DarkHorse Podcast with Geert Vanden Bossche & Bret Weinstein

hey folks welcome to the dark horse podcast i have the great pleasure of sitting today with gert vandenbusch garrett vandenbusch is a doctor of veterinary medicine who has specialist expertise in virology and vaccinology he has worked in industry in the construction of vaccines he has also worked in the non-profit sector in bringing immunity to larger numbers of people uh welcome garrett thanks everybody for having me so you have become well known in certain circles and controversial of late because you have deployed an argument that suggests that the current campaign to vaccinate large numbers of people in the midst of the covet 19 pandemic may be ill-advised and i have seen you have been accused widely of being an anti-vaxxer which is uh completely preposterous in light of the career that you have uh you have participated in um do you want to say any words up front about where you're coming from uh in deploying your warning and then we can get into some of the biology that will be relevant to the argument that you're making well brett what i could say is that for me the alarming point came when i realized or we realized as a community that all of a sudden this was back in november last year a number of highly infectious variants were popping up almost simultaneously that was one thing and the second thing was when um vaccination started that there were some reports that were reporting indeed about uh you know people being vaccinated and still shedding virus so the combination of these things the presence even before mass vaccination started of highly infectious strains that were already present and then this combined with the fact that the vaccines as most vaccines do not prevent against infection and enable people who are vaccinated to shed the virus and basically to spread it so this was the for me the alarming point interesting so from my perspective one of these things uh it seems to me is obvious that we would see it it's essentially no matter where this virus came from we would expect in light of the fact of effectively a point source we would expect a large number of variants to emerge on the basis that this virus is new to people and it is now experiencing uh a effectively a very large canvas on which to learn new tricks so i find nothing surprising about the idea that new variants are are popping up we should have expected that the other point that you make is not so obvious from my perspective that people who are vaccinated may still be shedding virus in other words they do not have immunity sufficient to ward off the infection and prevent them from infecting others is that is that what you're saying yeah but this is this is pretty normal for conventional vaccines there is uh there are only a few very few vaccines and you would rather need to look into life vaccines life attenuated vaccines most of our modern vaccines prevent against disease and to some extent they diminish of course the the spread of the infection they diminish the viral load to some extent really substantially but they do not completely prevent infection um yeah so this then sets up uh a hazard in the form of a trade-off that the vaccines are very good at preventing people from becoming sick but by being narrowly focused and not preventing the shedding of a virus they open an evolutionary pathway for the virus to learn new tricks because that is to say somebody who has substantial immunity but not complete immunity to the virus will will tend to shed new variants that have making made use of that higher bar or that have cleared the higher bar well if the variants are present already which was the case before the mass vaccination really got got rolled out the mass vaccination campaigns and of course the we are talking about the spike protein i think everybody by know knows more or less about the spike protein as we know the version of the spike protein in the vaccines is not the same as on the variance so there there is some heterologous situation and therefore it's also logical that when you are vaccinated but you are exposed to a variant that has a different version of the s-protein that the s-protein may not be completely recognized by the vaccinal antibodies and therefore not completely completely neutralized for example so that is pretty logical it only becomes a problem i guess if you do this at a very large scale and that is my argument the mass vaccination in the midst of a massive infectious pressure which is the case during a pandemic of course all right so here's my suggestion in order for people to understand what is i think a fairly subtle distinction deploying a vaccine like one of the ones that we currently have narrowly targeted at the spike protein in advance of a pandemic might work very well and in the midst of a pandemic might have exactly the opposite impact the the reason for that is clear enough to me but i think it will be obscure to almost everyone so let's talk a little bit about the immune system and how it functions so that people can understand the context of your argument so i should say my background i did not i have no degree in either virology or vaccine science but i did study this many years ago in the context of basically i took a course in the medical school that i was interested in in immunobiology which is basically the biology of the immune system that underlies both the natural immunity that we have and the immunity that we create with um with vaccines so we essentially have we can dichotomize the systems that create immunity in a number of different ways one of them is that we have something called innate immunity these are the ability to recognize pathogens or other disease-causing patterns without needing to have any exposure and then we have what's called acquired immunity acquired immunity is for example people all will have had the experience of getting sick with something a cold or a flu and then uh a couple of weeks later they will find themselves recovered and what has happened is that the immune system has learned the electromagnetic signature on the surface of the um the either the viruses or the cells that have been infected these are called antigens and having learned that specific pattern it is then very good at finding cells that have been infected and destroying them or triggering them to self-destruct and once you have that then a set of memory cells are created so that if you ever encounter the same pathogen again creating the same antigens the immune system is so quick to recognize it that we very frequently don't even realize that we've been invaded right so you don't tend to get the same cold twice or chickenpox for example all right so what i want you to do i i'm going to sort of stand halfway between what you understand and what my audience is likely to understand and just try to paint with a broad brush some detail about the systems here so that people can follow so the acquired immunity is carried in two kinds of cells broadly speaking we've got b cells which make antibodies people who have heard the term antibodies antibody is basically a y shaped protein and that y shaped protein floats freely and it sticks to things based on the electromagnetic the pattern of electromagnetic magnetic charge on the the pads on the tips um and so those antibodies float around and they attach themselves to bacteria or to virally infected cells and uh that has a number of consequences and then the t cells uh function very much like b cells except that instead of creating free-floating antibody the what look like antibodies remain on the surface of the t cells and they function as receptors so the t cells move around and when they encounter something that their receptors stick to an antigen for which they're well matched those t cells become triggered to do something how am i doing so far yeah yeah that's uh that's okay so there is uh just the t cells that then then can immediately destroy the infected cell because as you were pointing out they recognize an antigen of the pathogen on the surface of that cell but there are also the t cells that will provide help to the b cells in order to build that memory if there is no t help there will no be no b-cell memory so there is two types of t-cells that are important to helper cells to enhance the b-cell response and the cytotoxic t-cells that have the capability to immediately destroy a cell an infected cell provided they recognize the antigen on the surface of that cell great all right so help me remember that we want to come back to that so people understand what it means what i want to do is talk about the way in which acquired immunity is acquired in the first place so that we can then understand what these memory cells are so acquired immunity i must say is one of the most fascinating evolutionary processes i've ever heard of the first time i learned of this my jaw was on the floor it was so interesting that such a system had evolved and existed and functioned without our awareness 24 hours a day every day of your life so the system functions more or less in this way you have a an array of cells that produce antibodies which have an ability sort of a general ability to react to any large organic molecule any configuration of charges that an antigen might have is contained in the system there are multiple cells in the system that will react to it somewhat so you have billions billions is that the right order of magnitude maybe it's tens of billions of well it's a huge amount anyway it's a very large number of these cells existing in your body that have a very wide range of patterns of antigen that they can react to and you have these things before you're born now the system will react really in principle to any sizable organic molecule but it's very important that it not react to molecules that you yourself make and so what happens is the system during a critical period in development eliminates all of those cells that are triggered by your own molecules and the fact of being a mammal plays into this very interestingly because there's a period before you've been exposed to the world where the only molecules you're encountering are your own so the system wakes up to all of the members of the this class of cells that react in utero and it eliminates them and what that does is it creates a system that once you've been born and you're out in the world and you encounter molecules that aren't yours the system reacts but when it encounters molecules that you're making it doesn't so it creates a self-non-self-recognition system that's what we call tolerance to the self-antigens right we become taller and if you weren't tolerant you'd have an autoimmune disorder your immune system would be attacking your own cells and maybe we'll talk a little bit about what that might uh represent later on but the what i want to get people to understand is that the system in its initial state just simply reacts to anything that isn't you right and what isn't you might be a pathogen or it might not right you could breathe in some pollen pollen isn't actually utilizing your cells to do anything it's just an organic molecule that you've inhaled and your system might react to it as if it was dangerous that would be an allergy but when you are invaded by let's say a bacterium or a virus you are suddenly creating molecules that your system has never seen and your system begins to react but at first it reacts very weakly because it doesn't have a very good program for recognizing this specific new invader it has a very general program that just recognizes anything it does it hasn't seen before right but this is the really amazing part the cells that react a little bit to this new pathogenic pattern those cells create a bunch of offspring cells that are not identical to each other and those cells among the offspring cells that react even more strongly to the pathogen are then triggered to produce more offspring cells and so what this does is it uses quite literally evolution to generate a recognition of this new pathogen that your body has never seen but it learns over the course of hours days and weeks to recognize this new pattern and it becomes very very good at it right at the point it has become very good at it so it can recognize any place in the body that's making these new antigens then it is capable of fending off the pathogen as you point out the natural killer cells actually no the natural killer t cells uh will come in and kill cells that have been infected by virus and the body will in many ways clear the uh the infection these are the cytolytic t cells cytotoxic or cytotoxic t cells cytotoxic t cells okay so having done that so imagine you got sick you breathed in a virus maybe it was a cold it invaded some cells those cells started to make viral particles those particles got recognized by the adaptive immune system the immune system got very good at becoming specific and targeting those antigens the affinity for the antigens went up and then you eventually clear the infection because your system is good at recognizing it and then your system goes and it produces memory cells these memory cells remember the formula so that if they are triggered again they can immediately create a large army of cells that are very specifically targeted at that pathogen still right yeah yeah sure okay good um and then you point out that the uh helper t cells are actually involved in helping to trigger b cell immunity in the adaptive immune system having discovered the formula for uh for the particular pathogen yeah well this process that you were describing maturation and acquisition of memory is the help cell dependent it depends on the support the assistance of the helper cells great and so in the context of covid people will have heard a discussion about whether or not the infection with the virus or the vaccination triggers a robust b cell response they will we will be able to detect an antibody titer that is the degree of antibodies that we find a deeper question is how how well how much affinity do the antibodies have for the antigen in question which will vary based on whether or not we're talking about the variant of the virus that the vaccine was built to recognize or a new variant right so the affinity could drop but wouldn't drop to zero and then there's a question about whether or not the system that creates the antibodies which would create a short-term immunity has converted over into a system of memory that would allow long-term immunity to exist so we talk about the cellular immunity having been acquired and that is much harder to test for it's very easy to test for antibodies uh in the system so you get the vaccine your antibody titer goes up we can measure that with a simple blood test testing whether or not you have long-term immunity based in cells that have a correct memory is tougher but still possible am i right yeah but the b cells also do have memory right and in order to to to get that memory you have to boost uh you have to you need to boost an injection for the most of the vaccines so it's not just uh it's not just the t cells that have memory it's also the b cells and you need that memory also of the b cells in order to uh to recall your antibodies upon the re-exposure of course to to the virus or to the antigen so you have as well b cell memory as t cell memory great okay and um the so people can also now understand in some sense why some of these vaccines require two doses right so the vaccine is um entering your cells let's take one of the mrna vaccines as an example the mrna which encodes uh the spike protein is introduced it is taken up by cells and actually i'm a little unclear on why the lipid nanoparticles cause it to be taken up into cells given this is effectively like a synthetic virus that we introduce an mrna surrounded by lipid nanoparticles can you explain why it is taken up by the host cells in the lipid nanoparticle these lipid nano particles will simply enhance uh the uptake of the because you could say if you would have the mrna as such it would be very soluble and you know it could go anywhere whereas the lipid nanoparticle has a higher affinity i would say for the cell the cell membrane because of all kinds of interactions you could say hydrophobic interactions between the lipids and and the organic phase of the of the cell membrane so that will enhance the uptake of the uh of the mrna because of the particulate structure one and second because of the physical chemical nature of uh of this particle which is now a lipid nanoparticle and also the size uh dental sized particles are readily taken up into what we call you know uh well as well antigen presenting cells as normal cells for example it will it will it will promote and it will enhance the entry of the mrna in the in the target cell okay beautiful so i think what i've just heard you say is that um you have an aqueous environment that is to say a wet environment of the blood and the lymph they're primarily made of water the cells are surrounded by fat which is obviously not water soluble and by putting the mrna inside effectively a globule of fat nanoparticles the affinity for the cell these basically drives these mrnas into the cells which then transcribe them because one of the things that goes on inside of cells is that mrna is transcribed just to do the normal business of the cell itself okay great so what we've done so far is we've talked about the adaptive immunity system which through a process called clonal selection actually evolves to be able to target and eliminate or control an infection once acquired but this is not the full basis of our immunity to pathogens in the world we also have innate immunity that is to say immunity that does not require exposure in order to develop so can you describe the basis of innate immunity well i'm going to limit myself to the equivalent the the humor all so the antibody part and the cellular part of the innate immunity because that is really what is most important for this discussion so as you were pointing out you have the antibodies as you described being part of the innate immunity uh sorry a big part of the acquired immunity specifics are first of all they specifically recognize an antigen and they can also induce memory these b cells can have memory and therefore produce antibodies that will readily recognize the antigen upon the re-exposure so the equivalent in the innate immune in innate immunity are what we call natural antibodies those natural antibodies are produced by what we call an innate like b cell right this is a b cell that is already pre-programmed it's already present at birth right so these natural antibodies in contrast to the antibodies produced by the b cells of the acquired imbued system uh have no antigen specific specificity they can recognize multiple antigens and they are not recalled upon re-exposure so that is the humeral part of the innate immune system then the cellular part the cellular part is in contrast to the t cells we were talking about not able to recognize a specific antigen that is presented for example or on an infected cell but that the cells that uh of the innate immune cell of the native immune system we call them natural natural killer cells like you have the natural antibodies of the innate immune system you have the natural killer cells of the innate immune system they recognize in a non-specific way a kind of array of motifs on the surface of an infected or pathologically altered cell like a cancer cell for example they will recognize motifs a pattern of motifs so this is not very specific for an antigen but if for example a virus invades that cell and there are some proteins that are presented on the surface or some glycogens then these glycogens for example will build a pattern and these patterns will be recognized by the nk cells in case cells again have no memory but they can act very very fast like the natural antibodies they are already there they are pre-armed they are pre-pre-programmed so they act immediately this is really the first line of immune defense when a pathogen gets in fascinating okay so you have a system that reacts more or less to the symptoms at the cellular level of pathology the cells are behaving molecularly in an unusual way that triggers these natural killer cells and they don't need to learn any new tricks but they also are limited in their capacity because they are not specific so they can recognize the pathology and react but to specifically recognize the pathogen and its molecular consequences requires this acquired immunity all right now i hope we haven't antagonized people by leading them through that biology but i know from experience that listening to conversations about covid if you don't have this basic level you can't understand what's being said and why it might be true you have no it it doesn't uh it doesn't add up the complexity of this system is inherent to understanding uh how it works and what is reasonable to do in response so all right let us get into your argument about the hazard of our current vaccine regime and let me say you have made some very strong claims you have argued that in fact the vaccine campaign that we are currently engaged in is so dangerous that it should be halted and i will say i don't know if you're right i cannot i cannot determine based on what i understand if you're right but what i can say is that you are making sense right this is frightening in and of itself that your argument is completely coherent whether or not it is true this is at least a question that should be engaged by those who are making policy around this because the possibility of making our viral situation with respect to covid worse is present and you know we we are creating the hazard of the future that we will be confronting a year or two down the road by our actions now and so um were we to have reacted differently at the beginning of kovid we might not be in the situation we're in now were we to act differently now we will be in a different situation years down the road and so we are always sort of setting the stage of our next battle and it is in that context that we have to engage your argument and take it quite seriously so what in a nutshell is your argument for the hazard that we may be creating so my argument is first of all as i was always saying these vaccines are would be perfect to be used outside of a pandemic why i'm saying this because if you use them if you use vaccines before you get exposed to the virus well in this case it's a virus you can build a full-fledged immunity as you were pointing out this takes time most of the current vaccines even require two doses you have been pointing out about this this clonal expansion in the meantime you acquire memory you acquire higher affinity etc this is a process before you acquire the full-fledged immunity so if you have this full-fledged immunity and then you get exposed to the pathogen you literally have everything you need to fight off this pathogen right and and there is absolutely no problem and that's what i'm always what i have always been saying i'm not talking about maybe secondary uh effects or adverse events etc this is not my field of specialty other people can discuss this so i'm not talking about really the quality of the vaccines or adverse events but in principle this is a correct vaccine to be used outside of a pandemic so let me just pause you there let's say just hypothetically speaking let's say that the virus had emerged in wuhan and the world had limited its spread let's say that it was kept to eurasia and the rest of the world had not faced the virus then if we took one of these mrna vaccines for example and vaccinated the population so that 80 90 percent of the population was vaccinated before encountering the virus before the virus crossed any ocean for example then we would expect this to work very well sure and the hazard of it would be low even if it was true that it only produced let's say 80 percent uh immunity and even if it was true that people shed some people who were vaccinated but then became infected did shed some virus and occasionally infected other people is that fair to say that this would still be a reasonable yes a reasonable campaign yeah the only thing i would like to add rich just to be clear for the audience is that here we are talking about the original virus about the wild virus the original gohan virus right we are not yet talking about variants right under that assumption what you're saying is perfectly correct and fine because even if you don't prevent infection completely and you diminish only the viral load as long as the virus will have not will not have enough opportunity because the infectious pressure is so low to propagate it will it will die out so that is perfectly fine and and and so you can control it so this is the thing that i think is too subtle for most people to to get and hopefully we can help them see the difference the vaccine from the point of view of the patient the patient goes they get they you know go through whatever anxiety they have about needles and unknown hazards of vaccines and they get their shot that looks the same to people whether they're being vaccinated in the midst of a pandemic or in advance of a pandemic but from the point of view of the evolutionary landscape these two things are completely unrelated right introducing the vaccine when the the virus has already gotten a foothold and has started to diversify getting a vaccine is actually you know it's like showing up imagine that your nation was being invaded right and there's a question about how useful your rifle is when the ship you know some little boat with 12 people on it shows up on the shore your rifle might be very useful right if you show up with that same rifle against an army of 10 000 you're gonna get shot and you know you may actually be in a worse position because you'll give away you know you're shaking your finger especially if this happens before you can completely charge your rifle your arm is not fully charged and you are already under attack right already under attack so this is i mean in some sense this is uh this is very straightforward to me because i'm used to thinking in evolutionary terms right and so the idea of to me the virus looks very different even though the particles may be very similar to each other the virus looks very different when it has a huge number of individuals in which to engage in evolutionary experimentation versus a tiny number of individuals where the chances of it happening on anything useful are very small right once you've got the huge canvas the chances that the virus is going to learn new tricks are a hundred percent and in fact it's doing it and you know as i said at the top no surprise at all that us having botched the initial reaction to the virus which frankly in my opinion should have been much stronger right we should have had a much more intensive campaign to to control the spread of the virus early on and we might not be dealing with this you know half-assed long-term uh you know set of measures that are increasingly draconian and having all sorts of other effects a short intense uh control effort would have been more effective in part the reason that i say that is because it's just much easier to address you know if this was an invasive species and there are 10 individuals right finding them is very uh effective you could find them you can eliminate them you're done once the thing has covered the landscape it's a whole different puzzle even if the uh the individual uh critters aren't very different so all right we've got a difference between these vaccines and their utility in advance of a pandemic versus in the pandemic we are in the pandemic and now what do you see the hazard being of a mass vaccine campaign well so these vaccines will definitely induce an immune response that's what we have been explaining so what we know is that it takes time to develop an immune response so during that time your immune response is not optimal right it's not fully mature that is one thing the other thing is we are already dealing before we started the mass vaccination campaign before they got rolled out properly we had already variants so again the immune response that you are mounting when you have been vaccinated is suboptimal towards a variant that has a spike protein which is different from the spike protein in the vaccine so the vaccinal antibodies against the spike protein are suboptimal because the s-protein of the variant is not the same so we are when we when we are vaccinating people as i was saying you're you are going to war but your arm isn't charged yet you are already fully under attack and you still need to mount this antibody response and you are attacked by things that you have not learned to properly recognize so the immune response is suboptimal so now so this creates what we call an immune pressure a pressure it's suppressed it's definitely a pressure on the virus the the the virus isn't happy with with with his immune response but it is going to be able to adapt to that immune pressure why am i saying this i'm saying this because when you have whenever you have to adapt a virus or a microorganism but i'm talking about viruses to unfavorable conditions let's let's let's say you you would like to do this in the lab you have a virus and you would like it to adapt the virus to an unfavorable condition that unfavorable condition could be cultivating for example an influenza virus on eggs instead of on a cell culture or incubating your virus on a temperature that is not ideal for the cells to grow and for the virus to produce but it could also be the unfavorable condition could also be an immune pressure antibodies for example that are present so if you would like to do this in the lab you would like to adapt a virus to unfavorable conditions what you would do is you would take that virus and you would put it on a cell line in the presence of those unfavorable conditions so in this in this case it would be a optimal antibody dose let's say but then that is not sufficient because of course you have always and that is the argument of many people yeah you have all the time variants and mutations etc of course but now you will select certain mutations that are capable of dealing with this unfavorable condition right so you will select those variants but that is not sufficient because it's not because you have done this selection one single time that this variant is now going to become dominant in the population it will still have a very low we call this a viral title a very low concentration but now if you take that virus or you know the all these viruses and you're now going to inoculate this on another cell culture under the very same conditions of immune pressure and then you do it again and again and again then ultimately this mutant will adapt to these unfavorable conditions and it will have a competitive advantage compared to the original viruses and that is how you know in the course of time this population of these mutants that originally were only presently very low concentration will now become predominant so now you trans uh you extrapolate this to two people what you're gonna do in order to be able to adapt to adapt a viral mutant you would need to passage a virus from one person to the other but in order for that virus to be able to adapt it would be important that these people are under the same immune pressure also experiencing a situation of suboptimal immune response and what i'm saying is that if you're already having variants before you start your vaccination campaign and then you're immunizing in the heat of the pandemic where while the immune response is built up you're already under attack many many people of course in such situations are going to be to be experiencing a suboptimal immune response and hence this will enable mutants that occasionally emerge of course to adapt and to gain a competitive advantage and to become dominant in that population and then of course we have a problem because this is what we call selective selective immune escape you select it and you enable the virus to adapt to that situation so it becomes predominant and that is what we are seeing right now as soon as you have an infectious variant popping up guess what i mean it takes like a few weeks or it becomes predominant in in the population okay so let us build on the analogy of uh of war to to see your argument more clearly we send soldiers to war we send them to boot camp first okay boot camp is like the vaccine right we expose them to something that is war like without there being an actual enemy so that the soldiers can learn to fight that enemy in a comparatively safe context before they face the actual enemy if you send your soldiers to the front before you send them to boot camp not only will they be vulnerable but they will end up training the enemy on how to exploit their weaknesses right you want to eliminate the weaknesses first and so in effect what you are saying is that by deploying this vaccine in the context of an epidemic already underway we are effectively sending soldiers to the front and we are yes it is true that the soldiers will learn to fight on the front to the extent that they can survive but they will also teach the enemy to fight even better so you are entering an arms race at a disadvantage rather than an advantage now if we extend the metaphor a little bit let's imagine so the whole system functions based on the ability to recognize the enemy and see it very clearly right you could imagine on the battlefield this would make sense too to the extent that some enemies are very good at camouflaging themselves those enemies tend to persist to the extent that some enemies are obvious they tend not to persist because they get shot so imagine that we did some trick with the camouflage that the soldiers on the front wore where those that persisted the longest their camouflage spread itself and those that died early their camouflage went extinct right so over time the camouflage would get better and better by exerting this pressure you are arguing and i think there's no question that this is accurate we are effectively running what would in the laboratory be called a serial passage experiment we are creating those exact conditions in a context where there's a huge landscape of virus already adapting to the inability of the immune system to see certain things and i would add one thing to your description so far which is that the nature of these vaccines part of the magic of them the ability to generate them so quickly has to do with how utterly narrowly focused they are instead of doing something traditional like taking a virus and inactivating it and introducing the whole virus into the body so the body sees the whole thing right we've narrowed the focus down to the spike protein itself and not only that we've narrowed it down to the spike protein of the original virus and this has created a very concentrated pressure which means that we're trying to inform the immune system of exactly what the enemy looks like and we've honed in on one characteristic and that means that if the virus can change that one characteristic then suddenly it becomes invisible and so we are effectively setting ourselves up for an evolutionary failure by concentrating our response and introducing it on the front rather than in advance of the encounter and you know again i don't know that your argument is right but i can say it's very clearly plausible and the hazard is potentially immense so the thing i would like to to add to this brett which is a very objective argument we absolutely need because otherwise we not not the both of us but the community is going to turn around in circles and of course i can understand that the resistance is enormous but we absolutely need criteria that we agree upon that would that would uh enable us to distinguish whether human intervention whether this is mass vaccination or the mass prevention if infection prevention measures are both combined in use in uniscape so what would be the criteria that would be generally acknowledged and accepted would this be for example dramatic increase of more infectious variants for example would this be resistance to the vaccines ultimately would this be that we have more and more younger age groups that become infected so there is a number of criteria that could be uh defined and that according to my humble opinion clearly illustrates that there is a huge impact of human intervention on the way the virus evolves and on the collective the collective immune response of the population and the dynamics thereof but as long as we don't agree on upon this criteria my fear is that mass vaccination will continue no matter what till everybody gets vaccinated it's no longer a question of immune defense building an immune defense it becomes a question of vaccinating everybody which is not the same certainly not within the context of this complex phenomenon the pandemic combined with human intervention yes so i i like what you're saying very much about the criteria i have a concern or two some of the criteria are likely to occur either way so for example let's just take one you talk about the potential for the increasing vulnerability of the young and we have not yet described why it is that the young might be anomalously immune to covid which they seem to be we'll come back to that but one thing that is certainly true is that the young to the extent that they do not seem to come down with covid and when they get it don't seem to have very severe disease in general represent an opportunity for any variant that can figure out how to bypass effectively what must be their innate immunity that is preventing the disease so that opportunity exists whether we vaccinate or or we don't and it is in fact one of the reasons you know the argument that i would make for a very intensive campaign of behavior modification to control the virus which you know this the ship has sailed but we should very early on have treated this much more carefully because now that it is out in the world in such large numbers there is nothing to stop it from discovering a pathway to infect the young right it is always hovering at the door and it may eventually figure out how to how to accomplish that just as it may eventually figure out how to spread outdoors something that it does not seem to do well yet but is an opportunity you know to the extent that some of us are using the outdoor environment uh effectively to engage in social behavior because the environment itself protects us that's an opportunity if a virus can figure out how to endure uv light or whatever else it's doing so how many of your criteria will separate the natural evolution of the virus just by virtue of the fact that we have an uncontrolled pandemic from the evolution of the virus driven by a targeted broad-scale vaccine campaign well that is exactly what the criteria should be based upon and i guess the only comparator we have unfortunately is almost like the flu pandemic 1918. why i'm saying this because this was clearly a pandemic of a respiratory virus where there was no human intervention infection prevention measures were very very very limited it was war on top so you had crowding you had very bad hygiene genie conditions etc and there was no vaccine so there first of all what we have seen we have seen no variants the whole thing happened within one year and and people have been sampling uh or analyzing autopsy samples to see whether it was any variation in the in this range that you know during this pandemic appeared in several different parts of of the world and it was very homologous so that is one thing now so that is that is very important because this is a high infectious pressure a natural pandemic no human intervention so if you imagine now that we have like every second or third week we have a new uh infectious variant appearing and not only is this a more infectious variant it's very often also much more infectious like in the brazilian compared to the uk etc and it all appears very rapidly it's not like during evolution of course you know these things appear and if they have a competitive advantage they will replace the original strain now all this is happening multiple variants within a short period of time with dramatically increased infectivity and this in parallel with with the mass vaccination campaign i mean as i was saying you have the same pandemic well it was flu of course nothing happens in in terms of variance there were a few mutations but here the mutations are very clearly targeted they are selected at domains that enhance the infectivity files so they are not like random they are really selected towards parts of the of the spy protein that are responsible for effectivity so i mean there is something there right oh yes we need to agree upon this same same for example if you look if you imagine now the the the situation in chile for example okay so you are vaccinating you're vaccinating on a background of a variant that had just appeared right i mean the brazilian the brazilian variant so this brazilian variant is of course pretty much different the s protein from the s-protein of the vaccine if you now start vaccinating people of course this variant that just emerged is going to have a competitive advantage because it's more infectious and what you want to do with your antibodies is to prevent infectivity so now all of a sudden you see how this variant is exploding and you see the infectious rates that are dramatically increasing so all of a sudden you have a much higher infectivity rate right and so there is other criteria as well that we could uh the mutations are of course studied and we see more and more that they are also now converging towards domains that are targeted by the vaccinal antibodies so if you take all these things together we we should be able compared as you pointed out correctly to a natural pandemic to observations that are really high very very strange and that according to my humble opinion could be correlated with at least i would say human intervention right in this pandemic so uh if i can make that a little bit simpler what you're saying is a something that surprised me the first time i heard you say it which is that in the um the 1918 pandemic there was apparently there were no widespread variants and we know this from the comparison of samples taken during autopsy so that shocks me i think what it suggests is that the evolutionary experimentation took place before the pandemic that effectively the virus got very effective at uh transmitting in some small population that wasn't captured in the autopsy samples maybe it wasn't even recognized as a unique disease and that by the time it circulated around the globe it was already highly effective and that in this case we have well a i would say the anomalous fact of this virus apparently having emerged in the human population already highly effective we have no evidence for that experimental evolutionary period at the beginning which is one of the reasons that many of us believe the laboratory origins hypothesis is probably correct but in the context of this vaccine campaign what you're arguing is that we are seeing exactly the pattern of change that you would predict if we were creating this inadvertent serial passage experiment in the human population we are putting pressure on the spike protein in this narrow way we are seeing change in the spike protein and in exactly the domains that would cause immune escape and that you know uh the let's put it this way i think the um presumption would have to be that we are driving that change or at least accelerating that change by virtue of the very intense and very narrow evolutionary pressure that we are applying to the virus well frankly speaking brett if you would ask me set up an experiment where you adapt a variant to immune pressure but do it in humans or do you do it in a mammalian population what would you do you would of course first of all make sure you have a high viral load you would make sure that as many people as possible are in the same situation of a suboptimal immune in your response and i mean if you have already if you can already start with variance where the match is already suboptimal then it's even better right so that is exactly what you would do that is exactly what you would do to adapt and what what is worrisome right is the the kinetics of all these this is all going very very fast right i mean the appearance the emergence of all these variants and i i mean as i was saying there is probably a whole series of variants that have not been identified yet then and but it's not like any variance many of these variants are selected towards for example a higher higher infectivity and when we come now more and more with antibodies etc we see already that some of these mutations are uh abolishing the effect of certain antibodies within within the polyclonal serum of the vaccinal antibodies so it is very well directed it is fast it is pretty huge because i mean as i was saying if there is a a mutation just by an antigenic uh drift for example and that mutation happens to be a little bit more infectious than the original strain then in the course of time it will take over but this will be pretty slow right evolutionary speaking here these things are like accelerated enhanced and it's difficult to deny that this is not really in parallel with with with the mass vaccination campaigns or with with human intervention because as i was saying during the the flu pandemic nothing was seen and you could argue as well people must have mounted uh antibody responses right during the flu pandemic i mean it was not like there was no immune response so um you have said if you were going to set up an experiment to induce the effectively gain of function here it would look more or less like this campaign i would say evolutionarily we can describe this very simply that effectively we have given the virus a gentle evolutionary evolutionary slope for which it can discover high infectivity and escape from immune surveillance so that's all um that's all quite frightening that not only does the pattern in the wild seem to match the fears of somebody uh who is well positioned to say here's what you would expect to see if my hypothesis is correct about um about immune escape so that that raises a number of different questions i mean it raises the question about what should we be doing vaccine wise well brett i i'm a little bit hesitating if for a second we should come back to the innate immune response oh and the connection to the young because because i mean you could say well if there is a mute escape worst case scenario is that the vaccine won't work anymore and that is then the other argument we will produce new vaccines right but my main argument really that is my key argument is that even though the antibodies may no longer neutralize the virus they will still be able to bind to the spy protein and all this is is signs because people have been showing that for example antibodies against the common cold virus right they do not neutralize or cross neutralize uh cov19 for example or sars cov2 but they do bind they do bind to this protein but they do not neutralize it so if antibodies are no longer completely functional in the sense that they can neutralize the virus they can still bind bind to the s protein and there comes my big argument and therefore we need to come back to these natural antibodies by binding to the s protein these antigens specific antibodies are capable of out competing natural antibodies and that is that is the disaster because as we were saying at the beginning the natural antibodies they are not antigen specific they have the capacity to broadly neutralize not only all kinds of covid variants but even all types of corona viruses and maybe you want to jump in at this point to to make it a little bit clearer too sure yeah this is such a fascinating point but uh what we have is the possibility of antibodies that are ineffective at preventing the spike protein from binding the receptor and therefore ineffective at preventing infection that would nonetheless attach themselves electromagnetically they would just simply stick to the spike protein and they would block the innate immunity that we all have some degree of and that young people appear to have a great deal of and therefore take the immunity that works best and neutralize it without creating a new immunity that would take its place that's um you know again that's a it's a wild argument but i see nothing wrong with it logically logically speaking this makes a great deal of sense well you know brett i i'm going to be very open with you the the field of natural antibodies is not well recognized or known in the field of vaccinology it is well known by immunologists frankly speaking there are there is dozens of papers on these natural antibodies and how fascinating they are as i was saying they are a little bit you know in parallel to the nk cells they recognize patterns they recognize patterns of antigens but um this field is is so neglected so underestimated i i'm sure that many vaccinologists don't even really understand what natural antibodies are about and what they can do because there is a lot of documentation on this and there is even documentation i will tell you i will tell you the nicest documentation is you know about the blood groups right ado etc so these blood groups these are glycosylated structures right glycans sugars for the people who don't understand what glycans are and so for example if you have uh if your blood group group is o for example you will have antibodies natural antibodies all documented all in papers in publications you will have natural antibodies against for example the blood group a blood group a is a sugar and acet acetyl uh galactosamine right and so now interestingly enough if the virus is now grown in a cell in a mammalian cell in a target cell that belongs to somebody who has blood group a right then as the virus is budding when the virus is leaving it's released from the cell membrane it has an envelope of course that envelope because it's partly you know part of the membrane of the target cell it will also have this blood group a antigen and when such a virus is encountered by somebody who has blood group o and who has natural antibodies against blood group a this will the virus will be destroyed and this has been proven not for sarsko v2 but for sarsko with one that these natural antibodies will prevent the virus and the s antigen from interacting with the ac2 receptors right i mean it's not like there is no evidence there is no points also the binding forces between the multimeric natural antibodies and the specific specific antibodies are completely different you know the the type of chemical bonds the one is the multivalent interaction which is much weaker than the specific binding for example i mean there is many many things documented there is also very well documented that natural antibodies can prevent influenza infection against a whole range of variants all this is in the literature so it's not like i'm the crazy guy just inventing some stuff and making putting uh pieces of a puzzle that doesn't exist in reality together to make a fancy story right it is it is really it is really highly likely that if you have a specific antibodies binding but not neutralizing your virus that they can prevent the natural antibodies from from acting on that virus and that is as you pointed out your specific antibodies are no longer functional and you have no substitute for it because you put your natural antibodies out of business so this potentially puts the young at risk who are largely protected because it is presumably their innate immunity that is functioning to keep them safe so i want to clarify a little bit in here a it is uh a very familiar pattern that medicine and medical science will ignore the parts of the system that work well without intervention in other words the idea that we are much more familiar with adaptive acquired immunity and just so happens that there are lots of interventions that we deploy that depend on it and that we are largely ignorant of this alternative kind of immunity because effectively it just simply functions uh without largely our awareness of it um is that's a classic pattern and the uh the fact so members of my audience will remember when heather and i started doing our live streams about kovid we were struck many times at the accumulating evidence not unlike for other pathogens but there's a piece of evidence that suggests that whether or not you get sick is heavily dosage dependent that effectively even if you are in a room with an infected person and you are there very briefly that you don't tend to pick up the virus but if you talked if you were there for five minutes you effectively fill some kind of bucket and that once that bucket overflows you're likely to get the virus so on the one hand this creates a whole landscape of advice that we can give about how to behave to reduce your risk like opening windows and being in large volume environments etc but effectively that piece of evidence implies the innate immunity system that basically you have a system that is capable of recognizing in a not very specific way a wide range of particles and it can deal with them until it is overwhelmed that is to say when you have just simply too many viral particles so that your entire innate immunity that is capable of dealing with this virus is occupied then that leaves some of these viral particles uh unhindered yeah right yeah sorry go ahead go ahead no so all i'm saying is that it's interesting we have seen patterns here that are suggestive of the importance of innate immunity in the covet 19 story in a way that you know is underappreciated and the idea that now we're talking about uh rendering that immune system the innate immune system ineffective uh at the same time we are failing to create proper immunity in the adaptive immune system that is you know it's a perfect storm at some level right we're taking the thing that works and upending it without creating the thing that would replace it and uh it does seem a very frightening prospect so the the the errors the error comes from the fact that as i was saying normally adaptive immunity is a fantastic thing it's a fantastic thing because it's very quick it's very very specific it's it's really up to target but for example if you have let's say you you would have adaptive immunity let's say against influenza right and all of a sudden bread all of a sudden you have a dramatic change in the antigen we call this an antigenic shift right then the adaptive immunity will not work anymore right but the innate immunity will still work and many many people have never been vaccinated you know they will simply deal with influenza no problem so this adaptive part that has now been subverted so to say by the virus by the antigenic shift you will have an outbreak of course right and what is happening here with the immune escape is that we are also creating an antigenic shift but it's not static it's dynamic the more we vaccinate the more it's going to change so we can never solve this normally if you have an antigen you will have an outbreak and then again the the collective immunity of the population can can can deal with this but here we are always changing the entity so the adaptive immunity cannot cope cannot deal with this and that is why here in a kind of exceptional situation the innate immunity becomes so important when people talk about herd immunity i'm always saying the real hurt immunity that we have here is innate immunity because if you have this infection 80 percent of the population in some populations depending on age and the demographics even 85 percent of the population eliminates the virus and doesn't have any symptoms isn't that isn't that fantastic herd immunity this is due to innate immunity we know in the elderly the innate immunity is weakened and due to aging and these are the guys who first get get severe disease so the whole immunity is here due to innate immunity right and that is the complete misunderstanding yep now this uh tracks perfectly with uh what i understand of the system and it does raise the specter that our intervention is actually not only going to become ineffective but render things far worse than they are that in fact we you know we take the immunity of the young to covet 19 as somehow god-given and permanent and it is anything but it is dependent on a system we know not enough about and that system is capable of being disrupted by a ham-fisted intervention in the adaptive immunity system that uh strikes me as all too plausible and i would actually point out uh it occurred to me when you were speaking earlier that there are lots of familiar examples where the same kind of overly simplistic logic has failed us for exactly the same reason so people who have been prescribed an antibiotic by a doctor for an infection know full well this counterintuitive advice that even after you've gotten better you should finish the course of antibiotics and most people know why you were advised this and that's because you will surely feel better before you've completely eliminated the pathogen and if you withdraw the antibiotic before you are done with the course what you have then done is trained the remaining members of this population to you know you have selected for those members of the population of the bacterium or the fungus that were most resistant to the bacteria uh you have selected four of those and then if you withdraw the uh the antibiotic then that population uh regenerates and what you've done is you've induced resistance and so we now know that we have a population level problem with induced resistance and we've seen the same thing with pesticides where we think oh this pesticide is going to eliminate malaria or it's going to eliminate this pest from the crop but effectively we've entered an arms race we're incapable of winning and made things worse in many cases so people say uh yeah i know that many people i think what i'm saying is is crazy because it has never happened before but never ever in the whole history of mankind have we been doing anything like this we massively intervene in this pandemic you know infection prevention measures worldwide and pretty stringent and then on top of this mass vaccination in the midst of the pandemic we have never ever been doing a thing like this and then saying what you're saying doesn't make sense because it has never happened before and i'm saying well the situation we have never generated we have never created a situation like this right it's it's novel either way all right so i would like to talk a little bit more about if you are correct about the hazard here uh my guess i think as you have already said is that there's no stopping this campaign that is in some sense politically inconceivable that people would change course even if it made perfect sense for them to do so and so the criteria you suggest might tell us that uh your model is correct um standard hypothetical deductive science you've put out a hypothesis here are the characteristics that you would expect to indicate that it's right if it turns out it's right what do we do next do you have a sense well do you mean in terms of to remedy the situation uh [Music] i mean my point is uh you know the best thing that can happen to somebody is to to to be sero-negative right because if you're set or negative certainly certainly if you are in good health and your sero-negative you have good uh natural antibodies again this is no fantasy there are studies scientific studies where even natural antibodies are defined or are used as a benchmark for good health right so if you're seronegative you you don't suffer from any antibodies that could block your natural antibodies and you can be fully exposed i mean of course the problem is gonna be the more you vaccinate people the more people are gonna gonna be sitting on long lift on long-lived antibodies right and even if those antibodies decline and they get re-exposed to the virus i mean these antibodies will be immediately recalled you were pointing out you were educating people on what is memory and how antibodies get recalled upon re-exposure right so then you have of course uh well being zero negative is not going to be easy and i tell you why because if we if we continue to breed these highly infectious variants the likelihood for somebody who is seronegative to become infected is is gonna become higher and higher of course so at the end of the day you can turn it the way you want for me there is only one solution at this point in time maybe not at the beginning where there was a wild uh just the wild say but at this point in time there is no other solution but better intervene and for me the the the only intervention that makes sense is really to eradicate those uh those variance rings because nobody is telling us how we are ever gonna get rid of those right uh hurt immunity well i mean that's not going to happen obviously because you know we have it's not going to happen because people will have been exposed to different variants and therefore it's you know it's a family of viruses yeah you know not uh not a single but remember this was the final target this was the end game of the vaccination of the mass vaccination is to have hurt immunity right sure so you could you could of course also and i'm not the expert but let's assume an antiviral would work and this antiviral could even be things like ivory meccan you you don't hear me advocating for ivanka but let's assume some kind of antiviral drug would work you could you could imagine to treat also people with with this antiviral but doing this in a prophylactic way you're going to have the same problem as with antibiotics that some people you know will have low concentration be confronted with the virus and it will induce resistance i think uh at the end so you can use this for early treatment that that i think is very very useful but to get rid really of all these variants and to reduce the infectivity and control the whole thing i really see no other way but to have a vaccine that induces you can maybe explain this to the audience sterilizing immunity which is really to completely kill the virus no matter no no no matter what the antigenic constellation is of the virus but it is a variant so maybe i don't know well enough to explain it to the audience i'd like to understand better i certainly see that there is a hazard a vaccine is not a vaccine right a vaccine is a very general technology and in this case the narrow targeting of the vaccine seems to me it was a blessing in the sense that it allowed the vaccine to be generated very quickly but it's a curse in the sense that it informs the immune system only about the one characteristic and that if we were to use something like a an inactivated virus that the immune system could discover various antigens and therefore the evolution of a single antigen would not create the kind of escape that we're seeing but you tell me whether that adds up no no it doesn't i think it's a very logical reasoning but unfortunately uh it does not apply the reason is if you target the s protein what what most of these vaccines do you prevent you can prevent the virus from entering into the cell so that is basically that is that is sufficient if you know um the problem is if you well let me put it the other way around instead of an inactivated virus i think that might make sense because by the way that is the way we eradicated like uh smallpox that's also the uh well the biggest rights in the eradication of polio polio is not fully eradicated but almost but the biggest rights we have made with the oral polio vaccine which was also a life attenuated vaccine and there of course you induce innate immune responses as well as of course adaptive immunity etc and that would be i think in my humble opinion much more efficient but of course it would not be uh a solution for people who have already been vaccinated because as i was saying if you re-vaccinate them with the oral polio with the let's say an attenuated corona virus you're gonna recall their original antibodies first because those have memory and there is something like we call this antigenic sin if you are re-challenged with an antigen that is similar to the one to which you got originally primed then your original antibodies are going to be recalled and those are not going to match with with the variance so you you are gonna even promote again immune escape if you re-vaccinate people who have previously been vaccinated with with the current vaccines but it may help for those who are negative so attenuated you're arguing so the attenuated virus is one that functions to transmit between cells uh that function to transmit well it's it's live attenuate so it's going to be uh secretly excreted right to some extent yeah some people will say it was also the problem with with oral polio that in at the end of the day you put this in the environment it gets again in people it can recombine etc but still as we have seen with oropolio it has dramatically dramatically reduced viral loads but my understanding is because of this antigenic sin that you could not use it in people who have already been pre-primed with with the current vaccine right so this is this is yet another argument against the current regime is that the current vaccine regime actually eliminates what might be our best weapon going forward because it will induce a kind of immunity that will react to uh this alternative type of vaccine this breath is something people need to understand in contrast to a drug you have a drug when that gets eliminated from your blood or you know you have the the the half time of the you need the minimum concentration for the drug to be active if you're below that concentration it doesn't work anymore it's eliminated and you're fine it's done you know there is no there is no consequence so to say a vaccine is something that educates your immune system for god's sake for the rest of your life right so that is not a simple thing that is something which has serious consequences i mean we were talking about the memory what is memory well memory means that if you see this antiquation again or something alike your antibodies your original immune response will be recalled right yes so that is a serious thing i i've been trying to to call my audience's attention to this that we are inherently intervening not just in a complex system right complex systems are tough enough but you're you're intervening in a complex system within a complex system within a complex system right the narrowest one being the immune system which you are educating the immune system existing inside the body which is itself an adaptive system and then it exists inside a population and so all of these things interact and what they do is they mean that any action that you take because it sounds like the right thing to do risks creating a cascade of consequences you did not anticipate this being one such consequence that there is a tool that would take longer to develop that you will take off the table to the extent that you have educated people's immune system such that effectively you've warned them about a pathogen your next vaccine might be attenuated and effectively the immune system would have the equivalent of post-traumatic stress disorder where it would react to the attenuated vaccine which is potentially life-saving it would react to it as if it were a pathogen and it would prevent the effectiveness is that what you're saying well it will recall your original antibodies and these are the s antibodies uh of the current vaccines right which uh which we know uh you know they uh they they don't do the job essentially let's assume you you make this vaccine and you start vaccinating with it in half half a year from now in the meantime you will have further evolution of course of your variance so they will even be more different the s-protein from the one that was originally in the vaccine so now when you recall the original antibodies in one in half a year from now yeah for sure they will match much less with with with the s protein of the variants that will be circulating in half a year from now right so it's so it's further driving immune escape basically so for me and uh yeah i i start uh you know to hate to say this because people think that i'm selling my business or whatever but asymptomatic people asymptomatic people they clear the virus thanks to natural antibodies in combination with nk cells again this is science there's publications or very compelling very very compelling show that um the combination of the natural antibodies the natural antibodies so to say as you were saying they evacuate part of the virus so that you know the concentration so to say diminishes and and so that the the chances that you're going to get severe disease or are diminished so they evacuate part of the virus and they bring it they they into the nk cell pathway so that the virus can be destroyed by the nk cells and but in case else normally that's how we started the discussion have no memory so now there are tricks and we know that to some extent nk cells can acquire memory it has not been proven for corona but i think this is really a pathway to work on because if we know uh the motifs that the nk cells recognize we can use them in a vaccine and of course we need to do something about the memory but i'm always giving the example maybe you have heard about the streptococcus vaccines the polysaccharide vaccines against pneumonia for example or type is media etc that you you you get you know during childhood normally these antigens polysaccharide sugars they induce antibodies but without memory so that's not good so what we have been doing we have been making a conjugate vaccine and we have taken the polysaccharides and we have conjugated them to a t helper protein a t helper protein and now with this synthetic construct this is not a natural construct this is something man-made i think the biggest invention ever in vaccinology we have now managed to induce an immune response that not only recognizes the polysaccharides but that also has memory thanks to this conjugate so in other words even though natural immune responses do not have memory we can educate the immune system in a way that it can get you know acquire memory against this particular patterns i would say so that's fascinating yeah that because this is non-antigen specific so that means that cannot be immune escape right escape against what selection of what it's it's non-antigen it's ant yeah antigen non-specific that's the right way to say all right uh that's very interesting i did not know about that construct but the idea of creating basically hacking the system to trigger memory in a case where memory would not ordinarily be developed is that's fascinating so um i had a thought here likely wrong but when triple drug cocktails emerged against hiv i had this moment where i had the sense that it was obvious that we should have done something like this from the beginning because effectively by taking three different drugs and challenging the virus simultaneously with them we eliminate the pathway by which we would train it against whatever our best drug was because you sort of push it in three directions at once and it can't it can't adapt so evolutionarily speaking i thought this was straightforward that something like this would work it doesn't have to be three but pushing it in more directions than it can go makes sense so by analogy um if you were to uh set up conditions where you know some sort of competition where somebody had to uh you know increase their capacity to high jump at the same time they uh increased the amount of weight they could lift and uh conserved the maximum number of calories all those things push in different directions so the point is there's no way to game any of these systems you have to just sort of compromise which makes you low quality at all of them so i'm wondering if there's not a vaccine style solution here that involves uh instead of pushing the virus in one direction and creating the immune escape pathway that you describe is there not some way of formulating a challenge that pushes it in simultaneous mutually exclusive directions so that it cannot move well of course i've been torturing my brain you know for like many years not because of this corona thing but as as you can imagine we could have other pandemics as well to which we are not prepared at all so in other sense what has been the focus in fact of my attention of my rich research in the last eight years has been universal vaccines and universal doesn't mean one vaccine for all kinds of diseases no it means one vaccine for a number of like for example natural antibodies as i was saying or nk cells recognize a pattern of motifs that may be shared by several different pathogens when they infect cells right it's like a cancer cell at the very beginning the first alteration of the cancer cell no matter what cancer it is it's an alteration of self that's the kind of common denominator so it's a pattern that is shared among several different pathogens or pathogenic agents and so how can you how can you make such vaccines this is very challenging but frankly speaking to cut a very long story short that is why i started to concentrate on nk cell based vaccines because the innate as we were saying the innate immune cells but we need to provide them with memory of course or in fact the only cells that have this capacity to recognize you know a wide array of several different changes on the surface of the cell and another important thing is at a very very early stage of infection that's a very important thing because we were talking about the t cells in the cytolytic t cells we know when people get a disease for example severe disease and then they cure it out it's to a large extent thanks to cytotoxic t cells but they come way too late what we need is the cell that the virus gets into the cell there is an alteration on the membrane before even you have the progeny of the virus right before you have you know uh uh replication uh and and and production of new virus particles so at the very beginning you have an alteration of the cell of the cell membrane at a very early stage that's where you need to kill this cell and i i'm not aware and and i don't don't think it exists that you could use multiple multiple immune interventions at the same time combine them to cut let's say several different pathways for the virus to to generate a progeny and to propagate because as soon brett as soon as you come with several different uh immunogenic uh agents you will have competition as well right you will have competition one will be more dominant than the other and will will take advantage of the immune system and and use its full capacity and other immunogens you know they they will barely generate any new response because they are not dominant right so there is one thing that i've learned in immunology that does not apply which is the more the better that doesn't apply to immunity right the more debate that does apply to drugs very often it does not apply to immunology people always think oh wow this vaccine doesn't work we give double dose or we we we give another dose after three weeks and then one month and etc so the more the more the better that's not that's that doesn't work in immunology that doesn't work in vaccinology it's a message that you convey to the immune system yes for for multiple reasons it doesn't work so to the extent that you have informed your immune system about a particular challenge it's informed right informing it sending it you know a thousand emails that share the same piece of information doesn't inform it better then there's also the problem of uh autoimmunity and leukemia right so the point is it's not just a question of the information which uh the value of which a single email will do or a single vaccine that is effective at creating memory will do but there's also the problem that this system is very tightly managed for health and that at some level i'm pretty sure we don't know what the result of continuing to trigger it in various ways is and you know uh unregulated production of uh b cells for example uh would be a known type of tumor it's uh uh would be leukemia right and uh autoimmunity would be the reaction of the immune system to uh things that you yourself make and so the point is messing with this system when you don't know what you're doing carries all kinds of potential hazards and we have to be very careful with it and unfortunately i think the political environment in which we find ourselves makes it very hard to behave rationally that there is a demand on people who are um in a position to govern that they do something and the problem is very few appreciate just how delicate this system is and how marvelously it's working on their behalf already i mean yes covet is frightening but the degree to which most of us have not gotten it is uh owing to the effectiveness of the system uh before you make any intervention at all yeah yeah the immune system is extremely sophisticated and for example i posted on my website a number of maybe 15 maybe 20 15 let's say questions that are really fundamental questions things we don't understand uh you know in the pathobiology of of covet 19 and a number of questions surrounding of course the the the immunology and the immune defense and i think if you cannot answer to this fundamental questions i mean it becomes very very tricky to intervene in the immune system and certainly certainly if you intervene at a very very large scale knowing that the message we were talking about will stay with you for the rest of your life right so that is something really i um yeah i i think there we should have done a much much better homework because massive intervention in in something which is so well tuned so so sophisticated uh either you have a fantastic effect or uh you know if you do this on a massive scale or it's uh it's all but good and uh that is that is really my fear right now with uh what is happening and the terrain which seemingly we we will not be able to stop anymore yes uh i think in some sense to continue with the military analogy this is a live fire exercise in which we're all in unfortunately that's an experience yes it's an experiment and a very poorly uh a very poorly controlled one which is uh frightening all right where can people find you well people can find me uh based on my website uh because unfortunately although i try to distribute you know scientific information and only scientific information it gets increasingly blocked on all kinds of channels and media so um my my website is uh gear vandenbosch and then um dot org org okay gert vandenbusch.org i know that you're also on twitter and that your website can be found through your twitter bio i will say to the extent that people that platforms are taking down the material that you're putting up this is madness no i know right this is madness you are a domain expert you are clearly motivated by concern what you're saying is whether or not it is correct it is perfectly rational it is highly logical and can be interpreted by anyone who has uh the scientific training enough to follow such an argument that the idea that you are somehow a hazard um by virtue of engaging in very serious questions on which a great deal of human well-being rests is preposterous these these platforms are in no position to evaluate what you're saying and that means we have to be able to discuss it uh in public well that is what i'm calling for since many many weeks because the the the way the discussion is conducted right now is that uh well some fact checkers reach out to some experts and then you have some one-liners in their report some one-liners that so to say contradict what i'm saying and then the fact-checker confronts me with this kind of uh you know contradictory statements so to say that is not a discussion and that is and i i'm asking all the time you know for these experts to to to to start a debate right uh like we are like we are discussing then things can be clarified and uh you know arguments can and and we could i would love to see a consensus on what are the what is going to be the the criteria that we all agree upon to say whether or not human intervention is driving this this is driving immune escape right because if there is really immune escape driven by human intervention in the way we have been discussing then i think everyone will agree that this is not a good thing this is really very problematic but if we don't have criteria and if we don't agree upon i mean the only thing will be vaccinate everybody right till not everybody is unless everybody's vaccinated it's not over right and and that cannot be according to my interpretation no and the pressure to vaccinate everybody is incredible the number of uh young people that i hear are being vaccinated is preposterous in light of the fact that there's really almost no reason to do it um even even if the vaccine is as safe and good as it's being portrayed it uh the fact is young people are already immune and there's no reason to inter intervene in the well the only caveat that is this was certainly the case when the wild strain came in and and i told my kids you know uh okay if you have if if you're obliged to because you know you have to wear a mask in the store for example you have to do this but don't do it when you are with friends etc and they are not they were not participating in mass gathering gatherings anyway but now the problem now is with this highly infectious variance the likelihood is increasing that well this is something we didn't discuss but it's important to understand when you are an asymptomatic uh asymptomatically infected so you got infected with the virus without developing symptoms during a short period in time you will be developing antibodies right these are antibodies that are not very mature and i'm not saying in all asymptomatically infected people but in a fair extent a fair number of asymptomatically infected people they will develop antibodies that are not fully mature and that are short-lived so as we as we discussed these antibodies will be able to bind to this protein not neutralize it but out complete your innate immune response so now with the highly infectious variant circulating the likelihood that as a young guy or lady you get a hit by the virus during the time where you are sitting on your immature antibodies becomes increasingly higher right and that is how we now also see how younger age groups without underlying diseases people in perfect health get severe covet right so you see these are criteria for me that are really important to analyze and to further discuss and to agree upon if that is not done and the only criterion is we go until everybody gets vaccinated young or old no matter what no matter what you know whether they are in good health or or whatever whether they are serum positive or seronegative i mean then it's it's yeah it's it's really a war situation right yeah well that's that's very frightening all right well this has been a fascinating discussion um i look forward to hearing how this develops and i do hope that people i i know people are taking your argument seriously privately i think there's a lack of courage in especially in and around academia where people won't necessarily say what they understand because they're afraid of consequences and in this case the consequences for humanity are so immense that i think uh it is incumbent on people to um to at least point out that this is an argument that needs to be taken very seriously well there are top experts much more famous than i am who i know and who write me that you know i'm right but if you're really a top expert of course you are working in some of these communities that are now or you know deeply involved in in driving these vaccination campaigns so unfortunately these people cannot speak up and i i think it's it's really given what is at stake it is yeah i for me it's a moral obligation uh you know i could be employed i could be whatever you know i mean this is so frightening to me i i have spent uh weeks and weeks and nights to understand what is going on and uh so you know having done my homework the moral obligation to react is such that you know that this is for me the absolute prior priority no matter what well uh i agree with you about the moral obligation of it um it's of course not entirely safe for me to put you on my channel either i feel that same moral obligation and i would just point out that i think we've lost track of how much risk people have taken through history when something was important and to the extent that people may have fears about what happens career-wise to them if they speak an important truth they need to recognize that lives are on the line this is an argument that must be engaged and it's time for them to step up and i would say to the extent that there are people who privately acknowledge that what you're saying is sensible people who believe you are right and are in a position to change uh public opinion i open this channel to them if they'd like to come on and and tell us uh what you've got right what you've got wrong what they think we ought to understand i'm more than happy to to host that discussion well i i much appreciate that uh brett i really do and uh yeah i'm also very much hoping for uh people ultimately uh because it's really uh it's really more than time to do so because as you as you will realize right now things start to be very fast to evolve very very fast if you see in some countries because that is the only the other thing every country is looking at its own situation when i hear the news for example in belgium it's like the only country where uh where we have uh a coffee from them right and and the world is closing in on us and it's like i mean if there is a double mutant in in india that it's resistant for example that is also my problem that is your problem that is everyone's problem and it's like oh let's let's uh let's put the figures down let's try to to put a figure down in in in belgium or in germany or in the uk right if if there was ever a situation in which we should put politics aside put national boundaries aside and team up to address a problem this is it yeah pandemic is per definition a global thing and our strategy is not global at all right uh yeah well you know we we could go on forever at this but uh i much appreciate uh you doing this and uh at least giving me an opportunity to talk about this and frankly speaking i think brett we have been very scientific about this right i mean yep yeah so um yeah i think we have we have to um to continue to have this discussion and i must say i greatly appreciate your courage and your insight i think uh you're a force for good and i uh i am so glad that you chose to come on darkhorse yeah thank you so much for having me all right thank you okay be well everyone you

Channel: Bret Weinstein

Views: 650,730

Rating: 4.91539 out of 5

Keywords: COVID, SARS-CoV2, Evolution, Vaccine, Mutant

Id: BNyAovuUxro

Length: 107min 45sec (6465 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Cyrus_Marius]

"Goort" lmao

[u/AnyMightyMouse]

One thing that kind of stood out as odd that I wished got a little more attention was the mention of blood types.

It sounded like GVB said that anyone who is O Neg is going to be immune, especially if they are exposed to COVID by someone who is A/B/AB blood type. The reasoning was that the virus would then have a marker from those blood types which would make someone who is O Neg more likely to kill it quickly.

Has this been observed? I do remember that blood type A people are supposedly more susceptible to COVID. But I felt like his explanation was more generalized and implied that any O Neg person is a lot more immune to any type of virus. I feel like something that profound would have been common knowledge if true.

[u/dgilbert418]

It probably goes without saying that this man's theory is viewed as nonsense by the relevant academics. Here are some articles about why what Geert Vanden Bossche is saying is nonsense:

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-critical-thinking-pseudoscience/doomsday-prophecy-dr-geert-vanden-bossche

https://www.deplatformdisease.com/blog/addressing-geert-vanden-bossches-claims

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/countering-geert-vanden-bossches-dubious-viral-open-letter-warning-against-mass-covid-19-vaccination/

I understand that many people in this sub think that it is good to hear from heterodox thinkers, that establishment academics are likely acting as bad-faith gatekeepers, and perhaps there is even a broader conspiracy to suppress views like GVB's. For those people, here's my view:
- The vast majority of Bret's audience cannot evaluate the scientific merit of GVB's position. If you want to ignore reputation and context, the only thing you can do is read his letter and watch this video, and then maybe read the links above. I don't believe almost anyone watching this video (including myself) has the scientific background and expertise required to personally weigh one theory against the other

- Bret gives us no information about opposing views. Bret could google for 5 seconds and bring up the three articles I linked and give some context to the audience about challenges to GVB's views, but he chooses not to. Why?

- Most people who watch this video will decide what to believe based on entirely irrational criteria; what makes them feel good, who seems trustworthy, and whether GVB *sounded* science-y and rigorous.

For these reasons, it seems to me that this kind of content should be viewed as irresponsible and more harmful to the audience than helpful.

[u/UpHog]

My memory of this is probably distorted as this was a few months ago, but does anybody know if there is a response to Bret and Heather's concerns about the unknowns of one of the mRNA vaccine's proprietary synthetic lipids and the dangers of how complex and precise they must be as every organism has a unique chemical history that must be tuned and compensated for, and we have no access to the propriety formula for analysis?

I think they also were claiming a serious possibility of RNA getting into cells and we have no idea what that could precipitate.

[u/brutay]

By the way, someone has written a rebuttal to Geert's argument. I don't believe all of these objections were addressed in Bret's interview, so it would be interesting to see Geert's response to some of the more substantial counter-arguments..

[u/ba4x]

Did anyone catch why the vaccines supposedly impact natural immunity? I didn't get the mechanism.