Masters of Health Magazine June 2023 | Page 61

The Calm Before Another

COVID Storm?

A renowned virologist issues a warning to those who believe we’ve seen the end of COVID, and how mass vaccination campaigns perpetuate the pandemic.

March 2021 saw vaccinologist, Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, take to social media to broadcast a warning about the dangers of a mass vaccination campaign during a pandemic. Yet his warnings to the World Health Organization and global health authorities fell on (deliberately) deaf ears.

Dr. Vanden Bossche, who has now published a book that explains how mass vaccination during a pandemic drives extreme selection pressurerecently joined Rob Verkerk PhD for an interview in which Dr. Vanden Bossche argues that while the WHO has announced the end of the COVID emergency, the virus is circulating and generating variants in ways that don’t make it a normal endemic infection. He describes is as the calm before the storm – and provides a chilling reminder that it’s just a matter of time before a more virulent variant re-emerges.

The key insight that Dr. Vanden Bossche brings to the fore, and describes in the interview in great detail, is the idea that mass vaccination has driven the evolution of more transmissible and dangerous viral variants. The COVID vaccines delivered only partial immunity to the virus in that they did not block infection or transmission—the main idea was that they prevented you from getting really sick. But this “non-sterilizing immunity” allows the virus to hang around and replicate in the body to adapt to its environment, creating viral variants that can evade vaccine-induced immunity.

We’ve learned similar lessons from the scourge of antibiotic resistance. When you put a microorganism in a hostile environment—but not one hostile enough to kill it—it will evolve and mutate in ways capable of overcoming this hostile environment. Dr. Vanden Bossche is suggesting that a new variant could very well be on the way that evades vaccine-induced immunity and could cause another massive wave of infections.