This is the week Dr. Anthony Fauci said he plans to resign as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) sometime in 2024 or 2025. (See HERE or HERE.) Today a masked friend sitting in an air-conditioned bank branch lobby said she learned this month during while on vacation in the Pacific Northwest that she had Covid — after having had two shots of mRNA vaccine and a booster. (Her age is within a year or three of Fauci’s 81.) She seemed fine. A daughter who had been traveling with her, also fully vaccinated, tested positive for the infection as well.
A link to the post that begins below came today from a Facebook friend. “Sensational interview,” she wrote, “the best yet from Dr. Harvey Risch — loaded with common sense that has been missing all the way through this pandemic.” Risch is a physician and epidemiologist. — MCM
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By Jan Jekielek | The Epoch Times
The vaccines have done damage to the immune system such that it makes people more likely to get COVID—over a longer term, not the short-term vaccine benefit period, but after that—more likely to get COVID infections, more likely to get other respiratory infections. — Dr. Harvey Risch
I sit down with Dr. Harvey Risch, professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.
We discuss why vaccinated individuals appear to be getting COVID-19 infections at higher rates than the unvaccinated, and how much of our policies over the last two years were based on flawed science—from lockdowns to the vaccine rollout for children.
We also reflect on the recent passing of Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, who pioneered the use of early COVID treatments. Doctors all over the country are now prescribing these sorts of treatments—mostly quietly, for fear of losing their medical licenses.
“I’m sure by now, there’s a quarter of a million Americans who have been treated successfully with these medications. They know that they were treated with these things. And they worked,” Dr. Risch says.
Jan Jekielek: Dr. Harvey Risch, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Dr. Harvey Risch: Great to be with you.
Mr. Jekielek: I want to do a catch-up from our last conversation many months ago, looking at the newest information around vaccine efficacy in children. These vaccines have now been authorized in the U.S. for six months and older. Also you wrote a pretty remarkable tribute to Dr. Zelenko who recently passed away. I want to discuss your thoughts about him and his work.
Dr. Risch: Sure.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s start with the genetic vaccines being authorized for age six months and up.
Dr. Risch: These vaccines were not shown to have efficacy in the six-month to five-year-old children, or the five-year-olds to twelve-year-olds, for that matter. They were looked at with what’ is called immuno-bridging studies, which measure antibody levels. We’ve learned over the last two years that antibody levels are not very good proxies for immunity. You really only know about the effects of a vaccine when you study the outcomes that you’re trying to prevent, either infection or hospitalization or mortality. Those outcomes were not studied for children. They only had their antibodies measured.
As much as you think that an acute increase in antibody levels reflects immunity or a certain kind of immunity, it’s not really enough to know how well the vaccines work. So, it’s a supposition. And that supposition doesn’t stand the evidential standard for other things. But somehow in the last two years, we’ve been led to believe that you didn’t need to measure actual immunity, you can measure antibody levels instead. That is not well-established criteria or a substitution. Certainly for adults, antibody levels have not shown to be that strong of a correlate to protection from serious outcomes.
Mr. Jekielek: Also these antibodies actually wane pretty quickly. They have been shown to wane in adults. What is the situation with children?
Dr. Risch: We don’t know that very well yet. Of course, antibodies have to wane. If they didn’t wane, then our blood wouldn’t flow. It would be all clogged up with the antibodies of every infection we’ve ever had. So they wane, but there are memory cells in the immune system. They are the memory B cells that go into quiet rest in the bone marrow, ready to start making those antibodies when challenged with a similar infection. And so you expect them to wane over time, but that doesn’t mean a person loses immunity. That’s the point, there’s memory. T-cells have memory as well for making antibodies, and making the immune system function once again, when necessary.
Mr. Jekielek: Is immunity from natural infection the same as immunity from the vaccines? How does that play out?
Dr. Risch: It’s roughly similar. Natural immunity is diverse. The immune system makes antibodies for every provocative component on the surface of every offending molecule. The viruses have a number of different proteins and carbohydrate things, basically sticking out of the surface, including the spike protein. The immune system sees all that and makes antibodies for all of that. They are called neutralizing antibodies that bind to the virus and help to terminate their life and their survival in the human.
However, the vaccines only make a very narrow range of antibodies to the spike protein, because the vaccines are making the body make spike protein, which is not the same as a whole virus being seen by the immune system. So it’s a much narrower range of antibodies that is made post-vaccine. Of course, the problem with that is when the spike protein changes because of new strains of the virus, that the ability of the immune system to make antibodies that correlate to the new strains becomes reduced to the point where it may be almost ineffective over longer periods of time.
Mr. Jekielek: How does that look right now? The vaccines that we have now were designed for the initial variants. Now we’re at the Omicron variant, which is actually quite different.
Dr. Risch: That’s a very good point. Up to Delta, the changes in the spike protein were relatively few. So, the antibodies that were made for the original strain had enough of a benefit against Delta. There was still some reasonable amount of immunity. For Omicron, things went haywire. Omicron started off with more than 50 changes to the spike protein, and then the sub-variants of Omicron have had at least 30 or more. So it’s a very different spike protein. It has the same overall structure, but because the way that the angles of all the different parts changed due to mutation, the antibodies don’t bind so well. In particular, the old antibodies that are made from the original strain that see the new spike protein, they bind, but not strongly enough, so they’re not neutralizing it anymore.
They become interfering antibodies instead of neutralizing antibodies. That’s the reason we have seen what is called negative vaccine efficacy over 4, 6, 8 months after the last vaccine dose. One sees that the benefit of the vaccine turns negative. It’s because the immune system is still making antibodies for the original strain, which aren’t neutralizing the new strains. Therefore, the new strains are protected from the immune system trying to make new antibodies for the new strains, because some of the places where it would bind those new antibodies are blocked by the old antibodies from the original strain that were made and are now not effective.
Mr. Jekielek: You’re saying that the effect is negative. What does that mean, practically speaking?
Dr. Risch: So what this means is—and one sees this in the UK public health data—that through March of this year when when they stopped reporting this, they were reporting infection rates per 100,000 population, according to vaccine status and age. They compared people who had been triple vaccinated, who had a booster, with people who were completely unvaccinated, by age group. What they showed is, for above age 18 in every age group, the rates of symptomatic infection in each age group were approximately threefold higher in the vaccinated people than the unvaccinated people.
Now, you could say vaccinated and unvaccinated people live different lifestyles, so one group may be more likely to get infections. It could go either one way or the other. You can rationalize almost anything with that premise, but that still wouldn’t account for a threefold difference. It might account for maybe one-and-a-half fold, as we epidemiologists believe.
So, there’s still a higher rate of infection after some amount of time after each dose. After the second dose of the mRNA vaccines, it looks like they provide a benefit against symptomatic infection for most people for maybe 10 to 12 weeks. After the first booster, which is the third dose, that drops to six to eight weeks. After the fourth booster, it may be as short as four weeks before the efficacy wears off and begins to turn negative.
Mr. Jekielek: So, the bottom line is you become more susceptible to infection after the fourth booster after four weeks, is that right?
Dr. Risch: Correct. In fact, . . . READ MORE . . .
