Scientists worry self-spreading vaccines could be hijacked to make biological weapons.
QUICK FACTS:
- Researchers are investigating the potential for needle-less vaccinations that spread immunity by passing themselves on like a virus, The Dail Mail reports.
- Such vaccines are designed to spread from one person to another—just like viruses themselves—rather than be injected into each individual to trigger an immune system response.
- The unvaccinated would then ‘catch’ the vaccine, Daily Mail explains, as it spreads rapidly across the country in airborne droplets passed on via close contact with others, just as colds and flu already spread.
- Roughly a dozen research institutions in the U.S., Europe, and Australia are already investigating the potential for self-spreading vaccines in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
- The research has already been subsidized by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).
- One advanced project related to self-spreading vaccines is being funded by the U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
ETHICAL CONCERNS:
- In a 2019 paper prepared for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), the authors admitted that self-spreading vaccines are “not non-lethal: they can still kill,” Daily Mail reports.
- “Some people will die who would otherwise have lived, though fewer people die overall,” they said, adding “The other issue is there is no consent (for vaccination) from the majority of patients.”
- Pointing to governments of the world adding fluoride to their population’s drinking water, professor Dominic Wilkinson, a medical ethics specialist at Oxford University, argued that “Nobody is asked whether they give consent, even those who disagree with it. Instead, we entrust elected officials to examine the likely health benefits and make decisions based on the evidence.”
- “I don’t think that there is anything intrinsically different when it comes to the idea of self-spreading vaccines.”
- Scientists like Dr. Filippa Lentzos, senior lecturer in science and international security at King’s College London, are worried about the risk that weakened viruses could mutate into more potent forms once they are free to spread in the population.
- Dr. Lentzos warns of a danger that the science behind self-spreading vaccines could be hijacked to make biological weapons: “Such a self-spreading weapon may prove uncontrollable and irreversible,” she said.
BACKGROUND:
- For now, most of the research on self-spreading vaccines involves animal-to-animal or animal-to-human spread, with human research so far focusing on whether the idea is safe in principle, Daily Mail notes.
- Vaccines would only need to be given—either injected or potentially inhaled—to small groups of people from different parts of the country, who would then transmit the vaccine to those in their local community.
