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Is Geert Right? Let’s Hope Not.
Rather than control the pandemic, vaccines now appear instead to be contributing to it—with alarming implications, Vanden Bossche warns. This article is part of a publishing collaboration between RESCUE and Trial Site News.
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Is Geert Right? Let’s Hope Not.
Mary Beth Pfeiffer
Senior Investigative Reporter at Trial Site News | I'm a fire-in-the-belly muckraker who abhors the role of money-fueled corruption in government and medicine. My job: Expose it.
Oct. 21, 2022, 5:30 p.m.
Rather than control the pandemic, vaccines now appear instead to be contributing to it—with alarming implications, Vanden Bossche warns.
Virologist Geert Vanden Bossche predicts a vicious wave of covid-19 that will be driven by
the vaccinated, or, more accurately, by the scientifically dubious policy of repeated mass vaccination.
(Mary Beth Pfeiffer)
ANTWERP, Belgium—I spent nearly three hours in this historic city on October 11 in an interview with Geert Vanden Bossche, who has devoted years to studying the complex interplay between vaccines and the human immune system. In our talk, this Belgian veterinarian-turned-virologist and vaccine researcher made unsettling predictions for the future.
I can only hope that Vanden Bossche, 62, is wrong. Let’s for the moment assume he is, that there are significant variables that can and often do intervene. That will make this story easier to read as well as write.
From the start, I asked Vanden Bossche to speak, uncharacteristically for him, in as simple terms as possible.
The short version is this: He predicts a vicious wave of covid-19, with cases already rising in parts of Europe. The coming re-emergence of SARS-CoV-2 will escalate quickly, he contends, and make all other waves pale in comparison. It will, he believes, be driven by the vaccinated, or more accurately, by the misdirected and scientifically dubious policy of repeated mass vaccination.
Vanden Bossche has long asserted that the global covid vaccination program, unprecedented in human history, would put enormous pressure on the virus to mutate; his warning has repeatedly been proven true. While the unvaccinated gained long-lasting, adaptable natural immunity from covid infection, the vaccinated harbor a confused and mostly unhelpful array of old-variant anti-spike antibodies; Vanden Bossche believes these so complicate the immune response that more serious disease from new variants will result. In the vaccinated, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, he predicts, will imminently turn a corner from more contagious to more virulent.
“The losses will be huge,” Vanden Bossche, dressed in a scarf and light jacket, told me across a table in a sunny outdoor café. Hospitals will be overwhelmed, he believes. Stability will be shaken. He has told his 20-something children (two daughters and a son), to prepare for this, even though he and his family are unvaccinated. “Literally there is no immunity, no single protection left for the vaccinated,” he said.
First, let’s pause here. Vanden Bossche is well-respected. He was involved in vaccine science at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, a German institute and two pharmaceutical companies. He is a knowledgeable scholar of vaccinology. He got it right early on. But is he right now?
James Lyons-Weiler, an evolutionary biologist and published biomedical research scientist, admires Vanden Bossche, but demurs. He sees a population that, vaccinated or not, has been widely exposed to the virus and gained protective antibodies to other proteins than the vaccine-based spike. “Evolution simply won’t allow the emergence of a virus that is both deadly and highly transmissible,” he said, and others agreed. “Certain viruses could potentially spread through humanity. In terms of the end of civilization, this is not the one.”
Steve Kirsch, a leading vaccine critic, on the other hand, supported the dire next-wave theory, writing to me: “Vanden Bossche has been extremely accurate in his predictions. It’s puzzling to me that world health authorities are following the advice of the experts who got it wrong instead of the experts who got it right.”
Tess Lawrie, a physician-expert in evidence-based medicine and a founder of the World Council for Health, agreed that vaccines pose immense immunological danger, but not necessarily on the timing of disaster. She wrote in an email, “I do agree that humanity is in grave danger and that many people are likely to die in the next few years.” (Her statement is copied in full below.)
When I told Vanden Bossche I needed to ask others about his prediction, he was not pleased. He sees himself as one of few people worldwide—“in all modesty,” he said twice—who understands the “current vaccine-shaped pandemic.”
“Finding different opinions is easy, but if you cannot judge whether the science behind them is sound,” he wrote to me, “then it all easily ends up in a cheap fact-checking exercise.” I told him I disagreed. Surely, an end-times kind of article needs other views, of which there are more below.
One Way Out
In our interview, Vanden Bossche, who is known widely by his first name, Geert (pronounced Heert), listed certain vaccinated people who may be spared in the coming covid wave:
- The single-jabbed.
- Those who, as with any vaccine, have no response.
- Those who may have gotten placebos, a whisper campaign I heard in France and the United States before.
- Those who had been covid-exposed before vaccination or whose injection held degraded mRNA (as a North Dakota report shared by Lyons-Weiler suggested).
Strikingly, in making his prognostication, Vanden Bossche said something hopeful: He suggested a way forward. His simple fix, which he admits may be impractical in the current environment, would induce the herd immunity that has literally escaped vaccines. “You can only correct this if you intervene with something that reduces the transmission rate,” he said. “You use antivirals—mass administration of antivirals that are safe, effective, broadly accessible to people, and that can be produced and acquired at an affordable cost.”
He specifically pointed to ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which have been used for decades for other diseases and show prophylactic and treatment efficacy in many trials in mostly low- and middle-income countries.
Although the drugs have been all but banned from covid-19 protocols, Vanden Bossche said their large-scale prophylactic use would prevent individual infection and community spread, making the pandemic “very easy” to stanch. Covid would die.
“What herd immunity does,” Vanden Bossche said, “it dramatically reduces the transmission rate of the virus to a level that is so low, even if a person has no immunity, that the likelihood to get a productive infection is remote.”
Rather than control the pandemic, however, vaccines now appear instead to be contributing to it.
Triple-vaccinated people were more likely to become sick with most Omicron variants in a recent Kaiser Permanente study of 16,418 sequenced covid samples. In an August 2021 report, 74 percent of covid positives in a Massachusetts outbreak were fully vaccinated, outstripping the state’s 69 percent vaccination rate. A Canadian Liberal Party analysis last June found six times more fully vaccinated/boosted Ontarians in ICUs than unvaccinated, in a province with a 77 percent vaccination rate. If that’s not enough, data from the United Kingdom shows four- and five-fold higher per-capita covid rates—across every age group but under 18—in triple-vaccinated people.
The trend toward ever-more-vaccinated patients in hospitals—driven by what is called a “leaky” vaccine—will only escalate in coming weeks and months, Vanden Bossche contends.
What astounds him and many other vaccine critics is how such obvious vaccine failures are dismissed. In many conversations in Europe over eight days, I encountered people, as in the U.S., who embrace the warts-and-all jab paradigm. They take comfort in their booster shots. They dismiss side effects that they did not get—except for one who did. They believe they are protected from serious illness and death, which may, for limited periods and in discreet populations, be true. But evidence is growing that this small benefit is dwarfed by the larger vaccine risks and, whether Geert is right or not, its future implications.
In Vanden Bossche’s calculation, the issues of adverse vaccine effects and death, and of vaccine efficacy itself, no longer take center stage. Compared to what may be coming, those concerns are “peanuts,” he said in what he called his last video, and where he explains the mechanisms behind his prediction.
Underpinning This Wave
Vanden Bossche’s forecast is built on how the immune system works (immunology), how viruses change under environmental stress (virology and evolutionary biology), and how vaccines intervene to ward off disease (vaccinology). To listen to him speak or to read his manifesto is an exercise in follow-the-dots concentration. But stripped of molecular jargon, as one doctor told me, it’s pretty basic. Geert boiled it down for me, perhaps a little too well.“For people who are vaccinated, right now, the virus is evolving in a direction that will not only make it highly infectious but also very virulent,” he said. “I’m really sure of it.”
He referred me to a computer engineer and entrepreneur, John Heathco, who studied Vanden Bossche’s theory. “I strongly believe that he will end up being correct in his assertions,” Heathco wrote in an email. “I’m reluctant to opine as to when this will occur…but in my opinion his analysis is sound, and I’ve yet to see a reasonable refutation of his hypothesis.”
What keeps Vanden Bossche awake at night are the twin phenomena of “antibody-dependent enhancement,” or ADE, and “immune refocusing.” It’s widely accepted that the repeatedly vaccinated have an array of antibodies built for another viral variant—they “escape” immunity, namely fail to prevent infection. Under ADE, these “non-neutralizing antibodies” turn lethal, enabling viruses to enter cells rather than keep them out. Under immune refocusing, the immune system is further hobbled, “decoyed” into responding in ineffective ways.
While ADE has been documented in dengue fever and Ebola virus, the literature is predictably unsettled for covid-19. What is clear is that more vaccinated people are getting sick—what Lyons-Weiler calls the “very definition of disease enhancement.” One example is Manitoba, Canada, where 89.3 percent of covid deaths last May were among vaccinated/boosted patients.
These vax-generated antibodies “are putting tremendous pressure on viral virulence,” Vanden Bossche states in his final video. “And there is no doubt that the virus, as it has done all the time along, will also overcome yet another humoral immune pressure.” The result is that the vaccine will fail to do the one thing it was capable of, namely curbing severe illness. “And that is going to be a real catastrophe,” Vanden Bossche asserts.
He predicts the emergence, within “not more than two or three months,” of the variant to end all variants.
“For me this is going to be the end of western civilization,” he said, a phrase he used several times in our conversation. “The hospitals will crash. The rest of society is just going to follow.” He recalls the history of other plagues that culled humanity, times when the human order was reshuffled during years of subsequent struggle and upheaval.
Dr. Lawrie’s response did not address rapid mutations and imminent die-offs. Instead, she explained the insidious process playing out in vaccinated people that undergirds her own prediction. “The covid injections give the cells throughout the body a recipe to make a foreign protein (known as the spike protein). The body then makes antibodies and T cells to fight this foreign protein,” she wrote. The abundence of these proteins leads to constant inflammation, she wrote, “reducing the ability of the immune system to respond to other infections.” Thereby immunocompromised, the vaccinated are susceptible to infections, cancers, and autoimmune disorders. (Lawrie’s full statement is copied below.) No one should get any more such covid vaccines, Lawrie contends.
In our conversation, Vanden Bossche faulted the growing belief that technology—specifically referring to vaccine development—can solve society’s problems. “People have forgotten about one thing and that is biology,” he said, making an eminently fair point.
Is it fair to ask, however, if biology can so specifically be predicted now?
Scientific Uncertainties
Dr. Paul Marik, chief scientific officer of Front-Line COVID Critical Care Alliance, credits Vanden Bossche for seeing the perils early on of mass vaccination. But the mutations he predicted, so far at least, have made for a less harmful pathogen, following the usual course of viral evolution. And the case that antibodies are enhancing infection in covid-19 has not been made, he said. “Omicron turned out to be less virulent,” Marik said. “He has to be careful making these predictions.” While Marik agrees that mRNA vaccines are harmful, he admits, as did others, that he doesn’t quite follow Geert Vanden Bossche’s detailed doomsday explanations. “He may understand,” he told me. “Nobody else does. That’s the problem.”Dr. Sin Hang Lee, a pathologist and published expert in molecular diagnostics, also believes covid will become “less of a problem even with ADE infection. We will live with it (with all its descendants) for a long time.”
Another doctor, who asked not to be identified, said Vanden Bossche was “scaremongering.”
“Those who tell the vaccinated that terrible things will be happening to them are giving the vaccinated an excellent reason not to believe anything else they say,” this doctor told me.
Vanden Bossche’s answer to his critics—there are many on mainly pro-vaccine sites on the Internet—is that their criticism has nothing to do with science.
“I’m a very serious guy. For me to go on all this social media,” he said, “to speak out with all this passion. I take it very seriously. What we are doing right now [in response to this pandemic],” he continued, “I cannot imagine how we can sustain our society for the kind of crisis I am predicting.”
Who is unscathed in this scenario? he asks rhetorically and answers. “Africa will win this battle,” he said, pointing to a continent where immune systems are hardened by natural elements and 24 percent of people are vaccinated, compared to 64 percent worldwide. “This one,” he said, “will be won by Africa.”
As I was writing this, a Washington Post story came across my desk, about a coming “variant swarm” this winter, with examples I’d seen from Vanden Bossche’s video. Then came a tweet from Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, a vaccine cheerleader and epidemiologist, about highly evasive variants that are “worse than CDC has been admitting…surging over 11%.”
Not long ago, I might have called these messages fear-mongering in the service of more shots in more arms, which they all too often are. But then I thought, not for the first time, “What if Geert is right?”
Dr. Lee, who believes inadequate covid tests have exaggerated case counts, added context. Many of these new cases, he said, might simply be the seasonal flu.
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Miranda Sellick
