MALTA GAMBLES EVERYTHING ON ‘LEAKY’ VACCINE, BANS MOST OF WORLD

Malta, the global iGaming hub, has taken the unprecedented step of banning most of the world, only allowing those with current Maltese, UK, or EU vaccine certificates to enter or leave the country. 

Despite an ongoing international advertising campaign promising tourists a warm welcome, and proclamations that the country is open for business, the tiny republic has become the first EU nation to ban all non-vaccinated people from either entering or leaving. Making matters worse, the Maltese authorities say they will only recognise vaccine certificates issued by Malta, the UK, or EU countries – effectively banning most of the world’s population. 

This obviously has major implications for the country’s gaming and tech industry, throwing the viability of planned expos and conferences into doubt, making business travel difficult, creating a headache for expat workers, and making the recently FATF-greylisted country even less attractive to foreign investment. 

Why has Malta taken this extreme step?

Although Malta itself has vaccinated around 80% of its own population, the government has taken the action following a spike in positive test results over the past week. This, of course, brings up a fairly obvious issue – but one that has so far been ignored by Maltese media and politicians. That is that everyone visiting the country had to produce negative COVID tests (except for Brits, who already had to produce a valid vaccination certificate). So, everyone entering had tested negative for COVID. Still, the current outbreak is being blamed firmly on those foreigners.

Of course, this strongly suggests that either the tests themselves are highly inaccurate, or that the vaccinated local population is actually spreading the virus (or a combination of the two). But, because very few of the vaccinated locals are developing symptoms, they are not getting tested – hence the majority of people getting tests are unvaccinated, possibly leading to the erroneous conclusion that it is the unvaccinated foreigners who are spreading the virus. 

The truth could be very different. Why? Because of a combination of several factors which are conveniently swept under the rug by politicians and health authorities who have gambled everything on the current vaccination campaign. And, let’s be clear here, this isn’t just a Maltese issue. It’s happening globally. But, because Malta is so small, and its policies are so extreme, it illustrates the ‘Catch-22’ situation we find ourselves in very nicely. 

But, before we look at exactly why the vaccination campaign is not likely to deliver the hoped for outcome, and is probably making a bad situation worse, let’s remind ourselves of something, and keep it in the back of our minds. That is that, by the time COVID-19 was brought to the world’s attention through the Wuhan crisis (which had more than a touch of the theatrical to it), the virus was already established around the world. This means that there was never a realistic opportunity to contain it. Indeed, the initial strain spread without detection precisely  because it was so innocuous. All things considered, had the Wuhan incident not struck fear into the world, it’s unlikely COVID would have ever prompted the lockdowns and hysterical clamour for vaccines that we’ve seen.

Why you need to understand what a leaky vaccine is

Which brings us on to the vaccine issue. Quite apart from the fact that none of the vaccines being used have completed long-term trials (by virtue of the fact they haven’t existed long enough), and some are using very controversial mRNA technology, there is a very big difference between these vaccines and those we have become accustomed to, like those for measles, mumps, rubella etc. 

Indeed, this is perhaps the most important thing to understand, the vaccines that were developed (of which there are over a dozen now in use globally), despite using several different technologies, including controversial mRNA tech, are all ‘leaky’ (also referred to as ‘imperfect’ or ‘non-sterilising’). This means they don’t stop people becoming infected or transmitting the virus, but rather reduce symptoms (and, some say, viral load and shedding) in the vaccinated. Furthermore, all the COVID vaccines in use are highly targeted, for example to the much discussed spike proteins. By contrast, ‘non-leaky’ or ‘perfect’ vaccines, like those we’ve all gotten used to taking for years as children, prevent both infection and transmission, and give our immune system exposure to the full makeup of the virus. 

On the one hand, developing leaky, highly targeted vaccines was very quick, enabling several pharmaceutical companies to roll out products in under a year – no mean achievement. But, on the other hand it means the vaccines we are now using might well be making the big picture much worse, and by deploying them we may have brought an illusion of short-term benefit at the expense of opening Pandora’s Box in the long-term. 

A warning from chickens

At this point, it’s probably helpful to consider what has happened with Marek’s disease in the poultry industry. Marek’s spreads rapidly and turns bird’s brains to mush, and decades ago was threatening to destroy the global poultry industry. So, they developed vaccines. Leaky vaccines. Most scientists assumed the vaccines would lessen the severity of the virus and be better than nothing, so they started a mass-vaccination campaign. 

At first, it seemed to work. Indeed, the vaccinated chickens survived for months longer, and seemed okay. However, something unexpected happened. Any unvaccinated birds exposed to vaccinated birds started dying extremely quickly. As it turns out, the vaccinated birds were found to be shedding up to 10,000x more virus than unvaccinated birds. 

You see, normally, as a virus evolves to become more brutal, it kills its host quicker, meaning it has less chance to spread, and usually dies out. It’s for this reason that Ebola, as terrifying as it is, has never gone on a world-wide rampage. But, the vaccinated chickens had essentially become asymptomatic carriers, in which the virus could continue to live, mutate, and shed.

So, the poultry industry unwittingly started off a process that would ensure Marek’s disease only got worse. Fortunately, for the industry, chickens tend to live on farms, in cages. In a state of permanent, total lockdown. So, it’s relatively easy to keep on top of a 100% rolling vaccination campaign, and keep ahead of the curve so-to-speak. Plus, chickens only need to live for a few months. 

However, humans aren’t chickens. Of course, if we completely locked down the entire world – every last man, woman, and child, and rolled out a total, continuous, rolling vaccination for the very latest strains, it might, theoretically at least, be possible to ‘pull a poultry industry’ and keep on top of COVID. But, in reality, this is far from possible. 

For, in a world where there are already a multitude of COVID variants, all evolving away in hugely infected populations, and where people need to work, socialise, and travel, any one single vaccinated population (say, for example, Malta), will inevitably end up seeing the introduction of a COVID variant which is so far removed from the one the population was vaccinated against, that the population will be akin to the unvaccinated chickens. 

So, by rolling out a mass vaccination campaign, in the middle of a hot global pandemic, using leaky vaccines, we may well have condemned ourselves to a never ending cycle of increasingly dramatic outbreaks of increasingly brutal strains – and all the resulting lockdowns and booster campaigns, that will inevitably fall ever further behind the curve. 

Want to find out more about the possible dangers of following a mass infection prevention and mass vaccination campaign with leaky vaccines, during the midst of a pandemic? Check out what Geert Vanden Bossche DVM, PhD (University of Ghent, University of Hohenheim, GSK Biologicals, Novartis Vaccines, Solvay Biologicals, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Discovery, Global Alliance for Vaccines & Immunization, German Center for Infection Research) has to say at his official website.

For more about how vaccination made Marek’s disease worse in chickens, check out this PBS News Hour article from 2015.

What happens next? Is there a solution?

So, here we are, in July 2021, and Malta has become the first European to ban anyone except those vaccinated in Malta, the UK, and EU, in a desperate attempt to halt the latest perceived outbreak. Will it work? Probably not – for while Malta is literally an island, it is still at the mercy of events elsewhere. Like the UK, Israel, and other countries that have enthusiastically embraced the vaccines, they may well buy some time, keeping symptoms down and hospital admissions lower for now, giving politicians and medical authorities some opportunities to pat themselves on their backs and claim they are winning. 

But, whereas early 2020, the world found itself widely infected with a relatively mild virus which the vast majority of people fully recovered from without medical assistance, in July 2021, we are in a much worse position, with multiple far more virulent variants, and billions of vaccinated people walking around as potential asymptomatic carriers, constantly spreading and mixing strains. And, at some point, with the already noted rapid waning of vaccine efficacy, and the constant rise of more transmissible and brutal variants, all the vaccinated will find themselves vulnerable once again. 

At that point, the jury is out on whether those who never got vaccinated will be in a better position than those who did get vaccinated. There are those who argue that, because the vaccines are so narrowly targeted, once they encounter a virus which is of sufficient difference, they will elicit an immune response, but it will be ‘sub-optimal.’ In a nutshell, your body will think it has the answer, and deploy its ‘acquired immunity’ (given by the vaccine), instead of/before its innate immunity (the generic, ‘gatekeeper’ immune system you have from birth). This means that those who either never had the vaccine, but have a healthy innate immune system, or those who were naturally infected by the virus and recovered, may well find themselves in a much better position to fight off future variants. 

Of course, there are those putting their faith in boosters for new variants, but anyone following the rise of new strains will realise this is fanciful thinking. The emergence of new variants is clearly accelerating (likely driven by the mass vaccination campaign itself), so any attempts to keep up with boosters will inevitably fall further and further behind. And, that’s not even taking into account the unworkable mess international travel would become if you had to ensure you had the correct boosters for the specific variants that were currently dominant in the place you were travelling to (something that will always be rapidly changing). 

So, looking back, it would probably have been far better never to have locked down or started a mass vaccination campaign at all. It would have been bad. People would have gotten sick and died. But, in absence of the extreme evolutionary pressure that such measures placed on the virus, it may well have naturally attenuated, and gradually faded into the background, becoming no more troublesome than a bad cold. 

While no one knows for sure if the COVID-19 virus was man-made and deliberately released, man-made and accidentally released, or an entirely natural virus that crossed the species barrier somehow, anyone could be forgiven for thinking this entire sequence of events was entirely predictable… and that some group, somewhere, might be sitting back and watching their plan unfold.