Some of them are frauds

The panel also seemed intrigued by preliminary data suggesting that Johnson & Johnson recipients may be better off with a booster shot from Moderna or Pfizer. Although no vote was taken, Dr. Peter Marks, who oversees the F.D.A.’s vaccine division, said regulatory action to allow boosters with a different vaccine was “possible.”

While some experts emphasized that the data was based on small groups of volunteers and short-term findings, others urged the F.D.A. to move quickly with what has fast become known as a mix-and-match approach, especially for recipients of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, which is much less widely available.

“I’m sold already,” said Dr. Mark Sawyer, an infectious disease specialist with the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. “We need flexibility and to improve access to everyone.”

Others said they worried that the public would end up bewildered if the government kept broadening the categories of people eligible for boosters and which vaccine could be used for extra shots.

“I hope we can do this in a way that doesn’t look like we’re changing rules all the time,” said Dr. Stanley Perlman, a professor of immunology at the University of Iowa.

Health officials and committee members suggested on Friday that the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine had long been less protective. In a particularly biting critique, Dr. Amanda Cohn, a high-ranking C.D.C. medical officer, said a single dose of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine offered less protection than two doses of the mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer or Moderna — a gap that would only grow if it remained a one-shot regimen while the other two-shot vaccines were followed by a booster…

The experts generally agreed that the protection conferred by a single dose was inadequate, but at least some were unconvinced that the second dose would bolster that protection significantly.

The smart people I know who started with J&J took this matter into their own hands some time ago, typically opting for an mRNA supplement.  They are just “people,” yet they had “skin in the game” and they are miles ahead of the FDA and CDC as formal institutions.  Here is a research paper on the question.  Here is another.  And here is a Paul Sax tweet and Op-Ed: “Don’t know anyone who disagrees with this, and the data have been highly suggestive for months.”  And this is after the authorities insisted for months that all vaccines will be treated the same.

Again, I will repeat the perennial question: do our public health agencies wish to maximize their own status and control and feeling of “having done everything properly as they were trained,” or do they wish to maximize the expected value of actual outcomes for the citizenry?  If it is not the latter, and too often it is not, I say they are oppressive frauds.  (And please don’t try to tell me this kind of craperoo is boosting their credibility — in fact they have lost massive credibility with America’s public intellectual class, both left wing and right wing and for that matter centrist.)

I really do not have much sympathy for Kyrie Irving and Bradley Beal and their ilk, but in fact their views are more understandable than you might think from reading MSM.  Their generalized mistrust is not so crazy, even though they are quite wrong in this particular instance.  By the way, don’t take those aspirin any more!

Here is the full NYT article, cringeworthy throughout, and I thank Jordan for the pointer.

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