Widespread Claims Misrepresent Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccines

Viruses mutate, or change, as they replicate. That’s largely why the currently available vaccine formulas aren’t working as well at preventing infection with the virus that causes COVID-19.

Those vaccines — made by Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson — were highly effective in preventing both symptomatic infection and serious illness against early strains of the virus. But they are less effective against infection from the currently circulating subvariants of the omicron variant.

Public health officials have acknowledged this shift and changed their advice accordingly, in an effort to deal with a disease that became the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021 and has killed more than a million people across the country.

But anti-vaccine campaigners and those who have cast doubt on the severity of COVID-19 have twisted those remarks to suggest that the health care establishment had given faulty advice about the value of the vaccines from the beginning.

For example, conservative influencer David Harris Jr. — who has 1.5 million followers on Instagram — posted a pair of video clips featuring Brett Sutton, the chief health officer for the Australian state of Victoria. One clip is from April, showing Sutton encouraging people to get a booster shot, saying that it can help keep people from “getting infected in the first place.” The other clip shows part of a press conference from August, as Victoria was experiencing a surge in cases, where Sutton said: “Despite two, three, four doses of the vaccine, it’s not so good at preventing infection in the first place.”