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Feb. 25, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
38:18
Vaccinologist Geert Vanden Bossche

RFK Jr talks with Geert Vanden Bossche, DMV, PhD, an independent virologist and vaccine expert, formerly employed at GAVI and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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Hey everybody, I'm really proud to have as our guest today one of the leading and most outspoken authorities on the impacts of mass vaccination on the evolution of the bug, but also the evolution of the human immune system.
And Geert van den Bosch has made some of the most controversial, but I think useful comments and critiques about the impact of mass vaccination But also the evolution of the human immune system.
Geert van den Lodz received his DVM from the University of Kent in Belgium and his PhD degree in virology from the University of Hohenheim, Germany.
He worked for several vaccine companies including GSK and Novartis and Solvay.
He then went on to join the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on its Global Health Discovery Team in Seattle as a Senior Program Officer.
He worked with GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization in Geneva, the Senior Ebola Program Manager at GAVI. He tracked efforts to develop an Ebola vaccine.
He also represented GAVI in fora with other partners, including the WHO, to review progress on the fight against Ebola and to build the global plans for pandemic preparedness.
He worked on the Ebola vaccine in Guinea in 2015.
His critical scientific analysis and report on the data published by WHO in Lancet in 2015 was sent to all international health and regulatory authorities involved in the Ebola vaccination program after working for GAVI. Here joined the German Center for Vaccine Research in Cologne as head of the Vaccine Developmental Office.
I wanted to read that part of that is only a small part of a very impressive resume, but just to establish your credentials and really as a mainstream pro-vaccination scientist, but one with integrity.
And his integrity has led him to This moment is a critic, major critic of the rollout of the mass vaccination rollout and all of the attacks that occur because he's taken that very courageous.
And so welcome to the podcast, Geert.
I'm just delighted to have you here.
Well, thanks, Robert, for having me.
The pleasure is also on my side.
And thanks for the opportunity to talk to you and your audience.
Let's talk about just Well, the impact of the mass vaccination is, of course, it's almost per definition.
If you're going to massively vaccinate a population, you are going to generate a huge immune pressure in that population.
And if the immunity that you induce is capable of eliminating the virus, then that would be just fantastic.
But that is not the case because we know very well that none of the vaccines that are currently used It's capable of preventing infection or blocking transmission.
So that means that now, by doing the mass vaccination, you're basically putting a huge immune pressure on the virus through the population, but the virus can still be transmitted, is still infectious, because that immune pressure cannot, in fact, kill the virus.
So that means...
Let me just summarize what we call sterilizing vaccines.
Actually make it so the virus cannot survive in the body of the vaccinated individual.
But very early on, the AstraZeneca monkey trials revealed that the level of viral load in the vaccinated monkeys We got to go forward anyway.
And to me, that should have made at least that vaccine DOA because it's such a risk to vaccinate in the middle of a pandemic with a non-sterilizing vaccine.
And I don't want to do I have a lot of experience from suing the industrial hog farms.
The use of sub-therapeutic antibiotics in those animals breeds antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
And the same thing happens with vaccines.
If you have a vaccine that And they are breeding, and you're spreading them to other people, and that's the problem, right?
Yeah, well, Robert, I mean, you understand this, and many other people understand this, many vaccinologists who understand this, but yeah, it is just appalling to me that, you know, the experts and our leading health authorities obviously did not understand this, because remember, Protection against infection was not even an endpoint of the clinical studies.
Very clearly, the endpoint of the clinical studies was protection against disease.
So what I call these mass vaccinations are symptomatic mass vaccinations.
And as you pointed out correctly, if you cannot stop the infection of the virus and the transmission of the virus, all you will do is you will give Variants that are able to overcome this immune pressure, you will give them a competitive advantage.
And as the transmission continues, these variants will just be enriched in the population up to the point where they become dominant.
And that is what we have been seeing.
We have been seeing that during this mass vaccination, we got infectious strains that were more and more infectious.
That was really the common denominator of alpha, beta, gamma, delta, omicron, etc.
That they became more infectious and that they became dominant.
So it is really unbelievable right from the beginning We knew that if you deploy this type of vaccines during a pandemic, so where the people who are in the process of mounting an antibody response are continuously attacked by the virus, that this would only derive immunoscape, and that is of course A kind of disaster in the sense that ultimately this leads to resistance, of course.
As you were pointing out correctly, pretty similar to what everybody seems to know very well that can occur with antibiotics.
What is the future of this?
What we're doing is we're creating a reservoir that is constantly producing what we call escape variants.
In other words, Under evolutionary pressure, they're being selectively bred to escape the impacts of the vaccine.
And each one of those now will become dominant in the population.
And so we've doomed ourselves.
And Luke Montaner pointed this out.
You've addicted the population to permanent dependence on boosters as each, you turn every human being who's been vaccinated into a factory for mutant variants that are going to escape the vaccine.
Those variants will then spread through the population and you will need to develop a new vaccine for them.
It's the best economic model for a vaccine company that you could ever dream of.
Yeah, so that is true.
However, there is a very, very interesting phenomenon that we now observe.
So I've always said the key type of immunity to protect against coronavirus, and by the way, this is true for influenza virus as well, is our innate immune system.
And that is also the reason why, at the beginning of the pandemic, the population was, of course, immunologically naive to this virus.
The population has never seen this virus.
And yet, the vast majority of the population, and certainly all people who were in good health without underlying diseases, were protected.
Maybe they got mild illness or something, but they got protected.
So that was due to innate immunity.
So if that is true, and if that is protected, you can imagine that the acquired immunity, the immunity that you acquire through the vaccine, is basically useless.
And the clearest proof of that, we do see this now, because what we are seeing right now with Omicron, is that this virus becomes resistant to these antibodies, to the antibodies that have been induced by those vaccines.
And guess what?
The disease has never been that mild.
So that clearly demonstrates that the vaccinal antibodies are normally competing with the innate antibodies that protect you.
But of course, if the virus becomes resistant to these neutralizing antibodies, and these neutralizing antibodies can no longer bind very well to the virus, then again, the innate antibodies can bind and protect you.
So the fact that we are now dealing with a virus, Omicron, that is resistant to the neutralizing antibodies and at the same time only causes mild disease is not a coincidence.
The explanation is that the population is now regaining The functionality of its innate immune system that we know is protective against coronavirus.
That's also why children that have very good innate functional immunity are so well protected against coronavirus.
So we are now, in fact, this is a present from nature.
We are now benefiting from a circulating virus that has become resistant to all these useless antibodies that we have been inducing, so that as well the vaccinees, as of course the non-vaccinated, can now again dispose of this Innate protective immunity, and that is the reason why this disease is now so mild.
If we don't take this small window of opportunity to generate now herd immunity in a natural way, Using this circulating Omicron as a kind of life-attenuated vaccine, then we are going to mess it up completely.
If we are now going to vaccinate against Omicron, then I promise that what I have been forecasting at the beginning of this year, that if we would continue this mass vaccination, that this would lead to a disaster and that this would lead to severe disease, Primarily, of course, in people who get vaccinated against this Omicron variant.
That's very interesting because Pfizer is now manufacturing an Omicron vaccine, so you think that will be a catastrophe.
Yeah, well, that is an absolute disaster.
And I can briefly tell you why this is really my fear as a scientist, as an immunologist, as a vaccinologist.
You may know, Robert, that in the current Omicron family, because there are already several different Omicrons, in the Omicron family the common denominator is That we have about 15 mutations in what we call the receptor binding domain.
This is the domain on the virus that binds to the AC2 receptors on the susceptible cells.
And that is a lot of mutations in a very small region of the virus.
So now you can imagine if you are now going to generate new and fresh antibodies against this receptor binding domain, and that would be the case, of course, when you administer a vaccine against Omicron.
That would induce new antibodies that would now recognize these 15 mutations and recognize the receptor binding domain.
But we know, and that remains valid, that nevertheless, when you do this during a pandemic, that even this anti-Omicron vaccine will not be able to prevent transmission and infection of the virus.
So that means that, again, the virus will be able to select mutants that can overcome this.
But how is the virus going to overcome this?
It would require a tremendous fitness cost for the virus to add to this very small domain yet another 10 or 15 mutations to escape the Omicron vaccine.
What is much easier for the virus to do is just to introduce one or two mutations outside of this receptor-binding domain So that it can now enter the cell through a different mechanism.
And that, for example, it doesn't need to use the AC2 receptor anymore.
And we know already, this is documented, this is published, that Omicron can enter the cell via a mechanism that is already slightly different from the one used by all the previous variants.
So if you now add one or two mutations to this virus, it could basically enter through another portal into the cell, and that would, of course, render the virus against infectious.
But what would be very, very dramatic is that all the antibodies that you have been inducing through the Omicron vaccine would still be very tightly binding to the receptor binding domain, Whereas the virus would not care about this.
It would not care about the receptor binding domain blocked by new and fresh antibodies because it would use another mechanism to enter into the cell.
And then you have a situation where, first of all, you have a virus that is still infectious, that is still Able to out-compete innate antibodies that for most is in fact coated by antibodies that bind very tightly to the virus but that are not capable of neutralizing the virus.
So this is a textbook example of how you induce antibody-dependent enhancement of the disease.
So this would enhance the pathogenicity of the virus and would equal a higher level of virulence of the virus.
So the intrinsic virulence genes would not have to change, but the fact that this virus is now coated with antibodies that bind very tightly to the surface of the virus Without being able to neutralize the virus, that in its own right would expedite entry of the virus into the cell and the pathogenicity.
And that would equal a higher level of variance.
And that is really, that would be very, very dramatic, of course, because these people would get the illness so fast, so rapidly, that The natural acquired immunity would not be able to catch up in time for these people to recover in fact from the disease.
I don't even know if early treatment, when that happens, if early treatment would still come in time to prevent these people from getting severely ill.
What you're talking about makes complete sense from an evolutionary standpoint.
You know, I would venture to say this is virology 101.
And any virologist who hears you speak, even if he's on the other side of the spectrum, like Paul Offit or Peter Hotez or Gorski or any of these people who are extremely, almost This is a possibility.
They may say, we don't think it's going to happen.
Let me ask you this.
Within your community of virologists and immunologists, are people generally receptive?
Are they acknowledging what you're saying?
Are they hostile to it?
Are there people who are saying, yeah, we think you're right?
Well, Robert, I'm always giving this one very, very strong example.
And I promised myself that I would not disclose the name of this person.
But I can tell you, and I have told this, shared this in many interviews already, that one of the most renowned, the most famous vaccinologists on this planet...
It's probably within the three most renowned vaccinologists in the world.
He replied to me Back when I sent out to the WHO and all the regulatory authorities and CDC and global health authorities my warning at the beginning of last year, 2021, I copied this person and this vaccinologist replied to me, of course he knows me and I know him, He replied to me, Geert, you are right.
These vaccines are just going to breed variants, but nobody will listen to you because you go against the current.
And that is one thing, Robert.
And the other thing is that, of course, I get attacked by fact-checkers, I get attacked by people from academia, etc.
But none of the people in industry, none of my peers in industry, of the people I worked with in the past, Have been criticizing me.
That is where I learned my job.
That is where I got my training, my deep training in vaccines and immunology.
These people probably very well know what I'm talking about.
And as you pointed out correctly, I'm not saying I cannot prove that what I'm predicting here or the fear I'm having, that this will happen for sure.
But scientifically speaking, It is a very, very legitimate concern.
And I cannot understand how, you know, given this serious scientific concern, how you can even consider, you know, doing such a thing and now, for example, preparing the vaccine against Omicron, which will most likely not even be tested in clinical studies.
It will just be cut and paste and be right, you know, right going to the population and be administered to massive Across all age groups, including children, because children, vaccinating children against COVID-19 is meanwhile, in many countries, a given, right?
So the precedent will already have happened.
And that is just something that is unbelievable to me.
I'm speechless about this.
I'm really speechless.
Do you anticipate that there will be any regulatory process, like the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices and CDC, or the VRBAC Committee in...
FDA that will look at this at all and allow people like you to submit comments of the kind that you're talking about here prior to the release of an Omicron-specific vaccine.
Yeah, I'm sure that this committee will convene, etc., but people like me and other critics will not be asked to give their opinion.
I mean, there are sufficient Key opinion leaders, unfortunately, all of them have conflicts of interest, but there are sufficient key opinion leaders that can be asked to give their advice.
And it's always the same, Robert.
They say, well, given the urgency and given the The fact that this is still a health emergency of international concern, we need to go fast and we need to accept that there is some kind of risk, but basically this is the same platform that is going to be used and that we consider to be safe, and it's simply a cut and paste, so the principle is exactly the same.
There is just a little bit of change in the genetic sequence of the S protein that we will insert Into this mRNA or into these vectors.
And therefore, the likelihood that, you know, it would react in a different way than the previous vaccines is very remote.
And we, given the emergency, will need to take that risk.
But officially, of course, the committee will convene.
But they will not be conducting studies like for two, three months, which was already too short.
For the initial vaccines.
So I think we will have to learn from Israel.
I think they will be the first to test this.
And it is cynical to say, but one can only hope, but I hate to say this, but one can only hope that the world will learn from them and see what happens when they start massively, you know, to vaccinate massively their population against Omicron.
Let me tell you one thing.
Usually, the ACIP and the Virbac process in CDC and FDA are processes in which the public does have an opportunity to comment.
They don't listen to the public, but they do.
I hope that when that happens that you will file comments.
I want to ask you this because you've worked for the vaccine industry.
Do you think Berla, who is the CEO of Pfizer, He has any conception that it's a possibility.
Does he have the knowledge base to think through and to understand it?
Or is he hearing propaganda from the people around him?
Well, I cannot imagine to be open.
I cannot imagine that nobody has raised his awareness about this possibility.
But, you know, even being, you know, the CEO, you have to imagine that these people are just puppets of the shareholders.
Even the CEO. That is why I'm so angry.
The only party I'm really, really very angry with is the WHO. Because they have opened the door.
Robert, you know, when you're dealing with industry, you know that it's all about the money.
And they don't care about lives.
I mean, in this case, it's very clear with these companies.
They care about the money.
But if you know this, You should be very, very careful and think twice before you open the door to industry.
But in this case, we are dealing with an organization, WHO, that is financially completely, completely dependent on external sponsors to a large extent industry.
And of course, secondly, they are again very much dependent on industry when they claim this being, you know, a health emergency of international concern, because that means that if you come with vaccines, you ought to be able to supply vaccines to all over the world.
Well, the only organization that can do this, that can manufacture at this large scale and supply, you know, this amount of vaccines is industry, of course.
So in all regards, they are completely dependent on industry.
And therefore, if you open the door, like WHO did...
And you declare this a pandemic, okay, but not a health emergency of international concern.
But if you do this, you have to deal with industry.
And it's about the money.
It's all about the money.
So I wouldn't even blame them.
It's not industry or up to industry to say, yeah, wait a minute, there is this, the potential that this may go wrong or, you know, that there is second concerns about So certain mutations that could happen and that could go completely in the wrong direction, etc.
Believe me, they don't care about this.
They have their platform and the more they can throw this, you know, in the pipeline and get this rolled out, the happier they are because they have to obey to the shareholders.
And if they don't do it, Pfizer, for example, another company will do it.
Now, in the natural course, when a novel virus...
It's a naive population.
There's kind of a classical path that occurs during the initial exposure.
There's lots of death and serious injury, but two evolutionary pressures are happening simultaneously.
One is the virus in its natural course will mutate to favor viruses that are less lethal because the virus is Of not killing or causing illness in the host.
If you are a parasite of any kind, you want your host to be active.
You don't want your host dead because it means you're dead.
You want your host active, sociable so that you can spread, having sexual behavior as healthy as possible.
So the ones that It's going to dominate very quickly, and subsequent waves of that infection will be less and less damaging to the population.
At the same time, the population is evolving in various ways.
As you say, through the exposure to the immune system, there is an immediate reaction where the innate immune system begins to develop So if you look at
at the curve for these natural infections in naive populations, there's initially a lot of kill and then subsequent waves of it get more and more innocuous until basically it learns to live in equilibrium with the population and no longer makes anybody sick or very few people like there's initially a lot of kill and then subsequent waves of it get How does the vaccine, the intervention of the vaccine interfere with a natural evolutionary process?
Yeah, well let me first say, Robert, that the evolution that you are describing and which is entirely correct, people, you know, and I understand this tend to interpret this as being a kind of The virus don't want to kill itself, it wants to survive, and therefore it is becoming less virulent, etc., But what happens, in fact, that is how people interpret this.
But what is really happening is, well, one has to realize that pandemic is, of course, interaction, an interplay between the virus and the immune system.
And, of course, the virus will come into the population, but the population will start to develop immunity.
I often call this immunity.
Natural immunity.
Natural immunity is in fact a combination of two things.
First, innate immunity that is already existing as of birth and that, for example, for coronaviruses and influenza virus is very, very important because of the innate antibodies that recognize these viruses.
This is not necessarily the case with other viruses.
This is also the reason why neither coronaviruses Nor influenza viruses are to be considered childhood diseases.
Of course, they can infect children, but they are not typical childhood diseases.
So what you get is that after a wave of infectivity, of course, the natural immunity comes into play We'll eliminate the virus.
That is, by the way, also the way people recover from the disease, so you can transpose this at the population level.
So when you get infected and you get the disease, and the vast majority of the people who used to be in good health and have no underlying diseases will recover from the disease.
That's why we call these diseases acute self-limiting diseases.
But what happens, in fact, is that people who recover thanks to their natural immunity, they will eliminate the virus.
So that is very, very important to realize.
And that is the reason why you see that after a wave of infectivity, you know, you have a steep decline.
That is the natural immunity that kicks in, that not only protects the people against the disease or help them to recover, but that is primarily, and that is very important, diminishing the infectious pressure in the population is eliminating the virus.
And that is what brings, ultimately, the herd immunity, immunity, because herd immunity means that you have a kind of immunity in the population that is capable of diminishing the transmission of the virus to a level that is so low
that even people who didn't get immunized, you know, their chance of getting infected is now so low that it is almost like non-existent and therefore these people are protected.
So that is the natural course of a natural pandemic and how the immune system kicks in to really reduce infectious pressure.
Now, of course, when you start to vaccinate, you generate another pandemic.
Why am I saying this?
Well, you know, at the beginning of our talk, I tried to explain how mass vaccination with vaccines that have no sterilizing capacity that cannot block transmission will ultimately lead to the propagation, to the expansion of more and more infectious variants.
So that means that the immunity that has been established, so to say, With the vaccine, you try to protect these people, is simply going to generate more infectious variants.
And this more infectious variant, it's like you get another pandemic kicking in, and that is why we see this continuous, you know, we are making of this pandemic.
Normally a pandemic is like the disease itself, acute self-limiting.
So that means a pandemic, typical flu pandemic, 1918, was terminated within 10 months.
This is pretty acute.
You had a number of waves, three waves, and then everything finished.
Just like somebody get a disease, they'll be in bed for a number of days, and then the virus is eliminated and people recover.
So what we are seeing right now is that this is becoming chronic.
You get one wave after the other.
That is one thing.
And the other thing what we are seeing is that you never get back to the baseline.
And this is because more and more people get vaccinated.
When you get vaccinated, You can no longer eliminate the virus because we know that vaccine-induced immunity has no sterilizing capacity.
There are fewer and fewer unvaccinated people.
We know that the unvaccinated people that get in contact with the virus, that develop mild disease or even develop moderate disease and recover, that they will eliminate the virus.
But the fewer unvaccinated people, the lower the capacity of the population to eliminate the virus.
So you don't get back to the zero baseline.
And that's what we are seeing in all these countries, more and more waves.
And when the decline, after the summit, it starts to decline, but it never gets back to the baseline.
So that is kind of like a few things That make it clear how the vaccine interferes with the natural course of a pandemic as well with regard to the infectious pressure that is each time renewed because you get new infectious variants dominating.
And secondly, because the immune response is jeopardized because you are exchanging sterilizing immunity from unvaccinated people.
You're exchanging this against an immunity that is not sterilizing.
So we have changed the definition of herd immunity.
Now the authorities are saying, well, herd immunity is almost like, you know, the same as the number of people who are vaccinated.
I mean, it's easy to induce immunity.
It's not that easy.
To induce sterilizing immunity.
So if you make vaccines like against coronavirus and influenza virus and you want to use them during a pandemic, you need to make sure that you do at least as good as natural immunity.
That means that these vaccines need to have sterilizing immunity.
If they don't induce it, you can never end a pandemic by doing mass vaccination.
The punchline, because we unfortunately have a hard stop, but the punchline is that the vaccine is almost certainly prolonging the pandemic and potentially could make it much more deadly.
Absolutely, absolutely.
But there is one pleasant surprise, as I was saying, which is just illustrating that the vaccine-induced immunity is completely useless.
The virus has developed complete resistance against these neutralizing antibodies.
And so what do we see?
Well, what we see is that now, again, the natural antibodies that got suppressed by these vaccinal antibodies come again into the play.
And guess what?
We have a resistant virus, but everybody's happy because the disease has gotten very, very mild because now the innate immunity is back and is kicking in again.
So that is a unique but small window of opportunity.
I also explain to you if we are now going to, you know, to vaccinate against Omicron, then of course we will lose this opportunity and then we will drive the virus into some kind of virus that will be very, very different from the variants that we have seen so far and that will,
that is my fear, most likely develop the kind of mutation that I have been describing that would enable the virus, so to say, to become more virulent Because of a phenomenon that is very well known as antibody-dependent enhancement.
So it's very clear that we cannot do this.
We cannot do this and we need to let nature go its way.
But of course, we can protect people against disease, vulnerable people.
We can identify them.
We know which people have underlying diseases.
These people should still continue to respect infection prevention measures as long as the pandemic is not under control and they must have access to early treatment.
For the rest of the population, it's simply so important That they take good care of their health.
And I know that industry is laughing about this because you cannot make any money with this, but exercise, you know, healthy lifestyle, no overweight, good nutrition, good physical and mental health.
This is so important.
There is plenty of publications that show That good health is directly correlated to good quality of urinate immune system.
And that is what we will need in order to get rid of this pandemic and to turn it into endemicity, where the virus is under control, thanks to the immune system that is capable of eliminating the virus whenever it pops up again.
Thank you for your courage, your integrity.
I know you have suffered tremendously because of your outspokenness, and I have nothing but admiration and respect and gratitude to both youth.
Thank you very much, Geert.
Well, thank you very much, Robert, for the opportunity to speak to you and your audience, and you take good care.
I wish you all the best.
Thank you.
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