From Dick Atlee:
Recently, there has been a lot of what has become known over the last 20 months as fear porn, concerning in this case the Omicron variant. The latest seems to be related to Denmark, which is doing a VERY good job of data collection/publication: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/18/omicron-variant-denmark
As this approaching tidal wave of fear washes over you, I can suggest a good starting point for an anchor, some work done by a person who style her/himself as writing for people who like bad cats. Don’t let the superficial theme/image mislead you — the work I’ve seen this person do is very good. In this case, it is a look at actual Danish data of Omicron and other variant infections in the various categories of vaccination status: https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/theres-something-antigenic-in-denmark
S/he is very clear, in each of the interpretations, on how the state of the data can make concrete conclusions harder to draw. But it is not possible to escape the general conclusion that being vaccinated increases the chance of getting Omicron COVID. This negative efficacy means that it isn’t simply vaccine failure/waning at play, which would result in 0% or slightly greater efficacy.
The writer points to the likelihood that this negative efficacy is either due to ADE (antibody dependent disease enhancement) or OAS (original antigenic sin). ADE manifests as a worse case of illness when encountering the virus after a vaccination. OAS is the result of preprogramming of the immune system for a particular antigen via a vaccine which doesn’t follow the pathway of a natural infection, thus skewing how the immune system reacts when it re-encounters that antigen. Because the omicron cases tend to be milder than previous variants, the writer concludes that ADE is not as likely as OAS as the underlying cause of what we are seeing.