[kyazawa]

I am so confused about this. The linked Lancet study seems to make the opposite claim, as far as I can tell. Furthermore, the Lancet study seems to be specifically focused on COVID vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19, whereas the quote makes it sound like the study showed a general decrease in immune function among the vaccinated.

Am I missing something here, or is Kenji Yamamoto's paper completely fraudulent?

[origin_path]

Look at figure 2 in the Lancet study. Seems to be making that claim indeed.

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.

[kyazawa]

Thank you. That helps me to view the author's paraphrasing in a more charitable light. "Fraudulent" may have been too strong of a word. I still find it misleading to paraphrase a study in a way that is different from its main conclusion. We don't know what data concerns, etc. the study authors may have had such that they did not explicitly reach this conclusion. And the imprecision in Yamamoto's wording seems intended to mislead as well.

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.

[origin_path]

If you aren't familiar with vaccine research then citing a paper whilst contradicting its conclusion may look odd or malicious, but it's not. Vaccine papers are quite "special". The problem is that scientific journals simply will not publish any paper on vaccines that doesn't praise them, regardless of merit or data. This pattern is extremely consistent.

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.