Samizdata

An excellent summary of an serious issue we are facing by commenter phwest:

Polio and smallpox are not the right comparison to Covid. Those are DNA viruses that are largely stable. The proper comparison to COVID is influenza, a similar RNA virus, which has had a vaccine (of sorts) out for decades of limited effectiveness that requires constant annual fiddling to have any impact at all. There are real medical arguments against the COVID vaccines, the most important of which runs as follows :

Vaccinations prime the body to respond to a highly mutating virus with a specific antibody response. Eventually the virus will mutate to a form that is close enough to the original that it provokes the vaccination response, but different enough that those antibodies will not be effective. Google “Original Antigenic Sin” for more details. Changing the vaccine won’t help, because it too will be close enough to the original to provoke the production of antibodies to the original vaccine, not the updated one.

Now this isn’t any different that natural immunity, which has the same issues. This can be seen with influenza. However natural immunity is generational in the population – that is, each generation acquires immunity to the strains of influenza that were prevalent in their youth, so that as influenza cycles through the various mutations that are available a certain portion of the population has acquired immunity to that strain. This provides a degree of herd immunity that limits the spread.

This is where the risks of a universal COVID vaccine become clear. We are immunizing the entire population against a single strain of COVID. Once the virus mutates its way past the vaccine, and it will, there will be no significant portion of the population that can even acquire natural immunity to the new strains, and new vaccines won’t work for the previously vaccinated. This in particular is why vaccinating children is such a disaster. Not only don’t they need it (children appear to clear the virus through a totally different immune response system in the body, and don’t generate antibodies at all), but now they have a primed immune response and it’s the wrong one.

This is essentially the argument against flu vaccines as well (the effectiveness seen in studies is not actually the effect of the vaccine at all, just the previously acquired immunity to the flu strain in question, which the studies do not control for). And the nastiest possibility is that the flu vaccines themselves are close enough to COVID that they are behind the sharp age response in serious outcomes, as these are the populations with the highest degree of vaccination for influenza (this would be an interesting study that will NEVER be funded for obvious reasons).

Now this is not my field by any stretch, so I am simply summarizing a number of presentations I’ve seen by several immunologists. This exposition makes sense to me, but I am not pretending that I am qualified to actually judge its veracity. It is obviously not a universally held position in that field (at least I hope not). But the public health drive for universal COVID vaccination has significant opposition in the medical community, including some prominent resignations in the US advisory committees over the decision to extend the vaccine to children.