More often than not, politicians will tell people what they want to hear, rather than what’s really true. Their oracle of choice for such messsaging is the mainstream media, who have been aggressively pushing the claim that a miracle vaccine for the coronavirus will be arriving “in a few months.” Are such claims really true, or are they hype? This is an important question to ask, especially as the promise of a new vaccine seems to be the centerpiece of most western governments’ strategies to ‘re-open’ their economies and societies after imposing draconian ‘lockdown’ measures designed to supposedly contain the spread of COVID-19.
The Guardian claims that human trials for a Covid-19 vaccine could be completed as early as mid-August. However, when pressed on the details, UK officials are reticent to promise anything specific.
John Bell from the government’s coronavirus vaccine taskforce admitted as much in a recent BBC interview:
“[The question is] will it protect people, and that has not been tested and it will only be tested once you have vaccinated a significant number of people and exposed them to the virus and counted how many people have got the virus in that population.” he said.
When asked recently, the UK government’s chief science advisor, Sir Patrick Vallance also reiterated that finding a coronavirus vaccine which actually works is anything but a fait accompli.
“This is a new disease that didn’t exist before December and we have a lot to learn about the virus and how the body responds to it,” said Vallance in The Guardian.
“All new vaccines that come into development are long shots; only some end up being successful, and the whole process requires experimentation.”
“Coronavirus will be no different and presents new challenges for vaccine development. This will take time, and we should be clear it is not a certainty.”
But how much time? Government officials in the UK, US and Canada seem to be using the vaccine as the cornerstone of their policy remedy to experimental ‘lockdown’ measures imposed in March and April. How long can they keep their mostly healthy citizens under house arrest before social unrest and disenchantment reaches unsustainable levels for government to retain power and control?
Currently there are some 100 different vaccine projects underway in the ‘Great Corona Race’ to see which one will be crowned the winner in the global panaceas sweepstakes. While this grand narrative sounds wonderful, and even inspirational to some, the reality is much more complex and even more problematic than anyone will care to admit, especially those who are bought and paid for by the transnational corporate pharmaceutical industry which stands to make hundreds of billions in profit should any COVID-19 vaccine ever be adopted for wide scale use.
Speaking to STAT, Mark Feinberg, president and CEO of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, whose work as chief public health and science officer at Merck Vaccines was instrumental in the development of the immunization against Ebola, stated the following:
“The traditional vaccine timeline is 15 to 20 years. That would not be acceptable here,” said “When you hear predictions about it taking at best a year or a year and a half to have a vaccine available … there’s no way to come close to those timelines unless we take new approaches.”
More skepticism was recently aired by an envoy from the World Health Organisation (WHO), warning that there is no certainty over whether there will be a successful vaccine.
“You don’t necessarily develop a vaccine that is safe and effective against every virus,” said David Nabarro, professor of global health at Imperial College London.
“Some viruses are very, very difficult when it comes to vaccine development,” he said to The Observer. “So for the foreseeable future, we are going to have to find ways to go about our lives with this virus as a constant threat.”
Among the leading high profile skeptics is one eminent Australian vaccine inventor who says COVID-19 may never have a preventive vaccine, but could possibly burn out.
The co-inventor of the controversial HPV vaccine, Professor Ian Frazer, admits that a workable vaccine for the coronavirus is “tricky” and may not even be possible. He is instead working on an anti-viral treatment for the most vulnerable who get sick. Frazer says that although 100 different teams around the world were testing vaccines, medical scientists still do not have an effective model of how to attack this virus.
Interestingly, Frazer stated that for 99% of people who catch it, COVID-19 is a “trivial illness.”
Candace Sutton from News.com Australia reports…
The professor of medicine at Queensland University, which is testing for its own COVID-19 vaccine, said immunisation against coronavirus was similar to immunising against the common cold.
“It is tricky, vaccines for upper respiratory tract diseases, because the virus lands on the outside of you,” Prof Frazer said.
“Think of us as a football, with the skin and respiratory tract on the outside of the football and the lungs are where the outside interfaces with the inside.”
“The place where the virus lands is outside us and it tries to infect the cells within us.”
“Our immune system is inside of us. When it lands inside our lungs it tries to infect our cells and succeeds. Our immune system goes to fight the virus and that’s why people get sick.
“If the immune system turns on too strong it can cause damage to the lungs …. The wrong vaccine could make things worse so we have to be very selective about what part of the virus we want to attack.”
“If you immunise someone with a vaccine, it goes inside and makes an immune response within you …. What you want is an immune response to migrate out to where the virus lands.”
“There is no vaccine against the common cold.”
Prof Frazer said that with flu, the immune response inside a person’s body didn’t occur until the flu virus gets inside them.
“We tried to deliver a vaccine to the lungs with the Flu Mist which you snuffed up your nose, delivering the vaccine to the place where you need an immune response, but it didn’t work terribly well,” he said.
“Coronavirus doesn’t get into you, it stays on the surface cells in your lungs. All these flu viruses get into you, so the body can fight and makes T cells.”
“This virus doesn’t kill the cells, it makes them sick. At the moment we don’t know how to make a coronavirus vaccine work.”
“That’s why there are 100 vaccines under testing using every conceivable approach ….We don’t know if any of them will work.”
Prof Frazer said a vaccine for the 2003 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak was never successfully developed and then the virus burnt out. SARS broke out in China and didn’t spread as far, partly because overseas travel by the Chinese population was not as great 17 years ago as it is today.
But, Prof Frazer said, it also had diluted potency as it went from host to host. “As it passed from animal to the first human and then through the second human, as it passed through every human it got a little less good at infecting people,” he said.
“The virus attenuated itself; it got less powerful …. It may well be the same with this virus. It’s not very effective in making us sick. It may become less effective.”
“We are now mapping it as it goes and changes are occurring in its genetic make-up, small changes.”
“Changes to it in China led to the virus becoming less virulent or sick-making …. At the moment it’s not passing through a lot of people in Australia.”
Prof Frazer said coronavirus was less infectious and not as deadly as MERS, the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome or camel flu which broke out in South Korea in 2015.
“MERS … was very efficient infecting and making people sick,” he said.
“One person who went to South Korea from the Middle East infected 170 people and a third of those died …. He went through four hospitals before he was diagnosed, but in South Korea they were very effective with contact tracing.”
“MERS is much nastier .… than coronavirus.”
Prof Frazer explained the annual vaccines prepared against the winter flu by the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL) were not entirely effective.
Each year CSL “takes about a quarter of Australia’s egg supply to make the vaccine,” he said.
“We purify the protein parts of the virus out of the eggs and make the vaccine out of that.
“But it’s not 100 per cent effective at all … for older people (because) as your immune system gets weaker as you get older.
“With measles you are protected against it for life. The vaccine kills any virus that gets into your blood.
“We don’t have a mode that works against other coronaviruses.”
Prof Frazer, who is currently developing vaccines for cancer, is working with a team of medical scientists on a trial for a coronavirus treatment drug.
The intervention drug’s purpose is to dampen down the inflammatory response in high-risk coronavirus patients.
He said for 99 per cent of people who got coronavirus it was a trivial illness, but that was not the case for those in the vulnerable categories.
See the full interview at News.com Australia
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Still, there are powerful forces at play who are determined to rush what is even fast as a two to four-year process of vaccine research and development – and somehow squeeze all of that into an even highly unrealistic and potentially risky 6 to 18 months. The UK government’s John Bell seems to be one of those promising a world record in deploying this new coronavirus ‘solution’:
“If we can see evidence of a strong immune response by the middle or the end of May, then I think the game is on,” he said, adding that the next step would then be “the massive issue of how you manufacture at scale many billions of doses”.
By rushing the process, western officials and their pharmaceutical ‘partners’ are effectively skipping animal testing and moving straight on to using humans as their guinea pigs.
“Outbreaks and national emergencies often create pressure to suspend rights, standards and/or normal rules of ethical conduct. Often our decision to do so seems unwise in retrospect,” wrote Jonathan Kimmelman, director of McGill University’s biomedical ethics unit, for STAT.
Could such a hasty move also help proliferate a new mutated strain unnecessarily? Should the general public be concerned that by releasing these humans out into the public then some people might also be more at risk to serious infection should they have a bad autoimmune reaction to an untested experimental vaccine?
As it turns out, there are numerous problems already with the seasonal flu shot, and it only stands to reason that a vaccine for the common cold variant of the coronavirus will experience related problems of “negative vaccine effectiveness”, or the increase in risk of illness from influenza (Flu) and non-influenza viruses. Like any vaccine expected to cover for multiple variants of the coronavirus, we have learned from the Flu shot that this may not actually be possible. Criticisms and failures of the annual Flu shot can be found here, here and here.
Such a rushed strategy by the world’s governments may pose additional problems in terms of risk to public health, but so far governments do not seem to mind in this case because supposedly ‘the threat is too great to wait and follow proper procedure.’ Is it really?
Far from being the ‘sure thing’ which people like Bill Gates, GAVI, and other health experts are claiming it to be, the idea that a working vaccine which the industry has never been able to manage in history, can all of the sudden be conjured up in a mater of months – could easily end up introducing more new problems into this situation in addition to the ones we have already.
All indications are that any rush to fast-track a vaccine for COVID-19 could end badly. Still, government and the media are hyping this possibility.
The real question is: do they really have the public’s best interests in mind, or are there other more powerful (and profitable) overriding agendas at play here?
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