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Geert Vanden Bossche received his DVM from the University of Ghent, Belgium, and his PhD degree in Virology from the University of Hohenheim, Germany. He held adjunct faculty appointments at universities in Belgium and Germany.
After his career in Academia, Geert joined several vaccine companies (GSK Biologicals, Novartis Vaccines, Solvay Biologicals) to serve various roles in vaccine R&D as well as in late vaccine development.
Geert then moved on to join the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Discovery team in Seattle (USA) as Senior Program Officer; he then worked with the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) in Geneva as Senior Ebola Program Manager. At GAVI he tracked efforts to develop an Ebola vaccine. He also represented GAVI in fora with other partners, including WHO, to review progress on the fight against Ebola and to build plans for global pandemic preparedness. Back in 2015, Geert scrutinized and questioned the safety of the Ebola vaccine that was used in ring vaccination trials conducted by WHO in Guinea. His critical scientific analysis and report on the data published by WHO in the Lancet in 2015 was sent to all international health and regulatory authorities involved in the Ebola vaccination program. After working for GAVI, Geert joined the German Center for Infection Research in Cologne as Head of the Vaccine Development Office. He is at present primarily serving as a Biotech/ Vaccine consultant while also conducting his own research on Natural Killer cell-based vaccines.
a reply to: TrollMagnet
So every rollout of boosters, IF EFFECTIVE against current strains, but not 97%+, will once again naturally select the strongest of that mutated strain, basically accelerating evolution.
In the early 1880s, Wallace was drawn into the debate over mandatory smallpox vaccination. Wallace originally saw the issue as a matter of personal liberty; but, after studying some of the statistics provided by anti-vaccination activists, he began to question the efficacy of vaccination. At the time, the germ theory of disease was very new and far from universally accepted. Moreover, no one knew enough about the human immune system to understand why vaccination worked. When Wallace did some research, he discovered instances where supporters of vaccination had used questionable, in a few cases completely phony, statistics to support their arguments.
Always suspicious of authority, Wallace suspected that physicians had a vested interest in promoting vaccination, and became convinced that reductions in the incidence of smallpox that had been attributed to vaccination were, in fact, due to better hygiene and improvements in public sanitation.
Wiki
originally posted by: Mantiss2021
a reply to: TrollMagnet
Flip side logic:
The 10% who have been vaccinated, yet suffer an infection, do so because their immune response to the virus, even with the vaccine (and booster-shot), was insufficient to protect them.
It doesn't mean that the virus has become a stronger version of itself, just that some people, even though apparently healthy otherwise, have immune systems that are more susceptible to this type of virus.
Furthermore, if your hypothesis had any merit, the mutation(s) necessary for the virus to exhibit such evolving "strength" would be showing up not only in viral assays, but as a steady increase in the number of COVID19 deaths; a "death spike" if you will.
And, although the number of cases may be increasing (likely due to seasonal impetus and a still large pool of unvaccinated individuals), the death rates have not increased dramatically.
Call handlers are dealing with about 10,000 more 999 calls a month than last summer. The impact is being felt by patients as they wait for hours for medical help