[conspire] (forw) [skeptic] Vaccines are a very good idea, except when they aren't (was: Jab)

[Rick Moen]

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2020 12:23:11 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: skeptic at linuxmafia.com
Subject: [skeptic] Vaccines are a very good idea,
	except when they aren't (was: Jab)
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Eva Durant (durant.eva at gmail.com):

> Quora post from Russia.
> https://qr.ae/pNo4QH

Here in the US, reflexive trust of vaccines took a big hit when
President Ford rushed out a virus for the then-feared 'swine flu' H1N1 
outbreak in October 1976, pushing on account of the Presidential
election, and the result was 532 cases of Guillain–Barré syndrome
paralysis[1], probably on account of inadequate vaccine testing.  (The
incident remains disputed to this day.)  But that was a serious setback
for public trust of vaccines.  (It didn't help that there never was a
significant outbreak of that swine flu strain, but in fairness
scientists couldn't have predicted that outcome.)

Even before that, there had been two problems with the polio vaccine
program, one merely troubling, and the other a fatal horror:

Retroactively, it was discovered that 10-30% of polio vaccine doses
administered between 1955 and 1963 had been contaminated with simian
virus 40 (SV40), present because scientists had cultured the virus on
tissues taken from rhesus monkeys imported from India.  Scientists
culturing the polio virus had been aware that the simian virus was
present in some of the monkeys (actually, probably most or all of them
because of haphazard handling of the monkeys and just storing large
numbers of them in a cage together), but had simply assumed without
checking that formaldehyde would kill it -- which did not happen.

There's no particular evidence that the simian virus hurt humans, but
that definitely wasn't supposed to happen.

The real horror was the Cutter Laboratories incident of 1955.  After
anouncement of the Salk inactivated polio vaccine on April 12, 1955,
several companies signed up to mass-produce it; one was family-owned
pharma company Cutter Laboratories of Berkeley, California.  Cutter
mistakenly produced 120,000 vaccine doses in which the polio virus had
_not_ been killed.  40,000 children had a narrow escape and developed
only the 'abortive' form of the poliomyelitis infection, where the virus 
never enters the central nervous system (CNS).  This causes various
minor illneses:  gastrointestinal disturbances, flu-like symptoms, or
upper-respiratory infection (sore throat and fever).  The virus
statistically enters the CNS in 1% of poli infections, and in the case
of the Cutter Labs vaccine doses, a few hundred children developed
paralytic polio, and about ten died.

What went wrong at Cutter Labs?  Nobody is quite sure.  A thorough
investigation found nothing -- but a Congressional followup
investigation found that NIH's Laboratory of Biologics Control wasn't
monitoring them nearly closely enough.  The modern successor of PDA's
Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), which we should all
hope is currently on top of its game.

The Cutter Labs disaster should never have happened at all, and one
hopes would never happen today, and _no_ vaccine is completely without
risk, but even the Cutter Labs disaster needs to be seen in context of, 
for example, the USA's 1952 polio outbreak, which killed 3,145, gave
21,269 mild-to-disabling lifelong paralysis, and made about 58,000 ill.
Compently produced vaccines are way, way less hazardous than the
diseases they're aimed at.


I should also mention, however, _another_ scandal that haunts vaccine
development:  The 2017 Dengvaxia incident in the Philippines.

What happened:  French pharma Sanofi Pasteur, Inc. starting in April
2016 rolled out about 700,000 doses of its new 'Dengvaxia' vaccine
against dengue fever in parts of the Phillipines, primarily to school
children.  The country had paid a lot of money to be the first country
in Asia to receive the vaccine.

But then the horrors started.  The vaccine was _supposed_ to be given 
only to children (and others) who had already had a bout of dengue
fever -- but this was not done.  In individuals who had not already had
dengue, the Dengvaxia vaccine primed that person's immune system for
the subsequent disaster, the _first_ time they (then) had a dengue
infection, of antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), where the result of
the infection becomes dramatically worse, and hemorrhagic.

The Phillipines Dept. of Heatlh suspended the vaccine program in late
2017 after the first few children died, but the damage had already been
done, and by two years later over 600 people had died of the
vaccine-driven amplified disease -- and many more are doubtless to come.

The incident is so infamous in the Phillipines that, when I went to look
up details, I found an online newspaper article that speaks of the risk
that a COVID-19 vaccine might turn out to be another Dengvaxia, and the
paper didn't bother to explain the reference:  They assumed their
readership already knew.  In addition to boiling anger over the incident 
in the Phillipines, there is also the charge the Sanofi used Filipinos
as 'guinea pigs', sacrificing their children because they were in a
conveniently powerless tropical country.  Criminal charges have been
filed against officials involved. 


'ADE' remains a significant risk for the current vaccine development, e.g.:

  Abstract

  Antibody-based drugs and vaccines against severe acute respiratory
  syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) are being expedited through
  preclinical and clinical development. Data from the study of SARS-CoV
  and other respiratory viruses suggest that anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies
  could exacerbate COVID-19 through antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE).
  Previous respiratory syncytial virus and dengue virus vaccine studies
  revealed human clinical safety risks related to ADE, resulting in failed
  vaccine trials. Here, we describe key ADE mechanisms and discuss
  mitigation strategies for SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and therapies in
  development. We also outline recently published data to evaluate the
  risks and opportunities for antibody-based protection against
  SARS-CoV-2.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00789-5


[1] This is often so similar in severity to the effect of paralytic
polio that modern scientists suspect that FDR's symptoms that he
suffered starting in 1922 were actually more consistent with
Guillain–Barré syndrome autoimmune neuropathy than with polio.


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