For those who have questions on the vaccine

 

 

Recently the Suzuki Elders received an email asking if we knew what Dr David Suzuki thought about the Covid 19 vaccine(s).  The  person asked “My husband and I are debating whether or not to have the corona virus vaccine administered to our family. We wondered “What would David Suzuki do?”  Here, written in his usual fulsome manner, is David Suzuki’s response.  We then asked for permission to post this letter to the larger public through our Elder Facebook page and Dr Suzuki agreed. 

I have a couple of responses to your query about the COVID vaccine.  Vaccination, like antibiotics, is one of the great innovations of medicine and the story of how it came to be is a wonderful one.  You may know it, but basically smallpox has been a terrible disease that practically wiped-out Indigenous people who had not encountered it before.  In the 1700s it had been reported that milkmaids contracted cowpox from milking cows.  They would get lesions on their hands and arms but would recover but never contracted smallpox that was a deadly disease, killing between 20 - 60% of its victims while 1/3 of the survivors went blind and almost all had disfiguring scars from the pox.  Edward Jenner deliberately infected a boy with cowpox and when he recovered, Jenner injected smallpox (something that would never be done today) and the boy was immune. That began vaccination that has saved millions of lives and in 1980 smallpox was eradicated worldwide. It's now extinct. Now a big push is on to do the same with polio.

So, I am a big admirer of vaccination.  It involves using the body's own mechanism of immunity by injecting an antigen, usually a coat protein of a virus or sometimes a heat killed virus itself.  The body recognizes a foreign material and creates antibodies to eliminate it.  So, we have inbuilt defenses that vaccination accelerates.  There have been contaminants in the past resulting from the way antigens are processed chemically.  After widespread use, the Salk vaccine was found to carry a live virus that was ultimately found to be harmless.  And there have been trace amounts of chemicals like mercury.  But the whole basis of the anti-vax movement was a report that has been proved to be bogus, yet it is repeated over and over.

  

The speed with which the new vaccines have been developed is astounding.  After more than 40 years, there is still no vaccine for HIV. The reason it has taken so long to get approval for the new ones is that there is a very elaborate assessment process to ensure safety. Now the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are radically different from the traditional antigen injection.  It involves injecting the gene (mRNA) specifying the coat protein (spike) and the gene gets into our cells where they produce the spike antigen and that, it turns out, is a very powerful way of getting our immune system to respond.  The efficacy of this method is amazingly high.  There might be some consequences that we can't find until the treatment has gone on for years (esoteric issues like what happens to the mRNA, can it get into the nucleus of a cell and integrate into its DNA).  What excites me is that this new approach could allow us to create vaccines very rapidly for any new viruses that emerge in future.

I'm sorry I've gone on so long.  Most of medicine is about relieving symptoms when we are sick and depending on the healing capacity of the body, but vaccination is really a medical intervention that works.  Would I take the new vaccine of Pfizer or Moderna? In a flash.  I'm in a high-risk category and while I know I'm in the last part of my life, I don't want to risk hurrying the end.  Would I have any concerns about unexpected deleterious effect?  Nothing is absolutely sure in medicine but I have no worries at all.  Get it to me quick.

There is an aspect of anti-vaxxers (I know you're not coming at it from conspiracy) that I have to rant about. A lot of folks are saying it's their right to decide whether or not to get a shot.  It's all about freedom.  The thing that bugs me is that freedom comes with responsibility otherwise it's just license to do anything.  If people resist mandated vaccination as a constitutional right, what about the right of everyone else who is sharing the same air?  I hope they have a complete airtight case around them so they only breathe their own air.  And they should not be allowed to use public medical facilities if they do get sick because they've opted out of the system by abrogating their responsibilities.

Thank you for your query.  Please know I am not a medical doctor.

 - - - David Suzuki