Moving Targets

Here's an interesting news story from Wisconsin. It doesn't go into much details, but it appears that the vaccine everybody's so excited about is less effective than expected. Furthermore, there's a 1% mortality rate among those who get sick despite being vaccinated. That's a fivefold increase from 0.2% for those who get the virus without being vaccinated.

While this is too little data to draw any conclusions, it fits well with what we've already observed, and what we know about flu viruses in general. It appears that the virus is mutating. There's a strand of the virus out there that the vaccine doesn't affect. This would mean that we're likely to see this strand spreading as normal while the stand affected by the vaccine dies out. The result of this will be that the vaccine has no long term ability to fight the virus.

This would not normally be a problem. Our bodies will adopt to the change and respond accordingly. Furthermore, viruses tend to mutate towards something less lethal. After all, there's no point in killing the host. It's better for the virus to mutate towards something harmless so that it can stay in the host for longer. So, what's going on with the increase in mortality rate among the vaccinated who gets the virus? Is the new strand deviating from the normal trajectory towards less lethality?

One possibility is that the vaccine itself is at fault. Without pretending to be an expert, I have the impression that RNA vaccines remain in our bodies even when no longer needed. Furthermore, they have the potential to trigger immune responses when no such responses are needed. This would pose a problem for a vaccinated person under attack by a new strain. Not only must that person fight the new strain without any help from the vaccine. The vaccine may complicate things by prompting the immune system to produce useless antibodies.

This may in turn open for a very dangerous response by those who see nothing but good in the current vaccine program. They may insist on producing a new vaccine to fight the new strand, and they may use the increased mortality rate as an argument for this, falsely claiming that the virus has mutated towards something more lethal. This will lead to a rollout of a new vaccine. Anxious people will line up to get this one as well, only to discover that the virus is becoming even more lethal. Too late, people will realize that the vaccines they've been taking have weakened their ability to fight viruses.

What's amazing in this is that it doesn't require much insight to predict that a virus will respond to a vaccine by mutating towards a new strand, and that a vaccine that stays in our bodies when no longer needed is unlikely to yield a long term positive effect. Yet, people still line up to get their shots, and I'm sure they will line up for next year's shots as well.

Smallpox vaccine

By Photo Credit: James Gathany Content Providers(s): CDC - This media comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Public Health Image Library (PHIL), with identification number #2674. Note: Not all PHIL images are public domain; be sure to check copyright status and credit authors and content providers. Deutsch | English | македонски | slovenščina | +/−, Public Domain, Link