I copy:
Geert Vanden Bossche earned his PhD at Ghent University in Belgium and then in virology at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany. He was employed as a professor at universities in Belgium and Germany. After completing his academic career, he joined several vaccine manufacturing companies (GSK Biologicals, Novartis Vaccines, Solvay Biologicals) and performed various functions in vaccine research and development and late vaccine development. He then joined the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Global Health Discovery team in Seattle (USA) and then the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) in Geneva as senior program manager for Ebola. After working for GAVI, he joined the German Center for Infection Research in Cologne as head of the vaccine development office. In the continuation of this post, I publish a translation of his public appeal to the World Health Organization (WHO).* “WHO colleagues, I think it's time to admit that the mass vaccination program you proposed with the aim of ending the COVID-19 pandemic has been completely unsuccessful. At the beginning of this year I called on you to start a scientific discussion on the potential risks of mass vaccination with these vaccines – in the middle of a pandemic. I received no response to this request. Soon after, one of the world's most renowned vaccinologists wrote me an email saying; “vaccination with these vaccines would only breed new variants, but it's pointless to “swim against the current”, because no one would listen to me anyway. I hope second-generation vaccines will solve the problem.” So I wanted to tell you that you cannot afford to ignore the opinions of people with long-term professional knowledge and experience from various relevant fields related to this pandemic: virology, immunology, vaccinology, evolutionary biology, epidemiology, zoonoses and the like. While some of us predicted that mass vaccination with these vaccines in the middle of a pandemic would inevitably lead to the spread of more infectious variants, your leading scientists preached a simplistic mantra that the more we vaccinate, the less the virus will replicate and the lower the chance of new variants emerging. The consequences of these simplistic and incorrect positions are that we are now dealing with the predominant circulation of the Omicron virus, the most infectious SARS-CoV-2 variant we have seen so far. Given that we are dealing with numerous strains circulating and numerous subvariants of them, given the fact that infection rates are very high and that we probably already have several animal populations serving as reservoirs for the virus, the likelihood that viral variants are now recombining and creating reassortments within the same host is becoming more and more likely. This means it will be increasingly difficult to trace the origin of new strains and even harder to predict the characteristics of these new strains in terms of infectivity, virulence, pathogenicity and also in terms of resistance to vaccine-induced antibodies or vaccines in general. But it is clear that these new variants will have to be more infectious than, for example, the Omicron variant if they want to survive in an environment with high immune pressure at the population level. However, the Omicron variant offers a very good opportunity as it has acquired a significant degree of resistance to vaccine-induced antibodies, which means it is unlikely that vaccine-induced antibodies will overcome innate antibodies, which is very good news. We know that innate antibodies can protect against SARS-CoV-2. This has been reported multiple times in the scientific literature. We also know that innate antibodies can be stimulated, so they can even improve recognition and protection against the virus. Innate antibodies can be trained, just as other innate immune effectors can be trained, by repeated exposure to so-called pathogen-associated molecular patterns.