Vaccine News: Pfizer’s Study On Vaccine Effectiveness Against New Variants And Claims are Misleading, Numerous Professional Experts Aghast.

Vaccine News: Pfizer’s PR teams and the corrupted media they must have probably bought along with unethical medical experts are all helping to mislead the public that their vaccines are truly effective against the new variants including the B.1.1.7 strain.


 
Pfizer and BioNTech announced on Friday that their COVID-19 vaccine is effective against the emerging variants. https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/vitro-study-shows-pfizer-biontech-covid-19-vaccine-elicits
 
Many so called independent ‘experts’ said the findings were good news, and the media was abuzz with news that  the Pzifer vaccines  were effective against new strains including the B.1.1.7 strains and even the new South Africa variants.
 
Pzifer’s PR team capitalized on their preprint study that has yet to be peer reviewed https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.07.425740v1 and sadly, many  media that we once though were reliable and credible including the New York Times and STATS News etc went along and agreed with the claims.
 
The big problem is that Pfizer only focused on one mutation found in the variant and that too it was just an in vitro study. In the human body, the dynamics of immune and antibody responses are much more complicated.
 
It must be stressed here that these new variants including the B.1.1.7 contains as much as 23 mutations with a sizeable quantity just on the spike proteins alone. https://www.thailandmedical.news/news/u-s-cdc-indicates-that-vaccines-might-not-protect-against-new-uk-variant-b-1-1-7-new-details-show-new-variant-could-be-the-expected-super-strain
 
Numerous experts are commenting about the misleading study and also the misleading media coverages.
 
Professor in Medicine, The Norwich School of Medicine, University of East Anglia, Prof Dr Paul Hunter said, “The authors say “no reduction in neutralization activity against the virus bearing the Y501 spike”.  But looking at figure 1 it does seem to me that there is a reduction of a single dilution in the assay in about a half of all sera tested. The authors have helpfully drawn lines for those sera that did exhibit different inhibition titres between the two variants. How is this figure compatible with the statement? I suspect the issue is that when comparing a single serum or paired sera we generally need a twofold change to be sure so on any one serum a one fold difference would not be taken as being significant. But when looking at multiple sera then a one fold decline in titre in about half of cases and only one increased titres in the remaining does suggest an impact.”
 
He added, “Sometimes you get the appearance of an es cape mutant (antigenic shift for influenza) that renders all its daughter viruses resistant to pre-existing immunity.  Often you get a build up over time of small mutations (antigenic drift for influenza) that gradually produce daughters with increasing resistance. It does seem to me that this preprint does suggest a small increase in resistance to vaccine produced antibodies, that even if not sufficient in itself could in combination with other mutants be an important step on the pathway to reduce the efficacy of pre-existing vaccines.”
 
Dr Hunter further commented, “The other issue is that a recent preprint 1 found that the most important mutation giving resistance to immunity following natural infection may be at E484 which is a mutation in the South African variant which of course would not be covered by the preprint by Xie et al. and as far as I can tell by the preprint by Sahin to which Xie refers 2 . However, it is not clear to me whether the E484 site is important in immunity with existing vaccines, but this needs to be confirmed. So at present the jury is still out on the impact of the South African variant on vaccine efficacy. It is likely that vaccines will still be effective but maybe a little less so unless of course additional variants arise.”
¹ https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.31.425021v1
² https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.09.20245175v1
 
Professor of Microbiology at the University of Cambridge, Prof Dr Ravi Gupta, said, “The short report, showing a single Spike mutation has little impact against serum from individuals vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine, is misleading for a number of reasons. Firstly, the mutation selected is only one of 8 in the UK variant, and in fact was not expected to have significant impact alone. Secondly, primary titration curves are not presented so one cannot see how well the experiments worked and what the measurement error was. The number of times the experiments were repeated is not given. This work should be ignored until properly conducted work is made available. The present paper would not pass peer review in its current form.”
 
Professor in Molecular Immunology, London Metropolitan University, Prof Gary McLean, said, “It’s a very short paper, not really even a paper – just some experiments written up into a communication. However, they made mutant SARSCoV2 viruses with wild type N501 or the Y501 spike variations and have shown that 20 sera from previously vaccinated people can still neutralize the virus in vitro and in fact is equivalent i.e. both variants were neutralized equally by sera from people immunized with the N501 variant. Sera was obtained 2 and 4 weeks after the standard two dose regimen – presumably separated by 3 weeks as per guidelines (not the UK “let’s give as many the first dose and then eventually get around to the second dose regimen”). This could be critical. The limitation is that they did not construct SARS-CoV-2 with the full set of spike mutations in the UK variant and therefore further conclusions cannot be made fully at this stage.”
 
Chair of the British Society for Immunology COVID-19 and Immunology taskforce, and Professor of Immunology at University of Surrey, Prof Deborah Dunn-Walters said, “A limitation of this study is that the mutation was tested in isolation. Where evidence, such as structural modeling, indicates that mutations could interact with each other to affect the overall antigen structure they should be tested together.” 
 
Most media covering medical and health news should actually get writers are properly qualified to write about medical and health matters preferably with a biology science or medical background and not some stupid journalist who do not understand anything about medical matters and are easily bought for small sums of money by some of these PR agencies.
 
The public should be wary of also where they get their medical and health news from. Stay away from most mainstream media and also American and British media as they are the most corrupted and unreliable these days. If they were that good and so reliable, we would not have so any people dying in America and United Kingdom from COVID-19. Many of these same garbage media talked about the merits of remdesivir etc in terms of saving lives in the past!

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