A heads up about vaccine disinformation.

A lot of vaccine misinformation is of the "A flat earther told me that vaccines will change my genes!" variety.... but there's also a pretty fair bit of it that comes from relatively mainstream media.

It has recently come to my attention that the Wall Street Journal, once a paper of some merit, has diminished to the point where they regularly publish vaccine misinformation / disinformation. In particular, the WSJ employs a writer named Allysia Finley who appears to have made it her entire schtick to encourage vaccine hesitancy by sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

I won't link to her latest whaarglebaargle, but suffice it to say:

1. No, getting vaccinated won't make you more likely to become infected with any variant of SARS-CoV-2.
2. Yes, newer strains exhibit some significant degree of immune escape. That's why bivalent boosters are important. The degree of immune escape varies by vaccine and by immunological status.
3. The claims in her latest piece misrepresent the conclusions of the underlying study.
4. She neglects to mention that the underlying study was performed using Sinovac's inactivated-virus CoronaVac vaccine. CoronaVac was never widely used in either the US or Europe. (In fact, I don't think any inactivated-virus SARS-CoV-2 vaccine has seen wide distributed in the US or Europe)