https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/virologist-huge-price-covid-mass-vaccination/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=49970d0e-990f-4dec-89a3-9828ade1f01d

Read the interview transcript:

McMillan: I think the first thing that we have to clarify is that we have to explain you are someone who is in the vaccine development business, so to speak. What has that background been like?

Bossche: Well, I have a background essentially in, as far as vaccines are concerned, in industry as well as in the non-for-profit sector. So I have been working with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, GAVI [The Vaccine Alliance] especially concentrating on vaccines for global health.

And I’ve also been working with several different companies, vaccine companies developing of course essentially prophylactic vaccines and my main focus of interest has always been, in fact, the design of vaccines. So the concept, how can we educate the immune system in ways that are to some extent more efficient than we do right now with our conventional vaccines.

McMillan: Right. And so any effect, this is the area of work you’ve been in. You develop vaccines, you are as well working with the Ebola vaccine as well. One of the really, really dangerous viruses we have out there in the world. How does that work? Is it, is that easy to do?

Bossche: Well, I was not, let me be very clear. I was a coordinator of the Ebola program at GAVI. So we were interacting with several different vaccine companies that were developing Ebola vaccines, because it was important for GAVI to make the right choice, the right vaccine in order for this vaccine to be rolled out in the Western African countries that had this severe Ebola crisis back a number of years ago. So that was not a, let’s say operational practical work.

This was more a role of coordination, but of course was also a role of assessing what would be the impact of using some of these vaccines in larger populations and in an area where an epidemic really is going on because that’s a very particular and peculiar situation.

McMillan: Yes. And so in effect, we’ve had so much success over the past hundred years with some very big breakthroughs with vaccines, smallpox, you know, measles, mumps, rubella, polio. But we have struggled with other vaccines. Without going into the details, because this is very difficult to get across, but is there a difference with how viruses operate that make some easier to get a vaccine for?

Bossche: Well, I think we have a, Philip. Essentially, we need to distinguish, of course, between what we call acute self-limiting diseases. These are diseases that naturally come to an end in a sense that ultimately the individual will eliminate the pathogen. Of course, some people may die. Of course, let’s be very clear. Those who survive will ultimately eliminate the pathogen.

That is the vast majority of the vaccines we have been developing so far. The, you know, I don’t need to tell you that with other viruses where we clearly see that they spread in a completely different way. They spread, for example, from cell to cell, they tend to be more intracellular.

They tend to develop chronic infections where it’s not self-limiting, it’s not acute self-limiting, it’s chronic. It is much more difficult. And the reason primarily is that most of the vaccines we are developing are still antibody-based vaccines.

So we need these antibodies in the blood, or we need these antibodies to translate to the mucosa, for example, in order to capture the pathogen and to neutralize it. So some of the other work, I mean, they have a very insidious strategy in the sense that they hide in cells, that they can already at the mucosal barrier penetrate, you know, immediately into cells. And then the cells may migrate, for example, to the lymph nodes.

So they are shielded from the antibodies and that makes it very, very difficult because we know that we can catch them to some extent in the blood, but what they do all the time is that they insert mutation and they escape, they fully escape to our antibody responses.

So that makes it way more difficult. It’s also the reason why also against cancer, et cetera, we have not been extremely successful with vaccines as I would say, stand alone therapy.

McMillan: Yeah, absolutely. Yes. So it, it brings us into where we are with regards to COVID-19. Now, if we have 20/20 vision at the moment, when we look back at the pandemic and where we started from, and I’ve always said that at the time, when the pandemic started, when it got from China and Italy into Europe, into the UK. I thought that the only way that we could manage this is to lock down and to prevent the spread of this apparently, this very dangerous virus. We do have to stand back and to see whether or not those decisions were correct. But as we said, that hindsight is 20/20. What would you say now, as we look back at the decisions we made then, were we about on the right track? Did we make any mistakes?

Bossche: Well, frankly speaking, from the very beginning, and I mean, there are many people who can witness this or testify this. I always said that it was a bad idea to do lockdowns that would also affect the younger people.

That we would prevent younger people from having contact, from being exposed. Because remember, the big difference back then was, of course, that we had a viral strain, COVID strain, that was circulating, dominant strain, and that was not as highly infectious as those that we are seeing right now.

Of course, when a new virus gets into a population, it immediately gets to the folks that have, you know, weak immunity. And we know, we know these people, this is to a large majority, of course, elderly people, people that have underlying diseases or are otherwise immune suppressed, et cetera.

And of course, I mean, it was certainly the right thing to do, to protect these people, and for them also to isolate, but we have to distinguish, frankly speaking, and that is what we have not been doing, between those people that have strong innate immunity. I mean, it’s not a, you cannot see when you see a person, you don’t know this, but we know that young people have quite decent innate immune response and therefore they are naturally protected and even more, I mean, if they get in contact with coronavirus, it will boost their natural immunity.

So therefore from the very beginning, I disapproved, you know, the fact that schools got to close and universities and that youngsters were prevented even from having contact with each other. That situation is of course completely different.

If you look at vulnerable people, the virus, this comes to the population, there is no, you know, humoral immunity. There is no immunity at all. In fact, so nobody has been in contact.

So the youngsters, they can rely on good innate immunity. Elderly people, I mean, the innate immunity is waning. It gets increasingly replaced by antigen-specific, by specific immunity as people get older.

So these people very, very clearly needed to be protected, but it has taken a lot of time before we understood, in fact, how exactly the immune response and the virus were interacting.

So there’s been a lot of confusion. A lot of mistakes made. Mistakes, I mean, retrospectively. And that has also led to, you know, bad control right from the beginning. I would say.

McMillan: With that in mind and where we are now, as countries across the world have been drifting towards the Christmas period, there’s still a rise in cases. Countries had to try and lock down, mask mandates and so on, but we all had the hope that vaccines would come and break the cycle. This is where clearly now from your expertise, you seem to have a different thought about how we should have been thinking about vaccines then, and even now, what is your perspective?

Bossche: Well, my perspective was, and still is, that if you go to war, you better make sure that you have the right weapon and the weapon in itself can be an excellent weapon. And that is what I’m saying really about the current vaccines.

I mean, just brilliant people who have been making these vaccines in no time and with regulatory approval and everything. So the weapon in itself is excellent.

Question is, is this the right weapon for the kind of war that is going on right now? And there my answer is definitely no, because these are prophylactic vaccines and prophylactic vaccines should typically not be administered to people who are exposed to high infectious pressure.

So don’t forget we are administering these vaccines in the heat of a pandemic. So in other words while we are preparing our weapon, we are fully attacked by the virus. The virus is everywhere. So that is a very different scenario from using such vaccines in a setting where the vaccine is barely or not exposed to the virus.

And I’m saying this, because if you have a high infectious pressure, it’s so easy for the virus to jump from one person to the other.

So if your immune response, however, is just mounting, as we see right now with the number of people who get their first dose, they get the first dose, the antibodies are not fully mature, the titers are maybe not very high. So their immune response is suboptimal, but they are in the midst of this war while they are mounting an immune response, they’re fully attacked by the virus and every single time. I mean, this is textbook knowledge.

Every single time you have an immune response that is suboptimal in the presence of an infection, in the presence of a virus, that infected person, you are at risk for immune escape.

So that means that the virus can escape the immune response. And that is why I’m saying that these vaccines, I mean, in their own right, are, of course, excellent. But to use them in the midst of a pandemic and do mass vaccination, because then you provide within a very short period of time, the population with high antibody titers – so the virus comes under enormous pressure.

I mean, that wouldn’t matter if you can eradicate a virus, if you can prevent infection, but these vaccines don’t prevent infection.

They protect against disease because we are just, unfortunately, we look no further than the end of our nose in the sense that hospitalization, that’s all what counts, you know, getting people away from the hospital.

But in the meantime, we are not realizing that we give all the time during this pandemic, by our interventions, the opportunity to escape to the immune, to the immune system.

And that is of course, a very, very, very dangerous thing. Especially, if we realize that these guys, they only need 10 hours to replicate.

So if you think that by making new vaccines, a new vaccine against the new infectious strains, we going to catch up, it’s impossible to catch up. I mean, virus is not going to wait until we have those vaccines ready. I mean, this thing continues.

And as I was saying, the thing is, I mean, if you do this in the midst of a pandemic, that is an enormous problem.

These vaccines are excellent, but they are not made for administration to millions of people in the midst, in the heat of a pandemic. So that is my thoughts.

McMillan: Is this equivalent then, because you’ve mentioned this in your paper, is this equivalent to using either a partial dose of antibiotics in anti-microbial or in a bacterial infection where you then produce super bugs. Is this the kind of example that you’re alluding to?

Bossche: Well, that is a very good parallel. It’s also the parallel I’m using actually in the paper. We just post it on LinkedIn [bad choice, LinkedIn has been deplatforming and censoring scientists and doctors more than any other platform] which, you know, should be so open for everybody [wrong, they outsource to low paid “fact checkers” who aggressively censor according to left media news narratives].

I mean, it’s pure science because as you were pointing out, the thing is the rule is it’s very simple. I mean, same with antibiotics. Either the antibiotics do not match very well with the bug. That’s not good. That’s why we are making antibiograms, you know, to first identify which is the germ. And then we choose the antibiotics. We need to have a very good match. Otherwise there could be resistance.

So when I compare this to the current situation, do we have a good match with our antibodies? No, at this point in time, we don’t have a good match anymore because we have this kind of like almost heterologous variants.

So that differs from the original strain. So the match isn’t very good anymore. And hence we see people are still protected, but they are already shedding the virus. So that is one thing.

The other thing is the quantity, of course. You tell people, you know, you take your antibiotics according to the prescription, please don’t as soon as you feel well, that doesn’t mean that you can stop the antibiotics. Same here.

And I get just one example. If you give people just like one dose, I mean, they are in the process of mounting their antibodies. The antibodies still need to fully mature, et cetera. So this is a suboptimal situation. We are putting them in a suboptimal situation with regard to their immune protection. And on the other end, they are in the midst of the war. They are fully attacked by all, you know, by all these kinds of a highly infectious variants.

So, I mean, it’s very clear that this is driving immune escape and will ultimately drive resistance to the vaccines.

So my point is, yes, Philip, it’s very similar. There is one difference. The virus needs living cells. I mean, if you’re driving immune escape, but the guy has no chance to jump on somebody else, who cares?

This situation is now different because we are in the midst of a war, there is a high infectious pressure. So the likelihood that an immune escape immediately finds another living cell, that means another host is very, very high. It’s per definition. It’s the definition almost of a pandemic.

More at this link:

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/virologist-huge-price-covid-mass-vaccination/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=49970d0e-990f-4dec-89a3-9828ade1f01d

Many Blessings,
CrystalRiver