Vaccine Experts Raise Concerns About Non-Specific Effects of Some Vaccines

Systems for approving and testing vaccines is not set up, at all, to capture non-specific effects of vaccines. There are also serious limitations when it comes to capturing adverse events.

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Even before COVID-19, numerous doctors, scientists, and healthcare practitioners raised concerns about vaccine safety. Yes, this is true even though you never heard about it. When I tell people this, the response is often, “Yeah, um, I’m not sure about that.”

Well, you’re not sure because you haven’t sifted through recent medical literature and kept up to date on all things vaccines. Vaccine hesitancy among healthcare professionals has become so big that it was emphasized (as I’ve mentioned and cited many times in previous articles) at the 2019 World Health Organization Global Vaccine Safety Summit. COVID simply marked the first time in history when experts and academics were falsely labelled as “anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists,” as if vaccine safety was unquestionable.

“The other thing that’s a trend, and an issue, is not just confidence in providers but the confidence of health care providers, we have a very wobbly health professional frontline that is starting to question vaccines and the safety of vaccines…”

- Professor Heidi Larson, the Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project. Stated at the 2019 Global Vaccine Safety Summit

Today, the concerns continue and experts in the field are providing perspective in a field that’s not at all black and white, even though we’ve been painted with that picture for years by pharmaceutical companies, medical associations and big media.

There are several concerns, like the bio-distribution of aluminium, for example. The difference between ingested aluminium and injected aluminium is fascinating, but the topic of this article deals with the “non-specific” effects of vaccines.

Non-Specific Effects

A recent commentary published in the journal Vaccine by Professor Christine Stabell Benn, of the Bandim Health Project at the University of Southern Denmark, challenges the conventional view of vaccines.

While vaccines are recognized for their ability to prevent specific diseases, Benn highlights a critical but overlooked phenomenon: non-specific effects (NSEs).

NSEs can either bolster or weaken overall health by shaping the immune system’s response to other infections.

Benn explains,

“Today, the most well-known example of a vaccine with NSEs is the BCG vaccine. Observational studies and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have shown that BCG reduces child mortality to a much greater extent than expected based on its protection against tuberculosis (TB).”

Another example would be the three doses of the diphtheria-tetanus-whole cell pertussis (DTP) vaccine that have been the backbone of immunization programmes in low-income countries. However, research shows that DTP-vaccinated children had higher mortality than DTP-unvaccinated children. Multiple studies uniformly suggest that being DTP-vaccinated is associated with higher mortality than not being DTP-vaccinated. Overall, the DTP vaccine is associated with a 2-fold increase in mortality, and this effect of DTP was more pronounced for females.

This difference is seen more with non-live vaccines. Which are usually associated with negative non-specific effects. Live vaccines contain a weakened (attenuated) form of a pathogen that triggers an immune response without causing the disease, whereas non-live vaccines use deactivated pathogens (viruses or bacteria) to stimulate an immune response without causing the disease. Some live vaccines are actually association with positive non-specific effects.

“Vaccines have been shown in numerous randomized controlled trials, primarily in low-income settings, to have non-specific health effects. Live attenuated vaccines have been shown to harness beneficial non-specific effects (leading to reduced risk of non-target diseases or overall mortality). However, non-live vaccines have been observed to be associated with negative non-specific effects (increased risk of non-target infections and mortality, primarily in females). The effects are seen as long as a given vaccine is the most recent and can be reversed with a new type of vaccine. The current system for testing, approving and monitoring vaccines is not set up to capture non-specific effects and has serious limitations when it comes to capturing adverse events. Thus, studies of vaccines should aim to look at overall health impacts and not just the impact on the target disease. This is particularly important when the risk of the target disease is low.”

- Tracey Beth Høeg, Md, PhD and Dr Christine Stabell Benn in their piece,

“The Child Immunization Schedule in the US vs Denmark: Why is there such a big difference & how can we use the next four years to improve our evidence base?”

All this being said, some live vaccines are still associated with negative effects as well.

Encouraging Discussion

It’s great to see other countries take heed of science. In North America, many feel we have a problem, but propaganda and misinformation have created extremes on both ends of the vaccine debate, with rationality, discussion and nuance thrown out the window. There is misinformation on both ends of the coin, like vaccines are specifically designed to poison us. On the other end of the spectrum, it would be that vaccines are unquestionably great, the only solution, completely 100 percent safe, don’t really cause many injuries, extremely necessary in developed countries, and anybody who questions vaccine safety is a danger to society and has no right to share their opinion.

But if we look at other countries, things are different. For example, in Denmark, yearly COVID-19 or flu vaccines are not recommended for children or adults under the age of 65.

The hepatitis B vaccine at birth and MANY other vaccines like the rotavirus and chickenpox vaccines mandated in the US are not even offered to children in Denmark.

Denmark only vaccinates for a total of 10 diseases in childhood, and only those that can cause severe disease in the child, but the US vaccinates for 18 diseases with 68 doses!

There are examples of discrepancies and differences all over the world.

Now more than ever we need a system of public health that focuses on improving overall health, rather than preventing specific diseases. And when vaccines and medicines are tested for their ability to prevent specific diseases, other outcomes must also be studied.

When a vaccine is studied to prevent a specific illness, a study only examining how well that vaccine targets that illness is not enough. We must look for other things, it’s obvious that a study is not going to find what it’s not looking for, like non-specific effects, among other things.