There are NO "Breakthrough" Infections!
The vaccines are working as expected...
The term “breakthrough infections” implies that the vaccines have somehow failed to do their job. The vaccines are working exactly as expected.
What has failed is people’s understanding of how vaccines work and months of misguided public health messaging overselling what these vaccines are can and can not do.
This is a lengthy update, but it’s important to understand why we’re seeing vaccinated people getting infected and what this means for the future…
What Vaccines Do
There is a strong reaction in the virology community right now against the term "breakthrough infection" in regards to the Covid vaccines. The word "breakthrough" implies that infection after vaccination is something that was not fully and completely expected.
These are non-sterilizing vaccines. Meaning that they do not perfectly prevent infection of the mucosal tissues in the nasopharyngeal region (nose & throat) and upper lung.
The Covid vaccines work by keeping the virus out of the bloodstream and out of the lower lungs. This prevents Covid pneumonia and the permanent internal organ damage seen in more than 1/3 of natural infections.
Once pneumonia and internal organ damage have occurred, people need hospitalization. And this is why the rate of hospitalization after vaccination is extraordinarily low compared to the unvaccinated.
The Early Animal Trials
The early vaccine animal “challenge trials” from April and May of 2020 clearly showed that infection and transmission after vaccination could be common.
”Challenge trials” are where test animals are fully vaccinated and then deliberately exposed to varying levels of virus to see if they could become infected. These infected animals were then exposed to un-infected animals to see whether transmission could occur.
This is NOT new information but has been available for well more than a year now. I wrote about this extensively in this newsletter more than eight months ago and have written about it in other forums since June of 2020.
That research showed that ~70% of fully vaccinated animals could be infected and re-infect others if exposed to a sufficiently high viral load.
Vaccination offers some level of protection against infection, but not a lot. Especially if the viral load is quite high and the level of contagiousness is high.
And this is EXACTLY the situation we have right now in the US with the widespread Delta-variant outbreak!
The Clinical Trials
This understanding was also made explicitly if you'd read the Clinical Trial Protocol documents from the human Phase III vaccine trials back in 2020.
Infection and re-transmission was ALWAYS seen as a possibility after vaccination and ALL the vaccines trials instead focused exclusively evaluate the vaccine efficacy based on reducing (but not eliminating) severe disease requiring hospitalization.
Infection after vaccination was seen in 100% of all the vaccine trials. So this is not a function of the vaccine, but rather a function of the limitations of the immune response to this particular virus.
I wrote about this in this newsletter extensively eight months ago:
Not only can you be infected, but you can ALSO transmit the infection to others after being vaccinated. This is true not only of vaccine-induced immunity but also of immunity after natural infection. This effect was seen early on before the public vaccination programs had even begun.
Again, this was discussed almost nine months ago:
The Delta Variant Changed Everything!
So after months of being told that the vaccines would prevent you from getting infected, why are “breakthrough infections” now all over the news?
During most of the ramp-up in vaccination over the Spring and early Summer, the level of community infection was at an all-time low. And the Delta-variant had not yet emerged as the dominant infector.
When there are very few people infected, your chance of being exposed is very low. Whether you’re vaccinated or not. So few people who had gotten vaccinated had the chance to be exposed in those first few months.
But the Delta variant has changed EVERYTHING!
Not only are we seeing close to the highest levels of infection and community spread ever recorded, but this virus is extraordinarily more contagious. The viral load being expelled by an infected person is 1000x greater than with the original version of the SarsCoV2 virus.
This is the very first moment where large numbers of the population are vaccinated (~50%) and are being exposed to a large number of infected people with high viral loads.
What was seen in the earliest animal trials was that even after vaccination, if exposed to sufficiently high levels of the virus YOU WILL GET INFECTED!
What was seen in the animal studies 17 months ago is now being seen in the human population. There’s absolutely nothing surprising or unexpected about what’s happening.
Are These Vaccines Different?
No! Many vaccines are “non-sterilizing” and can permit infection and re-transmission.
This is NOT what vaccines are designed to do. Their job is to prevent disease or in the case of the Covid vaccines, severe disease requiring hospitalization. And the Covid vaccines are doing THAT job remarkably well.
Only about 5% of people being hospitalized are vaccinated. Close to 50% are specifically immuno-compromised patients where we know that ALL vaccines work poorly, if at all. And most of the remainder of those fully vaccinated but hospitalized are people in their mid-70s and older. Again, a group for whom vaccines, in general, tend to provide poor levels of immune protection.
But even these people, although requiring hospitalization, are seeing significantly reduced death rates. So even for those where the vaccine is working poorly, it’s still doing its primary job of keeping you alive!
Why Such Confusion?
Many people, even many MDs and healthcare workers, have a naive almost cartoon-like notion that vaccines all look like the MMR (measles) vaccine. A vaccine with near-perfect lifetime sterilizing immunity. This is simply not the case.
Even the polio vaccine is non-sterilizing and will permit infection and re-transmission. But even after 60 years, it has proven to be nearly perfect at disease prevention.
Localized micro-outbreaks of polio occur periodically in the US and Europe but are often never found until much later by immunologists because the infections cause NO disease symptoms.
Polio “the disease” ONLY occurs if the poliovirus jumps into the bloodstream. Polio is ingested orally and colonizes in the lower gut. It can then be expelled in feces and that contamination can re-infect others.
But as long as the vaccine prevents the poliovirus from entering the bloodstream, the person will be completely asymptomatic and never even know they were infected.
The Covid vaccines work EXACTLY like this. They prevent the SarsCoV2 virus from entering the bloodstream and replicating in the major organs (including the lower lung). This prevents Covid pneumonia and the permanent organ damage seen in many people with natural infection.
The vaccines prevent disease, that's what vaccines are meant to do…NOT prevent infection!
This is why the fully vaccinated MUST mask up, distance, and avoid high-risk venues during periods of extreme outbreak like what we're seeing right now across all the southern and southwestern states.
Dangers of “Vaccine Boosterism”
Early in the vaccine rollout, a LOT of irresponsible people made a lot of wild-eyed claims about how nearly perfect the Covid vaccines were.
Some of this was out of complete ignorance. A lot of doctors and medical personnel simply lack a full understanding of the subtleties of how different vaccines actually work.
But much of this was originating from scientific and public health experts who ABSOLUTELY knew they were lying (or at best being extremely “selective” with the truth) in a duplicitous belief that telling fairy tales would convince the vaccine resisters to get vaccinated.
Again, for those following this newsletter, almost eight months ago at the very beginning of the vaccine roll-out, this topic of “vaccine boosterism” and the dangerous precedence that was being set was discussed early on:
This is a classic mistake of highly educated experts. They imagine they can trick the stupid into doing the right thing without ever grasping just how deep down the well of stupid actually goes.
Lying to the ignorant and the uneducated isn't going to outsmart them...as we're seeing all too clearly in Arkansas and Texas and Florida and Louisana right now!
People should have been told the unvarnished truth from day one! It's never been a happy story and these vaccines were never going to be magical fairy dust.
Even now, the lying continues with the use of terms like "breakthrough infections", which continues to imply that the vaccines are somehow “broken”.
They are NOT breakthrough infections...they are fully normal and expected infections.
If the truth had been told from the beginning, people would NOT have been shocked at their "breakthrough" infections. And the vaccinated would have known that masking and mitigation were going to be a permanent part of their future.
Conclusion
Over the past 18 months, I've gotten a tremendous amount of pushback and outright attacks for being "too negative". What I've tried to do is communicate the emerging scientific evidence in a clear and non-sugarcoated way.
It has seldom been happy news, starting with the early vitriol over the explaining how herd immunity was going to be the magical glitter-farting unicorn that would come and save us all.
But close to 100% of what I've written about over the past 18 months has now come to pass. And unfortunately, there's a LOT more unhappy news to come. But the sooner people come to grips with the actual reality that we're living, the sooner we can get control of this virus as a society.
The old normal is never returning...but the "new normal" can either be livable with a few precautions, or a non-stop living hell.
Things are entirely capable of getting VASTLY worse than they are right now today if people don't come to grips with what's happening.
And by “worse”, I mean a future SarsCoV2 variant more contagious than any virus ever seen in all of human history with the added ability to jump the vaccines. People need to be prepared for that within the next 2-3 generations of variants.
Right now, each new dominant variant appears and is replaced on a 6-month cycle. So 2-3 generations forward would be somewhere between July to December of 2022.
It's a collective choice...so far, we've chosen very poorly!
About the author:
I am a scientist with 20+ years in the biotech industry. I currently work as a consultant with companies involved in developing molecular diagnostics platforms, including some of the key testing platforms used to detect the SarsCoV2 virus.
So I bring an insider’s perspective that is scientifically oriented but directed to a general audience trying to make sense of the conflicting stories surrounding the Covid pandemic.
To learn more: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dalewharrison/
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I read last winter that the Delta variant needs fewer ACE2 receptors and that is why it is infecting younger and older people. The older variant needed more. My school is about to make masks optional when students come back in 2 weeks. What can a person do to protect themselves. I plan to wear a mask and socially distance but how can one do this if our work environment does not require vaccine or masks?
Well, this article didn't age well. I wonder how many who read this article for guidance took the Jonestown Jab and died?