Last week, the director of Pfizer Netherlands Marc Kaptein was a guest at Op1 to talk about booster shots, among other things. In this conversation, a number of interesting and remarkable statements were made, worth analyzing. In this article, Guido Versteeg discusses the statements of Marc Kaptein and Thijs van den Brink and weighs both the questionable assumptions and the candid truths. For those who missed the conversation, the video is below. Then it is up to Guido.
'Natural immunity may be better than the vaccine' (Thijs van den Brink)
Thijs van den Brink asks Marc Kaptein whether you can also control the virus by going through an infection in a natural way, which causes your body to produce an immune response that may protect better than an immune response from the vaccine. Thijs van den Brink does not ask this question lightly. There is scientific evidence that natural immunity protects more broadly and for a longer period of time than a vaccine. This is because the natural immune system is confronted with the complete virus and therefore stores all 'parts' of the virus in the immune memory. If a part of the virus mutates afterwards, the immune system still recognizes the parts that are not or hardly mutated (a kind of pattern recognition) and thus triggers the right immune response against the virus.
However, the vaccines only target one part of the packaging of the virus and the immune system only recognizes that part when it comes into contact with the virus again. If this part mutates, it affects the recognition of the immune system and thus the immune response. This is why influenza vaccines show varying degrees of effectiveness, as they are made up of influenza strains from previous years. A large number of scientific articles support Thijs van den Brink's suggestion. Here are two links: an article in Nature and a in the Lancet.
A direct comparison between natural defenses and immunity through vaccination gives the following conclusion:
'This study demonstrated thatnatural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection,symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity. Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.'
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1
And here's a Summary of a number of other studies with the same findings (click on Read More).
Marc Kaptein's response is 'You don't know if you're going to get sick or not'. It article from The Lancet indicates that it does not matter whether you become seriously ill or not, even with asymptomatic infection, the immune response is good afterwards and the chance that you will ever become seriously ill again is small.
'You can adapt a vaccine to a new variant' (Marc Kaptein)
Marc Kaptein says that the vaccine can be adapted to variants. In doing so, he implies that natural defenses cannot cope well with variants, which is incorrect according to scientific studies. And he also implicitly says that it is necessary for vaccines to be adapted to variants, because the current vaccines apparently do not offer protection against variants.
Kaptein tries to portray the phenomenon of natural immunity as inferior. This is really a strong example of turning the truth around. Natural immunity is broad, precisely because it has come into contact with the complete virus. That is why there is even cross-immunity with previous coronaviruses and people with a well-functioning immune system do not become so seriously ill that they have to be admitted to hospital.
'If you're just healthy, and you've had two shots, then you can do without it for a while, right?' (Thijs van den Brink)
Thijs van den Brink asks the question whether you, as a healthy person, are not sufficiently protected for a longer period of time after two injections. Marc Kaptein's answer is both honest and striking: 'You can indeed continue 6 to 8 months after the second shot without any problems'. This statement is extremely important: Marc Kaptein indicates that the vaccines are only effective for 6 to 8 months. Because if you formulate his statement negatively, he is actually saying: after 6 to 8 months after the second shot, you can have problems with the virus again. For a lot of people, this information may be new or uncomfortable. It indicates that vaccines are not the way out of this crisis. At least, not if you think you're there after 2 shots. You have to take a new shot every 6 months to stay protected against the virus. If you post this on Facebook, Facebook will remove your post because you are violating Facebook's guidelines.
Marc Kaptein is following the science with this. Several studies have shown that the protection of the vaccine decreases after 6 months. The vaccine has previously proven unable to prevent transmission or infection, but these studies say, just like Marc Kaptein, that the vaccine also no longer prevents you from becoming seriously ill or dying after 6 months, as can be read in this study:
‘A comparison of the rate of confirmed infection among persons vaccinated at different times revealed a clear increase in the rate as the time from vaccination increased in all age groups, with and without correction for measured confounding factors (Fig. 3A and Table 2). The rate of confirmed infection among persons 60 years of age or older who became fully vaccinated in the second half of January was 1.6 times as high as that among persons in the same age group who became fully vaccinated in March. The data show a similar increase in rate with increasing time since vaccination in the other age groups. The rate of severe Covid-19 cases also increased as a function of time from vaccination. Serologic studies in Israel have shown a correlated timedependent reduction in neutralization titers,12,20 which might be the biologic mechanism governing the observed waning immunity, and thus support the finding in this population-based research.’
The same has been observed in another study from Qatar, where something very serious can be seen 7 months after receiving the second shot. Table 2 shows that after 7 months there are vaccinated people where the risk of severe covid is 40% GREATER than in unvaccinated people:
With these studies in hand, it is also possible to explain why in Flanders and Maastricht, for example, the majority of patients in hospital and ICUs are vaccinated.
'If you take him [the third shot – ed.], you help relieve the burden on healthcare and you also take care of the unvaccinated again' (Marc Kaptein)
Given the scientific studies above, this only applies for a short period of time, whereas if you don't take the vaccine and go through the disease naturally, then your protection is broader and is expected to be longer-lasting.
The second argument from this judgment is again a distortion of the facts. Vaccinated people don't take care of the unvaccinated. Vaccinated people are just as contagious as unvaccinated people and can pass on the virus just as well as unvaccinated people. Vaccinating with a third shot does not help unvaccinated people at all.
'Of course, you can continue on the path we have taken so far, corona measures, convincing people who are not vaccinated [he means convincing people who are not vaccinated – ed.], but in the short term that is not a solution' (Marc Kaptein)
The problem with the approach to corona is that it has not brought a solution at all. The effect of measures on the spread of corona has no correlation with the number of infections in the various countries, and vaccination has not brought us the relief of healthcare that Hugo de Jonge has promised.
There are a large number of studies that have shown that lockdown measures have not worked and that most NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) only marginally contribute to reducing the spread of the virus. Here is an example from the many studies and an extensive discussion of this study here.
Vaccination has therefore not had the desired effect either. The fact that Marc Kaptein is arguing for a third shot as a solution is therefore special, as there are no new facts at the moment that show that vaccination will now have the desired effect. And the facts that are there argue against vaccination as a solution to an overburdened healthcare system.
'Increasing ICU capacity is not possible, we have heard Gommers about that several times' (Marc Kaptein)
This is where Marc Kaptein gets to the heart of the problem, the root cause, so to speak. Covid is a disease that mainly affects older people, or those with weakened immune systems due to underlying suffering. It is mainly the last group to be admitted to the ICU. Much earlier, the Netherlands has been warned about the problem of shortage of ICU capacity. In 2018, for example, a report was published on this subject. However, nothing has been done to increase this ICU capacity. In fact, it has been scaled down further. And although there are undoubtedly bottlenecks to be overcome to increase ICU capacity, it is administrative and political ignorance to say that it is impossible to increase ICU capacity. No attempt has been made to make a national policy to expand ICU capacity. Some hospitals have made an attempt on their own and have succeeded. To quote Gommers is of course not a strong argument, since Mr. Gommers has strange views When it comes to scaling up ICU capacity:
Finally, the bouncer of this conversation, where the true nature seems to emerge:
'The vaccines, the dose that may be used for that third shot, that contract has already been signed with the European Union and is also being delivered.' (Marc Kaptein)
This has indeed appeared in several newspapers, for example in the AD. The contract has already been signed and Minister de Jonge assumes that we will have to get two shots annually until at least 2023. It is therefore a very curious discussion that officially the Health Council has yet to decide on booster shots (which is a third shot), while the contracts have already been signed and vaccines are being delivered for another two shots annually. Then a booster is needed every six months, in line with studies and Marc Kaptein's story about the decline in protection against serious illness.
If we have to draw a conclusion from this conversation, it is the following:
Vaccines only work for 6 months against hospitalization and even shorter against transmission and infection. The plan of Pfizer and the government is to re-vaccinate everyone every 6 months for the next 2 years. Other options to combat this crisis do not seem to be considered.
