When the message is constantly hammered home that there is going to be no return to a prior normality 'until a vaccine', it does rather beg the questions: Will the vaccine be safe, will it work, and will the consequences of receiving it be worse than the disease? That's pretty much the questions that I ask about any drug. Why would anybody not ask those questions??
I don't discriminate about vaccines (though it has to be said, as a class of drugs they have a very poor record).
The fact that DCVax is called a 'vaccine' is really just a quirk of history. And it deserves the epithet of being a therapeutic vaccine. It has been proven entirely safe, doesn't cause auto-immune dysfunction, or cytokine release syndrome. And that is most certainly related to its autologous origin. But you couldn't say that about the ICI's or the Car-T's...
So for me, it's all about evidence-based medicine.
The risk of vaccine-related immune enhancement and Th2 immunopathology is very real, not imaginary.
Here's a good balanced article on some of these issues, which quotes experts with varying views on how these risks might apply in the case of a Covid-19 vaccine.
From the article:-
Researchers need to understand in particular whether the vaccine causes the same types of immune system malfunctions that have been observed in past vaccine development. Since the 1960s, tests of vaccine candidates for diseases such as dengue, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) have shown a paradoxical phenomenon: Some animals or people who received the vaccine and were later exposed to the virus developed more severe disease than those who had not been vaccinated (1). The vaccine-primed immune system, in certain cases, seemed to launch a shoddy response to the natural infection. “That is something we want to avoid,” says Kanta Subbarao, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza in Melbourne, Australia.
This immune backfiring, or so-called immune enhancement, may manifest in different ways such as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), a process in which a virus leverages antibodies to aid infection; or cell-based enhancement, a category that includes allergic inflammation caused by Th2 immunopathology. In some cases, the enhancement processes might overlap. Scientific debate is underway as to which, if any, of these phenomena—for which exact mechanisms remain unclear—could be at play with the novel coronavirus and just how they might affect the success of vaccine candidates.
A vaccine is designed to boost our natural immune response to an invading virus by priming it to recognize antigens, unique molecules found on the surface of pathogens. Ideally, the immune system responds to the presence of these antigens by producing special immune cells that directly attack the pathogen, or by producing proteins called antibodies. Antibodies attach to an antigen and attract immune cells that engulf and destroy the pathogen. A dysregulated immune response may involve antibodies or immune cells—or both.
Some researchers argue that although ADE has received the most attention to date, it is less likely than the other immune enhancement pathways to cause a dysregulated response to COVID-19, given what is known about the epidemiology of the virus and its behavior in the human body. “There is the potential for ADE, but the bigger problem is probably Th2 immunopathology,” says Ralph Baric, an epidemiologist and expert in coronaviruses—named for the crown-shaped spike they use to enter human cells—at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In previous studies of SARS, aged mice were found to have particularly high risks of life-threatening Th2 immunopathology (2). Baric expresses his concern about what that might mean for use of a COVID-19 vaccine in elderly people. “Of course, the elderly are our most vulnerable population,” he adds.
Experts generally agree that animal experiments and human clinical trials of candidate vaccines for COVID-19, which is caused by the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), should include a careful assessment of possible immune complications before releasing the vaccine to the public. If any of the mechanisms under investigation are indeed involved, they say, the resulting risks are real. “You really have to test a vaccine carefully,” says Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health in Boston, MA, “and not just roll it out because people are clamoring for it with an epidemic underway.”
If a vaccine was introduced without rigorous and extensive safety and efficacy testing, it could easily put numerically more people at risk of death than the virus.
Any view that maintains that all vaccines are inherently good, or all vaccines are inherently bad, simply denies the importance of assessment based on scientific evidence! And you really don't need anyone with those extremes of view having anything to do with public health!
