The "non-specific effects" of vaccination, or: How certain vaccines appear to have enduring influences on infections and mortality in the vaccinated unrelated to the viral infections they prevent

Virus transmission and the human immune system are poorly understood, and interventions to reduce human disease often have a range of unanticipated outcomes.

Viruses and their human hosts together form complex systems, which do not react in predictable ways to simplistic interventions. The entire pandemic has been an extended lesson in this truth. If our thought leaders weren’t such laughable cretins, they might’ve bothered to learn something from the fact that lockdowns don’t have any effect on virus mortality, that allegedly highly efficacious vaccines failed to do anything at all against the circulation of SARS-CoV-2, and that mask mandates – if they’re not merely worthless – now and then seem slightly enhance transmission.

An intriguing paper published yesterday in the journal Drug Safety on Implications of Non-Specific Effects for Testing, Approving and Regulating Vaccines points to a wealth of research showing that vaccines not only reduce the chance of infection from targeted pathogens, but also often “affect all-cause mortality and morbidity in ways that are not explained by the prevention of the vaccine-targeted disease.”

Live attenuated vaccines have sometimes been associated with decreases in mortality and morbidity that are greater than anticipated. In contrast, some non-live vaccines have in certain contexts been associated with increases in all-cause mortality and morbidity. The non-specific effects are often greater for female than male individuals. Immunological studies have provided several mechanisms that explain how vaccines might modulate the immune response to unrelated pathogens, such as through trained innate immunity, emergency granulopoiesis, and heterologous T-cell immunity. These insights suggest that the framework for the testing, approving, and regulating vaccines needs to be updated to accommodate non-specific effects.

A lot has been written about some of the obvious malfeasance in the Covid vaccine trials, but rather less has been said about how our entire approach to testing candidate vaccines is so hopelessly one-dimensional and naive. Phase III trials enrol far too few subjects to catch rare serious adverse reactions, which by itself is an argument against the mass deployment of any new vaccine against SARS-2, since this virus already poses a minuscule risk to anyone who is not very old or very sick. In 2021, for younger cohorts especially, we had greater objective certainty about the safety of the virus than we did about the safety of the jabs.

In some ways the entire discourse around vaccination and its safety appears constructed around the limitations of these simplistic trials. Remember the old claim, pervasive in early 2021, that vaccines have no long-term side effects? The reason would be that most vaccine trials stop collecting data on adverse events six months to a year after participants are vaccinated. If this is how you conduct your studies, longer-term effects will certainly remain elusive, but whether that is because they’re truly not a thing, or because you’re simply not looking for them, is very hard to say.

The “non-specific effects” the authors outline are quite intriguing:

Calmette, co-inventor of the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine, noted that mortality was reduced by 75% among BCG vaccinated children in Paris, much more than could be explained by prevention of tuberculosis; he speculated that the vaccine may have additional benefits, strengthening the general resistance against other infections. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Russian virologist Voroshilova conducted large trials of live enteroviruses, including oral polio vaccine, and found that they significantly reduced the risk of influenza infection …

In the 1980s, when the Danish-Guinean field station Bandim Health Project started a systematic investigation into the overall health effects of routinely used childhood vaccines, it became clear that most vaccines affected all-cause mortality and morbidity more than explained by prevention of the target disease. …

I will put this in the growing pile of evidence for viral interference. When you’re injected with a live attenuated virus vaccine, you suffer a mild infection, and aspects of your immune response reduce your susceptibility to other pathogens for a refractory period following recovery.

Strangely, certain non-live vaccines that have high efficacy against infection appear to work in the other direction, and may actually increase mortality, at least for certain vaccinees. The diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) vaccine appears to drive up the death rate in lower-income females by as much as 100%. Similar effects have been noted for five other vaccines, including one against H1N1 influenza:

These non-specific effects are most pronounced when a given vaccine is the most recent vaccine. … [N]on-specific effects seem to last at least 6 months, and sometimes persist for many years. The non-specific effects of vaccines were initially observed in low-income settings with high mortality due to infectious diseases, but non-specific effects have also been reported in some studies from high-income settings, which assessed the risk of non-targeted infectious disease hospitalizations, corroborating that vaccines can affect the risk of unrelated infections.

Because the universal administration of common vaccines in the West has made unvaccinated controls highly scarce, “it is difficult to test already approved vaccines in random trials” for non-specific mortality enhancing or reducing effects. The rapid rate at which children receive different vaccines also makes the specific effects of any particular jab hard to recognise. As a society, we’ve concluded on the basis of simple, unsophisticated studies that vaccines are absolutely great, and then proceeded to use them so widely, that we’ve lost much of our ability to detect their drawbacks.

The “non-specific effects” delineated here are if anything an overly narrow concept, denoting merely one specific kind of unanticipated vaccination outcome. The unprecedented campaign to vaccinate the whole world against SARS-2 also revealed unanticipated “specific effects”, including the apparent enhancement of transmission for about ten days following the first and third doses, and generally increased rates of transmission among the vaccinated in the longer term. These effects were visible because the vaccination campaign unfolded over many months and millions of people refused to take part. More traditional, widely administered vaccines presumably have their own range of unanticipated consequences, which the nearly universal practice of early childhood vaccination has merely hidden from us.