COVID Booster Shots Cause Variants?

In this series on the church, health and “wellness” and the media, I want to briefly address examples as I come across them.

This morning I’m seeing a certain post going around my antivaxx Facebook friends about booster shots, virus variants and the World Health Organization.  Let’s examine it.

The first thing to notice is that we don’t know where this has come from.  It’s just a screenshot.  It could have been written by anyone.  However, WHO’s chief scientist is quoted, so we can easily Google that.

What we find is that the quote is from a WHO transcript of a press conference on the 18th of August:  who.int/publications/m/item/covid-19-virtual-press-conference-transcript---18-august-2021.

Here is the quote in full:

 

Many countries are already beginning even in 2021 and once you begin a programme like that it's very hard to step back. So the right thing to do right now on the science side is to wait for the science to tell us when boosters, which groups of people and which vaccines need boosters.

 

The second argument is a moral and ethical argument of giving people third doses when they're already well-protected and while the rest of the world is waiting for their primary immunisation.

I want to make a distinction here between an earlier announcement from the FDA and the CDC about giving a third dose in the primary vaccination series to people who are immunocompromised, whose immune systems don't work well because there there's some evidence that a third dose actually helps to bring those antibody levels up in these people because their immune system...

That's a small number of people and they should be protected because they are at high risk but if we're talking about everyone in high-income countries getting a booster this is an impossible situation and I'm afraid that this will only lead to more variants, to more escaped variants and perhaps we're heading into even more dire situations.

 

A few points to note:

• She is indeed talking about COVID-19 booster shots.
• She is indeed against booster shots for everyone.
• She is in favour of booster shots for the immunocompromised.
• She is not saying that vaccines cause variants.

Let's go back to the Facebook post.  Even the screenshotted article isn't saying that vaccines cause variants, despite what antivaxxers want you to believe.

The important take-away here is to read things very carefully.  Remember when you were in school and you hated English comprehension?  (That is, if you were even taught it.)  This is why it was so vital.

The crucial phrase here is “By diverting doses away from unvaccinated people . . . .” In other words, WHO’s position is as follows:

• If everyone in rich countries starts getting booster shots right now, that will divert doses away from people in poorer countries.
• If people in poorer countries don’t get vaccinated because they don’t have enough doses, the virus will be allowed to spread unchecked.
• If that happens, the virus will continue to mutate and we will end up with more variants.

Let’s also think about this logically. Viral mutations happen over time as a virus spreads from one host to another, because mutations happen over successive generations, just as they do in humans. The virus can only “breed” if it’s alive. Vaccines prepare the immune system to kill the virus quickly, so it cannot breed; therefore, vaccinations cannot possibly cause new viral strains to appear. We know, then, that the interpretation given by antivaxx posters is completely incorrect.

In other words, this post is saying the exact opposite to what antivaxxers would have you believe.