The Proliferation of COVID Variants

Garrett Vanden Busch said this is going to become a pandemic of variants and he talked about immune escape. And that has been very controversial. But they're... Did you explain that to people? Sure. What he argued, and let's just say... Could you explain who he is too? Sure. He is a immunobiologist. He is training his veterinary. He has training in the relevant area of vaccination technology. He was a guest on Dark Horse. People can look up my discussion with him. It is... Many people regard it as a very good way to understand what he's saying because often he speaks about matters that are quite technical. And anyway, I did my best in that podcast to make it non-technical so that people could understand it. In any case, what he argued was that the fact of these vaccines being very narrowly targeted, right? These vaccines contain a single subunit of a single protein and they're being deployed in a way that is unusual. They're being deployed into an active pandemic, right? When we immunize against something like measles, the expectation is you will develop your full immunity with almost no chance of encountering measles, right? In this case, what we have are vaccines that are leaky in which they do not provide full sterilizing immunity. They are narrow and we are effectively creating an intense evolutionary pressure to cause the spike protein of which this one subunit is what is contained, what the information for it is contained in the vaccines. We are putting intense evolutionary pressure on it to change so that the antibodies and other immune cell recognition mechanisms that are trained by the vaccines are incapable of finding the pathogen when it gets in. This is what causes a breakthrough case is that the immunity that's been created is evaded by the pathogen and if the pathogen changes, that is more likely. And so what he said was if you vaccinate into an active pandemic with vaccines like this, what you will get is a evolutionary pressure for a radiation of variance, an evolutionary radiation of different molecular signatures, changes in the spike protein that will then cause the vaccines to be less and less effective at producing immunity, which is exactly what we see. So he predicted this? Absolutely. He did predict it. Accurately. Accurately predicted it. Now, is every component of his model correct? That's a much harder question to answer, but what I would say is any time somebody succeeds in predicting better than the so-called experts, you want to know how they did it. And he was making absolute evolutionary sense, right? His concerns were very well honed and he was making sense and then the world that he predicted emerged and it is now incumbent on us to say, okay, have we learned anything from this, right? Do the vaccines need to be modified such that they don't produce this effect? There are conceivable ways you could do that, right? But if we don't do it, if we just say, well, more of the same, have a booster of the same thing, it's not going to solve the problem. So in effect, what I would say is these vaccines are a spectacular achievement, but they are a prototype, right? They have achieved something that had never been done before. Technologically, that's remarkable, but they were not ready for prime time and they have failed to produce lasting immunity. They have produced very narrow immunity. It does not compare to the natural immunity that people get from having had and beaten the disease. And what's more, we have learned an awful lot about how the disease can be managed so it's much less lethal, right? That combination suggests that we need a rethinking of our approach and, you know, it is impossible to prove, but based on what people who have successfully treated the disease and have successfully predicted events like the proliferation of variants are telling us, it does seem that we now have the tools at our disposal to manage this crisis and do away with it, which I don't know why we don't do that, but it is at least worth noting that were we to successfully manage it, it would interrupt a huge flow of revenue into this brand new pharma market. Is that the reason that we don't do it? I don't know. But we, the public, need to recognize our interests are not being served by the public health apparatus. It is making errors that it doesn't need to make and that that has implications for all of our individual health and our collective well-being that require a rethink.