3am Today

I ran into a social media post the other day, as I am sure millions of others have run into the same post, stating that Ex Pfizer Vice President Michael Yeadon claimed “There is absolutely no need for vaccines to extinguish the pandemic.”

As you can imagine, this, like almost every single post on social media, set off a fire storm of rebuke from fact checkers, the news media and the CDC pundit experts that should have all known better than to jump on a bandwagon of shouting from the roof tops in horror.

At no time in history as the present has there been a global population that will pass judgement on a sentence of spoken words before any thought as to what those words might be trying to convey to the person reading it.

Dr Yeadon is a co-founder of Ziarco and CEO. He is an Allergy & Respiratory therapeutic expert, developed out of deep knowledge of biology & therapeutics, and is an innovative drug discoverer with over 25 years of experience in drug discovery and development. Dr Yeadon has published over 40 original research articles since 2011 as well as has consulted to more than 20 biotechnology companies.

Prior to consulting as an independent, he was Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of the A&R Research Unit of Pfizer. At Pfizer, Dr Yeadon was responsible for target selection and the progress into humans of new molecules, leading teams of up to 200 staff across all disciplines and won an Achievement Award for productivity in 2008. Under his leadership the unit invented oral and inhaled NCE’s which delivered positive clinical proofs of concept in asthma, allergic rhinitis and COPD. He led productive external collaborations and was involved in product and device licensing.

Prior to Pfizer, Dr Yeadon worked at the Wellcome Research Labs with Salvador Moncada with the research focus on airway hyper-responsiveness and effects of pollutants including ozone and working in drug discovery of 5-LO, COX, NO and lung inflammation. With colleagues, he was the first to detect exhaled NO in animals and later to induce NOS in lung via allergic triggers.

He attended the University of Surrey in Guildford, U.K, where he received his PhD, with thesis work in the respiratory field, and a BSc, First Class, with Joint Honours, in Biochemistry and Toxicology.

As we can see, Dr Yeadon is a very intelligent man. This is not to say that any of the other million doctors are stupid, but it does leave one to wonder, why would some of these doctors rebuke what has turned out to be mostly true?

Do we need vaccines? Of course we do, but we also need them to be intelligently constructed and manufactured. As we know from that post, vaccines take a lot of time and research (including a very long clinical trial process) to accomplish a good, worthy vaccine. This process can take ten years or more to formulate a good stable vaccine before pushing it out to market.

As we have all seen, the covid vaccine has already been pushed out to market within a year. After the big hype of it’s distribution with millions of the global population having been injected with it, now comes the advertisements asking for volunteers for the clinical trials. It should strike a cord with anybody to have serious doubts about why they are asking for clinical trials after the vaccine has already been made.

As everybody should know, the human body is an amazing mechanism designed to take care of itself in a variety of ways that have resulted in the creation of vast volumes of research papers to understand how this is done. We all should also know that not everybody is created the same, highlighting the need for these volumes of documentation to be created.

One of the more interesting aspects of the human body is its ability to create and maintain the T-Cell. A wonderful organism that accomplishes more than we could ever thank it for. A silent hero inside or each of us. It is a type of white blood cell that is of key importance to the immune system and is at the core of adaptive immunity, the system that tailors the body’s immune response to specific pathogens. The T-Cells are like soldiers who search out and destroy the targeted invaders.

Concerns about coronavirus variants that might be partially resistant to antibody defenses have spurred renewed interest in other immune responses that protect against viruses. In particular, scientists are hopeful that T-Cells could provide some immunity to covid, even if antibodies become less effective at fighting the disease.

Alongside antibodies, the immune system produces a battalion of T-Cells that can target viruses. Some of these, known as killer T-Cells (CD8⁺ T), seek out and destroy cells that are infected with the virus. Others, called helper T-Cells (CD4⁺ T) are important for various immune functions, including stimulating the production of antibodies and killer T-Cells.

T-Cells do not prevent infection, because they kick into action only after a virus has infiltrated the body. But they are important for clearing an infection that has already started. In the case of covid, killer T-Cells could mean the difference between a mild infection and a severe one that requires hospital treatment. They could also reduce transmission by restricting the amount of virus circulating in an infected person, meaning that the person sheds fewer virus particles into the community.

T-Cells could also be more resistant than antibodies to threats posed by emerging variants. Studies have shown that people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 typically generate T-Cells that target at least 15–20 different fragments of coronavirus proteins. But which protein snippets are used as targets can vary widely from person to person, meaning that a population will generate a large variety of T-Cells that could snare a virus. This makes it very hard for the covid virus to mutate to escape cell recognition, unlike the situation for antibodies.

As you can see from all of this, Dr Yeadon is mostly right. We should not be injecting the virus or any of the myriad of other substances are in with the vaccine shot to a mass population that does not need it.

Why do I say “mostly”? Covid, like all viruses tend to mutate as time goes on. Much like any human, a virus has a set of survival instincts. This has been shown with one variant found in South Africa. The 501Y.V2 variant identified – also called B.1.351 – is partially resistant to antibodies in our current vaccine used against previous coronavirus variants, hence why vaccines take so long to create before being pushed out to market. It should also be noted that not every human is going to manufacture a complete set of “killer T-Cells.”

In conclusion, we as a global population could use to take more time reading instead of shouting from the roof tops.