A colleague of mine sent me a copy of a recent opinion piece published in Cell Host and Microbe entitled ‘Rethinking next-generation vaccines for coronaviruses, influenzaviruses, and other respiratory viruses’. This opinion piece by David M. Morens, Jeffery K. Taubenberger and Anthony S. Fauci is not only interesting because of its content but because the senior author is one Anthony Fauci.
I was not the only one to spot this publication and subsequently discovered that Alex Berenson had already pulled out the key findings from the paper and published them on his Substack.
I would recommend reading both the paper itself (which is written in something approaching plain English) and Alex’s excellent Substack, but here I thought I would go through this paper and bring out some of the key points.
So why is this paper so interesting? Given that the senior author is Anthony Fauci isn’t it just going to be a spin piece hailing the unbounded success of the ‘safe and effective’ COVID-19 vaccines? Well, as it turns out, not quite.
Let’s start with this quote from the introductory sections of the paper, which really sets the tone:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the rapid development and deployment of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines has saved innumerable lives and helped to achieve early partial pandemic control. However, as variant SARS-CoV-2 strains have emerged, deficiencies in these vaccines reminiscent of influenza vaccines have become apparent. The vaccines for these two very different viruses have common characteristics: they elicit incomplete and short-lived protection against evolving virus variants that escape population immunity. (My emphasis)
Once past the obligatory statement of lives saved in the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci and his colleagues dive straight in with the admission that the vaccines are ‘deficient’ and only ever achieved ‘partial pandemic control’, which seems a slight oxymoronic statement as either you are controlling the pandemic, or you are not and partial controlled means (partially) uncontrolled. Putting this aside, the reason for this ‘partial control’ was because the vaccines were leaky, transient in their effect, and never produced effective levels of immunity in the population because of the evolution of escape variants. Simply put, these vaccines were not very good.
A point the authors kind of make in their next paragraph:
Considering that vaccine development and licensure is a long and complex process requiring years of preclinical and clinical safety and efficacy data, the limitations of influenza and SARS-CoV-2 vaccines remind us that candidate vaccines for most other respiratory viruses have to date been insufficiently protective for consideration of licensure, including candidate vaccines against RSV, a major killer of infants and the elderly, parainfluenzaviruses, endemic coronaviruses, and many other ‘common cold’ viruses that cause significant morbidity and economic loss.
Here, of course, the implication is that the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines would have been sufficiently protective to achieve regulatory approval, but of course they did not go through the “complex process requiring years of preclinical and clinical safety and efficacy data” but were instead fast-tracked through a highly abbreviated development programme, so we’ll never know. Despite this, the authors acknowledge that these vaccines have limitations and highlight the fact that vaccines to other coronaviruses (amongst other things) have failed to satisfy the regulatory authorities that they are effective. The question of whether the COVID-19 vaccines would actually be deemed to be effective in more normal times is one I’ll come back to this at the end of this article.
The authors go further in explaining why vaccines like those developed to prevent diseases caused by respiratory viruses are scientifically unlikely to be effective at controlling these diseases:
Taking all of these factors into account, it is not surprising that none of the predominantly mucosal respiratory viruses have ever been effectively controlled by vaccines. This observation raises a question of fundamental importance: if natural mucosal respiratory virus infections do not elicit complete and long-term protective immunity against reinfection, how can we expect vaccines, especially systemically administered non-replicating vaccines, to do so?
In other words, it appears that we haven’t evolved to develop long-term immunity to pathogens like SARS-CoV-2 and so it was always extremely unlikely that the COVID-19 vaccines were ever going to produce effective long-term protection, especially as they are “systemically administered non-replicating vaccines”. Any transient immunity would wane and so were always going to get reinfected.
The reasons for this lack of “complete and long-term protective immunity against reinfection” are discussed in a section of the paper entitled: ‘Natural infections with mucosal respiratory viruses may not be fully controlled by human immune responses because the human immune system has evolved to tolerate them during very short intervals of mucosal viral replication.’
It turns out we’ve evolved to tolerate some level of respiratory infection (especially in the upper airways) rather than having our immune system going into over-drive all the time. Given the prevalence of respiratory viruses in the environment, it is easy to see why this might be the case because if our immune systems went into action at the first (literal) sniff of a viral infection, we’d be sick all the time.
This local tolerance of respiratory viruses is in contrast to systemic viral infections where we do generate a strong, long-lasting immune response and vaccination can be effective, e.g. measles.
The consequence of driving a systemic immune response to what would normally be a contained, tolerated local infection is unclear, but this is something Alex Berenson discusses in his Substack article:
Many studies in humans and experimental animals, some before sIgA had been recognised, indicate that secretory mucosal immunity is generally more effective than systemic immunity in controlling mucosal respiratory viruses and that tissue-resident memory T cells can be effective in rapidly responding to mucosal infection.
Finally, the authors discuss the numerous pieces of scientific evidence showing that generating a local immune response is the best way of protecting oneself from respiratory infection and that this response can be driven through T-cell immunity. Again, this calls into doubt the effectiveness of systemic vaccination against such respiratory viruses whilst simultaneously acknowledging the role of T-cells in immunity to viruses like SARS-CoV-2… something that was consistently downplayed during the pandemic itself.
Overall, the authors are surprisingly critical of single vaccine approaches:
The implications for vaccinology are clear: preventing viral upper respiratory infection and limiting post-infection viral spread to contiguous respiratory compartments are both critical but may not be easily achieved with single vaccines.
Especially those using systemic administration of agents to induce immunity to respiratory viruses:
Attempting to control mucosal respiratory viruses with systemically administered non-replicating vaccines has thus far been largely unsuccessful, indicating that new approaches are needed.
Based on prior experience of vaccines against diseases like COVID-19, it would seem to be extremely unlikely that a single vaccine would achieve what is required to prevent severe disease. So, one is left with the impression that either we were extremely lucky with the SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations, which bucked this trend, or a conclusion that these vaccinations are not actually very ‘effective’ at “controlling a mucosal respiratory virus”. Interestingly, there is no discussion of this point in the paper, and one might naively believe that it would have been a critical point of interest give the billions of doses of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines given to people worldwide. Why are these vaccines examples of success, given the fact that they appear to have many of the features of countless other vaccine failures?
Before finishing off with a few thoughts, I thought it worth highlighting this passage:
The observation that repeated infant exposures to RSV reduces severe disease upon subsequent infection, coupled with experimental data, suggest that respiratory vaccine timing and frequency can be important. Indeed, a recent controversial theory posits that the key determinant of immune/vaccine protection is not immune memory and recall but repeated antigenic exposures. This proposal seems to be contradicted by many observable phenomena but is at the same time consistent with the observation that maintenance of memory T cells in the lungs is associated with repeated antigenic exposures.
So, repeated exposure to some viral pathogens may actually be important in maintaining immunity to them and preventing them causing severe disease. This would be consistent with the observations discussed above about the limited form of immunity such exposure gives and speaks to the concept that “a challenged immune system, is a healthy immune system”. Therefore, locking everyone up in their houses for months on end would be predicted to result in a loss of immunity to common respiratory viruses that would normally circulate through the population causing mild disease while reinforcing our immunity to them. As a result, once people were allowed to mix again one would further predict a wave of things like RSV infection causing much more severe disease in what had essentially become a naïve population. Indeed, this is what was seen in places like New Zealand post-lockdown. Not only were the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines unlikely to do what we wanted them to, but lockdowns were always likely to produce predictable viral problems. Worst cold in the world anyone?
This is a very interesting article, not just because of what it has to say about vaccinations to viruses like SARS-CoV-2, but also because of who is saying it. There are many statements in here that I suspect would fall foul of the ‘fact checkers’, not least the discussion about the transient and incomplete immunity produced by the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and their various deficiencies and the fact that they would seem to be a far cry from what anyone might reasonably deem to be genuinely ‘effective’. One is certainly left with the impression that written by a different author the slant could easily have been something like “SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations are another example of our failure to develop effective vaccines against mucosal respiratory viruses”.
Overall, I’m left with the questions as to whether the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are really exceptions to the failures to produce suitably effective vaccines against such respiratory viruses or whether in other circumstances they would not be approved for use. Maybe in a pandemic it is necessary to accept vaccines that “elicit incomplete and short-lived protection against evolving virus variants that escape population immunity”? Perhaps one could argue something is better than nothing, but if this is the case why should we keep on taking them after the pandemic is passed, especially if “none of the predominantly mucosal respiratory viruses have ever been effectively controlled by vaccines”?
Because of exceptional circumstances, the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines did not go through the usual “complex process requiring years of preclinical and clinical safety and efficacy data” and were fast-tracked to approval. Many of the missing studies were the long-term safety studies usually required of vaccines before approval and we need to always remember that it is the balance of benefit AND risk that is important in a pharmaceutical treatment, not just whether they have some level of efficacy… something that is especially true for vaccines that will be given to healthy individuals who may never gain any benefit. Unfortunately, vaccine safety and the risks to the patient are one area that Fauci and his colleagues are strangely silent on in this piece.
Finally, having comprehensively highlighted the issues and deficiencies with both the current SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and the challenges of making better ones, what do the authors suggest is the answer to this problem?
With regard to public health usefulness and acceptance, it will be important to consider roles for high dose or frequently boosted vaccine antigens, mixed-sequential vaccines (e.g. prime-boost with different vaccines), and whether these approaches will be accepted by providers, regulators, and the public.
We also need to ask whether there are other vaccine approaches that should be considered, such as sequential seasonal vaccinations and supplemental mucosal vaccines to stimulate specific upper respiratory immunity, or non-specific innate immunity. Such approaches might include prime-boost approaches, for example, mixing elicitation of systemic and mucosal immunity, perhaps with prime systemic vaccination followed by a boost with intranasal vaccination or vice versa.
Their answer is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot more vaccinations. I would certainly agree that there need to be more effective vaccinations, and I am not underplaying the seriousness of some of the diseases caused by these viruses. But if we accept that immunity against respiratory viruses is somehow ‘hardwired’ to be transient, then the imagined approach here seems to be one in which we could spend our lives injecting, taking, and sniffing a stream of pharmaceutical products ad nauseam and ad infinitum. No wonder it is right to ask, “whether these approaches will be accepted by providers, regulators, and the public”?
George Santayana is the pseudonym of a senior executive at a British pharmaceutical company.
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God bless you Chris. Now the green lobby claim desert good, rain forest bad! Deserts are a sign of co2 stress, IE concentrations are too low to allow plants to grow in non optimum conditions.
Somewhat akin to the Royal Society for Protection of Birds being fervently behind windmills which are murdering tens of thousands of birds every year in our own waters and land alone.
Amazing isn’t it, socialists hate that the main bi product of capitalism is plant food, so they had to invent pseudo science to dismantle it.
The Climate zealots are anti human, they want less of us around, and so anything that causes depopulation in their crazed minds is good, anything that encourages human population growth is bad. When its viewed from that very simple angle it makes everything else we have been witness to in the past 4 plus years fall into place.
Succinct.
The real agenda is Depopulation.
What do the WWF have to say about that considering they’re are a clone of the WEF!
They say that polar bears are having to learn to live in trees!
WWF are right behind it even though it is killing all sorts of wildlife, whales, dolphins, birds
Nature in net zero transition plans | WWF
It seems obvious to me that milder winters at the end of the Mini Ice Age, allied with perfectly normal climate change, is causing CO2 to increase. After all, what is the primary purpose of plants other than to survive? Absorb CO2 and produce Oxygen.
Now, given that CO2 levels are, apparently, rising, despite the fact that temperatures have not risen for nearly 30 years, proves that CO2 does not have a definitive relationship with temperature. Indeed, the evidence that CO2 follows temperature is copiously detailed and reviewed. There is not one document in the entire world that proves the opposite without modelling. Modelling is about as accurate as Labour’s “1.5 million homes by 2029”.
In my layman view the Science is pretty obvious: the end of the Mini Ice Age and the Moon being on a ten year tilt cycle is causing ideal conditions for plants. Increased numbers of plants are, indirectly, producing more CO2, feeding more vegetation. It is exactly the same effect that was seen in humans since the invention of modern energy and better nourishment. There is also, of course, the increase in Oxygen levels, which plants absorb via synthesis causing healthier plants.
Quite agree. Do not forget the Vostok ice cores which lag temperature as pretty by Henry’s law.
Law?
It’s only his opinion!
Who is he, anyway?
Another candidate for decolonisation.
Although all organic life uses oxygen, green plants through photosynthesis give out oxygen whilst metabolising CO2. Quite a useful byproduct for the rest of us who use up oxygen and emit CO2.
Actually, in the UK, a lot of rarer species of plants like poorer less green habitats (not necessarily arid, as plenty of rain the UK, and when we had very dry springs in 2020 and 2021, then seeds did not geminate). But it is no good if there is dense vegetation such as Hogweed, cocksfoot and nettles- the rare plants get outcompeted and are lost. How much an increase of Co2 effects this I don’t know.
“…it is no good if there is dense vegetation such as Hogweed, cocksfoot and nettles- the rare plants get outcompeted and are lost.”
This I believe is now referred to as “re-wilding.” Or leaving the land to return to scrub when it becomes useless to man and beast. Land, all land requires management.
Not always. many nature reserves or wild places need some sort of management, hence conservation volunteers. Even in the mountains, they have to cull the deer as often there or too many, and some times fence areas off.
People often forget that nature reserves are semi-natural in many many cases. The scrub clearance and grazing has been done for thousands of years, so it is hardly surprising.
Scrub that is probably not indigenous to that “re-wilded area”.
They’ve tried shutting off large area in Mid-Wales and the Molinia grass, which is natural, has completely out competed everything else to form a sort of desert that not even the voles like and birds cannot nest in. Birds of prey cannot prey etc, etc. Idiocy.
As you said, rewilding results in scrubland, not pristine forests as they imply.
Plants are often rare and in marginal habitats because they are poor at competing. I was a botanist and remember studying rare plants, like Trinia glauca, a small umbellifer growing in the Avon Gorge. It was interesting to see a relic population, perhaps having migrated in after the last glaciation, but I wouldn’t obsess about its retention at all costs.
Thank you Chris for your continued contributions. They are a ray of light in these dark times.
How is the 4% human CO2 contribution figure calculated?
Professors Will Happer and his collaborator William van Wijngaarden(Tom Nelson Podcasts 56 and 158) attribute the recent modern CO2 rise to fossil fuel burning.I know that Professor Ian Pilmer and others quote 4%. Can anyone help?
Despite the Alarmist Club of Liberal Progressive Governments and Media telling us droughts are getting worse because of climate change, the opposite is true. Even the infamous CRU at East Anglia’s data reveals decline in drought since 1950.
——Incredibly reports that are the opposite of what is really happening are the norm on mainstream media. This means that the public are being thoroughly brainwashed, but why would that be? My friend recently said to me “Why would people say there is global warning if it isn’t true”? To an ordinary person like my friend that is busy with work and family life, who does not have the time to investigate every issue, and who may think mainstream news are doing that on his behalf, it is something he finds difficult to comprehend. So he just assumes what he is hearing will be mostly true. This is the power of propaganda.
—- We will all on this website have been in the company of friends and family and perhaps made statements that are contrary to current orthodoxy, and that the friends and family will not have heard before. The result is often a stare at you as if you are from Mars, and this suspicion that you are one of those conspiracy theorist people like those who think America did not land on the Moon or who think UFO’s are being hidden by the Military etc etc.
——-I have had a friend say to me “What makes you think you know more about this than the scientists”? They cannot see how silly that question is even when I ask them what scientists they are referring to. It is enough for people to just accept that this is all about science and that all the scientists agree and know what they are talking about. I have even had a person say to me with a look of exasperation on his face “David Attenborough says there is a climate crisis and that is good enough for me”. ———-Oh dear.
There are some people, far too many who are not worth talking to they have been so seriously brainwashed. Walk away or ridicule is the only answer.
I could walk away but I would probably be left with no friends. I give the example of my friend as typical of the general population. Apparently politicians today are less trusted than ever before, but somehow when it comes to climate change people seem to believe it all. They think it is all about science. —–No, it is bought and paid for science. Almost all science regarding climate change is funded by government. The same government that no one trusts anymore. —-Getting that message across however is not easy.
I’m experimenting with meeting such people half way by saying “yes you are half right but have you considered ….” I am hoping that they will be more open to further new facts. A work in progress and it is very tricky with close family and friends.
It is interesting isn’t it that the best of such conversations happen with total strangers at the bank or market or garden centre and a throw away remark gets the nod.
And bringing up the Hunga Tonga underwater volcanic eruption and 13% more water vapour in the atmosphere is normally a good move.
Spot on. It takes patience. Don’t try overloading their propaganda-soaked brains too quickly!
Always, first, follow the money.
‘……he just assumes what he is hearing will be mostly true…’
And that’s a big mistake; one should assume that the reverse is the case until proven otherwise. The MSM is a prime propagator of propaganda.
Start with Miliband, and once you realise he is a total charlatan, then you can move on to the rest of the eco socialist parasites.
The Great Climate Hoax – Ideology, Not Science!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3ZcPuVpg5s
My recent climate related chat with exceptional researcher and talent Ben Pile
Godfrey Bloom Official
Godfrey Bloom for PM.
% of CO2 in the atmosphere 0.04
% man made 4
% generated in the UK 1
I’ve asked many people who expressed concern over ‘climate change’ if they knew any of these numbers.
% who did? Zero.
Try it.
Indeed. I’ve had people answer 50% (in a hesitant voice) when asked what proportion of the atmosphere is CO2. The figures you show are never reproduced in any msm promoting AGW, I wonder why?!
And that tells us the state of our edukashun system. As a young child I knew atmosphere was 79% Nitrogen, 20% oxygen, 1% trace gases.
I blame the schools.
That’s 1% of the 4% in the UK, not 25% of total as some might construe from your list.
And 96% of CO2 resides in the oceans and there is a constant exchange between ocean and atmosphere determined by water temperatures, which are dependent on incident solar radiation, but also upwelling, downwelling of warmer/colder waters. This and the CO2 cycle with plants changes air carbon dioxide concentration.
None of this is controlled by Man.
I love doing this. The blank looks are sheer joy
Yes I have tried it many many times. But climate alarmists will say this—–“How is that you think a small amount of CO2 in the atmosphere cannot cause global warming while at the same time you claim it is causing global greening”. ——–I try not to fall into that trap. My way of saying it is this —-“There is no evidence that CO2 is causing or will cause dangerous changes to climate”. This stumps them every time because it puts the ball right back in their court and they are now required to provide evidence, which they cannot do because there is NONE
Tell them a further 2-3 % is made saving data around the world( cat videos!) or bit coin mining
And then the electrical energy requirement of AI…
Wales and Ireland look nice and blue. Speaking of Ireland, seen the protests on GBN with those Police fascists who are the useful idiots of the state spraying pepper spray even at Councillors now. Those pigs make my blood boil, if they piled on me I’d at least want to severely damage one of them. When were the Irish people asked to be dumped on like this.
“When were the Irish people asked to be dumped on like this”
And when the English?
..or the Welsh??
The assumption behind the warmists case is that the world was an ideal place around 1930. All change in the climat and all weather events since then have been the fault of mankind and before that we had millenia of calm, routine (yawn) boring sameness in the climate and weather.
Daft, of course, but that seems to be their starting point.
Perhaps they read “End of History” and believed it. Thought it also applied to science.
Thanks Chris – excellent article as usual.
Environmentalism became the new home for Socialists as their idol the USSR imploded. Socialism is all about planning and control using pseudo-scientism to predict and manage social and economic outcomes.
Spontaneous, emergent order terrifies the Socialist as they lose control particularly when outcomes are more successful than their plans. For them it’s all about process, best outcome is not the priority.
Commercial greenhouse maintain an air concentration of carbon dioxide between 1 000ppm to 1 200ppm which is optimum for plant growth, to speed up growth to produce strong, healthy plants requiring less water and fertiliser. (And, strange to report, none of these greenhouses ‘boil’ or catch fire.)
All that new plant growth around the World is also new habitat for myriad fauna. And food-crop yields have also increased.
Why do people obsessed with ‘rewilding’, ecosystems, biodiversity, etc want to kill off natural ‘rewilding’ and all those plants and animals on a massive scale by reducing CO2 (an absurdity anyway) to meet their ideological fantasies? Why do they want people to go hungry?
“Greening created by agricultural irrigation of fields can “obliterate arid-land ecosystems”.
But clearing vast tracts of natural vegetation – and keeping them clear of regrowth – to accommodate planting of non-native trees as ‘carbon-offset’ for royalty and celebs private-jetting around the World is OK?
You are right about greenhouse management. I think a fair bit of it is done by using the exhaust from gas fired heating; no need to waste it by exporting it into the outside air.
Correct, which is why Eart Day is on Lenin’s birthday
https://thenewconservative.co.uk/dr-green-will-see-you-now/
Roger Watson at thenewconservative with a cracking taking apart of ‘Dr Green’ aka The Royal College of Physicians and their “Green physician tool kit.’
“I leave you with this gem (not made up) which is given as an example of what a physician could say to a patient: ‘When cars burn petrol, they emit toxic air pollutants that can be bad for your health. Remember to carry an inhaler, avoid busy roads where possible and consider wearing a mask outside.’ As I may have mentioned already, who said Covid-19 lockdowns were not softening us up for something?”
I saw an old 1963 film where Sir John Betjeman travelled the long lost Dorset and Somerset railway from Shelton Mallet to Burnham on Sea.
Most notable the landscape was barren and lacked vegetation. I know that area well and today it is like a forest, rich in trees and hedges.
The Net Zero bandwagon is simply a gang of fanatics and business people with vested interests in scaring people to death, it’s Covid Mk2.
No——-The climate scare was there 30 years before covid.
It goes to prove that the planet can quite happily look after itself despite (not because of) our interference. .
‘This recovery of CO2 levels in the atmosphere holds out hope for higher food resources in many parts of the world that suffer from periodic famines.’
Excellent as always from Chris. But I’ve seen the point made that extra bulk greenery doesn’t mean proportional extra nutritional value. A parallel increase in nitrogen is needed for that.
Opinions, please.