This article is not intended to deter anyone from having a necessary or recommended vaccination, against Covid-19 or anything else. The article's purpose is to provide supporting material for an intended Parliamentary Petition asking the UK government to reconsider its policy of NOT using a quick, simple and almost cost-free procedure known as "aspiration" which ensures that an injection which needs to be intramuscular in order to work properly and safely, does indeed go into muscle tissue and not into a blood vessel, which can cause occasional serious complications and, probably much more commonly, may simply stop the injection working properly and lead to reduced or nil protection for the recipient. If a vaccine is designed to be administered by intramuscular injection in order to work, and if its safety has been assessed by regulators on that basis, then it would seem completely reasonable to require the use of a well-tested and very simple procedure for insuring that this is what happens. The Danish government requires exactly this!
This article is necessary because the rules for a Parliamentary Petition place a severe limit on the number of characters (80) which may be used for the petition itself, whilst the "more information" box is limited to 300 characters and the "additional information" box may contain no more than 500 characters. This isn't a lot when you're trying to argue with public officials enjoying almost unlimited access to media time and column inches.
The following YouTube video, by Dr John Campbell, has been embedded as the best way of summarizing what the argument is about, whilst respecting his copyright. There's a bit more material and some tidier links below the video.
The first (and most recent: August 2021) of the studies to which Dr Campbell refers is this one:
Intravenous Injection of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) mRNA Vaccine Can Induce Acute Myopericarditis in Mouse Model
Can Li, Yanxia Chen, Yan Zhao, David Christopher Lung, Zhanhong Ye, Wenchen Song, Fei-Fei Liu, Jian-Piao Cai, Wan-Man Wong, Cyril Chik-Yan Yip, Jasper Fuk-Woo Chan, Kelvin Kai-Wang To, Siddharth Sridhar, Ivan Fan-Ngai Hung, Hin Chu, Kin-Hang Kok, Dong-Yan Jin, Anna Jinxia Zhang, Kwok-Yung Yuen
And this is a link which goes directly to the relevant URL (Dr Campbell gives a link which includes his own search information, which whilst very scholarly is never going to fit in a 500-character box on a petition!)
https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciab707/6353927
This article set out to discover whether inadvertent intravascular injection of an mRNA vaccine could induce Acute Myopericarditis and the researchers found that it indeed it could, in a mouse model. (It being unethical to kill people to find this out.)
The second study referenced in the video was started in 2006 and published in 2007:
Adenovirus-induced thrombocytopenia: the role of von Willebrand factor and P-selectin in mediating acceleratedplatelet clearance
Maha Othman,
Andrea Labelle,
Ian Mazzetti,
Hisham S. Elbatarny,
David Lillicrap
The link (direct to the relevant URL) is:
This study requires more in the way of explanation: the researchers were trying to answer a fairly complex immunological question about the use of adeno-virus vectors in both vaccines and gene therapy. They administered an adeno-virus antigen to mice (which had been genetically modified in different ways) via a tail-vein intravascular injection. This induced thrombocytopenia (there was a panic about the AZ covid vaccine also doing this in humans in very rare instances) with mice modified in one way and not in those modified in the other. But where the thrombocytopenia was induced, it was when the antigen was given in an intravascular injection and in the case of a vaccine (but maybe not a gene therapy agent) it could have been given therapeutically as an intramuscular injection. The complex immunological process leading to thrombocytopenia involved the innate immune responses to an antigen circulating in the bloodstream, most of which would not be encountered by an antigen entering the lymphatic system via muscle tissue.
There are two implications here:
Firstly the use of adeno-virus vectors in gene therapy may be more problematic than their use in vaccines, but gene-therapy is only given to people who definitely already have a severe illness, whereas a vaccine is given widely to all sorts of people to prevent illness.
Secondly, to avoid thrombocytopenia with adeno-virus vector vaccines, it might be as well to ensure that vaccinations intended to be intramuscular in order to work properly and safely are indeed given that way, avoiding inadvertent intravascular injection.
Conclusion
While the first study explicitly finds in favour of aspirating intramuscular mRNA vaccinations to ensure that they are not inadvertently given intravascularly, the second study indirectly leads to exactly the same conclusion for Adeno-virus vector vaccinations as well.
Other types of covid vaccine exist and some of them are being used. The Chinese have two inactivated virus vaccines, which might be exempt from the above logic. However, "authorised news footage" of Chinese nurses administering these vaccines to the masses shows them quickly and efficiently aspirating the injection every time. So even though they may well be using the least problematic type of vaccine in this respect, the Chinese authorities appear to regard aspiration as good practice, fit to be seen in glossy propaganda footage. The Chinese government has certainly not banned aspiration! The Danish government mandates it.
The UK government's main argument against aspiration is that a small number of vaccines would be wasted. However, any intramuscular vaccine that is wrongly given into the bloodstream will not work and be wasted anyway: the real waste is any vaccine believed to be correctly given that wasn't, and therefore does not work, because that wastes the opportunity to protect that patient from illness.
No comments:
Post a Comment