Recently, I came across an article that sheds a new perspective on the efficacity of the MMR vaccine.
The article is entitled: “The declining antibody level of measles virus in China population, 2009–2015”.
I tried to find out how long the immunity from the measles vaccine lasts, and surprisingly, I got different answers.
The NHS website from the UK government states:
“It seems to be very long-lasting.” Nothing very specific.
Looking a little deeper, I found different answers ranging from 10 to 20 years.
But one thing we know is that it does not last for life.
No vaccine gives immunity for life. This is a fact. That is why they recommend boosters regularly.
Natural immunity is the best to have a long-life immunity.
This paper looks at the immunity against the measles virus in the Chinese population.
In China, a two-dose schedule of the measles vaccine was introduced in 1986, and the vaccination age modified in 2005. Up to now, the coverage of measles vaccine hit a high level of over 90% since 2006. However, the number of measles cases reported by China reached around 100,000 during 2005–2008, responsible for over 90% of cases in the Western Pacific Region.
The authors stated:
“In order to achieve the measles elimination goal, 27 of the 31 mainland provinces of China conducted unsynchronized province-wide supplementary immunization activities against measles between 2003 and 2009, and a nationwide measles supplementary immunization activity was conducted in September 2010, which meant that the reported measles cases dropped dramatically to 0.76 per 100,000 in 2011 from 2.8 per 100,000 in 2010. At the same time, school entry immunization checks and plans for reaching hard-to-reach communities were implemented. Nonetheless, the measles incidence still reached to 3.88 per 100,000 in 2014, which is far more than 1 per 1,000,000. Therefore, there is still a serious challenge to overcome on the way of eliminating measles.”
In other words, in addition to the 2-dose schedule that the government recommends, 2 additional campaigns of vaccination were performed between 2003 and 2010. This means that some people may have gotten 4 measles inoculations but they do not provide that data.
In the discussion section of the article, the authors state:
“Our results show that overall PRP remained high for measles during 2009–2011. However, it has been declining since 2012.”
PRP stands for “protection rate of population” which is the percentage of the population that have protection against the measles.
Then, they continue:
“This indicates that PRP really decreased in recent years, and implies that the number of susceptible people to measles may have already increased.”
They conclude:
“For this reason, it may be more important to implement supplemented measles vaccination activity targeting the susceptible population than the general population. The measles antibody level among the healthy population has been declining since 2012, supplemented measles vaccination activity may be necessary to eliminate measles in China.”
In other words, despite the several programs of vaccination (up to 4 within a decade), the population is losing their immunity. And the decline is rather fast.
The study was published in 2018, so the decline happened within 5-6 years of the last immunization program.
You know, if you have some basics in immunology, that vaccines would never give the same benefit as natural immunity.
The immunity from vaccination does not last; that is why they recommend boosters to boost it back up.
It does not last because this “fake” immunity does not trigger the full immune response that the body needs to develop long term immunity.
It was interesting to me that the authors recommended more boosters even though they already do such campaigns. I did not think that the vaccine does not really work like they think it does.
They never brought up the reasons why immunity does not last in the Chinese population. They never brought up the fact that up to 30% of kids are vitamin A deficient. You can see this article:
“The Prevalence of Vitamin A Deficiency in Chinese Children: A Systematic Review and Bayesian Meta-Analysis.” Published in Nutrients in 2017.
Could this explain why measles immunity does not work or last in the Chinese population?
What is the whole point of immunizing people when their bodies do not have the necessary nutrients to mount an optimal immune response?
It would make sense that nutritional deficiencies are responsible for this failure of the immunization programs in China.
Also, intense immunization programs like this one lead to another issue: the vaccine apocalypse.
I use the word apocalypse because currently, we live in the antibiotic apocalypse as several doctors call it.
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. I talked about it before, but I will recap here the main points.
We know that the pertussis bacteria is changing and becoming resistant to the vaccine.
Evidence from the last few years indicate the same phenomenon is happening for the measles virus.
We know that the genetic pool of the measles virus population is drifting, changing. We call this new virus “vaccine-escape mutants”.
In some cases, these mutations allow the virus to adapt to a new host or escape the
host’s antiviral responses.
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 high? 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.
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. This is Biology 101. It is the survival of the strongest, the fittest.
“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.
That is the reason why more doctors are asking for a new MMR vaccine, because of this resistance that is occurring.
I had personal communication with an evolutionary biologist that his job is to monitor the genetic pools of a variety of viruses and bacteria that vaccines target. He said that there are 5-6 pathogens that they are monitoring closely because they have observed a change in their genetic pools.
In other words, in the next few decades, we may be faced with populations of viruses and bacteria that are resistant to vaccines.
This whole picture is very scary. Vaccination, against the measles, has led us to this
a catastrophic situation where mutants are coming up, and we do not have immunity
against them.
And this is becoming true for other microbes as well.
Dr. Serge
