Why Didn’t Govts. Push Nasal Vaccines?
So here we go again. This is my fourth post on this topic, and finally, a year after my first, an article appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) revealing a bit of truth about the mRNA COVID vaccines (link below). They suck at blocking transmission. They protect you against serious disease, but don’t stop you from shedding virus from your nose and infecting others. And they don’t stop other vaccinated folks from shedding virus to reinfect you as your blood antibodies wane to sub-protection levels over about six months.
Vaccine SocioBiology
So my question is: in the context of a sane sociology, what should be the main goal of biomedical therapeutics during a pandemic? I contend, as did Mr. Spock in the original Star Trek and spinoff movies that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.” In other words, a therapy that prevents transmission of a pathogen like SARS CoV-2 would protect the greatest number of people from infection. But in our two-tiered, elite-prole, world, what did we get? Vaccines that keep people in rich countries from dying, while preventing spread poorly, if at all.
Why Nasal Vaccines? Mucosal Immunity
Blood antibodies don’t necessarily stop you from shedding virus, so they don’t provide the key factor in achieving broadest impact on a pandemic: attenuating or blocking spread. This is the job of mucosal antibodies — made in your nose itself and secreted into nasal mucus. They act like a glue to capture and eliminate viruses you breath in. In effect, they sterilize your nasal passages of virus, thus largely keeping you from shedding and infecting others. In short, in my opinion, this should have been a major, if not the major focus of vaccine development during a pandemic: greatest good for the greatest number of folks. Instead we got what Pfizer, Moderna et al. gave us in their collaboration with our federal agencies. Cheap-to-make, hard-to handle, semi-experimental jabs that set them up for this moment of profitable booster madness. And more moments to come. Perhaps I should’ve written “collusion” instead of “collaboration”? Decide for yourself. The power of big-money in this fiasco seems hard to deny.
Not New Research
Oral and nasal vaccines already exist for other infectious diseases and it’s been known for some time that they induce better mucosal immunity. So no one in the vaccine community, including in federal agencies, can honestly plead ignorance.
Nasal Vaccines and Natural Immunity
As I’ve written previously, natural immunity beats the current vaccines because among other aspects, actual infection leaves the COVID-recovered with mucosal immunity. Instead of nasal vaccine boosters that could mimic this and greatly attenuate spread, we have the offer of boosters that merely extend our individual protection against serious disease. How sociologically perverse. How violent to that “needs of the many” directive of Mr. Spock. What we have now are small biotech companies with phase-1 data that are trying to fund the much larger Phase 2 and 3 trials necessary to get FDA approval and bring these vaccines into our insane drug marketplace. Are our government agencies finally providing the support that this effort requires? Or are Pfizer et al. campaigning against them in some permutation of the government-corporate corruption that’s so blatantly evident in the refusal to force Pharma to negotiate drug prices? Blatant unless your brain is suffocated in propaganda by either major buffoonery party or by the corporate media. I’ve seen no reporting on this, and suffice it to say that I’m concerned.
And as a further bonus, nasal vaccines like the one in the following link (courtesy of my favorite pharmacist) don’t require ultra-cold storage and the insanely inconvenient and potentially wasteful handling requirements that characterize mRNA vaccines. And no needle-anxiety of course.
https://altimmune.com/adcovid/
Great, Now What?
People who contracted COVID, were most likely infected through breathing in the virus through their noses, so most or all of them would have developed mucosal antibody protection. Giving them another jab of a current vaccine is pointless, except to reinforce the global have/have not disparities. On the other hand, getting nasal vaccines to the world would almost certainly improve matters.
