Focus on vaccines: what we know today

In this article we will take stock of the situation on what is certain about vaccines to counter COVID-19, with a focus on vaccines: what we know today.

Note In the next paragraphs of this article: focus on vaccines: what we know today, have been written based on scientific evidence proven by multiple studies and research on the Coronavirus leaving aside personal thoughts and subjective or partisan points of view.

Benefits of vaccines against COVID-19

We must immediately agree on one point, human trials have at least two advantages over experiments on laboratory animals:

• There are no worries regarding the species differences that occur when extrapolating from animal test results laboratory to potential human impacts.
• The human beings they are exposed to a myriad of toxic stressors before, during and after the probationary period, providing results that mirror real-life experience.

We can therefore state that human studies will be more relevant if the characteristics of the study population reflect those of the target population (the one that will undergo the vaccine).

Disadvantages of vaccines against COVID-19

But this road (direct experimentation on man) also brings with it two inherent disadvantages:

• Exposures to toxic stimuli are unknown or, if known, have not been accurately estimated
• The identification of long-term effects requires long periods of time

It is precisely on this last point that the detractors of the vaccine against COVID-19 concentrate their efforts, because the question that is most frequently asked today is How long does it take to see these long term effects?

In a previous study on vaccines and autoimmunity, the authors concluded that "latency periods can range from days to years for post-infectious and post-vaccination autoimmunity."

"Submerged" problems of vaccines

Furthermore, medium-term adverse effects of vaccines, such as central nervous system (CNS) inflammatory demyelination and diabetes have been shown to emerge after about 3 years. Long-term effects, such as cancer, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, etc., have not been studied.

In fact, investigating such effects would require several decades of close monitoring to identify such adverse effects, which hardly happens for any vaccine.

The dangerous transgenerational effects

Another issue overlooked by vaccine discussions is: the potential transgenerational effects.

Transgenerational studies of the harmful effects of substances tend to focus on environmental causes; however, there are only a few examples of such studies for drugs.

A previous study on the late transgenerational effects induced by chemotherapy raised some concerns, both for the paucity of such studies in the literature and for the transmission of adverse effects deep down the generational chain.

We can summarily conclude that due to inadequate safety testing of several toxic stimuli in the past (including vaccines), it remains uncertain whether a number of diseases currently affecting humanity could be due in part to the actions of our predecessors transmitted to us through transgenerational effects.

It is unclear, therefore, whether any of the drugs, vaccines, foods, or radiation exposures of our ancestors, which have not been tested for transgenerational effects, is currently negatively affecting our lives.

Safety and vaccines

After the above analysis one question remains: Are we currently willing to pass on potential diseases to future generations due to the current need for rapid vaccine development, bypassing adequate long-term and transgenerational safety testing?

We do not have a certain answer to this questionWhat is certain, however, are two things:

• The questions ethics of concern associated with accelerated vaccine development, in particular to the drastic reduction of the time dedicated to phases II and III of the clinical trial.
• The main target population for a vaccine is the most demographically vulnerable: the elderly with high comorbidities and dysfunctional immune systems.

However, the demographic used for initial clinical trials is the relatively young and healthy population.

This generates uncertainty about the effectiveness of the study, raising questions about how to extrapolate the results of a young and healthy population to an elderly and vulnerable population.

Cost-benefit trade-off COVID-19 vaccines

We have reached the central point of this article, a focus on vaccines: what we know today.

If we think in a broad sense and think of vaccines to counter the Coronavirus as a new "good on the market", we can state that: for any new product, the decision to implement it typically involves a trade-off between costs and benefits.

Ideally, the benefits should far outweigh the anticipated costs, and the potential costs and/or benefits may have a degree of certainty or uncertainty.

How can we apply this discourse to COVID-19 Vaccines?

We can say that vaccine costs are the potential adverse health effects of a COVID-19 vaccine, especially in the medium and long term, being unable to estimate these "costs" we will apply a high risk factor to the latter.

We must then take into consideration that the cost-benefit trade-off for a CODIV-19 vaccine is different based on different vulnerabilities to the disease.

To simplify we can divide the entire population into 2 groups:

• The highly vulnerable subjects: tend to be the elderly with high comorbidities and people with a compromised immune system
• The rest of the population

This demographic breakdown is similar to that for influenza and the 2002 SARS pandemic.

It follows that the analysis of the cost-benefit trade-off of the vaccine will be different for each of these two groups.

For the most vulnerable, the main consideration is to survive the season.

Medium- to long-term effects may be of minor importance (although for the few younger members of this demographic with highly compromised immune systems, medium- to long-term adverse effects would not be negligible).

While for the less vulnerable (the rest of the population) the need for a vaccine is unclear, since the negative effects of the virus appear to be minor compared to the possible medium-long term side effects.

The risk, which will possibly be faced, is that this demographic population is less vulnerable would have to bear the brunt of any potential negative medium- to long-term health impacts that could arise from an inadequately tested vaccine for these effects.

In conclusion

In our focus on vaccines: what we know today, after having analyzed together the scientific evidence and the studies we can conclude that a vaccine that has been shown to be effective in the very short term for all demographics may be potentially justifiable (albeit high-risk) for the most vulnerable demographic.

However, it is difficult to ascertain how such a vaccine could be justified for the rest of the population.

Although we must bear in mind that most of the time the belief of being healthy turns out to be a false belief as, from more in-depth analyses, dysfunction of the immune system may emerge.

For a complete analysis of the COVID-19 situation we suggest you also read our article: 5 things that are clear today about COVID-19.

---

Sources:

• J Microbiol Immunol Infect. 2021 Feb; 54(1):12-16. Published online May 15, 2020. Doi:  10.1016 / j.jmii.2020.05.001
• Review Nat Rev Microbiol. March 2021; 19(3):171-183. doi: 10.1038 / s41579-020-00461-z. Epub 2020 October 14th.
• Int J Mol Med. 2020 Nov; 46(5):1599–1602. Published online September 18, 2020. Doi:  10.3892 / ijmm.2020.4733