One quote that stood out from the start:
"The [Lancet] study showed that immune function among vaccinated individuals 8 months after the administration of two doses of COVID-19 vaccine was lower than that among the unvaccinated individuals."
"The [Lancet] study showed that immune function among vaccinated individuals 8 months after the administration of two doses of COVID-19 vaccine was lower than that among the unvaccinated individuals."
The Lancet article is worth a read.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
What does their data actually show? Look at figure 2. It shows smoothly and steadily declining effectiveness that drops below zero. There is no change in the trend near the 9 month mark. How far can effectiveness actually fall? This paper stops looking after 9 months, but we know from UK data that it can in fact keep falling for much longer than that. Before they stopped reporting the numbers measured effectiveness in the UK was around -300%:
https://dailysceptic.org/archive/vaccine-effectiveness-hits-...
Additionally case rates in the boosted were higher than in unvaccinated at that point, i.e. by March 2022 COVID had become a pandemic of the vaccinated. Boosting had helped for such a short period it hardly mattered and then the problem became even worse.
Note that you have to be careful with effectiveness figures reported by public health authorities. Starting with COVID many of them began reporting "adjusted" effectiveness in addition to or entirely instead of case rates, but their adjustment methodology isn't valid.
So this is not vaccine "fear mongering". It's what government's own data shows. That makes it a very real problem that needs serious and immediate research to figure out (a) why this is happening, (b) what if anything can be done about it. The vaccines appear to have backfired and we're very lucky that Omicron is so mild. Unfortunately this will not be admitted to in the media, by governments, and not openly by researchers.
From what I could tell the The Lancet article is only talking about waning effectiveness against Covid (as previously known). [Table 1 possibly notwithstanding, but I'm reading this as people with co-morbidities are more likely to get the vaccine, not the other direction...]
Am I missing something here, or is Kenji Yamamoto's paper completely fraudulent?
As for immune function, the phrasing isn't as precise as it could be but he's paraphrasing a cited study so does it have to be? There's lots of fraud in science but that word should be reserved for things that justify it, like made up data, misrepresenting your own data, motivated reasoning etc. Assuming the reader will understand what's meant based on context, especially when the cited study can be easily loaded, doesn't rise to the level of fraud.
This is an interesting area of study and I'm sure a different author would make a more persuasive case for/against this effect being real.
So when someone is making an argument that isn't 100% pro-vaccine, and they cite a paper, what they mean is ignore the commentary, look at the data. They may not bother spelling this out explicitly because you get used to it so fast and then can easily forget that many people won't actually read the paper, they'll just look at the abstract and assume it's honest.
In this case their argument for boosters is simply that effectiveness keeps dropping, so everyone should take boosters. There isn't anything deeper, and obviously such an argument is facile in the extreme.