Internal Medicine-Adult Cardiologist Bernard Chiew, M.D. said vaccines are safe and effective. They have been around for more than a century and has been proven to save millions of lives.
Vaccines have practically eliminated or dramatically reduced smallpox, cholera, whooping cough, mumps and tetanus, just to name a few. It has protected the elderly and the young against flu and pneumonia, as well as prevented cancer through HPV and hepatitis vaccine.
Dr. Chiew said under normal conditions, it takes about five years to develop vaccines. The vaccines are first tried on animals in the pre-clinical stage to see if it can trigger an immunologic response or formation of antibodies against the specific disease.
Once proven, he said, it will undergo three phases involving human subjects before they are finally registered for public use.
Each phase would normally take about a year to complete.
“Due to the urgent need to develop a COVID vaccine, the WHO and other rich countries of the world put up funds to accelerate the process of vaccine development,” Chiew said.
The development of a COVID-19 vaccine – under the scrutiny of medical experts – followed the same phases of vaccine development, but in an accelerated manner, Chiew explained.
Since almost all of the side effects of vaccines appear within two months of shots, the COVID vaccine trial closely scrutinized individual subjects for this, the expert said.
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mentioned in their website that the U.S. vaccine safety system ensures that all vaccines, including the anti-COVID vaccine, are as safe as possible.
The Trump administration recently announced the first batch of vaccines to be released first-hand at nursing home facilities in highly-populated areas, where healthcare workers and older people in a facility will be the first recipients. These vaccines – which will be distributed this month – are reportedly effective in treating this novel coronavirus.
However, there are several opposition coming from various groups, including some health sectors and other religious groups regarding how it will affect their respective health and lives.
World renowned author of New York Times best-selling books Christiane Northrup, M.D., said there has never been a vaccine like this; it’s an RNA vaccine that causes transfection or the process of artificially introducing nucleic acids either DNA or RNA into cells, utilizing means other than viral infection.
Northup noted that this vaccine consists of a dye called Luciferase, wherein under a light you will see who’s vaccinated and who isn’t. The deal here is to store your biometric information, whether the vaccination or any health records, it also includes any activities you’re doing, such as your sexual activity.
The medical specialist finds this new COVID-19 treatment very concerning because this will mark the end of privacy and freedom, and every human will be treated like a commodity only.
She said this is a novel virus, from which 99.9 percent of people diagnosed have recovered. To put this to perspective, only 0.01 have died from this virus out of 7.594 billion people in the world.
“Why do we need anything like this?,” Northup asked. “This goes far beyond those previous pandemic conditions such as small pox.”
Interestingly, retired Pediatrician Robert Picardo, M.D. said viruses like polio, mumps, measles, rubella, hepatitis, varicella and human papilloma virus are relatively stable or do not mutate quickly, and these diseases are caused by the virus attacking target organs in the body. The created vaccines for these viruses have been shown to effectively provide long term protection with occasional boosters.
However, the medical expert said influenza viruses are prone to mutation. Thus, the available flu vaccine offers strain specific protection and its impact is not as significant as the above group of viruses.
On the other hand, the COVID virus is different from the known virus with effective immunizations; aside from direct injury to target organ cells, COVID virus also stimulates overwhelming inflammatory response and clotting, he said.
“So the impact of COVID vaccine remains to be observed as the mechanism of disease process is totally different,” Picardo added.