Original article (in Slovenian) was published on 10/02/2022
New variants of SARS-CoV-2 emerge as the virus spreads, which vaccines reduce, the World Health Organization explains.
On 24 December last year, Belgian doctor of veterinary medicine and virologist Geert Vanden Bossche published an open letter appealing to the World Health Organisation (WHO) to encourage a public debate on the potential risks of mass vaccination. In the letter, he said that he was told by “one of the most renowned vaccinologists on this planet that vaccination with COVID-19 vaccines would only breed new variants”. Which expert that was, he did not specify.
According to his website, Vanden Bossche has been designing and developing a new type of vaccine as an independent researcher since 2018. PubMed, a free resource of biomedical literature, shows that he has published five scientific papers in the field of virology and three in the field of veterinary medicine, the last one of them in 1995.
A translation of the open letter was published by Slovenian lawyer Domen Gorenšek on his blog and shared in Facebook groups in support of Ivan Gale, Civil Society Initiative of Slovenian Lawyers and others.
The WHO told Razkrinkavanje.si that, according to the latest data, none of the vaccines against COVID-19 are linked to emergence of new variants: “New variants of the virus emerge as a result of widespread circulation of the virus.” They added that the vaccines approved so far reduce the likelihood of transmission of all current variants of the virus, including Omicron.
In 2020, the WHO started classifying variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus according to the risk they pose to global public health. The variants associated with increased transmissibility, higher severity of disease or reduced effectiveness of public health and social measures, such as vaccines, are designated as Variants of Concern (VOCs). Currently, the VoCs include Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Omicron, the only variant to emerge after the launch of mass vaccination in December 2020.
The first case of infection with the Omicron variant was detected on 24 November last year in South Africa. According to Our World in Data, 23.5% of the South Africa’s population was fully vaccinated at the time, 17.9 percentage points below the global average at that point in time.
The WHO cautioned that the COVID-19 pandemic is nowhere near finished due to inconsistent application of measures to contain the spread of infections, increased social mobility, new variants of the virus and inequitable vaccine distribution worldwide.
In his comments for Oštro, Roman Jerala, Head of the Department of Synthetic Biology and Immunology at the National Institute of Chemistry in Ljubljana, emphasised that vaccines can’t cause the virus to mutate under any circumstances. “Virus mutations are caused by inaccurate viral replication and errors during this process. The likelihood of mutations is proportional to the number of infected individuals.”
The Omicron variant, he said, “very likely developed in the body of an individual with a compromised immune system or after transmission from an animal, as Omicron reproduces well in animals.” He also warned that future variants of the virus will likely be more infectious.
“Mutations happen more frequently if the virus is able to replicate rapidly, something the vaccines prevent,” Bojana Beović, Head of the National Advisory Committee on Immunization, explained to Razkrinkavanje.si.
She noted that booster doses with vaccines adapted to protect against new variants may need to be repeated every year, like for example annual influenza vaccinations. She furthermore cautioned that neither vaccination nor recovery from infection provide lasting immunity against the viruses that cause COVID-19, but that vaccines are “very important in turning this disease into the ‘common cold’, in other words, in preventing severe illness and hospitalisation.”
She added that high vaccination and recovery rates will make public health and social measures unnecessary, as the course of the disease will be milder in the majority of cases.
We shared our findings with the author of the open letter Geert Vanden Bossche and Domen Gorenšek, who translated the letter into Slovenian.
Gorenšek informed Razkrinkavanje.si that he can only give “legal opinions on the legality of measures, decrees, mandatory vaccination, status of ‘vaccines’ against COVID-19 etc.”
Vanden Bossche did not comment on our findings.
The claim that vaccination breeds new variants of the virus is false.