‘Breakthrough’ promises a ‘one-size fits all’ miracle vaccine

Alok Jha
UK Guardian
February 7, 2011

Scientists at Oxford University have successfully tested a universal flu vaccine that could work against all known strains of the illness, taking a significant step in the fight against a disease that affects billions of people each year.

The treatment – using a new technique and tested for the first time on humans infected with flu – targets a different part of the flu virus to traditional vaccines, meaning it does not need expensive reformulation every year to match the most prevalent virus that is circulating the world.

Developed by a team led by Dr Sarah Gilbert at Oxford’s Jenner Institute, the vaccine targets proteins inside the flu virus that are common across all strains, instead of those that sit on the virus’s external coat, which are liable to mutate.

If used widely a universal flu vaccine could prevent pandemics, such as the swine flu outbreaks of recent years, and end the need for a seasonal flu jab.

“The problem with flu is that you’ve got lots of different strains and they keep changing,” said Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute. “Occasionally one comes out of wildfowl or pigs and we’re not immune to it. We need new vaccines and we can’t make them fast enough.”

A universal vaccine would save the time and money now needed to create vaccines to fight whatever particular virus has emerged in any year. The government spent an estimated £1.2bn in preparing for the swine flu outbreak of last winter.

The process of developing a seasonal vaccine takes at least four months and if the flu strain is highly pathogenic – as in 1918 when millions of people died – the delay means more people get sick and die before the vaccine is ready.

This winter the government was criticised for its handling of the annual winter flu outbreak. Shortages of the seasonal flu vaccine became so acute in some areas that GPs were told to use old stocks of swine flu vaccine instead.

“If we were using the same vaccine year in, year out, it would be more like vaccinating against other diseases like tetanus,” said Gilbert. “It would become a routine vaccination that would be manufactured and used all the time at a steady level. We wouldn’t have these sudden demands or shortages – all that would stop.”

Note: … there are clearly enormous issues with this test. Nucleoproteins that are wrapped and not exposed to the surface, though far less mutable, clearly will be useless in terms of antibody production that can attack intact virus and in terms of production of effective memory cells. Thus, what we have is an injection of foreign protein that activates T-cells (as any foreign protein would). How long does T-cell activation last? Would one need , for example, to be vaccinated every 72 hours? Would any foreign protein (viral nuclear protein or ham sandwich) elicit the same effect? It is not surprising that priming the immune system will help in fighting subsequent infection. The question is how much virus was introduced into the test subjects: enough to produce a clinically/pathologically significant viral load. Diminution of basic symptoms associated with any inflammatory response for test subjects with pre-primed immune response is or should be expected. The quantitative assessment with viral titers and adequate controls is sorely needed to make this story a story.

– Taken from commentary written on the Guardian

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Australia Blames Fluvax for Children Convulsions

Australian Department of Health and Ageing reported that flu vaccination was “causally related” to fever and convulsions in 99 Australian children this year. Of those, 74 had no other possible cause.

New Scientist

Image: Reuters

As the northern hemisphere braces itself for the flu season, and for the first time the US recommends flu vaccination for everyone over 6 months of age, Australia has confirmed that its main seasonal flu vaccine, Fluvax, caused convulsions in 99 children, all of whom recovered. Fluvax is made by the Australian firm CSL.

Epidemiologists insist that the benefits of flu vaccines outweigh the risks, however, and are calling for better surveillance to pick up occasional problems faster.

Last March, Australia started vaccinating ahead of the southern hemisphere’s flu season. All the drug firms’ vaccines contained three killed strains of flu, one of which was last year’s pandemic strain, which persists as the dominant seasonal virus in Australia, North America and elsewhere.

In early April, reports came in of children with fever and convulsions following vaccination. On 22 April Australia suspended flu vaccination for children under 5. In late July, vaccination resumed with other makers’ vaccines, but not CSL’s Fluvax.

Fevers and convulsions

Last week the Australian Department of Health and Ageing reported that flu vaccination was “causally related” to fever and convulsions in 99 Australian children this year. Of those, 74 had no other possible cause, and Fluvax had been given to all 66 of those where the vaccine’s name was known, CSL says it is trying to identify the problem.

Fever is an occasional side effect in children given flu vaccines, and about 1.4 per 10,000 people vaccinated have seizures. High fever can cause seizures in 2 to 4 per cent of otherwise normal children 3 years and under, though no one is sure why. Fluvax caused seizures 50 times as often as would be expected with a vaccine.

In an analysis published in the journal Eurosurveillance, Heath Kelly, head of epidemiology at the state infectious diseases laboratory in Melbourne, calculates that Fluvax might have been worse than flu, causing two or three cases of convulsions for every case of flu it prevented that would have required a hospital stay during the pandemic.

Pandemic flu

But David Isaacs, professor of paediatric infectious diseases at the University of Sydney says the comparison is unfair. Children usually recover completely from fever-related seizures, though there can be brain damage in rare cases. By contrast, 1 per cent of children admitted to hospital with pandemic flu in Australia died.

Fluvax may well have prevented additional cases of convulsions caused by flu itself. In the biggest study so far of the neurological effects of the 2009 pandemic, Joshua Bonkowsky of the University of Utah reported last week that swine flu caused as many cases of neurological complications in five months as ordinary flu had in the previous four years. The most common were seizures. Moreover, the complications were more severe and lasting than ordinary flu. “Given how bad some of the complications from the H1N1 influenza were, we are really encouraging people to get vaccinated,” he says.

Kelly is also adamant about the need for vaccination. “The issue is not influenza vaccines in general, but one manufacturer’s vaccine in one year,” he says. “Such problems must be acknowledged rapidly on the rare occasions when they occur.”

Partly due to the scare, only 19 per cent of Australians were vaccinated this year. So far swine flu is known to have killed 16, including some with no previous health problems.

Influenza vaccine sends children into convulsions

Natural News

Influenza vaccines have sent 57 children into life-threatening convulsions, reports The Age out of Australia. These influenza vaccines were being give to children under five to “protect” them from seasonal flu, but after receiving the shots, these children started going into convulsions.

An investigation has revealed that there is no quality control problem with any particular batch of influenza vaccines. They all pass quality control, in other words, so the convulsions are being caused by what is intentionally put into the vaccines, not by some mistaken chemical contaminant.

This, of course, baffles conventional doctors who have all been told that vaccines are perfectly safe and could never harm anyone. So rather than pausing to consider what might be contained in the vaccines that’s causing children to go into convulsions, they charge ahead with the recommendation that even more people should get vaccines.

Alan Hampson, chairman of Australia’s Influenza Specialist Group, “…advised young, healthy people anxious to get the flu vaccine to consider having the swine flu vaccine” reports The Age. There is no amount of real-world evidence, you see, that can break the mythological stranglehold that vaccines have over the minds of mainstream physicians. Even if children start dropping to the floor and convulsing right in front of them, they will continue to push vaccines on even more children.

The illusion of vaccine efficacy

Vaccines are based on a scientific-sounding mythology that is widely believed by gullible physicians and scientists who simply believe what they are told rather than what’s real.

This mythology is based on the belief that injecting foreign matter into the human body will cause the immune system to adapt to the weakened foreign matter by creating antibodiesthat fight off future infections. This explanation, however, is pure mythology. In reality, an immune system can only invoke an adaptive response when it is properly nourished with vitamin D. And if the patient has enough vitamin D, they need no vaccine because vitamin D protects them from seasonal influenza in the first place.

Thus, vaccines only “work” in those people who don’t need them. People who have the least protection against influenza due to their vitamin D deficiency also have the weakest immune response to vaccines. The vaccines, in other words, just don’t work on them.

Children with particularly weak neurology are highly susceptible to neurological damage from vaccines. This damage may take the form of a coma, convulsions, autism or being partially paralyzed. Some children given vaccines soon find themselves in wheelchairs, unable to walk even though previous to the vaccine they were star athletes.

If you’re a parent, don’t expose your children to vaccine shots! Learn more about the dangers of vaccines with these articles:

Virginia teen athlete in wheel chair after vaccine shot:
http://www.naturalnews.com/027473_G…

Swine flu vaccine linked to paralysis:
http://www.naturalnews.com/026866_s…

Vaccine puts girl in the hospital:
http://www.naturalnews.com/027395_s…

Vaccines linked to neurological disorders:
http://www.naturalnews.com/022642_v…

Ten questions doctors refuse to answer about vaccines:
http://www.naturalnews.com/027258_v…