Biotech Values

[FreeNorth]

An interesting article from Eric Topol that summarizes the history of the Corona Virus's evolution under selection pressure from vaccines and how this evolution has greatly reduced the effectiveness of these vaccines against the latest variants.

But let me emphasize: the culprit in all of this isn’t our vaccines, which are now providing little to no protection against infections and transmission. They are damn leaky, which only arose from the emergence of Omicron and has gotten progressively worse as we moved to BA.5 . It’s the virus. That’s why we’ve started to see a crack in protection vs. severe disease from vaccines with boosters, as I previously reviewed (boiling frog metaphor). It’s that we have not gotten ahead of the immune escape properties of virus with a bolstered mucosal immunity strategy—local IgA, neutralizing antibodies in the upper airway—via nasal or oral vaccines to solidify our 2nd layer of defense. Or inhaled interferons to jack up our first line of defense. Or developing a variant-proof vaccine.

Dr Topol's sees this path forward

As Akiko Iwasaki and I wrote last week, it is imperative that we launch a new, major initiative, as we called it Operation Nasal Vaccine, to get ahead of the virus and promote respiratory mucosal immunity.

https://erictopol.substack.com/p/its-the-virus-stupid