Ultimately, our rush for pandemic solutions points to vaccines. Though I am not “anti-vax” in nature, I do think that all vaccines require a risk assessment prior to administration. Are patients at particularly high risk if they acquire natural infection? Are there pre-existing comorbidities or allergies that would make vaccination an inappropriate decision?
Is the vaccine itself known to contribute to dangerous sequelae after being administered, and does it lack long term data of safety and efficacy necessary for us to make an informed decision? Perhaps some discussion of instances where the long-term effects have proven dangerous is necessary in our current circumstances.
As we know, the advent of newer methodologies for what is loosely deemed vaccination, requires scrutiny and testing before mass distribution. As many people know, under the guise of an “emergency” many of the stringent requirements have been waived for the Covid-19 vaccines. This brings us back to that risk/benefit question.
Historically, SARS vaccines elicited an Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) reaction in the animal model which is why the idea of a safe vaccine was not successfully produced. SARS-type vaccines have failed non-clinical animal studies dating back to 2003 with little to no hope of development as late as 2013. This ADE phenomenon is often conflated with anaphylaxis, which is also a dangerous potential side effect of these vaccines, but these life-threatening events occur within the first hour of administration.
I want to examine ADE. Antibody Dependent Enhancement occurs long after you have left the clinic, often within the first 3 weeks of receiving this vaccine. There are many names given to ADE that all refer to the same phenomena. Such monikers as Pathogenic Priming, Immune Enhancement or Disease Enhancement all refer to the same mechanism of pathology.
Since not all antibody responses are created equally, sometimes antibodies fail to prevent cell entry and, on rare occasions, may actually increase the ability of a virus to enter cells and cause a worsening of disease through the mechanism called ADE. These Trojan Horses seem to be more pathogen-specific and occur in certain diseases such as Dengue Fever, but on a few occasions can be induced by vaccinations, such as RSV and the early version of the measles vaccine.
The question remains, has a decade of failed vaccine development for SARS CoV-1 truly been resolved? If not, there are lingering issues that will surface later after mass administration. In a preprint of conservative data analysis, it became evident that those with previous SARS Cov-2 infection are more likely to have systemic and severe side-effects from the vaccines than those who are naïve to the disease.
This finding justifies the question as to whether ADE is truly mitigated from the vaccine for this pathogen. Understanding the nature and timing of this phenomena of the first 3 weeks post vaccination, (during the typical exposure and shift from IgM initial antibody production to IgG long term specific antibodies) many adverse events have been reported, though fewer than 1% are actually documented. (Page 6.) I believe the jury is still out and common practice should be #ScreenB4Vaccine.
