Let’s talk about a topic that nobody wants to talk about.
A subject that is considered taboo, but it is of primordial importance.
We are on the verge of the vaccine apocalypse ☹
How did we end up in this situation?
Let’s look at the antibiotic resistance issue as an example.
In the words of England’s chief medical officer, Sally Davies: “The world is facing an antibiotic apocalypse.”
In other words, bacteria are becoming increasingly more resistant to antibiotics, and we are already seeing the unfortunate consequences of this.
Hospitals are now seeing patients dying of bacterial infections because no antibiotics can kill them. 25,000 people, in the United States and Europe, are dying annually because of this resistance.
There is no point to elaborate on this topic, as we are well aware of this catastrophic situation.
This phenomenon is happening in the vaccine world.
This article, published by the CDC, caught my attention 10 years ago. “Bordetella pertussis Strains with Increased Toxin Production Associated with Pertussis Resurgence.”
The authors concluded:
“Our results underline the importance of Ptx in transmission, suggest that vaccination may select for increased virulence, and indicate ways to control pertussis more effectively”.
In other words, they show that a new strain of Bordetella pertussis has developed resistance to the vaccine. I did not say it, the researchers at the CDC are warning us! Is
that why we have seen a resurgence of it?
Several other studies have confirmed this phenomenon.
In a 2014 paper published in Emerging Infectious Diseases , researchers in Australia, led by the medical microbiologist Ruiting Lan at the University of New South Wales, collected and sequenced B. pertussis samples from 320 patients between 2008 and 2012.
The percentage of bacteria that did not express pertactin, a protein targeted by the acellular vaccine, leaped from 5 percent in 2008 to 78 percent in 2012, which suggests that selection pressure from the vaccine was enabling pertactin-free strains to become more common.
In the U.S., nearly all circulating bacteria lack pertactin, according to a paper published by the CDC in 2017.
“I think pretty much everyone agrees, pertussis strain variation is shaped by vaccination,” Lan said.
With the international outbreaks of the measles virus underway now, I surveyed the medical literature to see if this is happening to the measles as well.
To my great surprise, several scientific papers have been published about this.
Scientists warned us, more than 20 years ago, that the measles virus would change and the vaccine would not give us immunity anymore.
Vaccination has generated what we call “escape mutants” of the measles virus under the genetic selection pressure of vaccination programs.
It is not my intention to inundate you with technical terms, however I need to use a few research papers to demonstrate this phenomenon to you. So just bare with me 😊
There was a paper published in 1994, named:
“Antigenic Analysis Of Current Wild Type And Vaccine Strains Of Measles Virus”
The authors stated:
“ These data show that the H proteins of the recent wild type viruses contain both conserved and new or modified antigenic determinants and are consistent with previous studies that described genetic drift in the H proteins of recent wild type viruses”
In other words, the measles virus is mutating, changing.
Another paper, published in 1999, is also very interesting:
“Spontaneous Mutation Rate of Measles Virus: Direct Estimation Based on Mutations Conferring Monoclonal Antibody Resistance”
The authors said:
“In the context of measles virus elimination efforts, evidence for a high mutation rate suggests that the possibility of strains that may escape neutralization by vaccine must be considered, although to date there is no evidence of such vaccine-escape mutants”
This was in 1999. Today, we know that some strains of the measles virus have become resistant to the immunity procured by the vaccine.
Several papers were published demonstrating the existence of those “vaccine-escape mutants”.
For example, this one:
“Measles viruses of genotype H1 evade recognition by vaccine-induced neutralizing antibodies targeting the linear haemagglutinin noose epitope”
And this one:
“Mutations in the H, F, or M Proteins Can Facilitate Resistance of Measles Virus to Neutralizing Human Anti-MV Sera”
The authors stated:
“Our studies demonstrate that subgenotype D4.2 lacks epitopes associated with half of the known antigenic sites”.
“ Viral RNA polymerases have high error rates due to the lack of proofreading ability, which leads to the high mutation rate of the viral genome and rapid evolutionary rates.
In some cases, these mutations allow the virus to adapt to a new host or escape the host’s anti-viral responses.”
What this study shows is that the virus has evolved, changed, mutated.
The frightening part is that this new subtype was not neutralized by pooled sera taken from US donors. In other words, taking the antibodies from the blood of
vaccine-immuned Americans, did not kill the new strain of the measles virus.
Very scary thoughts ☹
Is that why the measles is coming back in Asia, Europe, America, even places where the coverage is 98-99%? Are those outbreaks caused by those “mutants”?
Dr Claude Muller, from the National Health Laboratory in Luxembourg, told New Scientist magazine that the virus was known to have the ability to mutate rapidly.
Dr. Muller’s team reports that some strains of measles virus, circulating in Africa, appear to have acquired a considerable level of resistance to the standard measles vaccine in use in the continent.
At least half the immune system antibodies produced in response to the vaccine have no effect on these strains.
The rapid clearance of acute viral infections is a consequence of robust host defenses.
Survivors of acute infections are usually immune to infection with the same virus.
Acute infections recur because selection pressure in the host leads to the production of virions that are resistant to clearance by the immune system.
For example, when viruses replicate in the presence of antibodies that can block infectivity (neutralizing antibodies), viruses are selected that are resistant to the antibodies.
These viruses can then infect individuals who are immune to the original virus. The ability to escape antibody neutralization requires structural plasticity.
Examples of viruses with this attribute are, the influenza virus and HIV.
The practical consequences of structural plasticity are quite clear: they determine whether or not immunization confers sustained protection against infection.
Evolutionary biologists aren’t surprised that this is happening.
A vaccine is a novel selection pressure placed on a pathogen, and if the vaccine does not eradicate its target completely, then the remaining pathogens with the greatest fitness — those able to survive, somehow, in an immunized world — will become more common.
This is natural selection at play.
“If you don’t have these pathogens evolving in response to vaccines,” said Paul Ewald, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Louisville, “then we really don’t understand natural selection.”
Vaccine failures caused by vaccine-induced evolution are under the same natural selection.
These drops in vaccine effectiveness are incited by changes in pathogen populations that the vaccines themselves directly cause.
“I think the scientific community is becoming increasingly aware that vaccine resistance is a real risk,” said Dr. David Kennedy, a scientist from Penn State.
This whole picture is very scary. Vaccination, against the measles, has led us to this catastrophic situation where mutants are coming up and we do not have immunity against them.
