Replies

Compromised immune systems could be problematic with the “vaccine”.

https://ijvtpr.com/index.php/IJVTPR/article/view/23/34

- An interesting hypothesis has been proposed in a paper published in Nature, which described a case of serious COVID-19 disease in a cancer patient who was taking immune-suppressing cancer chemotherapy drugs (Kemp et al., 2021). The patient survived for 101 days after admission to the hospital, finally succumbing in the battle against the virus. The patient constantly shed viruses over the entire 101 days, and therefore he was moved to a negative-pressure high air-change infectious disease isolation room, to prevent contagious spread. During the course of the hospital stay, the patient was treated with Remdesivir and subsequently with two rounds of antibody-containing plasma takenfrom individuals who had recovered from COVID-19 (convalescent plasma). It was only after the plasma treatments that the virus began to rapidly mutate, and a dominant new strain eventually emerged, verified from samples taken from the nose and throat of the patient. An immune-compromised patient offers little support from cytotoxic T cells to clear the virus. An in vitro experiment demonstrated that this mutant strain had reduced sensitivity to multiple units of convalescent plasma taken from several recovered patients. The authors proposed that the administered antibodies had actually accelerated the mutation rate in the virus, because the patient was unable to fully clear the virus due to their weak immune response. This allowed a “survival of the fittest” program to set in, ultimately populating the patient’s body with a novel antibody-resistant strain. Prolonged viral replication in this patient led to “viral immune escape,” and similar resistant strains could potentially spread very quickly within an exposed population (Kemp et al., 2021). Indeed, a similar process might plausibly be at work to produce the highly contagious new strains that are now appearing in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil. There are at least two concerns that we have regarding this experiment, in relation to the mRNA vaccines. The first is that, via continued infection of immune-compromised patients, we can expect continued emergence of more novel strains that are resistant to the antibodies induced by the vaccine, such that the vaccine may quickly become obsolete, and there may well be demands for the population to undergo another mass vaccination campaign. Already a published study by researchers from Pfizer has shown that vaccine effectiveness is reduced for many of these variant strains. The vaccine was only 2/3 as effective against the South African strain as against the original strain (Liu et al., 2021).The second more ominous consideration is to ponder what will happen with an immune-compromised patient followingvaccination. It is conceivable that they will respond to the vaccine by producing antibodies, but those antibodies will be unable to contain the disease following exposure to COVID-19 due to impaired function of cytotoxic T cells. This scenario is not much different from the administration of convalescent plasma to immune-compromised patients, and so it might engender the evolution of antibody-resistant strains in the same way, only on a much grander scale. This possibility will surely be used to argue for repeated rounds of vaccines every few months, with increasing numbers of viral variants coded into the vaccines. This is an arms race that we will probably lose.