Will vaccination cause the virus to "immune escape"? The "latest call" is actually an "old rumor"

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Written by reporter Liu Daheng Edited by Ding Lin

New Media Editor/Chen Xuanzhi

Audit experts:

Wei Lin (Director of the Immunology Department, Hebei Medical University)

Recently, Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, who claims to be an independent virologist and vaccine expert, posted an open letter on social media calling on governments, scientists, and experts around the world to immediately stop large-scale vaccination against the new coronavirus and asking the World Health Organization (WHO) to pay attention to this "major public health emergency in the world."

△ "World-renowned" expert Dr. Geert van den Potts (Source: Potts' personal website)

In his open letter, Potts said that he was not "anti-vaccine" personally, but "under the current critical situation, I had to use social platforms to make an urgent appeal." He believed that there was no precedent in history for the successful use of vaccines during a pandemic of infectious diseases, and that the epidemic would end if it was allowed to develop.

The open letter also states that mass vaccination during the pandemic is equivalent to exerting evolutionary pressure on the new coronavirus, which will cause so-called "immune escape" - vaccines can only protect humans from the original strain, but vaccination will accelerate the mutation of the virus, and these mutants will be more terrible and deadly, causing a plague that is much more terrible than the current epidemic. Therefore, mass vaccination "is a crime, and humans must stop doing this immediately, otherwise it will cause a disaster."

But is this really the case?

In fact, this kind of view is not original to Potts. A few years ago, a doctor named Andrew Wakefield wrote an article against the measles vaccine, saying that "the measles virus will mutate after the measles vaccine is given." And this Wakefield is the initiator of the "vaccine causes autism" scam and one of the initiators of the modern "anti-vaccine movement."

△Andrew Wakefield

Wei Lin, director of the Immunology Department of Hebei Medical University, explained to reporters that "immune escape" is actually the way pathogens or tumors antagonize, block and inhibit the body's immune response through different mechanisms. There are three possible mechanisms for immune escape of pathogens such as the new coronavirus:

1. Antigenic changes: Pathogens can mutate frequently and continuously, escaping the neutralization and blocking effects of established anti-infection immune antibodies.

2. Persistent infection: Intracellular pathogens can hide inside cells and remain dormant, evading attacks from cellular and humoral immunity, resulting in persistent infection.

3. Immunosuppression: Pathogens antagonize, block and inhibit the body's immune response through their structural or non-structural products.

It is unrealistic to say that “the virus can completely resist antibodies as long as it adds a few mutations.” When designing various vaccines, researchers generally choose the entire spike protein of the new coronavirus or even the inactivated virus as a whole, so that the vaccine can stimulate the human body to produce multiple antibodies against various parts of the virus, and these vaccines will not immediately lose their effectiveness when the virus mutates.

Moreover, in addition to stimulating the production of antibodies, vaccines also activate T lymphocytes to respond to the immune system. Even if the antibodies stimulated by the "old vaccine" have a reduced ability to bind to the mutant strain, the strong response of T lymphocytes can still protect the vaccine recipients.

Although "immune escape" is theoretically possible, it is not the fault of the vaccine at all. Various variants of the new coronavirus appeared before the large-scale vaccination, and more contagious variants appeared.

On the contrary, if few people are vaccinated and the spread of the disease remains high, the virus will have more opportunities to mutate. The real solution to the COVID-19 epidemic is to vaccinate a large number of people as soon as possible to reduce the space for the virus to evolve and mutate. Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said at the China-US COVID-19 Prevention and Treatment Cooperation Forum recently: "Vaccine coverage determines the direction of the epidemic."

On the other hand, even if an "immune escape" strain emerges, at the current pace of COVID-19 vaccine development, humans can still launch an "updated version" of the vaccine to deal with it. As for the so-called "letting the epidemic develop", it actually disregards life and has no factual basis. Zhong Nanshan, head of the National Health Commission's high-level expert group, said: "Herd immunity cannot be achieved by letting a large number of people get sick. It must be achieved based on science and through vaccination."

Produced by: Science Central Kitchen

Produced by: Beijing Science and Technology News | Science Plus Client

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