The COVID-19 pandemic has attracted a swarm of vocal contrarians like little else in the recent past. These public commentators, often bedazzled with advanced degrees, have painted themselves as brave mavericks escaping from the mainstream herd to denounce the cataclysmic consequences of public health measures. The latest example of this phenomenon comes in the form of Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, who recently published an alarming manifesto. In it, Dr. Bossche makes a number of incorrect or exaggerated claims about the use of mass vaccination during a pandemic and urges international health authorities to stop the current crop of COVID-19 vaccines or else risk unleashing “a global catastrophe without equal.” This is scary stuff, but it’s all quite misguided.
Dr. Bossche asserts that vaccines are like antibiotics in that, when they are both overused and imperfect, they allow germs to mutate in dangerous ways. With antibiotic use, the bacteria that have developed a mutation or acquired a gene that gives them protection from the antibiotic will escape death and soon become the dominant strain. That’s antibiotic resistance. Bossche claims that the same thing will happen with the coronavirus. Because he says, the vaccines are imperfect, they will allow the virus to keep being transmitted from person to person and thus mutate inside of us until a dangerous new variant emerges.
He has at least 30 publications. In addition, there are huge achievements. He is currently a neutral vaccine researcher. With this news, he wrote ‘A Final Warning‘, he said that the vaccine of Covid-19 is a ‘brilliant’ vaccine. This vaccine works at a certain level. Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche said a vaccine is a misguided tool that is being deployed around the world. It is currently being used against highly contagious pathogens. On March 3, he wrote in a tweet, “I am extremely concerned about the impact of the mass immunization program in the wake of the Corona epidemic.” Read my global warnings and scientific evidence on this. He gave a link to a site. There is a PDF file. It contains a slide of a presentation that he has created himself. Its title is – “Why shouldn’t the Covid-19 vaccine be used in a mass epidemic?
Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche warns that the vaccine is becoming one of the world’s most destructive germs. The world is creating an uncontrollable monster. In his writings, he says, a relatively less harmful virus is being turned into a massive destructive germ weapon. In this case, one might think of a very small strategy to get to this stage with efficiency.
This is not complete nonsense. I reached out to Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician specializing in vaccines and immunology and the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, to get his thoughts on whether antibiotic resistance and vaccine-associated immune escape are indeed comparable. “In a sense it is, but he misses the main point,” Dr. Offit told me. A vaccine shows your body an inert part of the virus so that it can make neutralizing antibodies against it. If the body ends up making low levels of these antibodies, i.e. not enough to swiftly kill the virus when you catch it, this could allow the virus to stick around in your body for a little bit and make copies of itself. Some of these copies may by chance have the right kinds of errors in their genetic code to become variants of concern, although the mutation rate of this coronavirus is quite low.
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