Tell Me Covid Vaccines Don't Work Without Telling Me Covid Vaccines Don't Work

The BBC Is Puzzled

The BBC looks at the ‘Why Covid is Still Flooring Some People’.

Wait a minute, I thought Covid vaccines were not only supposed to stop people from getting Covid but if they were one of the very, very rare cases that did, supposed to stop them from getting ill?

I guess the BBC must be talking about unvaccinated people getting Covid at the moment? But every unvaccinated person that I know isn’t continually getting reinfected. And if they are, they certainly don’t know about it.

And we can all remember, only last year, how much the BBC liked to belittle the unvaccinated. They reported on unvaccinated people dying and made programmes to make the unvaccinated look like insane, social pariahs. So if this current article was referring to unvaccinated people you can bet your bottom dollar that it would be in the headline, as well as repeated multiple times every sentence.

But the article doesn’t use the word ‘unvaccinated’ once, so we can only assume that the case studies are vaccinated people.

“What is it like to catch Covid now? It is a question I have been pondering since a friend was surprised by how roughed up they were by it. Their third bout of Covid was significantly worse than the previous time they caught it.”

Surprised by how roughed up they were by it. Third bout of Covid was significantly worse than the previous time. All sounds like the friend was vaccinated to me.

"I thought every time you catch an illness it's supposed to be a bit better each time?" was the message from his sickbed.

That’s exactly what we have been screaming from the rooftops but the BBC told you otherwise. If you had caught Covid before being vaccinated then your body would have mounted an attack on all parts of the virus. And remembered all of those parts. But, instead, the vaccines focussed that response on the very specific spike protein and Original Antigenic Sin (OAS) means that is the only thing vaccinated individuals are prepared to fight, that very specific spike protein.

But that very specific spike protein is now unspecific. It has mutated and the vaccinated defence systems are struggling to recognise it.

I also know work colleagues and people I have interviewed or chatted to at the school gates, who have been hit hard by Covid in the past few months. A familiar tale has been a week of coughing, headaches or fever followed by a lingering fatigue.

OAS combined with an IgG4 immune response switch.

For some of us, Covid is just a sniffle - not even enough to make you go digging around in the bathroom cabinet to see if there is a lateral flow test hiding in there.

Which ‘some of us’, BBC. Go on, be honest!

The BBC tries to explain what is going on. They want to blame the unvaccinated but can’t. They want to praise the vaccines but can’t. They have erased the concept, that maybe the vaccines don’t work, from their brains, so this is hard for them. I actually feel a bit sorry for them. And then I remember the Hannah Fry ‘documentary’ trying to shame the unvaccinated and so my empathy disappears.

How we fare after being exposed to Covid comes down to the battle between the virus itself and our body's defences. The earliest stages are crucial as they dictate how much of a foothold the virus gets inside our body, and how severe it is going to be.

The earliest stages are crucial - exactly. And for many people this has been completely messed up.

Prof Eleanor Riley, an immunologist at the University of Edinburgh, has had her own "horrid" bout of Covid that was "much worse" than expected.

Why? Because you probably thought you couldn’t even get Covid once vaccinated.

Antibodies are like microscopic missiles that stick to the surface of the virus and stop it from infecting our body's cells.

So, if you have lots of antibodies, they can mop up the virus quickly and any infection will hopefully be short and mild.

"Now, because antibodies are lower, a higher dose [of the virus] is getting through and causing a more severe bout of disease," Prof Riley says.

Not only are antibodies lower but the ones being produced are targeting an old strain of Covid.

Prof Peter Openshaw, from Imperial College London, told me: "The thing that made the huge difference before was the very wide and fast rollout of vaccines - even young adults managed to get vaccinated, and that made an absolutely huge difference."

How exactly did that make a huge difference? Most young adults wouldn’t have even noticed that they had Covid. And even if it did make a difference a year ago, was that a worthy trade off for continual re-infections a year later?

Prof Openshaw says he is not a "doomster", but thinks the result will be "a lot of people having a pretty nasty illness that is going to knock them out for several days or weeks".

"I'm also hearing of people having nasty bouts of Covid, who are otherwise young and fit. It's a surprisingly devious virus, sometimes making people quite ill and occasionally leading to having 'long Covid'," he says.

He thinks there is a "good chance" you are susceptible if you have not caught Covid in the past year.

Of course, everyone is susceptible to the latest Covid strain but, as with all other coronaviruses, the more we catch them, the more mild they are.

Prof Riley argues: "But that's not to say people who are under 65 are not going to get Covid, and are not going to feel pretty rough.

"I think the consequence of not boosting those people is we have more people who are off work for a week or two or three over winter."

Young people taking three weeks off work definitely sounds like the vaccines are working. But now they have the excellent excuse of saying that the vaccines did work and would be working now, if only you had enough of them. Not enough vaccines is the reason vaccines aren’t working. Excellent logic.

Antibodies are highly precise as they rely on a close match between the antibody and the part of the virus to which they stick. The more a virus evolves to change its appearance, the less effective the antibodies become.

Prof Openshaw said: "The viruses circulating now are pretty distant immunologically from the original virus which was used to make the early vaccines, or which last infected them.

Exactly, I said that above, please catch up! Vaccines targeted people’s immune systems to a specific part of the virus which no longer exists.

If you are feeling rough with Covid - or rougher than you have done before - it could be this combination of waning antibodies and evolving viruses.

Just make sure you don’t hang around with unvaccinated friends and realise that the vaccines aren’t all they they were made out to be.

A different part of our immune system - called T-cells - kick in once an infection is already under way and they have been trained by past infections and vaccines.

T-cells are less easily befuddled by mutating viruses as they spot cells that have been infected with Covid and kill them.

"They will stop you getting severely ill and ending up in hospital, but in that process of killing off the virus there's collateral damage that makes you feel pretty rough," says Prof Riley.

Relying on your T-cells to clear out Covid is what results in the muscle pain, fever and chills.

Hopefully, this is the silver lining for vaccinated people. Whilst OAS may have messed up their initial defences, T-cells will hopefully come to the rescue in the end.

There are four other human coronaviruses, related to Covid, that cause common cold symptoms. One of the reasons they are thought to be mild is we catch them in childhood and then throughout our lives.

Prof Openshaw is clear "we are not there yet" with Covid, but "with repeated infection we should build up natural immunity".

Ermm, so why didn’t healthy people just do this in the first place? And why encourage vaccinating children when catching the virus whilst young is the very thing that will protect them?

Tell me Covid vaccines don’t work without telling me they don’t work in one article.