Throwing a vaccine at the coronavirus in hopes it will do some good might have serious implications for public health down the road, one prominent American virologist said Monday.
Dr. Robert Malone is described in some headlines as a “vaccine skeptic,” but he sums it up on his website in different words: “My mission is to ensure vaccine safety, make sure that children are protected, stop and/or limit the vaccine mandates, to identify and teach about lifesaving treatments for COVID-19 and other pandemics. My goal is to save lives.”
Malone was among the speakers at a Monday panel discussion convened by Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and titled, “COVID-19: A Second Opinion.”
Part of Malone’s remarks Monday focused on the potential of current vaccine policy to make it ultimately harder to save people from the virus by making the virus stronger than what medical science can throw at it.
“We are truly blessed, as I said back before Christmas, that omicron has such low risk for severe disease and death. However, it’s got a warning sign,” he said.
He said he is not the first to voice his concerns, noting that it was something “the FDA has acknowledged in the original documents allowing the Emergency Use Authorization.”
At that time, he said, “they told the pharmaceutical industry that they desired that the pharmaceutical industry would investigate the risks of antibody-dependent enhancement or vaccine-enhanced disease.”
As the virus mutates, which is basic to the behavior of all viruses, it will get stronger in the face of adapting to vaccines, he warned.
“If we continue to pursue this universal vaccination strategy in the face of the pandemic, particularly with omicron now — a much more highly infectious, highly replication-competent virus — what we risk is driving the virus through basic evolution to a state where it may be more pathogenic and more able to elude immune response,” he said.
Malone said his goal was not to spread fear, but awareness.
“In sum — I don’t wish to scare; we have had enough fear-porn — but if we continue to pursue universal vaccination, the high probability is that what we will continue to see is the evolution of additional escaped mutants that are increasingly infectious and may well become more pathogenic,” he said.
Malone noted that following the science would mean moving away from current public policy that stresses multiple vaccinations.
“This policy of forced universal vaccination is absolutely contrary to all of our understanding about basic viral evolution,” he said.
“We are clearly seeing the development of escaped mutants that are resistant to the vaccine. Omicron is not only resistant to the vaccine, but its infectivity seems to be facilitated by the vaccine — and in my opinion, this must stop for the sake of the world,” he said.
On his website, Malone said he is “not an anti-vaxxer in any way, shape or form.”
“But I do believe that the short cuts that the USG have taken in bringing the mRNA and the adenovirus vaccines to market for this pandemic have been detrimental and contrary to globally accepted standards for developing and regulating safe and effective licensed products,” he wrote.
Malone said he used to believe the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control “were working for the people, not big pharma.”
“I thought that if we could just re-purpose already known, safe drugs for emerging infectious diseases, we could quickly find ways to reduce the death rate. I thought that drug and vaccine development were regulated by the Federal government for the common good. What I have learned over the last two years is that regulatory capture of the federal government has warped and shaped the work of Congress and Federal agencies to such an extent that they no longer represent what is in the best interests of the nation, the world, and humanity,” he wrote.
“The more I have expressed data-based concerns about what is happening with the vaccines, the US Federal and WHO responses, the more I have been censored, defamed, and subjected to various forms of character assassination by big tech and legacy media.”