Muriel Moser (ULB): “Vaccination is a victim of its success”

A year and a half ago, Muriel Moser, professor at ULB, had the idea of ​​inaugurating the new collection of Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, Débats, of a job on vaccines*. Without knowing that, when it came out on Thursday, this topic would have been at the center of the news, Covid requests.

Several anti-Covid vaccines are arriving on the market, in fact, but remain shrouded in a certain mystery, for lack of perspective and because the complete research data is not yet available. How long will the immunity they offer last? We shouldn’t be afraid Side effects?

Muriel Moser, biologist and former dean of the Faculty of Sciences of the ULB, in “Vaccination – Biological Foundations and societal issues”, aims to define the context and the stakes: the great successes of the vaccine, the specificity of the development of this weapon against SARS-CoV-2 …

A vaccinated person protects himself, he will not get sick. But some people can’t get the vaccine. Protecting the most vulnerable who cannot be immunized is a duty of society. More, with a minimum of collective immunitydecreases the number of hosts into which the virus can divide, resulting reduced circulation of the virus. So in 1980 we managed to eradicate smallpox.

It is necessary distinguish the true anti-vax and the hesitant. The former are just under 20% and it is almost impossible to dialogue with them to make them understand the topics of vaccination.

To the hesitant, which are between 30 and 40% according to Sciensano, we must remember the benefits vaccines have provided to humans. It is estimated that 2 to 3 million lives have been saved.

But vaccination is a victim of its success. We forget all the good it has brought us and we neglect it. We think, for example, of not contracting measles anymore, while the number of cases is exploding. In 2017, 298 measles patients were identified in Wallonia. Most of these had not been vaccinated! 43% of the sick had to be hospitalized. And in 2019, the number of measles patients tripled again in Belgium …

A gossip said the vaccine measles-rubella-mumps had caused cases ofautism. Studies have disproved this rumor. In Africa, we feel it injection of polio makes it sterile. There is therefore reluctance in the face of this vaccine and polio cases are on the rise.

There is no reason to believe that there could be any serious side effects with the vaccination, even if we have little experience with this Covid vaccine. Most of the platforms used have long been mastered.

No but the technical and scientific principle of messenger RNA has been known for years and has been extensively tested on humans!

The addition of adjuvant allows decrease the dose of antigen required for injection by increasing its effectiveness. There is controversy over aluminum salts with a whole host of claims about chronic fatigue, but they have not been scientifically validated. No serious effects on humans have been documented. No vaccine has ever been withdrawn from the market due to an adjuvant.

Sometimes I wonder what people who hesitate to get vaccinated really know … There is a lot of nonsense or shortcuts, sometimes passed on by doctors, particularly in France.

It’s less surprising than you might think. The basic principles of development are known. Live attenuated and inactivated vaccines have been under control since the 19th century, for example! The urgency has meant that the groups involved start the different phases in parallel. Some vaccines have already been transported while the authorities have not yet issued marketing authorization. In fact, acceleration isn’t really scientific.

I didn’t say it no one will have any redness, inflammation or headache for a day or two after the injection. But this is quite acceptable compared to the situation we are currently experiencing.

* Moser Muriel, Vaccination – Biological Foundations and societal issues, University of Brussels Publishing, Debates Collection.