No, Brett Sutton did not admit that COVID vaccines never worked

^{By David Campbell}

Posts quoting Victoria's Chief Health Officer, Brett Sutton, are being shared widely on social media, with users suggesting they prove what they long suspected: that COVID-19 vaccines never worked.

On Instagram, an anti-lockdown group juxtaposed two videos of the senior bureaucrat delivering seemingly contradictory messages alongside a caption that asked: "How can anyone believe these hypocrites? Who's paying them to lie to us[?]"

In the first clip, taken from a YouTube video published in April 2022, Professor Sutton says: "Getting that third dose is protection against … getting infected in the first place."

But in the second, taken from an August 1 media conference, he says: "Despite two, three, four doses of the vaccine, it's not so good at preventing infection in the first place."

That quote has been splashed across Telegram, Twitter, Facebook and various conspiracy news sites, where it has been framed as "a direct contradiction of the lies he told" earlier and "a frank admission that vaccines simply do not work".

But a spokesman for the Victorian Department of Health has labelled the sharing of historical statements without context as "active disinformation".

"Data and evidence around COVID-19 changes as the virus changes and we have always reflected those changes in messaging and advice," he told RMIT FactLab in a statement.

So, what did Professor Sutton actually say?

The Chief Health Officer's April advice was delivered when the dominant strain of SARS-CoV-2 was the Omicron variant BA.2 and before Australia had recorded any cases of BA.4 and BA.5, which were the dominant strains in Victoria by the time of his August media conference.

During that more recent conference, Professor Sutton said the vaccines were "not so good" at preventing infection with the BA.4 and BA.5 strains, but that they still "produce a bit of downward pressure on transmission"

Most critically, he said booster shots offered protection against severe outcomes among vulnerable groups such as the elderly, who stood to benefit from "a four-fold reduction in your risk of dying or being hospitalised".

Menno van Zelm, who heads the Allergy and Clinical Immunology Laboratory at Monash University, told RMIT FactLab that the science on vaccine effectiveness was a "moving playing field" that was always catching up.

"In April, we had Omicron, but most data that we had were from Delta," he said.

Indeed, the then most recent advice from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) was that the evidence on boosters and Omicron was "evolving".

But it suggested that despite "gradual waning of immunity" over the months after receiving a booster, a third dose still offered some protection against symptomatic infection.

And it's worth remembering that, early in the pandemic, studies showed that two doses of Moderna and Pfizer's mRNA vaccines, for example, were highly effective at preventing infection.

By some estimates, they initially offered 85-95 per cent protection against the original Wuhan strain, and upwards of 85 per cent against the Alpha variant.

ATAGI has since written that a booster dose "augmented protection against infection" from the more severe Delta variant and provided "a substantial increase in the protective effectiveness against symptomatic disease and infection" from the more infectious Omicron.

Professor van Zelm said that the evidence showed vaccines did protect against infection, "especially in the first month after vaccination".

However, he said, that protection was never 100 per cent in the first place, which meant that while vaccination clearly lowered a person’s risk of infection, it did not protect everybody all the time.

"And the variants are much better in escaping [an] immune response," he added.

"Delta is very well recognised [by the immune system], Omicron is not. And now especially with the BA.2, BA.4/5 … [the immune recognition] is even lower".

Still, Professor van Zelm said, that doesn't mean the vaccines and boosters offer no protection against infection. It just offers less than it once did, and this drops away faster.

But, echoing the advice of ATAGI, the European CDC and others, he told RMIT FactLab: "The important part is that it protects especially vulnerable risk groups from severe COVID."

Thumbnail photo source: VicGovDH