Do COVID boosters make you more likely to get the COVID virus?

The doctor in the video isn’t a medical doctor and is instead an unemployed consultant pathologist with an FRCPath degree. She is making reference to studies she thinks show that the more doses of COVID vaccine you have, the more likely you are to have COVID, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of the data. She is likely referencing this study, which looked at whether people who are up-to-date on their COVID vaccines (meaning they got at least one dose of the new COVID bivalent vaccine) are less likely to get COVID compared to those who are not up-to-date.

The misunderstanding comes from misreading the figures contained in the study. This is called a Table 2 fallacy. Often, epidemiologists need to pool together data to come up with an estimate of risk, known as an adjusted effect estimate. A Table 2 fallacy results from multiple adjusted effect estimates from a single model presented in a single table. Problems arise when different types of estimates are presented on the same table. This fallacy is like saying that carrying a lighter makes you more likely to get lung cancer without considering whether the person smokes. In studies, it’s important to adjust for the right things.

She offers a hypothesis about the virus “switching” the immune system into one that recognizes the virus as benign but offers no evidence. If that were the case, however, we’d see vaccinated people with more severe disease, and that’s simply the opposite of what’s found.