Are vaccines set to replace antibiotics?
According to the World Health Organization, just over 1.8 million COVID deaths were reported in 2020, the first year of the great scare, before the shots were rolled out. A year earlier, over a million people died worldwide due to a common bacteria but no one suggested locking people into their homes or jabbing them with experimental potions.
However, that may be about to change.
One million deaths a year
The story doesn’t start with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but they are certainly part of it. In 2022, The Lancet published an article on an “urgent global public health priority” describing research partially funded by the Foundation into 33 different types of bacteria that threaten people’s health worldwide. Apparently, these 33 pathogens are responsible for 13.6 percent of all global deaths, and the real villain of the 33 is Staphylococcus aureus (S aureus) which is the most deadly of them all, killing around a million people every year.
From an estimated 13.7 million infection-related deaths in 2019, there were 7.7 million deaths associated with the 33 bacterial pathogens (both resistant and susceptible to antimicrobials) across the 11 infectious syndromes estimated in this study...
S. aureus was the leading bacterial cause of death in 135 countries and was also associated with the most deaths in individuals older than 15 years, globally.
Goodbye to antibiotics
While the research mentioned the importance of interventions such as health education, addressing malnutrition, improving hygiene and sanitation, and providing access to antibiotics, the article also stressed a need to develop vaccines to combat common bacteria.
Antibiotics are not always the ideal way of dealing with pathogens, the authors write, for a number of reasons. First, they are expensive and not all countries can afford a sufficient supply. Then, even when there is access to the necessary drugs, they may not be dispensed wisely, which can worsen the already huge problem of antibiotic resistance. This is a particular problem in what the article calls “low-income and middle-income countries.”
Therefore, they suggest that vaccines could be a better solution to the problem of bacterial infection, especially as the “sobering reality is that a high burden of treatable infections occur in very young age groups.”
Implementation and uptake of vaccines for bacteria ... can directly reduce the burden of bacterial infections, and new generations of vaccines will target older age groups that we have found are significantly affected by this bacterial agent.
‘The world needs a staph vaccine’ — suddenly?
If you haven’t heard about vaccinating against S aureus before, that’s not surprising. Researchers have been attempting to design an effective vaccine against staph infections for over 25 years, with no success. Around 14 different vaccine prototypes have been developed, tested, and retired in frustration. Millions of dollars have been spent on fruitless pursuits. Now, however, a researcher from the University of California, San Diego, thinks he may have cracked the problem and that a safe and effective S aureus vaccine is finally on the way.
Dr. George Liu’s work is featured in a JAMA article published on August 2, 2024. Unlike the article in The Lancet, this article begins from a position neatly expressed in its title:
The world needs a staph vaccine — new research could bring it a step closer.
Why would the world need a staph vaccine when there are effective antibiotics for every single one of the 33 most dangerous pathogens The Lancet researched?
The answer, in a nutshell, is that the mainstream medical research community think that our immune systems are inherently defective. Therefore, scientists must step into the breach and save mankind from deadly pathogens. Antibiotics were good in their day, but vaccines hold a different kind of promise.
Let’s take a deeper dive into the murky waters of scientific hubris and see what we find.
A vaccine worse than placebo?
JAMA’s article starts out by describing a number of failed attempts at developing an S aureus vaccine. In 2011, Merck had to call a halt to its clinical trials after data showed the vaccine was worse than placebo:
Participants in the trial who developed an S aureus infection were more likely to die if they had received the vaccine than if they had gotten the placebo shot.
Merck had gotten all the way to phase 3 of its vaccine trials — meaning that phase 1 trials, testing the vaccine on mice, had gone well, and also that phase 2, testing on a small cohort of humans, had appeared successful. 8,031 people in 26 countries were enrolled in the phase 3 trials. Significantly more people died in the vaccine cohort than in the placebo cohort. It wasn’t even close:
... the mortality rate in patients with staphylococcal infections was significantly higher among V710 vaccine than placebo recipients ... Significantly more patients with postoperative S aureus infections died in the vaccine group...
... [all this] yielding respective mortality rates of 23.0 [vaccine] and 4.2 [placebo] per 100 person-years.
Merck also had to face the fact that the vaccine appeared to be causing multiorgan failure. The trial results stated that,
... postoperative multiorgan failure developed more commonly in [vaccine] recipients.
This was a very generous way of describing how 8 people in the vaccine cohort died due to multiorgan failure, as opposed to zero people in the placebo cohort.
That is, the vaccine was exposed as a dire and deadly failure.
In 2012, another pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, decided to test its own S aureus vaccine prototype. JAMA describes how,
Based on promising efficacy data in mice, Pfizer tested it first among healthy adults and then in more than 3,000 patients undergoing elective surgeries.
Within a few years, it became clear that, once again, a staph vaccine had failed.
Serum data showed that although patients who had received it developed antibodies to S aureus, they contracted the infection at the same rate as the placebo group.
It was then that Dr. Liu realized that “what we needed is something that could explain not just one vaccine, but lots of vaccines, not working.
And he found an explanation.
Staphylococcus aureus — friend or foe?
The key to the puzzle is something with which those who have been following the sad trajectory of the COVID shots will be familiar: immune imprinting.
S aureus, like many other tiny organisms, is what scientists call a “pathobiont.” That is to say, it’s a pathogen but one that lives with us quite happily — until it doesn’t. Then, if we’re not careful, it might kill us.
Although Staphylococcus aureus sounds scary, around 50 percent of children and 30 percent of adults are colonized with it and never even realize it. For the most part, it stays in the nose, on the skin, or in the gastrointestinal tract, and doesn’t get any further. Problems generally start only if we get a deep cut or undergo surgery, when the bacteria can enter the bloodstream.
Given the chance to cross into the blood, lung, or soft tissue, S aureus can become lethal. Medical devices, surgical procedures, uncovered wounds, and injection drug use are all common ways people contract S aureus infections, which can lead to sepsis, pneumonia, endocarditis, and bone infections.
Scientists describe our immune systems as ‘faulty’
Dr. Liu realized that while humans in clinical trials for S aureus vaccine started out, for the most part, colonized with the bacteria, the mice in phase 1 trials who seemed to benefit from the vaccine had no known prior exposure to S aureus. So he conducted an experiment, infecting mice with S aureus before trialing the vaccine on them, and found that the vaccine no longer protected them from the bacteria when they were next exposed.
According to Dr. Liu, S aureus has “learned to hack” the immune system, getting around our natural defenses and warping natural immunity in such a way that instead of eliminating S aureus from our bodies when we encounter it, we allow it to hang around — which can turn out badly.
[S aureus] has a means of manipulating the immune system for its own protection, rendering host defenses and classic vaccine strategies nonprotective.
Dr. Liu’s understanding is that bacteria are always supposed to be destroyed by our immune system (apparently regardless of whether they are currently causing trouble or not). What was happening instead was that the infected mice produced antibodies that had an “extra sugar group” which interrupted the process and allowed the S aureus to survive.
While it is precisely this “faulty immune response” (as JAMA describes it) that enables us to coexist with S aureus, “it also undermines vaccination.” Why?
When a mouse or a person who was already exposed to the bacteria is vaccinated against it, their immune system preferentially recalls the original immune response instead of building a new protective one based on the vaccine.
What you don’t know (about antigens) can’t hurt you...
Calling the original immune response “faulty” and the vaccine-induced response “protective” may be an incredible distortion of the truth. Pfizer’s vaccine prototype utilized 4 different S aureus antigens, while other vaccine attempts used up to 8. But S aureus has at least 79 antigens and probably many more. Each of them causes the human immune system to react in a different way.
Liu and his team claim to know that the bacteria’s “dominant antigen” is the one that “induces the non-protective antibodies,” and that targeting “subdominant antigenic regions” with their vaccine will protect people from S aureus.
The study also showed some promise in targeting so-called subdominant antigens. A pathogen like S aureus has multiple antigens, and some elicit a bigger immune response than others. The bacteria’s dominant antigen, iron-regulated surface determinant B, or IsdB, induces the nonprotective antibodies. Liu’s team found it more effective to target subdominant antigenic regions that elicit a smaller immune response but may not be protected by faulty immune imprinting.
What they are not saying is that using a vaccine to imprint the immune system with a response to just 8 antigens causes humans to lose out on the immune responses to the dozens of other antigens they would otherwise have made when encountering S aureus — and no one knows what effect that will have.
Would we really all die without The Science?
What this means is that vaccinating only makes sense if you believe that S aureus is close to 100-percent fatal if ever it gets into your bloodstream. That is to say, the human immune system, as G-d designed it, is incapable of dealing with a bacterial infection which is why it’s vital that scientists intervene with vaccines.
That actually is what many scientists believe, including Juliane Bubeck-Wardenburg, MD, PhD, division director of pediatric critical care medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, who told JAMA that,
It’s very difficult to rewire an existing immune response once it’s already established on a trajectory that is unfavorable.” [emphasis added]
Just how unfavorable is this trajectory? While S aureus can be fatal once in the bloodstream, most people do survive; 65 percent of them, in fact. That’s even though around 50 percent of S aureus strains found in hospitals are resistant to multiple antibiotics.
Brave New World, here we come
Dr. Chris Montgomery, a critical care physician also quoted in the article, still comes down firmly on the side of nurture vs. nature. Meaning, get in there first with the vaccine before the person ever encounters S aureus, and avoid that first “faulty” immune response that ruins everything for vaccines forever after.
Vaccinating infants could allow the immunization to take effect before S aureus fully imprints the immune system, he noted.
(This is despite the fact that he also told JAMA that vaccinated patients who died during trials had “plenty of antibody” and that it was their nonexistent T cell response that seemed to be the real problem.)
The JAMA author does not suggest any possible drawbacks to injecting babies with S aureus vaccines, even though the article describes a very considerable drawback that emerged in Merck’s trials, namely the multiorgan failure that the vaccine appeared to induce and the possibility that this is caused by an over-the-top inflammatory response to the vaccine.
In effect, preemptively vaccinating everyone against S aureus is like putting everyone’s immune systems into overdrive just in case a bacterial infection ever gets into their bloodstream, which would be fine if the danger was just waiting to pounce but is more likely to be wasteful and exhausting considering that most of us, most of the time, are managing just fine with a bit of S aureus hanging around.
If a Staphylococcus aureus vaccine is ever added to the newborn vaccination schedule (or, worse, given to pregnant women), there will be very few mothers who know enough to weigh the risks and benefits and make an educated decision for the welfare of their child.
And how should they be expected to do so, when even Dr. Montgomery, a huge vaccine fan, admits,
If we don’t know what is truly protective in humans then everything that we are doing in preclinical models is just guessing — informed guessing but guessing nonetheless.
The information contained in this article is for educational and information purposes only and is not intended as health, medical, financial or legal advice. Always consult a physician, lawyer or other qualified professional regarding any questions you may have about a medical condition, health objectives or legal or financial issues.
