Dear Dr. Vanden Bossche,
My name is Lucas. I am a student and I am wondering whether to get the corona shot. Without that jab, my whole life will grind to a halt and that makes me pretty sad. I can hardly go anywhere anymore, I'm always just sitting at home and I'm losing my friends. They think it's strange that I haven't been vaccinated, and sometimes they even get angry.
"Everyone with a little sense gets vaccinated," my friends say. "Only scatterbrains who believe there are chips in vaccines don't take them. What harm can a little shot like that do?"
I wonder that sometimes, too. But on the other hand, the idea of getting jabbed just doesn't feel right. My mother doesn't know very well what to think about it either. She is a biologist, and works as a teacher at an institute that provides vocational training. She has been vaccinated herself. "Without that shot, I got into trouble at work," she says. "I got vaccinated without thinking much about it, but in retrospect I don't know if I made the right decision. And whether you should get that vaccine, I don't know at all."
My mother has read a lot from and about you on the Internet. There some people paint a particularly negative portrait of you, but my mother says that almost everything you predicted about the coronavirus has come true. You apparently understand very well what is going on during this corona outbreak, and what is about to happen. That is why I am emailing you.
Dr. Vanden Bossche, what do you think I should do? Should I go get that vaccine?
Best regards from Lucas
Hello Lucas,
You are going through a tough and sad time, it is clear from your email. Which also makes it clear that you are standing strong. While the government bombards young people with campaigns to get vaccinated, and your friends have complied, you are strong enough not to automatically obey. In fact, you are strong enough to resist the pressure of your friends and peers. That's special. For someone like that, I’ll gladly to take the time to explain to you what is going on right now, and how we got into this surreal situation.
Intuitively you sense that the whole fuss about mass vaccinations has nothing to do with health. If you decide to take a corona vaccine, it will not improve your health, nor will it protect the health of others. The information campaigns claim this, but the truth is exactly the opposite.
In the vast majority of healthy people, the immune system - if I put it more precisely: natural immunity - provides better protection against the virus than corona vaccines. This is most likely true for you as well. By the way, virologists and vaccinologists prefer to speak of SARS-CoV-2, but because I want to use as little jargon as possible, I prefer to speak of "the virus" or "the coronavirus”.
Certainly young people have very little to fear from the coronavirus. The overwhelming majority of them are so well protected against it by their natural immune system that they will only be sick for a few days at most. For young people, vaccination provides no health benefits.
However, young people who get vaccinated are at risk of health damage as a result. Doctors are seeing the same health problems crop up again and again in a remarkable number of people who have recently been vaccinated against corona. At the same time, concerns are growing about the long-term health consequences. Absolutely nothing is yet known with certainty about this.
Under normal circumstances, vaccines that could potentially cause as many serious side effects as the current covid vaccines, and whose health benefits for large groups are conspicuous by their absence, should not be allowed on the market. However, these are not normal circumstances.
When the coronavirus spread around the world from China in 2020, there was so much panic that the companies producing the vaccines and the regulatory authorities that had to approve them did their work in great haste - and incompletely.
That explains the large question marks over clinical studies on the basis of which the government decided to approve the vaccines. The effect on children, young or pregnant women, and old and frail people has not been studied, or has been barely studied. Normally, vaccines for that group are not approved until five to ten years after they come on the market for healthy adults. That this has not happened is in itself a sign that we are living in a very, very strange time.
The information in the clinical trials is so poor that the authorities still have not officially approved the corona vaccines. Their approval is "provisional," and for good reason.
That's not yet the full story. As I briefly touched on, if you decide to take that shot, you are not contributing to ending the corona epidemic.
As a vaccinologist with a quarter of a century of experience, I can assure you that the mass use of the current covid vaccines has allowed increasingly contagious virus variants to prevail - and that, if we continue with this jabbing, even more contagious virus variants are likely to emerge.
Look, the corona vaccines are something completely different from the vaccines you probably received as a child. They protect you from the germs that those vaccines are designed to protect against. Thanks to those vaccines, when those germs enter your body, they are killed almost immediately by your immune system. The corona vaccines don't work that well.
That's mainly because we are administering these vaccines while we are in the middle of a pandemic, and the virus is circulating all around us. After a vaccine is administered, it takes several weeks for the vaccine to reach its optimal effect. Because the virus is present everywhere, there is a good chance that it will infect people whose immunity, induced by the vaccine, is still in the process of being strengthened. The virus can therefore still multiply and immediately uses this opportunity to adapt to the immune pressure that vaccinated people exert on its infectious power.
Vaccinated people thus act as a kind of battlefield for the virus where only the strongest (i.e., the more infectious) variants survive. If many people in the population have been vaccinated, mutual contamination will cause the number of survivors to increase rapidly and the further spread of the virus in the population will not be hindered much by the vaccine.
Moreover, this will be all the more the case as the variant is less well recognized by the antibodies that the vaccine induces in the population.
This explains why vaccines currently still protect vulnerable groups from serious disease, but for the rest their protective effect has declined to less than zero.
If you want to understand how deploying "leaky" vaccines can lead to increasingly infectious viruses, you need to understand something about the way evolution exactly works, and something about coronaviruses. Those viruses can easily mutate. A mutated virus is also called a "variant”. If, during an epidemic of such an easily mutating virus, you use a vaccine that is unable to prevent the virus from infecting people and then spreading, you give the virus the opportunity to select a variant that is increasingly unaffected by the vaccine.
This explains why covid vaccines protect even worse now than when vaccinations began. It also explains why the government's message that unvaccinated people are contributing to the continuation of this epidemic is wrong. The immense number of people who have been treated with these vaccines has allowed the emergence of the increasingly contagious virus variants.
Let me recap. Young and healthy people gain nothing by being vaccinated, but they do expose themselves to still largely unknown health risks. Those who get vaccinated also contribute to the emergence of increasingly infectious virus variants. It will be clear that vaccinated people do not cooperate in building up group immunity. After all, group immunity presupposes that people will no longer transmit the virus - and that is precisely what the covid vaccines cannot prevent.
The virus variant that now dominates in our region is Omicron. Omicron is by far the most contagious virus variant that has emerged so far in this epidemic. Fortunately, Omicron causes only mild symptoms of illness in most people, but the successor to this virus may be less gentle. So we should take this opportunity to stop mass vaccinations. However, that does not seem to be going to happen.
The campaigns continue, and in a few months Omicron vaccines will even become available. Everything I said above about the problem sides of the corona vaccines also applies to the Omicron vaccines. They are based on the same technology as the first covid vaccines.
The Omicron vaccines will also cause side effects. Undoubtedly, the Omicron vaccines will provide some short-term protection against the virus, but at the same time, when they are administered en masse, they will ensure that a new variant of the virus will soon emerge, which, of course, will again take little or no notice of the new vaccine.
The seriousness of the consequences of this sequence of events can best be explained by a comparison. A vaccination can be compared to the installation of a virus scanner on your PC, but then one that you can never remove. As long as that virus scanner works well, that's fine. Many of the vaccines that children receive are such well-working permanent virus scanners. The current corona vaccines, however, are defective virus scanners. They don't stop viruses properly, and they also cause all kinds of other programs on your PC that are also aimed at keeping viruses and other malware out to stop working properly.
A human being is not a PC. A PC that no longer works properly can be discarded, but not a human, of course. A human, who has been vaccinated with a product that does not work properly, may have a major problem for life. This may well mean that as a result of the covid vaccinations you become more vulnerable to other coronaviruses that are circulating, or even to the flu virus, and probably to virus variants that will still emerge. Several scientists are increasingly concerned that the immune system will become less effective in other ways as well.
Now you may understand why I find the government's pressure on young people to get vaccinated totally irresponsible. That goes for the campaigns that instill a false sense of responsibility in young people, instilling fear, locking young people up, creating a climate where unvaccinated people are looked at strangely - and then telling young people that they can go back to living normal lives if they get treated with experimental vaccines. No government has the right to put young people in this situation.
That this happened anyway has everything to do with a series of important events that took place in the near past. Six years before the coronavirus started spreading around the world, in 2014, there was another virus outbreak: that of the Ebola virus in West Africa. At the time, the world health organization WHO took action too late, and the consequences were disastrous.
As a result of the Ebola catastrophe, the WHO was reorganized. The idea was that the next time there was a major outbreak, WHO would not repeat that mistake it made. Hence, when the coronavirus broke out, the WHO declared an emergency fairly quickly. That, we now know, was a hasty and erroneous assessment. It soon became clear that the new virus was only dangerous to people with weakened immune systems, for example, as a result of illness, an unhealthy lifestyle or very old age. The WHO had fallen from one extreme to another, and without examining whether it was necessary, began planning a massive vaccination campaign.
One problem with those vaccinations was that WHO could neither pay for them nor produce the vaccines itself. The WHO had to turn to a few large pharmaceutical companies for that. The sole purpose of these companies is to increase their profit margins to the highest possible level. The pandemic offered the companies the best possible opportunity to do so.
Governments around the world bought huge quantities of vaccines that were supposed to protect their populations against covid, and because of the great (and, in retrospect, wrong) sense of urgency, the authorities that assess the safety of new drugs relaxed the criteria that the vaccines had to meet. This, and only this, allowed vaccines based on genetic engineering to come to market so quickly. Without a corona outbreak, it might have taken another ten years for this to happen. Moreover, if there had been no corona outbreak, current corona vaccines would probably not have been approved. There are simply insufficient data to assess their efficacy and certainly their safety.
The companies need have no fear of a false outcome. I'll spare you a long legal explanation, but the companies can shift all liability for side effects to the governments that bought their vaccines and administer them to their citizens. So while the drug companies make unprecedented profits, their risks are virtually zero. The companies, plus the legion of experts who get paid by the same companies while advising the government, have a vested interest in greatly exaggerating both the severity of the pandemic and the efficacy of the vaccines.
The Silicon Valley tech companies and the major media do not play a nice role in this whole thing. In fact, one would expect precisely those companies to provide the public with the information needed to understand this curious and dangerous crisis. Instead, the tech companies and the media have acted as a mouthpiece for the pharmaceutical industry and the government over the past two years. They have simultaneously dismissed anyone who voices a critical opinion as a half-wit or a fraud.
The supreme alliance of rapidly getting richer pharmaceutical companies, their army of experts and partisan media has the national and international health organizations in an iron grip. The alliance claims that it adheres to WHO guidelines and advice, but that's a sham. The Alliance is behind the wheel of the corona automobile, not the WHO.
The politicians in parliament and the cabinet are the ones who bear the brunt of this development. That may sound odd, because you would say that this very group is in control. But because politicians, with a few exceptions, have no understanding of biology, the human immune system, viruses, vaccines and the pharmaceutical industry, they are currently at the mercy of the alliance. They whisper what the politicians should do and think.
I know my way around this field where companies, governments, politics, health authorities, media and scientists meet. I spent many years of my career in it. I look back on it with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I am grateful for what the vaccine world has taught me. On the other hand, it also taught me what happens in that world when you go against the grain, and how ruthlessly the system then treats you. Even when everyone knows you're right.
Early in 2021, when mass vaccination campaigns were gaining steam, I warned WHO of what was to come. One of the best-known vaccinologists on the planet let it be known that he shared my concerns. He immediately added that I could shout all I wanted, but I would not be heard. After all, I was rowing against the current.
In the meantime, a year has passed. The economy is damaged and discontent is growing. Arguments over vaccinations are tearing apart families and groups of friends. Those who are not vaccinated can no longer move freely and feel discriminated against. The vaccinated have more freedom than the unvaccinated, but they do not feel safe. They begin to worry more with each round of punctures.
Independent scientists have shown several times that mass vaccinations and other measures have not worked. This is doubly true for a virus as infectious as Omicron, which cannot be stopped by any means man has deployed in this crisis. What is also becoming increasingly apparent in science is that natural immunity protects healthy people superbly against the virus. Granted, the price for that immunity may be a mild illness. But that price is paltry compared to the negative health effects of vaccines denied by the government and pharmaceutical companies.
It is clear that this situation cannot continue. All signs point to the fact that chasing the coronavirus with vaccines as late as 2022, i.e., this year, will lead to a boomerang effect that will force the government to lift all discriminatory measures. The probability of that is 99 percent. The chance of it happening as early as the next six months I estimate at 60 to 70 percent. So the days of this Muppet show are indeed numbered.
Lucas, the miserable situation you are in now will soon no longer exist. Do not succumb to the temptation to take these corona vaccines for freedom, especially now that the end of this misery is so near. Nothing gives greater freedom, now and in the future, than a healthy body.
Don't believe the promises of the government and pharmaceutical companies. Don't take what the media proclaims at face value, nor automatically go along with the opinions of people around you who parrot the media. Learn how to use the Internet to find good information about health. Find sources from people who are scientifically credible, who have not affiliated themselves with suspicious companies, and who have no conflicts of interest.
I know how hard it is, but it sure pays off now to start living as healthy as possible. The healthier your lifestyle, the better your immune system. If you want to resist viruses like Omicron, make sure you get enough exercise, a healthy weight, a healthy diet, plenty of rest and avoid excessive use of alcohol or other substances that weaken immune defenses.
Another important component is a positive mental attitude. Loneliness, fear, despair and gloomy expectations for the future have a negative impact on the immune system. An important medicine for a positive attitude is social contact. Seek out other people, not only through social media, but especially in person and have fun together. If you can improvise and are a little creative, you still can, even in this day and age.
In friend groups and families, the pandemic can be a social divisive issue. If you run into that, don't try to convince people with different opinions. That won't work, and will only cause frustration. You're better off investing your energy in making new friends. If you are willing to take the first step, you will find that this is often easier than you think. Many young people have this same need. Find people with whom you feel comfortable. Help each other out. Support each other. Realize that you still have a sea of time to make up for what was taken from you in these black years.
I myself have three children between the ages of 20 and 25. They too are asking themselves immense questions about their future and how to proceed. I tell them the same as I tell you. I assure them and you that, even though there may not be much sign of it now, this terrible period will soon be over. Be patient, Lucas. Be strong for a little longer.
With affectionate greetings,
Geert
Geert Vanden Bossche received his DVM from the University of Ghent, Belgium, and his PhD degree in Virology from the University of Hohenheim, Germany. He held adjunct faculty appointments at universities in Belgium and Germany. After his career in Academia, Geert joined several vaccine companies (GSK Biologicals, Novartis Vaccines, Solvay Biologicals) to serve various roles in vaccine R&D as well as in late vaccine development.
Geert then moved on to join the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Discovery team in Seattle (USA) as Senior Program Officer; he then worked with the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) in Geneva as Senior Ebola Program Manager. At GAVI he tracked efforts to develop an Ebola vaccine. He also represented GAVI in fora with other partners, including WHO, to review progress on the fight against Ebola and to build plans for global pandemic preparedness.
Back in 2015, Geert scrutinized and questioned the safety of the Ebola vaccine that was used in ring vaccination trials conducted by WHO in Guinea. His critical scientific analysis and report on the data published by WHO in the Lancet in 2015 was sent to all international health and regulatory authorities involved in the Ebola vaccination program. After working for GAVI, Geert joined the German Center for Infection Research in Cologne as Head of the Vaccine Development Office. He is at present primarily serving as a Biotech / Vaccine consultant while also conducting his own research on Natural Killer cell-based vaccines.
Email: info@voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org