The professor of medicine at Queensland University, which is testing for its own COVID-19 vaccine, said immunisation against coronavirus was similar to immunising against the common cold.
“It is tricky, vaccines for upper respiratory tract diseases, because the virus lands on the outside of you,” Prof Frazer said.
“Think of us as a football, with the skin and respiratory tract on the outside of the football and the lungs are where the outside interfaces with the inside.”
“The place where the virus lands is outside us and it tries to infect the cells within us.”
“Our immune system is inside of us. When it lands inside our lungs it tries to infect our cells and succeeds. Our immune system goes to fight the virus and that’s why people get sick.
“If the immune system turns on too strong it can cause damage to the lungs …. The wrong vaccine could make things worse so we have to be very selective about what part of the virus we want to attack.”
“If you immunise someone with a vaccine, it goes inside and makes an immune response within you …. What you want is an immune response to migrate out to where the virus lands.”
“There is no vaccine against the common cold.”
Prof Frazer said that with flu, the immune response inside a person’s body didn’t occur until the flu virus gets inside them.
“We tried to deliver a vaccine to the lungs with the Flu Mist which you snuffed up your nose, delivering the vaccine to the place where you need an immune response, but it didn’t work terribly well,” he said.
“Coronavirus doesn’t get into you, it stays on the surface cells in your lungs. All these flu viruses get into you, so the body can fight and makes T cells.”
“This virus doesn’t kill the cells, it makes them sick. At the moment we don’t know how to make a coronavirus vaccine work.”
“That’s why there are 100 vaccines under testing using every conceivable approach ….We don’t know if any of them will work.”
Prof Frazer said a vaccine for the 2003 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak was never successfully developed and then the virus burnt out. SARS broke out in China and didn’t spread as far, partly because overseas travel by the Chinese population was not as great 17 years ago as it is today.
But, Prof Frazer said, it also had diluted potency as it went from host to host. “As it passed from animal to the first human and then through the second human, as it passed through every human it got a little less good at infecting people,” he said.
“The virus attenuated itself; it got less powerful …. It may well be the same with this virus. It’s not very effective in making us sick. It may become less effective.”
“We are now mapping it as it goes and changes are occurring in its genetic make-up, small changes.”
“Changes to it in China led to the virus becoming less virulent or sick-making …. At the moment it’s not passing through a lot of people in Australia.”
Prof Frazer said coronavirus was less infectious and not as deadly as MERS, the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome or camel flu which broke out in South Korea in 2015.
“MERS … was very efficient infecting and making people sick,” he said.
“One person who went to South Korea from the Middle East infected 170 people and a third of those died …. He went through four hospitals before he was diagnosed, but in South Korea they were very effective with contact tracing.”
“MERS is much nastier .… than coronavirus.”
Prof Frazer explained the annual vaccines prepared against the winter flu by the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL) were not entirely effective.
Each year CSL “takes about a quarter of Australia’s egg supply to make the vaccine,” he said.
“We purify the protein parts of the virus out of the eggs and make the vaccine out of that.
“But it’s not 100 per cent effective at all … for older people (because) as your immune system gets weaker as you get older.
“With measles you are protected against it for life. The vaccine kills any virus that gets into your blood.
“We don’t have a mode that works against other coronaviruses.”
Prof Frazer, who is currently developing vaccines for cancer, is working with a team of medical scientists on a trial for a coronavirus treatment drug.
The intervention drug’s purpose is to dampen down the inflammatory response in high-risk coronavirus patients.
He said for 99 per cent of people who got coronavirus it was a trivial illness, but that was not the case for those in the vulnerable categories.
See the full interview at News.com Australia
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Still, there are powerful forces at play who are determined to rush what is normally a two to four-year process of vaccine research and development – and squeeze all of that into a highly unrealistic 6 to 18 months. The UK government’s John Bell seems to be one of those promising a world record in deploying the coronavirus ‘solution’:
“If we can see evidence of a strong immune response by the middle or the end of May, then I think the game is on,” he said, adding that the next step would then be “the massive issue of how you manufacture at scale many billions of doses”.
By rushing the process, western officials and their pharmaceutical ‘partners’ are effectively skipping animal testing and moving straight on to using human as their guinea pigs. Should the general public be concerned that by releasing these human out into the public then some people might also be more at risk to serious infection should they have a bad autoimmune reaction to an untested experimental vaccine?
“Outbreaks and national emergencies often create pressure to suspend rights, standards and/or normal rules of ethical conduct. Often our decision to do so seems unwise in retrospect,” wrote Jonathan Kimmelman, director of McGill University’s biomedical ethics unit, for STAT.
Could such a hasty move also help proliferate a new mutated strain unnecessarily?
As it turns out, there are numerous problems already with the seasonal flu shot, and it only stands to reason that a vaccine for the common cold variant of the coronavirus will experience related problems of “negative vaccine effectiveness”, or the increase in risk of illness from influenza (Flu) and non-influenza viruses. Like any vaccine expected to cover for multiple variants of the coronavirus, we have learned from the Flu shot that this may not actually be possible. Criticisms and failures of the annual Flu shot can be found here, here and here.
Such a rushed strategy by the world’s governments may pose additional problems in terms of risk to public health, but so far governments do not seem to mind in this case because supposedly ‘the threat is too great to wait and follow proper procedure.’ Is it really?
Far from being the ‘sure thing’ which the people like Bill Gates, GAVI, and other health experts are claiming it to be, the idea that a working vaccine which the industry has never been able to manage in history, can all of the sudden be conjured up in a mater of months – could easily end up introducing more new problems into this situation in addition to the ones we have already.
All indications are that any rush to fast-track a vaccine for COVID-19 could end badly. Still, government and the media are still hyping this possibility.
The real question is: do they really have the public’s best interests in mind, or are there other more powerful (and profitable) overriding agendas at play here?
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