World vaccination campaign is not a biological weapon

Adapted from Verificat, June 17

The portal Latin American Information Agency (ALAINET) has published a paper with the arguments of Geert Vanden Bossche, a German virologist who in the past worked for the Vaccine Alliance (GAVI) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, questioning the massive vaccination campaign that is taking place all over the world.

Specifically, Vanden Bossche claims that it is one of the most effective strategies “to turn a relatively harmless virus into a biological weapon of mass destruction”.

This is FALSE as to date, vaccines are working and are preventing, in most of the cases, the most severe forms of the disease.

“I could think of a few strategies more effective to turn a relatively harmless virus into a mass destruction weapon,” Vanden Bossche says about the globally used measures to slow down the pandemic.

In one part of the text, Vanden Bossche is quoted as saying that vaccination and social distancing measures are an effective strategy for a “relatively harmless virus to turn into a biological mass destruction weapon”.

It is true that the virologist states this in his open letter to the World Health Organization (WHO), but this is false information: to date, the vaccination campaign is proving effective.

Deaths by Covid-19 have been reduced in countries where vaccination is more advanced —at the end of May, the UK reported for the first time in ten months a total of zero deaths associated with SARS-CoV-2.

This is an example that, for the moment, vaccines are working and are preventing the most severe forms of the disease from occurring in most cases.

In any case, vaccine manufacturers are currently developing alternatives, in case  a new variant suddenly appeared, and vaccines begin losing their effect.

Redesigning the injections to adjust them to new variants is not anything new or extraordinary: for instance, every year, injections against influenza must be redesigned because the old ones become obsolete.