COVID-19 and the Unraveling of Experimental Medicine
Part II
Excerpt from COVID-19 and the Unraveling of Experimental Medicine - Part II
In this three-part series, we delve into the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the first of the new millennium. We'll explore the evolving role of experimental medicine amidst unique challenges. Our focus will be on understanding the complex interactions between the biological and social realms, and how existing practices have influenced them. We acknowledge that these assessments hold the potential to shape future pandemic responses. You can read Part I here.
Introduction
In the first part of the article, we examined a flood of evidence that has emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic exposing grave flaws in 20th century immune theory and effectively rendering it obsolete. Most of the incriminatory facts involve interpretational matters raised in the closing decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries that were never properly adjudicated by the science community. Other issues involve recent observations that either contradict or are unexplainable on the basis of current immune theory. At this point in the pandemic science is long on description and short on explanation.
In this second part we extend our line of inquiry into the dynamics of the pandemic to examine social measures enacted by countries across the globe intended to curtail spread of the virus and to favorably impact evolution of the pandemic. We then examine the logic driving the one and only strategy advanced by the science community, i.e., vaccination, to neutralize SARS-CoV-2 and induce herd immunity. Finally, we examine the spiraling number of adverse events reported incident to the introduction of the vaccines in early 2021 that raise serious questions as to their efficacy and safety. Emerging evidence points to a tragic miscalculation on the part of medical scientists.
Social Influences
The first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan, China near the end of December 2019 and within weeks SARS-CoV-2 infections had spread across the globe. By early March 2020 the World Health Organization declared it to have reached pandemic status. Once in full swing the pandemic was destined to run its course until a widespread state of resistance to the virus, i.e., herd immunity, gained foothold in the population. Societies across the globe faced a twofold dilemma: how to find the quickest and safest path to herd immunity and to minimize adverse social consequences in its wake.
The pandemic stirred unprecedented debate in political, public health, research and medical circles as to potential strategies while at the same time calling into question long-held beliefs about the nature of herd immunity and how it must be approached.
Herd immunity is a hypothetical threshold said to occur when the fraction of susceptible individuals in a population is small enough (or widely enough separated) to interrupt the chain of viral transmission and prevent or mitigate person-to-person spread. It requires that a critical number—not all—of individuals develop resistance to a particular viral subtype.
Once this threshold is reached, local outbreaks, i.e., epidemics, may occur among susceptible individuals in particular regions, as with influenza, but there is insufficient susceptibility in surrounding areas to sustain transmission. In this state of affairs, the virus is said to be endemic and humans its permanent reservoir. Mathematical models suggest that such collective resistance requires up to 70% of the population but this is supposition.
From the onset many argued that mass vaccination was the safest and most efficient means by which to attain herd immunity. Wide-scale immunization of the population, it was argued, would affect the soonest return to normalcy. Scientists had developed what appeared to be a suitable candidate in the mRNA vaccines which, due to technological breakthroughs, could be ready for mass implementation in a fraction of the time of conventional vaccines. But such views were not universally shared [1- 9].
Others argued there were too many potential stumbling blocks with this strategy. Achieving herd immunity through vaccination would not only require vaccines to be highly effective in blocking person-to-person transmission but to confer reasonable long-term immunity. The less effective the vaccine, the higher the percentage of the population that would require vaccination. And how should the issue of vaccine hesitancy be overcome? It was not at all clear the new vaccines could live up to the challenge [10-13].
The logistics of the vaccine roll-out presented another serious obstacle. Ideally, to interrupt transmission dynamics would require the largest number of individuals to be immunized in the shortest period of time. Stretching out the length of the vaccination window or, conversely, preferentially focusing on certain at-risk groups such as the elderly and infirm, would permit continued unchecked spread through the rest of the population and potential emergence of new variants. In the final analysis mass vaccination was a desperate race against time. In spite of these concerns scientists bet the farm on the new mRNA vaccines.
Given the imperatives in late-winter 2020, and the unlikelihood of any suitable vaccines for at least a year, societies were obliged to implement strategies to limit viral spread and mitigate collateral damage not only to individuals but social systems. This resulted in a handful of measures that were inconsistently applied across the globe leading to variable and disproportionate results. Such disparities are best seen by comparing two dominant policy models: the relaxed recommendation-based mitigation strategy enacted by Sweden and draconian mandated strategies implemented by neighboring countries like Denmark and Norway as well as most European countries, the US, Canada, Israel, and Australia.
Part and parcel with either approach was recognition of the highly fluid nature of the pandemic and the necessity of closely monitoring emerging regional and global trends. Consequently, a handful of information gathering practices were widely implemented such as contact tracing, genomic surveillance for emergent variants, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing, and antibody detection methods, intended to chart evolution of the pandemic. In part 1 of this series, we pointed out the sheer impossibility of containment of viral spread or of accurately assessing the true number of cases in a population. Such methods gave scientists and policy-makers an illusion of control but did little to affect outcomes.
Read the full article here.
James A. Thorp, MD
Board Certified ObGyn
Board Certified Maternal Fetal Medicine
References
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