COVID-19 Vaccines Could Be Spurring Variants, Say Israeli and European Experts

In January, an Israeli Defence Forces Intelligence report (pdf) warned that Israel’s mass vaccination program could create an Israeli mutation that proved resistant to COVID-19 vaccines. Prepared for Coronavirus National Information and Knowledge Center, the report stated that “The mass vaccine campaign taking place parallel to the active outbreak in Israel may lead to ‘evolutionary pressure’ on the virus.”

In May, the Pasteur Institute’s Luc Montagnier, the virologist whose discovery of HIV won him a Nobel Prize in 2008, warned that COVID-19 vaccines are spurring deadlier variants. “I am doing experiments at the Institute with patients who became sick with Corona after being vaccinated. I will show you that they are creating the variants that are resistant to the vaccine,” he stated in an interview in France. “It is the antibodies produced by the virus that enable an infection to become stronger. … It is clear that the new variants are created … due to the vaccination.”

Though others have disagreed, that mass vaccinations in the midst of a pandemic can create variants is basic science, said Belgian virologist Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, whose vaccine-industry credentials include positions at GSK Biologicals, Novartis Vaccines, Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

In a keynote address at the Vaccines Summit in Ohio and in a letter to the World Health Organization (pdf), Bossche outlined the danger. Because the COVID-19 vaccines are unable to quickly kill off the COVID-19 virus, they create a breeding ground for variants, much as happens with bacteria that aren’t killed off when patients don’t take a full course of antibiotics. The virus then has time to adapt and mutate—what doesn’t quickly kill it makes its offspring stronger—leading to the seemingly endless variants we’re now seeing.

The danger of this “immune escape,” said Bossche, is heightened enormously by lockdowns, which prevent the body’s innate immune system from being adequately challenged by random pathogens and other environmental agents to keep it trained and fit, akin to the deconditioning that occurs when we don’t get adequate physical exercise to keep our heart, lungs, and other muscles fit.

The perfect storm of an unfit innate immune system and COVID-19 vaccines ineffectual against ever-more-virulent mutant viruses of their own making will then see those previously infected with COVID-19 and the vaccinated themselves succumb to infection from the variants, claimed Bossche, who added that the vaccinated are at particular risk since the long-lived specific antibodies produced by vaccination are particularly adept at incapacitating the body’s general antibodies (pdf).