Dec 7, 2021
Statement by Geert Vanden Bossche (DVM, PhD)
Public and Global Health authorities continue to convince people to get jabbed despite the abundance of breakthrough infections. Their short-sighted rhetoric focuses on an alleged advantage offered by vaccines to protect people against severe disease (which doesn’t even apply when one takes into account the many unvaccinated subjects that are naturally protected against mild or moderate disease – thanks to their innate immunity- and are, therefore, also protected against severe disease!).
As breakthrough infections accumulate, immune escape variants will only become more and more prevalent. This is because vaccines that cannot protect against mild or moderate disease allow vaccinees to shed virus while rapidly recalling and boosting their original vaccinal antibodies (due to ‘antigenic sin’).
The combination of mounting antibody (Ab) titers and high viral load in an increasing part of the vaccinated population experiencing breakthrough infections only promotes further immune selection and dominant propagation of viral immune escape variants that are featured by a higher level of resistance to vaccine-induced immune pressure on viral infectiousness.
It is, therefore, fair to assume that the recent emergence of Omicron resulted from large-scale breakthrough infections in a highly vaccinated population rather than from immune suppression in one or another HIV patient.
This is in sharp contrast to a situation where an unvaccinated individual contracts C19- disease. Unvaccinated individuals contract C-19 disease as a result from the virus breaking through their innate immune defense; in that case, viral transmission occurs well in advance of the appearance of a robust humoral response and, therefore, doesn’t cause immune pressure on viral infectiousness. The so-called de novo priming of anti-spike Abs that are directed at the relevant circulating SARS-CoV-2 variant prevents natural selection and adaptation of more infectious variants in the unvaccinated population whereas breakthrough boosting on a background of widespread vaccine-mediated immunity/ immune memory only precipitates breeding of viral variants with improved immune escape properties.
So, lowering the bar of vaccine efficacy down to protection against SEVERE disease is a vicious trick to leave people with the impression that C-19 vaccines are a blessing whereas exactly the opposite applies.