STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- Vaccines can in some cases trigger more serious illness when exposed to an unrelated virus, via a process known as virus interference
- Virus interference was found to be at play during the 2009 pandemic swine flu. The seasonal flu vaccine increased people’s risk of getting sick with pandemic H1N1 swine flu and resulted in more serious bouts of illness
- Researchers have also found military servicemen vaccinated against influenza were more prone to unspecified coronavirus infection than unvaccinated counterparts
- An October 2020 data analysis found a positive association between COVID-19 deaths and influenza vaccination rates in elderly people worldwide. Areas with the highest vaccination rates also had the highest COVID-19 death rates
- Possible explanations include reduced immunity to SARS-CoV-2 by some unknown biological mechanism, and viral interference causing reduced nonspecific immunity
Vaccines and Virus Interference
The kind of virus interference Murray was referring to had been shown to be at play during the 2009 pandemic swine flu. A 2010 review4,5 in PLOS Medicine, led by Dr. Danuta Skowronski, a Canadian influenza expert with the Centre for Disease Control in British Columbia, found the seasonal flu vaccine increased people’s risk of getting sick with pandemic H1N1 swine flu and resulted in more serious bouts of illness.
People who received the trivalent influenza vaccine during the 2008-2009 flu season were between 1.4 and 2.5 times more likely to get infected with pandemic H1N1 in the spring and summer of 2009 than those who did not get the seasonal flu vaccine.
To double-check the findings, Skowronski and other researchers conducted a follow-up study on ferrets. Their findings were presented at the 2012 Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. At the time, Skowronski commented on her team’s findings, telling MedPage Today:6
“There may be a direct vaccine effect in which the seasonal vaccine induced some cross-reactive antibodies that recognized pandemic H1N1 virus, but those antibodies were at low levels and were not effective at neutralizing the virus. Instead of killing the new virus it actually may facilitate its entry into the cells.”
In all, five observational studies conducted across several Canadian provinces found identical results. These findings also confirmed preliminary data from Canada and Hong Kong. As Australian infectious disease expert professor Peter Collignon told ABC News:7
“Some interesting data has become available which suggests that if you get immunized with the seasonal vaccine, you get less broad protection than if you get a natural infection …
We may be perversely setting ourselves up that if something really new and nasty comes along, that people who have been vaccinated may in fact be more susceptible compared to getting this natural infection.”
Please be sure to read the full story here: https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/04/26/flu-vaccine-increases-covid-mortality.aspx