentions immunological mechanisms that “have been suggested as possible mechanisms whereby prior vaccine may provide less protection than expected.” But Shrestha said that the result could also be from a confounding factor — some characteristic of people who got more vaccines that led them to have a higher number of positive tests.
[…]Observational studies like the Cleveland Clinic one can turn up associations between things, but it can be difficult to assess what caused these patterns.
Shrestha said the finding in his study on prior doses and infection risk “should certainly give us some pause.” But he also said that “a study like this, one study, is not going to prove any cause-effect relationship.” The goal in presenting the findings, he said, was to prompt other researchers to also look at the relationship between past doses and infection risk.
In other words: The study didn’t prove what Unruh claimed it did, nor was it designed to — it was an observation that calls for additional research. Of course, misleading and fearmongering about COVID vaccines is what WND does.