Will
COVID Shots Drive Mutated Variants?
Analysis by Dr. Joseph MercolaFact Checked
July 20, 2021
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
· Based on the scientific
evidence, the narrative that unvaccinated people are viral factories for more
dangerous variants is false
· Just as antibiotics breed
resistance in bacteria, vaccines put evolutionary pressure on viruses to speed
up mutations and create more virulent and dangerous variants
· Viruses mutate all the
time, and if you have a vaccine that doesn’t block infection completely, then
the virus will mutate to evade the immune response within that person. That is
one of the distinct features of the COVID shots — they’re not designed to block
infection. They allow infection to occur and at best lessen the symptoms of
that infection
· In an unvaccinated person,
the virus does not encounter the same evolutionary pressure to mutate into
something stronger. So, if SARS-CoV-2 does end up mutating into more lethal
strains, then mass vaccination is the most likely driver
· So far, SARS-CoV-2 variants
are at most 0.3% different from the original Wuhan virus. Such minor variation
means the virus will not present itself as a new virus. If you’ve recovered
from COVID-19, your immune system will still recognize it
Will COVID
shots drive the mutation of SARS-CoV-2, creating ever more variants? Or are the
mutations primarily occurring in unvaccinated people? In the video report
above, The Last American Vagabond host dives into the scientific research to
find out.
As noted by The
Vagabond, unvaccinated Americans are actually in the majority, still, despite
what you're hearing on the news. Those saying "no" to participating
in a medical gene modification experiment are not a small fringe group.
We are the
majority, at just over half (51%) of the United States population over the age
of 18, as of July 12, 2021. (More specifically, 56% have received one dose, and
49% are fully vaccinated, which for Moderna and Pfizer means having received
two doses.1)
Based on the
scientific evidence, the narrative that unvaccinated people are viral factories
for more dangerous variants is simply false. Worse, it's the complete opposite
of the truth and hides the fact that mass vaccination may be putting us all in
a far direr situation than necessary.
Vaccines Drive Viruses to
Mutate
As explained in
"Vaccines Are Pushing Pathogens to Evolve," published in Quanta
Magazine,2 "Just as
antibiotics breed resistance in bacteria, vaccines can incite changes that
enable diseases to escape their control."
The article
details the history of the anti-Marek's disease vaccine for chickens, first
introduced in 1970. Today, we're on the third version of this vaccine, as
within a decade, it stops working. The reason? The virus has mutated to evade
the vaccine. The virus is also becoming increasingly deadly and more difficult to
treat.
A 2015 paper3 in PLOS Biology
tested the theory that vaccines are driving the mutation of the herpesvirus
causing Marek's disease in chickens. To do that, they vaccinated 100 chickens
and kept 100 unvaccinated. All of the birds were then infected with varying
strains of the virus. Some strains were more virulent and dangerous than
others.
Over the course
of the birds' lives, the unvaccinated ones shed more of the least virulent
strains into the environment, while the vaccinated ones shed more of the most
virulent strains. As noted in the Quanta Magazine article:4
"The findings suggest that the Marek's vaccine
encourages more dangerous viruses to proliferate. This increased virulence
might then give the viruses the means to overcome birds' vaccine-primed immune
responses and sicken vaccinated flocks."
Vaccinated People Can Serve
as Breeding Ground for Mutations
As noted by
Reilly, before 2021, it was quite clear that vaccines push viruses to mutate
into more dangerous strains. The only question was, to what extent? Now all of
a sudden, we're to believe conventional science has been wrong all along.
Here's another
example: NPR as recently as February 9, 2021, reported that "vaccines can
contribute to virus mutations." NPR science correspondent Richard Harris
noted:5
"You may have heard that bacteria can develop
resistance to antibiotics and, in a worst-case scenario, render the drugs
useless. Something similar can also happen with vaccines, though, with less
serious consequences.
This worry has arisen mostly in the debate over
whether to delay a second vaccine shot so more people can get the first shot
quickly. Paul Bieniasz, a Howard Hughes investigator at the Rockefeller
University, says that gap would leave people with only partial immunity for
longer than necessary."
According to
Bieniasz, partially vaccinated individuals "might serve as sort of a
breeding ground for the virus to acquire new mutations." This is the exact
claim now being attributed to unvaccinated people by those who don't understand
natural selection.
It's important
to realize that viruses mutate all the time, and if you have a vaccine that
doesn't block infection completely, then the virus will mutate to evade the
immune response within that person. That is one of the distinct features of the
COVID shots — they're not designed to block infection. They allow infection to
occur and at best lessen the symptoms of that infection. As noted by Harris:6
"This evolutionary pressure is present for any
vaccine that doesn't completely block infection … Many vaccines, apparently,
including the COVID vaccines, do not completely prevent a virus from
multiplying inside someone even though these vaccines do prevent serious
illness."
In short, like
bacteria mutate and get stronger to survive the assault of antibacterial
agents, viruses can mutate in vaccinated individuals who contract the virus,
and in those, it will mutate to evade the immune system. In an unvaccinated
person, on the other hand, the virus does not encounter the same evolutionary
pressure to mutate into something stronger. So, if SARS-CoV-2 does end up
mutating into more lethal strains, then mass vaccination is the most likely
driver.
COVID Variants Are More
Similar Than You Think
Now, the fearmongering over variants is just that:
fearmongering. So far, while some SARS-CoV-2 variants appear to spread more
easily, they are also less dangerous. The Delta variant, for example, is
associated with more conventional flu-like symptoms like runny nose and sore
throat than the hallmark COVID-19 symptoms involving shortness of breath and
loss of smell.7
In an interview
for the documentary "Planet Lockdown,"8 Michael Yeadon,
Ph.D., a life science researcher and former vice-president and chief scientist
at Pfizer, pointed out the fraud being perpetrated with regard to variants. He
actually refers to them as "simians," because they're near-identical
to the original. And, as such, they pose no greater threat than the original.
"It's quite normal for RNA viruses like
SARS-CoV-2, when it replicates, to make typographical errors," Yeadon explains. "It's
got a very good error detection, error correction system so it doesn't make too
many typos, but it does make some, and those are called 'variants.'
It's really important to know that if you find the
variant that's most different from the sequence identified in Wuhan, that
variance … is only 0.3% different from the original sequence.
I'll say it another way. If you find the most
different variance, it's 99.7% identical to the original one, and I can assure
you … that amount of difference is absolutely NOT possibly able to represent
itself to you as a different virus."
Your immune
system is a multifaceted system that allows your body to mount defenses against
all sorts of threats. Parasites, fungi, bacteria and viruses are the main
threat categories. Each of these invades and threatens you in completely different
ways, and your immune system has ways of dealing with all of them, using a
variety of mechanisms.
Whether you're
going to be susceptible to variants has very little to do with whether or not
you have antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, because antibodies are not your primary
defense against viruses, T cells are. What this means then, is that getting
booster shots for different variants is not going to help, because these shots
do not strengthen your T cell immunity.
The importance
of T cells has been known for a long time, and their role in COVID-19 was
confirmed early on in the pandemic. Scientists wanted to find out if patients
who recovered from SARS-CoV-1, responsible for the SARS outbreak some 17 years
ago, might have immunity against SARS-CoV-2. As it turns out, they did.
They still had
memory T cells against SARS-CoV-1, and those cells also recognized SARS-CoV-2,
despite being only 80% similar. Now, if a 20% difference was not enough to
circumvent the immune system of these patients, why should you be concerned
with a variant that is at most 0.3% different from the original SARS-CoV-2?
"When your government scientists tell you that
a variant that's 0.3% different from SARS-CoV-2 could masquerade as a new virus
and be a threat to your health, you should know, and I'm telling you, they are
lying," Yeadon says.
"If they're lying, and they are, why is the
pharmaceutical industry making top-up [booster] vaccines? … There's absolutely
no possible justification for their manufacture."
Mutations Are Good for Vaccine
Business
Of course, by
pushing fear of variants, vaccine makers ensure a steady supply of people
willing to participate as guinea pigs in their for-profit business scheme. Pfizer plans to ask for
EUA authorization for a third COVID booster shot in August 2021, Bloomberg
reports.9
According to
Pfizer's head of research, Dr. Mikael Dolsten, initial data suggest a third
dose of the current Pfizer shot can raise neutralizing antibody levels by
anywhere from fivefold to 10-fold.10 The company is also
working on variant-specific formulations.
Dolsten points
to data from Israel, where Pfizer's mRNA injection was used exclusively, which
shows a recent uptick in breakthrough cases. This suggests protection starts to
wane around the six-months mark. For now, the FDA is not recommending boosters,11 but that can change
at any moment, and most likely will.
Pfizer recently
announced it intends to raise the price on its COVID shot once the pandemic
wanes,12 and during a recent
investor conference, Pfizer's chief financial officer Frank D'Amelio said
there's "significant opportunity" for profits once the market shifts
to annual boosters.13
In an April
2021 article, The Defender reported expected profits from current COVID shots
and boosters in coming years:14
·
Pfizer expects a minimum revenue of $15 billion to
$30 billion in 2021 alone
·
Moderna expects sales of $18.4 billion in 2021;
Barclays analyst Gena Wang forecasts the company's 2022 revenue to be somewhere
around $12.2 billion and $11.4 billion in 2023
·
Johnson & Johnson expects sales of $10 billion
in 2021
Vaccine Treadmill Ahead
The way things
have been going, it seems inevitable that we're facing a vaccine treadmill,
where new variants will "necessitate" boosters on a regular basis.
Boosters will also drive the "need" for vaccine passports to keep track of it
all. As reported by The Defender:15
"Annual COVID booster shots are music to the
ears of investors. But some independent scientists warn16 that trying to
outsmart the virus with booster shots designed to address the next variant
could backfire, creating an endless wave of new variants, each more virulent
and transmissible than the one before …
According to Rob Verkerk Ph.D., founder, scientific
and executive director of Alliance for Natural Health International, variants
can become more virulent and transmissible, while also including immune (or
vaccine) escape mutations if we continue on the vaccine treadmill — trying to
develop new vaccines that outsmart the virus.
Verkerk said 'if we put all our eggs' in the basket
of vaccines that target the very part of the virus that is most subject to
mutation, we place a selection pressure on the virus that favors the
development of immune escape variants."
Vaccinologist
Dr. Geert Vanden Bosche,17 whose resume includes work with GSK
Biologicals, Novartis Vaccines, Solvay Biologicals and the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation, published an open letter18 to the World Health
Organization, March 6, 2021, in which he warned that implementing a global mass
vaccination campaign during the height of the pandemic could create an
"uncontrollable monster" where evolutionary pressure will force the
emergence of new and potentially more dangerous mutations.
"There can be no doubt that continued mass
vaccination campaigns will enable new, more infectious viral variants to become
increasingly dominant and ultimately result in a dramatic incline in new cases
despite enhanced vaccine coverage rates. There can be no doubt either that this
situation will soon lead to complete resistance of circulating variants to the
current vaccines," Bossche wrote.19
Will COVID-19 Shots Save
Lives? Probably Not
As noted in the
BMJ paper20 "Will COVID-19
Vaccines Save Lives? Current Trials Aren't Designed to Tell Us," by
associate editor Peter Doshi, while the world is betting on gene modification
"vaccines" as the solution to the pandemic, the trials are not even
designed to answer key questions such as whether the shots will actually save
lives.
In an October
23, 2020, response21 to that paper, Dr. Allan Cunningham, a
retired pediatrician, provided a summary of papers dating back to 1972, showing
vaccines have been notoriously ineffective. In many cases, deaths have actually
risen in tandem with increased vaccination rates, suggesting they may actually
have a net negative effect on mortality.
Cunningham also
lists studies arguing that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has
exaggerated flu mortality statistics in an effort to increase uptake of the flu
vaccine. They're clearly doing the same thing with COVID-19 mortality
statistics. If people had not been so misled by government authorities about the true
lethality of COVID-19, half the country would not have rolled up their sleeves
to take an experimental gene modification injection. As noted by Cunningham:22
"2020: A 14-year study finds that influenza
vaccines are associated with an 8.9% increase in the risk of all-cause
mortality in elderly men … During six A/H3N2-predominant seasons their
all-cause mortality increase was 16.6%! …
The unfortunate history of influenza vaccines
should warn us against repeating the process with Covid-19 vaccines. Peter
Doshi may be understating the case when he suggests that influenza vaccines
have not saved lives. The foregoing history and other observations suggest that
in whole populations over the long run seasonal flu campaigns have actually
cost lives …
This idea is hard to grasp in the face of massive
publicity and reports of 'vaccine effectiveness.' The vaccines provide modest
short-term protection against seasonal flu, but the VE studies completely
ignore adverse effects (e.g. high fever, seizures, narcolepsy,
oculo-respiratory syndrome, Guillain-Barre syndrome) … We don't need another
vaccine treadmill that could do more harm than good."
Natural Selection Will Win
As we move
forward, it's really important that we not cast aside hard-won science lessons
in favor of politically-driven propaganda. The propaganda is not science. Do
not confuse the two.
If you don't
have these pathogens evolving in response to vaccines, then we really don't
understand natural selection. ~
Evolutionary
Biologist Paul Ewald, University of Louisville
If there's a
silver lining to this whole mess, it's that more and more people are starting
to get educated about health, biology, virology and vaccinology. These are
heady topics, but to begin to tease out truth from fiction, many are now taking
the time to listen to doctors and scientists who are explaining the science
behind it all.
The obvious and
blatant lies and propaganda and over-the-top censorship is starting to wake up
tens of millions of people in the U.S. about the vaccine frauds; not only the
COVID jabs but the whole lot of them. It's getting easier by the day to tell
the quacks from the real McCoy, because the truth tellers will actually explain
how things work, whereas the propagandists juggle catchphrases and attack those
who ask questions.
In closing,
here are two more excerpts from articles detailing the inevitability of
vaccines driving the mutation of viruses through natural selection. Quanta
Magazine writes:23
"Recent research suggests … that some pathogen
populations are adapting in ways that help them survive in a vaccinated world …
Just as the mammal population exploded after dinosaurs went extinct because a
big niche opened up for them, some microbes have swept in to take the place of
competitors eliminated by vaccines.
Immunization is also making once-rare or
nonexistent genetic variants of pathogens more prevalent, presumably because
vaccine-primed antibodies can't as easily recognize and attack shape-shifters
that look different from vaccine strains.
And vaccines being developed against some of the
world's wilier pathogens — malaria, HIV, anthrax — are based on strategies that
could, according to evolutionary models and lab experiments, encourage
pathogens to become even more dangerous.24 Evolutionary
biologists aren't surprised that this is happening.
A vaccine is a novel selection pressure placed on a
pathogen, and if the vaccine does not eradicate its target completely, then the
remaining pathogens with the greatest fitness — those able to survive, somehow,
in an immunized world — will become more common.
'If you don't have these pathogens evolving in
response to vaccines,' said Paul Ewald, an evolutionary biologist at the
University of Louisville, 'then we really don't understand natural
selection.'"
Similarly,
Alliance for Natural Health International points out:25
"'Mutants of concern' are clearly on most of
our radars. An important question is: are they growing or declining in
frequency? In some countries, including ones where vaccinations have occurred
at a high rate … they are increasing and have already become dominant … That
should be a very large, flappy, red flag to anyone who has a reasonable grasp
of evolutionary selection pressure on viruses with pathogenic capacity.
More infection — including more silent infection
among asymptomatic people (even if reduced by vaccination) — provides more
opportunities for mutation. If we continue to drag out the time it takes for
the virus to just become another endemic component of our virosphere, there
will be more opportunities and more mutations. Not dissimilar to a game of
Russian roulette — so why don't we start counting our chances?
If variants become both more transmissible and more
virulent, while also including immune (or vaccine) escape mutations — all
trends we are witnessing in some parts of the world — we could be in deep
trouble down the road.
At the very least, we stay on the vaccine (or
monoclonal antibody) treadmill, trying to develop new vaccines (or monoclonal
antibody therapies) that outsmart the virus when we should know better; that
the virus will continue to outsmart us if we maintain such intense selection
pressure on it …
Let me throw in one more concept that is ecological
in nature: herd immunity. The base equation used by government scientists that
estimates around 70% of the population need to be vaccinated or exposed to the
virus to achieve herd immunity is flawed.
It is predicated on a number of assumptions that
don't apply: equal mixing of populations and successful sterilization of the
virus in vaccinated people and those exposed to wild virus being just two. This
just isn't the case. In the real world, the situation is much more complex than
in an idealized model.
Randolph and Barreiro remind us in their review26 in the journal
Immunity that '[e]pidemiological and immunological factors, such as population
structure, variation in transmission dynamics between populations, and waning
immunity, will lead to variation in the extent of indirect protection conferred
by herd immunity.'
For vaccinated
people, antigen-specific antibodies bind firmly to virus particles and
competitively oust natural antibodies, giving vaccinated people potentially
less cross-immunity to mutant variants that are more infectious and the wave of
infectivity continues."
- Sources
and References
·
1 USA Facts Vaccine Tracker Updated July 12, 2021
·
2, 4, 23 Quanta Magazine Vaccines Are Pushing Pathogens to
Evolve
·
3 PLOS Biology July 27, 2015 DOI:
10.1371/journal.pbio.1002198
·
5, 6 NPR
February 9, 2021
·
7 Unity
Point Health July 12, 2021
·
8 Planet
Lockdown
·
9, 10 Bloomberg
July 8, 2021
·
11 HHS.gov
July 8, 2021
·
12 Fierce
Pharma March 17, 2021
·
13 Refinitiv
Streetevents Transcript March 11, 2021
·
14, 15 The
Defender April 19, 2021
·
16, 25 ANHinternational.org
April 15, 2021
·
18, 19 geertvandenbossche.org Letter to the WHO March 6, 2021
(PDF)
·
20 The BMJ October 21, 2020; 371:
m4037
·
21, 22 The BMJ 2020; 371: m4037 Rapid Response Dr. Cunningham
·
24 Nature December 13, 2001; 414:
751-756
·
26 Immunity May 19, 2020; 52(5):
737-741
