No theory of vaccines

One of the dark secrets of modern medicine is that we still do not know what makes the smallpox vaccine (discovered 200 years ago) to function as a vaccine. It's an ancient tabooed theme: the fact is that none other than Louis Pasteur was ostracized and even challenged to a duel after he attempted to debate EXACTLY this same problem back in 1880 in French Academy.
It is also still not known what makes any other live "attenuated" vaccine to work. This gap in our knowledge seems to be the most obvious cause of the failure to find an AIDS vaccine and, more generally, for failure of the whole 'new generation' of high-tech vaccines. So to say, new vaccines do not work because it is not known why old ones work.

www.igfarben.ru...

Farben, this article is very interesting, but why did you not include some of your own thoughts on it?

Enlightening Comments and Discourse of Reason on article “Toward Understanding of Vaccines”

1. Discourse of Reason

The problem of vaccines understanding is essentially trivial. But it is also an over two-century-old formal logic fallacy, so it is very complex as well. Furthermore, comments from academic officials interpreting my work as “analysis of AIDS campaign” formally look as if they do not understand what the talk is about (of course, I think it was an intentional misinterpretation of my work). Therefore, here is my desperate attempt to write a popular discourse on this problem to help understand the problem of understanding vaccines.

Let’s draw an allegorical parallel between vaccines and understanding the process of making wine which is traditionally also often considered to be “more of an art than a science”.
For many thousand years it is known that grapes may be converted into wine by numerous methods of special growing, crashing, cooling, warming, settling, aging etc…
Similarly, since Pasteur time we know that deadly virus may be converted into vaccine by some magic tricks of special growing, passing, aging, warming, exposure to oxygen etc…
It is a “great art” or an “empirical understanding” of wine and vaccines.

Now let’s say that “wine is a modified (or enhanced, or enriched) grape juice”. Can it be accepted as scientific explanation of wine? Nope it is useless and it is meaningless.

It is not the case with vaccines. The statement that “vaccine is modified (or weakened, or attenuated) virus“ does have sense. If wine had been given to us by gods or extracted as mineral from wine-mines – there would be a controversy whether wine is modified grape juice or is it some other staff, rancid Coca-Cola for instance. This question would be ultimately answered when people learn to make wine with their own hands.

And that is exactly what Louis Pasteur did. First vaccine (against smallpox) was a naturally existing cattle disease - cowpox. Its protective effect against smallpox was discovered in 1796 by Jenner and there was indeed a fierce theoretical debate – mainstream doctrine was that cowpox is a modified smallpox which is essentially the same disease (actually, doctrine also erroneously included horse grease as third modification of smallpox). «Anti-vaccine» scientists maintained that relationships between cowpox,horse grease and smallpox are perfectly unknown, so they may say for example that cowpox looks more like syphilis (large pox).

In 1880 Pasteur found a method of preparing vaccine against fowl cholera by growing it in vitro for extended period of time. He claimed that now he knows for sure that this vaccine is an “attenuated” cholera so his vaccine is more scientific than cowpox. It was an anti-vaccine claim and though Pasteur made wise curtsey that he does not wish to make assertions about cowpox-smallpox relationship, he got lot of troubles with that work and even challenged to a duel after debating it in French academy.
Pasteur's invention of word “attenuation” was not assumed to be an ultimate universal understanding of vaccines. It did not fit cowpox which is more virulent than smallpox (shorter incubation period, large poxes instead of small ones, vaccination does not protect from cowpox). And it did not explain half of the process of preparing most glamorous Pasteur's vaccine against rabies. Rabies vaccine should be attenuated from “fixed” laboratory strain of rabies virus, which is also (similarly to cowpox) more virulent than street rabies.
Original 1880 Pasteur's fowl cholera article is quite readable – look here www.pasteurbrewing.com... It is easy to see that Pasteur did not pretend that he knows clearly what his new grand word “attenuation” actually means.

Now what is the basic scientific explanation of wine making? Most important from practical point of view, it's an understanding that ethanol is the factor defining effectiveness of wine and fusel oils are responsible for hangover as side effect. As a result of such understanding we have got the great scientific method of distillation giving us opportunity to get drunk quickly and with minimal headache. (yes, this is not quite correct account of science of alcohol)

It is not mathematically rigorous theorem but just a common sense default hypothesis that there are usually two different factors in such things like alcohol or vaccines: one responsible for effectiveness and another for safety.

I have no proof against current view that vaccine immunogenicity is some uncertain magic property (like taste of wine probably) which may be nicked only by lucky accident or slightly improved by selecting right adjuvants, vaccination schedules etc.

I have just another suggestion. My guess is that a universal factor defining immunizing power of vaccine is antigenic diversity of vaccine.
It's simple: For example there are more than hundred antigenic variants of common cold (rhyno)virus. So that we may get colds twice a year - every time with a different form of virus.
The suggestion is that vaccine “attenuated” from single antigenic form of rhynovirus does not protect at all. Vaccine containing 10-20 most frequent antigenic forms is a bad vaccine which may show some protective effect in a statistical study. And ultimately vaccine containing almost complete repertoire of antigenic forms should be the real vaccine.

Here is why I like my suggestion better than official views:
1. Existence of universal factor defining immunizing power of vaccine is a common sense default hypothesis.
2. It explains methods of deriving and characteristics of classical vaccines.
3. It explains why modern “high-tech” vaccines have MUCH lower immunizing power than old empirical live vaccines.

Naturally, telling such God's Truth about vaccines was impossible without firm belief that vaccinology is governed by idiots. I don't like this idea, but it is a necessary condition of my suggestions feasibility.
So, I have written several notes to justify this unpleasant ramification:
note about R.V.Petrov – chief of soviet/russian immunology of the last 40(!) years who failed to write down mass action law and to distinguish cowpox symptoms from smallpox (it's in Russian)
Falsified "New" Discoveries in L.Pasteur's Biography – modern experts on Pasteur's life and work are not acquainted with his almost official biography by Vallery-Radot and cult "Microbe Hunters" by Paul De Kruif.
Diphtheria Can't Be Stopped by Vaccination – another funny formal logic fallacy.
And in the same idiotic category - Enlightening Comments on my article “Toward Understanding of Vaccines” from Nature editors and from Robert May (former president of Royal Acad.Sci)