Rumors debunked | Mass vaccination of the new coronavirus may worsen the epidemic? Should I still get vaccinated?

The lone hero began to appeal again, but there was no sign of human extinction.

Written by | Idobon

On March 7, 2021, an open letter appeared on Twitter, a major social networking site, calling on governments, scientists, and experts around the world to immediately stop large-scale COVID-19 vaccinations and asking the World Health Organization to pay attention to this "major global public health emergency." The caller was "independent virologist and vaccine expert" Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche. Now, the letter has been posted on Dr. Bossche's newly created personal website.
https://www.geertvandenbossche.org/, and has an updated version.

Bossche said in the letter that he is not against vaccines. As a scientist, a specialized virologist and vaccine expert, he has to use social platforms to make urgent appeals in the current critical situation. Bossche said that the unprecedented human intervention in the new coronavirus pandemic may lead to a global disaster. At the same time, he spared no effort to publish interviews, speeches, and speak out. His views have spread all over the Internet. Among them, an interview hosted by a healthcare company (Mcmillan Research) "The pros and cons of mass vaccination during the epidemic" has been viewed 770,000 times on YouTube.

This may be a major event that affects the global fight against the epidemic. How can a quarter of the world's population sit idly by? More than a week later, a translator finally took the trouble to translate the full text of the open letter into Chinese. On March 16, it was published on the personal WeChat public account "Kakashi Farm" with the title "Dr. Potts, a world-renowned vaccine expert, calls for an immediate halt to large-scale vaccinations." The number of readers quickly reached over 100,000. Subsequently, public accounts in different fields such as "Sanjia Fax", "Frontiers of Life Sciences", and "China-US Scholars Think Tank" also published Chinese translations of the open letter with the same title, and some even wrote special guides. In the end, the open letter successfully attracted the attention of Chinese media and was featured on Tencent News.

Bossche's open letter is long and full of professional terms, and the writing seems serious and objective. We summarize his views as follows:

The new coronavirus is just a harmless natural virus and should be dealt with by natural methods.

We are not preventing a rare virus. Now, the new coronavirus is everywhere and is replicating crazily. During the epidemic, large-scale vaccination cannot prevent the virus from replicating in the vaccinated population, nor can it prevent the virus from replicating in the asymptomatic infected population. This is equivalent to exerting evolutionary pressure on the new coronavirus in humans, prompting them to mutate to escape the attack of the vaccine, which is the so-called "immune escape."

Vaccines will accelerate the mutation of the virus, and these mutants will be more terrible and deadly, causing a plague that is much more terrible than the current epidemic. Therefore, large-scale vaccination is a crime, and humans must stop doing this immediately, otherwise it will cause a disaster.

In fact, the "danger" that Bossche claims can only be solved in the way he opposes.

All of Bosseche's conclusions and reasonings have a premise:

"Vaccination cannot prevent or even reduce the spread of the virus. Asymptomatic carriers can still spread the virus after being vaccinated."

— Wrong. Very wrong.

After the vaccine is injected, the antibodies generated by the vaccine will bind tightly to the virus, preventing the virus from entering the cell, so the virus replication will naturally be greatly reduced. Vaccination actually activates the immune system to prevent the virus from replicating.

Therefore, the premise of all Bosseche's conclusions may be valid in animals - after all, he studied veterinary medicine - but not in humans. It is a big mistake to think that vaccines cannot prevent viral replication.

Let's look at Bosseche's core point: vaccines can only protect humans from a certain strain, but cannot prevent the virus from replicating. As the virus continues to replicate, it will mutate, and under the selection pressure of the vaccine, new strains will mutate and escape the protection of the vaccine (immune escape).

Of course, if only a portion of the population is vaccinated, the population is only partially immune; similarly, if a person does not receive all the vaccinations, the immunity is also incomplete. At this time, will the virus replicate more and mutate more?

So far, the new coronavirus variants have appeared before the vaccine is widely available. In places where there is no vaccine, the virus has already begun to mutate and more contagious variants have emerged.

Furthermore, we now find that although the antibodies produced by mRNA vaccines do not bind as tightly to the newly emerged variants, the vaccines are still clinically effective and can still prevent severe disease. The so-called "rapid immune escape" has not yet occurred.

Is it possible?

——Of course, it is possible.

Is there any point in discussing this?

——Of course it makes sense.

So what can we do to prevent viral immune escape?

- Of course, we should vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as possible to reduce the space for the virus to evolve and mutate (cultivating pool). In this way, when mutant strains appear - they will appear, this is the nature of RNA viruses - we can launch a strengthened version of the vaccine to kill the mutant strains, which may be next year or the year after.

Obviously, Bosseche is a big believer in the natural immune system, T cells, natural killer cells, interferon, etc. He believes that we should use the natural immune system to fight this "harmless" virus. But he forgets that vaccines do more than just produce antibodies.

"Vaccines actually boost all the T helper cells to respond - that's a much wider range than antibodies alone. That's why when antibodies become less able to bind to new variants, vaccines still protect us because the T cell response is still very strong."

Remember when some people were able to resist the coronavirus at the beginning of the epidemic? We speculate that it was because their own T cells had already responded to other pathogens, and the immune memory of T cells was still there. So the mortality rate in Mumbai's slums is lower than that in Western society - because people there have been exposed to various pathogens, and their T cells still have memories. This is our innate immune memory.

Vaccines provide something similar, but in a different way. After the vaccine, do you have muscle aches, headaches, and fatigue? These are all signs that our immune system has been activated.

In the video, Bossche repeatedly claimed that "nobody's listening, nobody's talking about this", and the tragic image of "a lone hero fighting against interest groups to save humanity" was about to emerge.

On the contrary, all the relevant scientists are concerned about the mutation of the new coronavirus, so they are urging everyone to get vaccinated as soon as possible and not to delay the second shot - just to allow everyone to protect themselves from serious illness while these vaccines can still deal with the current strains.

The scientific rumor-busting part ends here. Let’s see why Dr. Bossche’s words sound so convincing. Some public accounts have already issued rumor-busting posts, revealing that Bossche “has only published eight papers, none of which are related to vaccines, and the most recent one was 27 years ago.” He is not a “world-renowned expert” at all. But after all, heroes don’t ask where they come from, and rumors don’t ask where they come from. In this era where appearance is justice, Zubin Damaina of the YouTube celebrity science column ZDoggMD gave his analysis:

Bossche has a nice accent.

Figure: LinkedIn profile shows that Bossche is a doctor of veterinary medicine from Ghent University