A team of 19 scientists from the United Kingdom have published new research that helps explain why countries with the highest vaccination rates are experiencing the highest numbers of what they call “breakthrough infections,” as well as reinfection with other variants of COVID-19.

This research article, published on June 14, 2022 in the peer-reviewed journal Science, has been downloaded nearly 277,500 times in less than two months. That is very unusual for a densely worded highly technical scientific study.

We can only speculate the reason so many people have been reading it. But what this study suggests—which many clinicians and research scientists have expressed concerns about—is that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines as well as the booster shots may be making our immune response less effective against the Omicron variant of the virus.

If this is correct, it means that the vaccine itself is leading to widespread infection. Instead of stopping the virus, it appears that the mRNA vaccination programs around the world may have inadvertently made the virus more ubiquitous.

As the British scientists point out, countries with higher vaccine uptake rates are experiencing high numbers of primary infections and frequent reinfections with SARS-CoV-2.