Who is Dr Geert Vanden Bossche?
- Geert Vanden Bossche obtained his DVM at the Veterinary Faculty of Ghent and his PhD in Virology at the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart. Following his Postdoctoral training in Virology, Immunology and Molecular Biology at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Hohenheim (Germany), He then transitioned to the Vaccine Industry to serve various senior roles in both early and late vaccine development (GSK, Novartis, Solvay).
- In 2008, he joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle to serve as Senior Program Officer in Vaccine Discovery for Global Health.
- He is now the Head of Vaccine Development Office at the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) in Germany.
The ongoing denial by WHO, public health agencies and governments of science-based evidence on how to mitigate the already disastrous global and individual consequences of this pandemic are beyond mind-blowing.
It becomes already obvious that several scientists who are studying the evolutionary biology and genetic/ molecular epidemiology of this pandemic know too well that this pandemic is not over at all and that the global health risk posed by variants is very substantial. So, why do they keep silent?
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Conducting a
mass vaccination experiment at a global scale without understanding the
mechanisms underlying viral escape from vaccine-mediated selection pressure is
not only a colossal scientific blunder but, first and foremost, completely
irresponsible from the perspective of individual and public health ethics.
A pandemic is typically to be considered a very dynamic event (until it merges into an endemic situation). However, the evolutionary dynamics of this Covid-19 pandemic have now been shaped by human intervention in a way that is completely unprecedented.
We do know about the outcome of a natural pandemic but don’t know at all about the outcome of the ongoing pandemic, as the latter has now become a ‘pandemic of variants’.
Deployment of current Covid-19 vaccines in mass vaccination campaigns combined with the ongoing widespread circulation of Sars-CoV-2 can only increase immune selective pressure on Sars-CoV-2 spike protein and hence, further drive its adaptive evolution to circumvent vaccine-induced humoral immunity. In this regard, the expectation of an increasing number of vaccinologists matches the current observation made by genomic epidemiologists in that S protein-directed immune escape variants are highly likely to further spread and expedite the occurrence of viral resistance to the currently deployed and future (so-called ‘2nd generation’) Covid-19 vaccines.
It is unbelievable how public health authorities (PHAs) are lagging behind when it comes to understanding the evolutionary capacity of Sars-CoV-2. Or do PHAs and policymakers simply ignore the observations made by world-class molecular epidemiologists? How can they possibly justify mass vaccination campaigns in light of all the scientific arguments pointing to the high likelihood that these campaigns will only expedite viral resistance to Covid-19 vaccines?
It cannot be
that they don’t understand the disastrous consequences viral resistance to
Covid-19 vaccines would imply! It cannot be either that they didn’t learn that
the kinetics of natural selection of immune escape mutations are much slower
(or even non-existent as in the case of the Influenza pandemic of 1918) in the
presence of naturally elicited immunity. Or don’t they realize that the type of
immune priming following natural Sars-CoV-2 infection is very different from
the one that results from prophylactic immunization with S-based vaccines?
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Read more: Comparing vaccines: country of origin, safety, efficacy, and approval
At last, WHO and their advising ‘experts’ are still preaching the ludicrous mantra that the more we vaccinate, the less the virus can replicate and hence, the lower the risk that VoCs will arise and become dominant in the viral population. Is it this mantra of mass vaccination that leads PHAs to conclude that monitoring of viral shedding in vaccinees has become obsolete? However, their simplistic interpretation of viral transmission dynamics would only apply to conditions of neutral genetic drift as occurring during the early phase of a pandemic, i.e., in a population of immunologically unprimed susceptible subjects that does not exert significant positive selection pressure on the virus prior to its host-to-host transmission.
However, at this stage of the pandemic where a multitude of variants, including several VoCs, are already circulating, the real global health concern is no longer about the likelihood for yet another problematic variant to emerge but rather about the ongoing population-level selection pressure that is now driving particular mutations of concern to expand in prevalence.
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