Christian Drosten: "I've Had Three Doses of the Vaccine and Been Infected Twice"

Does anyone still remember the days when COVID-19 vaccines were reputed to do what other vaccines do – namely, prevent people from getting infected – and hence we were all taught to speak of exceptional ‘breakthrough infections’ when the unexpected, nonetheless, came to pass?

Well, Germany’s ‘state virologist’ Christian Drosten apparently does not remember them either. Drosten is a member of the German Government’s ‘Corona Expert Council’ and is treated as the absolute authority in Germany for all things COVID-19-related. He also, purely coincidentally, developed the notoriously hyper-sensitive COVID-19 PCR testing protocol, which would go a long way to create the COVID-19 pandemic based on the innumerable ‘asymptomatic cases’ it would go on to detect.

Drosten has given a new interview to the German weekly paper Die Zeit on the solemn occasion of the awarding of this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine to Drew Weissman and Katalin Kariko, two scientists who contributed to developing the mRNA technology underlying the most widely-used COVID-19 vaccines in the West. Drosten praises the decision to award the prize to the mRNA pioneers – “the technology has proven its significance thanks to the authorisation for COVID-19” – and goes on to note that “I’ve had three doses of the vaccine and been infected twice”.

Three doses and he still got infected twice? Well, why does he agree with the Nobel Committee awarding the prize to Weissman and Kariko then?

Drosten’s remark is apparently supposed to help explain why he will not be getting the new ‘variant-adapted’ COVID-19 jab this autumn or donning a facemask when out and about: since, namely, he already has adequate immunity to fend off the virus – not, it seems, thanks to his previous vaccine doses but due to having caught the bug despite them!

Further on in the interview, Drosten makes this assumption explicit. Thus, asked whether the public has to be concerned about new, more highly transmissible Covid variants, Drosten replies:

Two years ago, higher transmissibility due to new mutations always also meant that more people got seriously ill. Simply because immunity against serious outcomes was not yet complete. By now, the overwhelming majority have built up immune defences by way of infections which are directed against the whole virus, not only against the spike protein from the vaccine. Infections were required for this.

So, Drosten now speaks (and it is not the first time) as if the idea all along was for people to get the vaccine and the virus. He adds, however, that vaccination was still worthwhile, since, he claims, it reduced the severity of the illness when people got infected. Mind you, he has just said that “complete immunity” even against severe disease is only achieved via infection.

The somewhat bewildering position adopted by Drosten is, by the way and not surprisingly – he is not referred to as Germany’s ‘state virologist’ for nothing – also the official German Government position. The official recommendation of the Standing Committee on Vaccination (STIKO) of the German public health authority is that everyone over 18 years of age should have acquired a “basic immunity” by way of at least three “antigen contacts”, either in the form of vaccine doses or infections. The STIKO, however, insists that at least two of these “contacts” should have taken place by way of vaccination, thus suggesting that vaccine-induced immunity is somehow superior to natural immunity, whereas Drosten’s remarks clearly suggest the contrary.

In its latest recommendation on the new ‘variant-adapted’ jab, moreover, the STIKO notes that “the majority of the population has already been vaccinated multiple times and has acquired good basic immunity thanks to having had SARS-CoV-2 infections in addition”. This is why, incidentally, the STIKO only recommends the adapted jab for persons over 60 and members of other ostensibly high-risk groups, but not for anyone else. But the tenor is exactly the same as in Drosten’s remarks, as if getting vaccinated and then getting sick had been the plan all along.

Well, for Drosten’s and the STIKO’s benefit, the below comes directly from the European Medicines Agency summary document on what is by far the most-widely used COVID-19 vaccine in the EU: BioNTech’s mRNA-based ‘Comirnaty’.