Source: Agoravox: le média citoyen (French to English online translation)

by Jacques Pollini (his website)
Monday, December 21, 2020

People around the world are debating whether they are going to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Is this a debate or a trench warfare? It seems that we are in the second situation. How do we get out of this? How can we finally establish a dialogue that allows everyone to leave their entrenchment and make an informed choice? It seems to me that in order to break the deadlock, we have to realize that two separate but related issues arise: the issue of vaccine efficacy and safety, which is a scientific issue, and trust in decision-makers, which is a political issue.

For the first question, only a few handfuls of individuals can answer. An ordinary citizen does not have the technical skills to judge whether COVID-19 vaccines will be effective and harmless or not. Our choice can therefore only be based on the answer we give to the second question, that is, our confidence in our decision-makers.

This is a particularly acute issue because the technology used in these vaccines is new. These are RNA vaccines, i.e. fragments of genetic code will be injected into our bodies, with the goal that viral proteins encoded by this RNA are produced by our body’s cells, triggering an immune response (Ulmer et al. 2012).

This technology raises many questions, including the risk of RNA fragments in vaccines being transcribed into DNA and integrated into our genome(Velot 2020). The integration of foreign genetic code with host cell DNA is a common occurrence, as evidenced by the fact that human DNA contains inherited virus sequences. Researchers have already discovered human chimeric RNA/SARS-CoV-2, suggesting that fragments of SARS-CoV-2 RNA (the virus that transmits COVID-19) have been transcribed and integrated into human cell DNA (Zhang et al. 2020). This risk associated with RNA vaccines is therefore not something new.

One thing is new, however. In nature, the integration of fragments of foreign genetic codes into the human genome is not related to human intent. It is the result of chance or natural necessities, while with vaccination it becomes possible to choose which code to inject and on which population to inject it. The RNA vaccine, and gene therapies more generally, make it possible to intentionally modify the human genetic code. Engineering is entering a new era in which it no longer deals only with the transformation of the human environment, but can focus on human nature, on our genetic identity. This is where the fundamental shift lies and it raises ethical issues that are overlooked in the ongoing debates on vaccines.

Of course, this does not mean that COVID-19 vaccines will alter our genome or that those who designed them have that intention. But almost no one has the technical or legal authority to verify these two points. We therefore have only the confidence, given or not to the decision-makers, and to those who have developed these vaccines, to guide our decision.

On the other hand, the impact on our genome is only one possible problem. Facilitation by antibodies of infection after vaccination (Lee et al. 2020), a phenomenon already observed in the case of a dengue vaccine (Normile 2017) and which can lead to more severe forms of the disease, is often discussed. It should be noted that if such an infection occurred, the unvaccinated would doubtlessly be stigmatized since they would be perceived as facilitating the circulation of the virus and thus reinfections. Another risk would be the development of immune pathologies if reinfection by the virus after vaccination [occurred], a phenomenon observed in mice (Tseng et al. 2012). The risk of autoimmune reaction to placental proteins, which could cause infertility, was also mentioned, due to the similarity between certain viral and placental proteins. The list of possible risks is probably longer and some doctors consider that the guarantees provided by studies carried out by vaccine manufacturers are not sufficient.

Finally, we are not at the first vaccine controversy. The issue of the links between autism and vaccines has not yet been clarified and until whistleblower Thompson, who has exposed the masking of the problem by health authorities in the US, is summoned to the U.S. Congress to testify under oath, trust in vaccines and the firms that manufacture them cannot be established. Another unsolved case concerns polio vaccines, administered in India with the support of the Bill Gates Foundation, which may have caused paralysis in nearly 500,000 children (Dhiman et al. 2018). A dengue vaccine developed by SANOFI and the Pasteur Institute has also caused deaths in the Philippines, due to a facilitation of infection by antibodies, a phenomenon mentioned above.

Any argument in favour of COVID-19 vaccines, heard in the media, decision-making bodies, or social networks, which would involve relying on technical or scientific arguments to convince us that these vaccines are safe, is therefore irrelevant because the central issue is that of trust, which is lost and for good reasons. Without this trust, these technical arguments can only lead to sterile polemics, especially since virtually no one, if not no one, can really decide. Personally, like many citizens, I do not have that confidence. So I’m not getting vaccinated. Why don’t I have that confidence? For the reasons mentioned above, but also because in the last 10 months our government has shown total incompetence in this epidemic, its scientific council being anti-scientific in denying or ignoring the achievements of science. And because social network algorithms and fact-checkers have become instruments of censorship and propaganda that keep our administrations and media in denial of the facts reported by science.

To illustrate this denial of scientific facts, I will address the issue of early treatment,which I have followed closely. To date, several early treatments for COVID have shown their effectiveness. First there was hydroxychloroquine associated with azithromycin and zinc; then azithromycin alone or other antibiotics; then ivermectin associated with doxycycline; then prevention with vitamin D or zinc; and other recently revealed molecules such as fluvoxamine(Lenze et al 2020)or bromhexine(Ansarin et al 2020). The commonality of these approaches is that they consist of repositioning low-cost and already known molecules, not protected by patents, and that treatments must be brought very early, as soon as the first symptoms are reported, in order to be as effective as possible. Hundreds of publications, listed on this site,have shown the effectiveness of these treatments, the most promising being the combination of azithromycin/hydroxychloroquine(Risch 2020),and ivermectin(Kory et al. 2020), possibly associated with doxycycline, a treatment that is not heard at the level of health authorities or at the media level. According to these publications, the effectiveness of these treatments is such that, if used, there would be no need for widespread containment or widespread vaccination. The severity of the COVID-19 pandemic would become that of an influenza epidemic. Unfortunately, censorship by social network algorithms and discredit by the media and fact-checkers have rendered these results almost inaudible, despite attempts to “fact-checking” fact-checkers!

How did we get to this point? Let’s not be naïve. The repositioning of molecules does not generate high profits for the pharmaceutical industry, unlike new molecules such as the remdesivir that it has managed to sell us despite the lack of evidence of its effectiveness, and unlike vaccines. This mercantile logic, which has been at work in the pandemic and which has deprived us of treatment, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, is a crime against humanity and those responsible will have to be brought to justice. I do not see why the same logic would not work in the case of vaccines. I do not see why the pharmaceutical industry would not put its profits ahead of the best interests of patients. I do not see how I can trust him with regard to the safety of his products, especially since the vaccines were developed very quickly, and their long-term side effects have not been evaluated since the tests started only a few months ago. The pharmaceutical industry is also exempt from compensation for patients in case of side effects in the USA,or this was already the norm,and will have to be compensated by member states in Europe if certain types of problems, unspecified, arise, under special agreements and in derogation from the usual rules.

So, to anyone who tries to convince me to get vaccinated against COVID-19, I will answer, clearly and simply:

“If it’s my health that worries you, give me azithromycin and hydroxychloroquine, or ivermectin and doxycycline, as well as vitamin D and zinc, because I know, scientific publications and testimonials from internationally renowned doctors to support, that these treatments will work if I catch COVID-19, and so I do not need to be vaccinated. If you are not convinced by what I am saying, here is the list of publications on the subject: https://c19study.com/. If you are still unconvinced, start randomized trials testing these treatments in outpatient medicine. And if you want people to trust vaccines again, mobilize independent commissions of inquiry to measure their possible links to autism and allow whistleblowers to testify under oath. And in the process, call for the implementation of a wide-ranging international investigation into the links and conflicts of interest between the pharmaceutical industry and the government.”

There would be a lot to say about vaccines against COVID-19, but I would stop there, because these arguments, however simple, seem to me irrefutable and sufficient to justify a refusal to be vaccinated. No doubt our leaders will not want to hear them, because choosing ivermectin and doxycycline over vaccines means removing, in the fraction of a second that this choice is made, the hundreds of billions of dollars in profits that the pharmaceutical industry and its shareholders are preparing to receive. These people will obviously do everything they can to prevent any decision against vaccines. So I hope that many of us will share this resistance not to vaccines (I am absolutely not an anti-vaccine) but to this vaccine in this context. We must make our leaders’ case in order to finally make COVID-19 treatments available, massively, which would render vaccination unnecessary or almost useless, for the early management of COVID-19 patients, especially in nursing homes where they continue to die not from COVID-19, but from the errors of decision-makers and Committees who have not taken the time to read the scientific literature.