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:
- No, getting vaccinated won't make you more likely to become infected with any variant of SARS-CoV-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.
- The claims in her latest piece misrepresent the conclusions of the underlying study.
- 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)