A push for a Tuberculosis Vaccine; is this warranted, and if so why? The World Economic Forum returns to Davos

BY SIMONE J. SMITH

The World Economic Forum (WEF) returned to Davos for its first winter session in three years on January 16^th, 2023. Record numbers of government officials and business leaders showed up at the elite annual affair. More than 600 CEOs were in Switzerland, including Wall Street executives such as: JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, David Solomon from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley’s James Gorman.

With climate change top of the agenda, chiefs of major energy companies are back after a COVID-related hiatus, and the claim is that climate change is increasing malaria, and tuberculosis infections, the executive director of the world’s biggest health fund said in Davos on Monday.

“Huge surges in malaria infections followed recent floods in Pakistan and cyclones in Mozambique in 2021,” said Peter Sands, the Executive Director of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

“Whenever you have an extreme weather event it’s fairly common to have a surge of malaria,” he said at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos.

The panellists also warned that COVID-19 isn’t yet over and that we mustn’t get complacent. “The problem that we have right now is that since the beginning of 2022, we’ve had enough vaccines to provide whatever countries want. The challenge has been getting the demand,” said Seth F Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

“Part of it is the world says, ‘We’re done with COVID.’ Of course, the virus is not done with us, and what we really need to do is make sure that policy-makers understand that we’re continuing to see new variants and we’ve been lucky that we haven’t had one with very severe disease, or one that can escape existing immunity.

There’s no reason to think that may not happen. So, the best thing we can do is use prevention methods, but also make sure we vaccinate our high-risk populations so they’re protected against severe disease and death.”

We can say one thing, he is right; more and more people are starting to catch wind of the disastrous effects of the vaccine. It has nothing to do with complacency; people are noticing a trend of side effects, and deaths that are not sitting well for them, but I digress…

According to the WHO, in 2021 more than 10 million people fell ill from tuberculosis and 1.6 million people died.

I came across an article titled, “Tuberculosis in People with Compromised Immunity: A Review of Guidelines,” and I learned that Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis and is transmitted through the air by those who are infected with the bacteria (i.e., coughing).

Patients with compromised immunity have a higher risk of LTBI infection and developing active TB disease^. For instance, people with HIV have a higher risk of developing active TB disease compared to HIV-uninfected people due to their compromised immune system and the inability to adequately fight off infection.

You know who else could possibly fit in that category; individuals who have been vaccinated and boosted. Let’s take a look at what science has to say about this.

In an article titled, “Vaccination Alters the Balance between Protective Immunity, Exhaustion, Escape, and Death in Chronic Infections,” they found that vaccination expands the numbers of lymphocytes specific for a given pathogen. However, in some circumstances, increasing the number of antigen-specific lymphocytes may fail to provide protection and instead lead to an adverse outcome following exposure to the pathogen, something they like to call vaccine-induced pathology.

Another article titled, “Vaccination Alters the Balance between Protective Immunity, Exhaustion, Escape, and Death in Chronic Infections,” they speak to the fact that vaccine-associated enhanced disease (VAED) is a rarely-observed phenomenon whereby vaccination promotes immune responses that exacerbate the disease caused by subsequent infection with the associated pathogen (meaning that your body will actually still catch the disease, because your immune system is compromised). VAED has been observed in humans in three vaccine trials, for vaccines against: dengue virus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and measles.

Is it possible that the rise in tuberculosis has everything to do with the vaccine rollout? Timelines do seem to indicate this fact.

Regardless of the well documented science, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

(Director General of the World Health Organization) announced the creation of the TB Vaccine Accelerator Council at a high-level panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

During his opening remarks, he noted that one of the most important lessons from the COVID-19 response is that innovative health interventions can be delivered fast if they are prioritized politically and financed adequately. I want to make note here that no new TB vaccines have been licensed in a century, yet for some reason now, there is a push for them.

“The challenges presented by TB and COVID-19 are different, but the ingredients that accelerate science, research and innovation are the same: urgent, up-front public investment; support from philanthropy; and engagement of the private sector and communities,” said Tedros. “We believe the TB field will benefit from similar high-level coordination.” 

WHO recently commissioned a study on investing in new TB vaccines, which estimates that over 25 years, a vaccine that is 50% effective in preventing disease among young people and adults could avert up to 76 million TB cases.

Furthermore, every dollar invested in a 50% effective vaccine could generate an economic return of $7 in terms of averted health costs and increased productivity. Additionally, some 8.5 million lives could be saved, as well as $6.5 billion in costs faced by TB-affected households, especially for the poorest and most vulnerable.

Hmmmmm! 50%  effective; do we really want to take another gamble with our lives? I will let you think about that