Most of Vanden Bossche’s arguments against SARS‐CoV‐2 vaccination have been disproven (
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/countering‐geert‐vanden‐bossches‐dubious‐viral‐open‐letter‐warning‐against‐mass‐covid‐19‐vaccination/), but there is one fundamental aspect of his arguments that I have not seen fully addressed. The crux of Vanden Bossche’s and his disciples’ anti‐vaccination argument is essentially a resurrection of Lamarck's theories of adaptive evolution. Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), rightly or wrongly, is most remembered for advocating the “inheritance of acquired characteristics”, which was discredited in modern biology almost 80 years ago. With respect to SARS‐CoV‐2 and vaccination, the argument goes that when the virus infects a vaccinated person, it acquires the ability to evade the immunity conferred by the vaccine, thereby becoming capable of infecting and growing in vaccinated hosts and immune individuals who recovered from COVID‐19. From their point of view, vaccination is thus fuelling the generation of immune‐resistant variants, which could ultimately become an existential danger to humanity. Thus, they claim, it is the vaccinated who threaten the unvaccinated, the opposite of what I argued in my letter in the
Proceedings.
Vaccination does not generate variants resistant to the vaccine
What is wrong with this argument is that modern biology has demonstrated that mutation is random, not directed by the environment. The classic fluctuation test experiments of Salvador Edward Luria and Max Delbrück, published in
1943, showed that a bacterial cell's resistance to a virus is not induced by the virus, but results from random mutations that allow the cell to resist the virus. In other words, mutations occur without selective pressure, not the other way around. Thus, the evolution and inheritance of new characteristics is not subject to Lamarckism even if epigenetics and hypermutation provide some important modifiers to the underlying mutation‐selection process.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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