What Happened to Herd Immunity?

One can't help but notice the number of pivots in the COVID narrative. Granted, we were dealing with something new (novel), therefore errors are to be expected. But time and again we are left scratching our heads and asking, "But, what about.....?"

The list is numerous, but herd immunity comes to mind (isn't that the most relevant, considering that would be what ended this?). Remember the number that we needed to reach to hit herd immunity? Of course you do: 70% (by either vaccination or infection). 

So, let's do some deductive reasoning: if 70% of the eligible population is vaccinated and roughly 60% of the population has been infected, that equals 130%. Obviously, we have to assume there is a sizable overlap. Nonetheless, how is the number not at least 70%? Yet, the administration is coming out and saying that everyone needs to be vaccinated. But why, if we have already supposedly hit herd immunity?

The administration is also partaking in doublespeak: the vaccines are highly effective, but they only work if everyone gets them. How can anyone capable of critical thinking take that seriously? In one breath they're saying: "only stupid hillbillies who take horse de-wormer for COVID won't get the jabs." Then out of the other side of their mouth they say, "these unvaxed hillbillies are making my vax not work."

Another example is the "my body my choice" narrative (e.g. radical neo-liberalism is a snake that eventually eats it's own tail): Women can erase a slutty escapade by murdering their unborn child, but "hillbillies" can't decline a series of injections that ultimately only effects them.

Effectively, the entire COVID narrative should be spun around what will end the COVID pandemic: herd immunity. A few weeks ago, after thinking about the above numbers, I thought to myself: "herd immunity must be bullshit!" Why has nobody asked: "haven't we already hit 70%? You said when we hit 70% this would all be over." 

Well, a renowned virologist (ie expert), who doesn't agree with the narrative (ie silenced) published a scientific paper that explains why we haven't reach herd immunity:

https://www.geertvandenbossche.org/post/the-last-post 

These are the key points one has to understand to be able to capture the never-ending discussion on whether or not mass vaccination campaigns work 

1. Pandemics are by definition not static but dynamic events
2. Pandemics have both detrimental and beneficial effects (e.g., waves of morbidity & death and generation of herd immunity, respectively) that are phased in time
3. Pandemic waves hit populations of different age groups at different points in time 
4. Normally (I should say: ‘naturally’), a pandemic starts with some bad news (a number of lives are lost) and ends with plenty of good news (all of the population protected by herd immunity)

This already illustrates that any assessment made during the course of a pandemic can only be a snapshot as long as the pandemic has not reached its ‘natural’ end station (which is herd immunity). As a result, one might erroneously assume that pandemic is over when the first wave ends with a steep decline in morbidity and mortality rates. That happens when someone doesn’t understand that herd immunity (HI) cannot be achieved if the number of vulnerable people who recovered from the disease and acquired robust immunity is too small. That is why - after the first wave - the virus launches a new attack. This results in an additional part of the population (i.e., younger age groups) contracting the disease.  Survivors of that 2nd attack will build life-long protective immunity too and, thereby, further contribute to building herd immunity. The mechanism that allows the virus to proceed with its offensive, step-by-step strategy is sophisticated, as repeatedly explained in previous contributions of mine. Several waves can take place before the resulting immunological capacity of the population will suffice to establish full-fledged HI and hence, to control viral transmission. 

It’s important to note that a high background level of innate population-level immunity will prevent the virus from wiping out a whole population. Part of this immunological capacity will be eroded as the infectious pressure rises; however, it will subsequently be replaced by robust, naturally acquired immunity when people who became vulnerable recover from the disease. This mechanism enables the host population to keep the virus under control while – in return - providing the virus with a renewable reservoir for asymptomatic transmission (i.e., by virtue of asymptomatically infected people). This is how Sars-CoV-2 could have become endemic. Under such circumstances, short-lived (i.e., self-limiting) outbreaks may intermittently occur when the innate immune defense of a sufficient number of previously asymptomatically infected subjects becomes sufficiently suppressed, for example as a result of high infectious pressure (e.g., due to crowding). So, nature has shaped the interaction between the virus and the population in ways that provide a homeostatic balance between protective HI on one hand and virus survival on the other.

Let’s now consider the additional impact of human intervention on the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic. Human intervention too may have both detrimental and beneficial effects which may be age-dependent as well and equally evolve over time. More importantly, influences from human intervention will interfere with those caused by the evolutionary dynamics of a natural pandemic. Infection prevention measures may, for example, have a beneficial short-time effect in that they diminish viral transmission and, therefore, reduce morbidity rates in vulnerable people (i.e., primarily in the elderly). In the longer run, however, they may lead to insufficient training of innate immune mechanisms, which would primarily become manifest in those who primarily rely on innate immunity as a first line of immune defense (i.e., children). Likewise, mass vaccination campaigns may have a beneficial short-time effect in that they reduce viral spread and protect vulnerable people from disease (e.g., elderly people and those with underlying disease), but will eventually drive the propagation of more infectious variants. Dominant circulation of the latter will lead to a resurgence of viral infectious pressure, thereby eroding the innate immune defense of the unvaccinated (i.e., mostly younger age groups including children) and thus making them more susceptible to contracting Covid-19 disease. This already explains why mass vaccination campaigns conducted in the middle of a pandemic will only cause Sars-CoV-2 to engender more disease and claim more human lives. Because of this mass vaccination program, waves of morbidity will continue for much longer, as more (recovery from) disease cases will be required to compensate for the erosion of the population’s innate immunity and, therefore, to make up for the latter’s deficient contribution to HI.  

Of course, if none of our arguments is taken seriously, if any offer for an open public debate gets declined, if we’re only getting insulted, vilified and humiliated, if all counter-arguments are targeted at undermining our credibility, if independent scientists are being played for fools and end up being censored and silenced on all MSMs, one has no choice but to hope that ‘the people’ will  finally wake up, start to do their own research and rely on their common sense before taking an informed decision on how to react to this crisis. 

As an independent expert, I have come to the conclusion that if stakeholders override the emergency brake, it is better to concentrate on solutions for when the crash takes place. The wake-up shock is unlikely to occur before the percentage of Covid-19 disease and death in vaccinees largely exceeds that observed in the unvaccinated group in at least several of the ‘model’ countries (let’s hope that by then we will still have an unvaccinated control group). Such an observation would indicate that the virus has largely escaped from neutralization by vaccine-induced Abs. Given the speed at which the virus is currently evolving, one cannot imagine that we will go through another winter before viral resistance will have occurred in a number of countries with high vaccine coverage rates.  

I am a seasoned vaccinologist and have gone several times against groupthink, which, unfortunately, also happens in science. My upper management didn’t want to listen to me when about 15 years ago I predicted that a Herpes simplex virus type-2 (HSV-2) vaccine candidate would not protect against infection and only turn vaccinees into asymptomatic carriers (much as Covid-19 vaccines do), who could then inadvertently transmit genital herpes disease to their partner. I deliberately quitted my position as project manager of that project as I considered the candidate vaccine an unethical immune intervention. Similar things happened when I was working with GAVI and pointed out that the results of the phase III Ebola vaccine trials conducted by WHO and published in a peer-reviewed journal were falsely concluding that the vaccine had an efficacy of 100%. As everyone will appreciate from the scientific report posted on my website, the truth looked extremely different. 

As HI is no longer considered within reach (in fact, it should never have been!), there is no longer a clear-cut goal for conducting the mass vaccination program. Without such a goal, there can be no strategy either to get to the endgame and bring a panoply of highly contagious circulating variants under control. Currently, we’re witnessing a variety of complex, mostly scientifically irrational, tactics that countries are using in a desperate attempt to extinguish or avoid the never-ending pandemic waves. None of our political leaders or policymakers seems to even understand that the word pandemic relates to an infectious disease that spreads across multiple continents or worldwide. So, instead of collaborating on a strategic global plan, each of them seeks to hunting down the virus locally.     

Given all of these detrimental consequences, the question arises as to how on earth will we protect the human population from Covid-19 disease when the vaccines themselves will no longer be able to do so? 

The answer is simple: Via herd immunity! 

But how on earth can we build HI after the vaccines will precisely have prevented herd immunity from being established (due to erosion of both, naturally acquired and innate immunity as a direct (4) or indirect (5) consequence of mass vaccination, respectively)?

So, this comes down to asking ourselves the question as to how the population can build HI if it will have to start from scratch and is now even facing viral variants that are far more infectious, and potentially even more virulent, than the virus which circulated at the outset of this pandemic.

The mass vaccination hype will undoubtedly enter history as the most reckless experiment in the history of medicine. It will be cited as the unequivocal proof of how overuse or misuse of man-made antimicrobials leads to antimicrobial resistance, regardless of whether the antimicrobial is an antibiotic or an antibody administered through passive immunization or elicited via active immunization. Mass vaccination campaigns conducted in the middle of a viral pandemic will, for generations to come, become the most sobering example of the boundaries of human intervention in nature in general and of the boundaries of conventional vaccinology in particular. This irrational experiment will unambiguously highlight the clear-cut limitations of conventional vaccine approaches. It will convincingly illustrate that – unlike natural acute self-limiting infection or disease – ‘modern’ technologies alone do not suffice to develop vaccines that are capable of preventing viral transmission or immune escape. For that matter, even ‘modern’ vaccines will not allow conventional B or T cell-directed antigens to generate herd immunity when massively administered in the heat of a pandemic of a highly mutable virus. Because of the disastrous consequences the current mass vaccination campaign will entail, I cannot imagine that the word ‘vaccine’ will continue to persist in the medical vade-mecum. In order to highlight the short-comings of all vaccines eliciting conventional B- or T cell-centered immune responses I propose to coin a new term for these vaccines and refer to them as ‘conditionally immune protection-inducing formulations’ (CIPIFs).

Last, to all those who’re still convinced the official narrative about the beneficial effect of mass vaccination is correct, I’d like to suggest they solve the following 5 important questions as food for further thoughts:

1. Why does a pandemic all of a sudden cause disease in younger age groups whereas those were protected from disease during previous waves?
2. Why would asymptomatically infected people mount anti-S Abs when the virus gets already eliminated by the time these Abs start to peak?
3. Why did the UK see a substantial decline in cases during the 2 weeks that followed the end of their lockdown rules (i.e., between July 20th and August 3rd)?
4. Molecular epidemiologists have provided compelling evidence of growing selective S-directed immune pressure exerted by the population. How can this be explained given that full-fledged innate or naturally acquired immunity do not promote natural selection or dominance of more infectious variants (as also illustrated by the Influenza pandemic of 1918!)?
5. How could mass vaccination even contribute to controlling transmissibility of highly infectious Sars-CoV-2 variants?

As long as questions like these remain unsolved by those who take the decisions on how to manage this pandemic, there should be plenty of reason for people to be extremely skeptical. When questions as basic as those listed above cannot be answered, one cannot conclude there is anything fundamental our leaders or advising experts understand about the pandemic.