[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.