COVID-19 ‘herd immunity’ without vaccination? Teaching modern vaccine dogma old tricks

Dr. Anthony Fauci has repeatedly emphasized vaccine development to control COVID-19 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 [SARS-Cov2]). His colleague, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins, subsequently interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, provided this caveat: “It would not be particularly encouraging if we have a vaccine that’s capable of protecting 20-year-olds who probably have a pretty low risk anyway of getting sick, and doesn’t work at all for people over 65.” Oxford University vaccine researcher and Regius Professor of Medicine Sir John Bell recently lamented that as COVID-19 cases rapidly dwindle in the U.K.,“You wouldn’t start (trials) in London now for sure.” Bell added that scientists might have to “chase” the virus around the nation for the vaccine trials to be successful.

Vaccine enthusiast Fauci and the more sober Bell each conveniently ignore unsuccessful vaccine experiences with other coronaviruses over the past two decades: (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) SARS-Cov1 and (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) MERS-Cov. They also seem to have forgotten, amid the COVID-19 hysteria, reassuring, almost 100-year-old basic concepts of naturally acquired community immunization, made clear prior to modern-era mass vaccination campaigns.

Since their emergence in 2003 and 2012 respectively, no safe and efficacious human vaccines for either SARS-Cov1 or MERS have been developed. Moreover, experimental non-human (animal model) evaluations of four SARS-Cov1 candidate vaccine types, revealed that despite conferring some protection against infection with SARS-Cov1, each also caused serious lung injury, caused by an overreaction of the immune system, upon viral challenge. Identical “hypersensitive-type” lung injury occurred when mice were administered a candidate MERS-Cov vaccine, then challenged with infectious virus, negating the ostensible benefit achieved by their development of promising so-called “antibodies” (produced by a class of cells that can circulate in blood called “B-cells”), which might have provided immunity to MERS-Cov.

These disappointing experimental observations must serve as a cautionary tale for SARS-Cov2 vaccination programs to control epidemic COVID-19 disease.