COVID desk: Bivalent Booster BS

Federal ads pushing bivalent COVID booster shots include “deceptive advertising,” notes The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley. The feds ordered “vaccine makers to produce” the shots and recommended “them without data supporting their safety or efficacy.” Neither Pfizer nor Moderna “conducted a randomized trial” of the new shots, instead designing “their studies to get the results they wanted. Public-health authorities didn’t raise an eyebrow.” The reality: “Covid vaccines mitigated severe illness while most Americans gained immunity through natural infection.” Even with “a growing consensus that we need better vaccines and treatments to protect those still at risk,” we “also need honest public-health leaders.”