How Drug Industry Is Countering Diminishing Vaccine Uptake – Dr. Joseph Mercola

Originally published: June 26, 2020

As lockdowns have kept people at home and out of medical facilities, infant vaccination rates have dropped. As you might expect, this is bad news for the drug industry, which is likely why they’ve started promoting baseless claims that childhood vaccinations might prevent COVID-19 deaths.

Baseless Claims Seek to Bolster Vaccine Uptake

There’s absolutely no evidence for this, yet, in March 2020, they started pushing the TB vaccine, claiming it might “steel the immune system” against SARS-CoV-2. As reported by Science:¹

“Researchers in four countries will soon start a clinical trial of an unorthodox approach to the new coronavirus. They will test whether a century-old vaccine against tuberculosis (TB), a bacterial disease, can rev up the human immune system in a broad way, allowing it to better fight the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 and, perhaps, prevent infection with it altogether.”

In April 2020, the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine was touted as a “major breakthrough” against COVID-19. The British Express reported:²

“Researchers at the University of Cambridge said the injection could prevent severe symptoms in people who have had it because the rubella virus has a similar structure to the coronavirus …

When they compared the rubella virus and the coronavirus the researchers found that they were 29 percent identical … The researchers have no evidence that the MMR vaccine works on COVID-19 patients but they assured ‘a study is warranted.’”

In June 2020, it was the polio vaccine’s turn in the spotlight. According to The Hill,³ tuberculosis and polio vaccines are being examined “for possible protection against COVID-19.”

Jeffrey D. Cirillo, a professor of microbial pathogenesis and immunology at Texas A&M Health Science Center, went so far as to state, “This is the only vaccine in the world that can be given to combat COVID-19 right now.”

Based on what? Based on vaccination rates in countries such as Pakistan, “where most of the population is vaccinated for tuberculosis and death rates for COVID-19 have been extremely low.” That’s it.

Meanwhile, discussions and evidence showing the benefits of vitamin C and vitamin D — as well as many other therapies — are banned and censored. This, despite significant scientific evidence actually backing their use and showing the biology by which these nutrients and therapies can prevent and/or treat this particular infection. Talk about travesty.

The oral polio vaccine, by the way, is now the primary cause of polio paralysis in the world, not wild polio.^4,5 This is an inconvenient fact that is completely ignored by most mainstream media.

Common Cold May Provide Long-Term Immunity Against COVID-19

In related news, June 12, 2020, the Daily Mail,⁶ Science Times⁷ and others⁸ reported findings from a Singaporean study⁹ led by professor Antonio Bertoletti, an immunologist with the Duke-NUS Medical School, showing common colds caused by the betacoronaviruses OC43 and HKU1 might make you more resistant to SARS-CoV-2 infection, and that the resulting immunity might last as long as 17 years.

In addition to the common cold, OC43 and HKU1 — two of the most commonly encountered betacoronaviruses¹⁰ — are also known to cause bronchitis, acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pneumonia in all age groups.¹¹ As reported by the Daily Mail:¹²

“They share many genetic features with the coronaviruses Covid-19, MERS and SARS, all of which passed from animals to humans. Coronaviruses are thought to account for up to 30 percent of all colds but it is not known specifically how many are caused by the betacoronavirus types.

Now scientists have found evidence that some immunity may be present for many years due to the body’s ‘memory’ T-cells from attacks by previous viruses with a similar genetic make-up — even among people who have had no known exposure to Covid-19 or SARS …

Blood was taken from 24 patients who had recovered from Covid-19, 23 who had become ill from SARS and 18 who had never been exposed to either SARS or Covid-19 …

Half of patients in the group with no exposure to either Covid-19 or SARS possessed T-cells which showed immune response to the animal betacoronaviruses, Covid-19 and SARS. This suggested patients’ immunity developed after exposure to common colds caused by betacoronavirus or possibly from other as yet unknown pathogens.”

In other words, if you’ve beat a common cold caused by a OC43 or HKU1 betacoronavirus in the past, you may have a 50/50 chance of having defensive T-cells that can recognize and help defend against SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. According to the researchers:¹³

“These findings demonstrate that virus-specific memory T-cells induced by betacoronavirus infection are long-lasting, which supports the notion that Covid-19 patients would develop long-term T-cell immunity. Our findings also raise the intriguing possibility that infection with related viruses can also protect from or modify the pathology caused by SARS-Cov-2.”

Other Studies Show Similar Results

Other studies have also discovered that many appear to have prior resistance to SARS-CoV-2. For example, a study¹⁴ published May 14, 2020, in the journal Cell, found 70% of samples obtained by the La Jolla Institute for Immunology from patients who had recovered from mild cases of COVID-19, as well as 40% to 60% of people who had not been exposed to the virus, had resistance to SARS-CoV-2 on the T-cell level.

According to the authors, this suggests there’s “cross-reactive T cell recognition between circulating ‘common cold’ coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2.” Like Bertoletti’s study above, the Cell study found that exposure to coronaviruses responsible for the common cold appear to allow your immune system to recognize and fight off SARS-CoV-2 as well.

May 14, 2020, Science magazine reported¹⁵ these Cell findings, drawing parallels to another earlier paper¹⁶ by German investigators that had come to a similar conclusion.

That German paper,¹⁷ the preprint of which was posted April 22, 2020, on Medrxiv, found helper T cells that targeted the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in 15 of 18 patients hospitalized with COVID-19. As reported by Science:¹⁸

“The teams also asked whether people who haven’t been infected with SARS-CoV-2 also produce cells that combat it. Thiel and colleagues¹⁹ analyzed blood from 68 uninfected people and found that 34% hosted helper T cells that recognized SARS-CoV-2.

The La Jolla team²⁰ detected this crossreactivity in about half of stored blood samples collected between 2015 and 2018, well before the current pandemic began …

The results suggest ‘one reason that a large chunk of the population may be able to deal with the virus is that we may have some small residual immunity from our exposure to common cold viruses,’ says viral immunologist Steven Varga of the University of Iowa. However, neither of the studies attempted to establish that people with crossreactivity don’t become as ill from COVID-19.

Before these studies, researchers didn’t know whether T cells played a role in eliminating SARS-CoV-2, or even whether they could provoke a dangerous immune system overreaction. ‘These papers are really helpful because they start to define the T cell component of the immune response,’ [Columbia University virologist Angela] Rasmussen says.”

Statistician Believes Majority Are Resistant to COVID-19

These studies add support to the latest COVID-19 mortality models suggesting widespread resistance and prior immunity. Freddie Sayers, executive editor of UnHerd, recently interviewed professor Karl Friston, a statistician whose expertise is mathematical modeling, who believes prior immunity across the global population might be as high as 80%. Sayers reports:²¹

“[Friston] invented the now standard ‘statistical parametric mapping’ technique for understanding brain imaging — and for the past months he has been applying his particular method of Bayesian analysis, which he calls ‘dynamic causal modelling,’ to the available Covid-19 data …

His models suggest that the stark difference between outcomes in the UK and Germany, for example, is not primarily an effect of different government actions (such as … earlier lockdowns), but is better explained by intrinsic differences between the populations that make the ‘susceptible population’ in Germany … much smaller than in the UK …

Even within the UK, the numbers point to the same thing: that the ‘effective susceptible population’ was never 100%, and was at most 50% and probably more like only 20% of the population.”

These statistics really throw the idea of social distancing being an unavoidable part of the post-COVID-19 “new normal” into question. What’s more, once sensible behaviors such as staying home when sick are entered into Friston’s model, the effect of lockdown efforts vanish altogether, so global lockdowns were likely completely unnecessary in the first place.

Nobel-Prize Winning Scientist Debunks Growth Projections

Michael Levitt,²² a professor of structural biology at the Stanford School of Medicine who received the Nobel Prize in 2013 for his development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems, has also presented strong evidence that supports Friston’s model.

According to Levitt, statistical data reveals a mathematical pattern that has stayed consistent regardless of the government interventions implemented. While early models predicted an exponential explosion of COVID-19 deaths, those predictions never materialized. As reported by Sayers in the video above:

“After around a two-week exponential growth of cases (and, subsequently, deaths) some kind of break kicks in, and growth starts slowing down. The curve quickly becomes ‘sub-exponential.’ This may seem like a technical distinction, but its implications are profound.

The ‘unmitigated’ scenarios modelled by (among others) Imperial College, and which tilted governments across the world into drastic action, relied on a presumption of continued exponential growth …

But Professor Levitt’s point is that that hasn’t actually happened anywhere, even in countries that have been relatively lax in their responses.”

Levitt believes prior immunity plays a significant role in why we simply don’t see an exponential growth pattern of COVID-19 deaths, and that certainly seems to make sense. A majority of people simply aren’t (and weren’t) susceptible to the disease in the first place.

He tells Sayers the indiscriminate lockdowns implemented around the world were “a huge mistake.” A more rational approach would have been to protect and isolate the elderly, who are by far the most vulnerable and make up the bulk of COVID-19 deaths around the world.

Hopefully, these data will not be swept under the rug if or when a second wave of COVID-19 emerges this fall. Making that mistake once is bad enough. Let us not repeat it.

Last but not least, to bolster your immune system and lower your risk of COVID-19 infection in the future, be sure to follow the instructions given in “Your Vitamin D Level Must Reach 60 ng/mL Before the Second Wave.”