Vaccination is one of the greatest medical successes. In an interview, biologist Sven Siebert explains why it also harms them. Together with the pediatrician Thomas Schmitz, he wrote a vaccination guide.
Your great success harms vaccinations, you write in your book. Can you explain what that means?
Sven Siebert is a biologist and journalist.
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The success is obvious: infectious diseases have been a terrible threat to mankind for centuries, even millennia. We in the rich industrialized countries only realized what that means with Covid-19. Measles, smallpox, polio used to claim millions of lives every year – of children and adults. Today we are protected from such diseases by vaccination. However, this has the effect that we no longer come into contact with many of these infectious diseases in our industrial societies. We no longer know they exist or how dangerous they are. As the threat diminishes, so does the willingness to vaccinate.
So like the measles? From 2010 to 2016, there was an increase in measles infections worldwide. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a new record high was reached in 2019 with 869,770 cases of measles. In January and February 2022 alone 17,338 measles cases recorded worldwide – an increase of almost 80 percent compared to the beginning of the previous year.
Exactly, we are no longer aware of the threat posed by measles. Measles are not only deadly, they can also trigger secondary diseases such as middle ear or meningitis. In addition, the legend that measles vaccination leads to autism has been spread, especially in the USA and Great Britain. But that’s nonsense. It has been scientifically proven that this is not true. The examination by an English doctor on which this legend is based was rigged. The results that the doctor had described in his research were actually not available. He deliberately published false results. But his false claims persist. They have led to major vaccination slumps – especially in the USA and Great Britain.
Vaccination reluctance is a social problem in Europe, you describe in your book. Vaccination rates are particularly low where education and income are high and there are many doctors and non-medical practitioners. For example in the district of Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin. Why is that?
There are mainly assumptions as to why this is so. There is a particularly high willingness to question vaccination recommendations in places where people want to make particularly conscious and responsible decisions about what they eat, which car they drive, and what is best for them, their children and the environment. So you don’t just rely on the doctor’s recommendation, you want to check the information. This critical attitude is good in itself, but when you do research on the Internet, you very quickly come across sites that spread false claims and false assumptions that have long been refuted. Either the people then get caught up in the false claims or they lead to such great uncertainty that the vaccination decision is postponed. Sometimes they don’t vaccinate their children at all. In any case, the bottom line is that vaccination numbers are falling.
Followers of an anthroposophical approach according to Rudolf Steiner often take the view that surviving infectious diseases supports the development of body and mind. It contributes to personality development. However, this is nonsense. For example, someone who has had measles does not have a stronger immune system – on the contrary! Statistically, those who have had measles are still more susceptible to other infectious diseases years later. Staying healthy is always better than being sick.
How problematic are such low vaccination numbers?
Let’s stay with the example of measles. If enough people are vaccinated against measles, unvaccinated people will also be protected from measles infection. Those who have been vaccinated do not transmit the pathogen. But if not enough people can be vaccinated, this system will no longer work. Babies under 11 months old cannot be vaccinated against measles, they can catch measles from unvaccinated people. Even in people who have a weakened immune system, vaccinations cannot develop their full protective effect or they cannot be vaccinated. Those who do not get vaccinated endanger vulnerable groups.
Why are people so skeptical about well-researched vaccinations, of all things, but use food supplements whose effectiveness or safety does not have to be proven with studies? There doesn’t seem to be such a great deal of skepticism about other drugs either.
In the case of dietary supplements, it can probably be explained by naivety. The advertising promises of the manufacturers suggest that these dietary supplements are necessary for a healthy life.
When it comes to medication, such as the safe use of painkillers, there is an obvious psychological explanation. Vaccination is a form of physical harm. I need to get my child or I pricked with a needle. One has to undergo this painful treatment even though one is not ill. Everyone would actually like to avoid that. A lot of people say unconsciously: “Why should I let myself be tortured here now, even though I’m perfectly healthy?” That’s a problem we always have with prevention – avoiding something that hasn’t happened yet. It’s different with painkillers. I use them when I’m sick. For example, with a terrible headache. So we are willing to accept the side effects of this pill to finally get well and get rid of the pain.
Is there anything that actually speaks against vaccination?
There is an argument against using vaccines that are ineffective or have side effects that are disproportionate to the protective effect they are designed to provide. However, we neither approve nor recommend such vaccines. For example, there is a vaccine against tuberculosis that we no longer use. The reason: Because the protective effect is so low that possible undesirable vaccination reactions weigh more heavily. We only approve vaccines if the benefit far outweighs the risk.
Does this mean that we were recently able to observe this risk-benefit analysis with the corona vaccines?
Because Sars-CoV-2 was rampant everywhere, it was possible to find out very quickly in the clinical studies whether the vaccine was effective and well tolerated. As we have seen in the pandemic, extremely rare side effects of vaccines can still emerge after clinical trials. This is because they are so rare that they may not be noticed in clinical trials with a large but limited number of participants. We were able to observe that an mRNA vaccine caused inflammation of the heart muscle in temporal relation to the vaccination. Especially in young men. This warning signal was taken seriously and carefully investigated. In most cases, the myocarditis was not serious. According to the analyzes of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, to which suspected cases of possible vaccination side effects are reported in Germany, the Standing Vaccination Commission (STIKO) has adjusted its recommendations to only use the mRNA vaccine from Biontech for under-30-year-olds. The suspicion was investigated, there was a reaction – today no one speaks of heart muscle inflammation.
Has the success of the corona vaccinations taken away the horror of the infection?
If people have the feeling that they no longer need to be vaccinated against Covid-19 because the pandemic is said to be over or a corona infection is “not that bad after all”, this can also be attributed to the success of the vaccination. The number of severe courses has decreased, so it no longer seems so threatening to any of us. It also no longer seems so threatening to the unvaccinated person, although he or she still has the full risk. He or she is exposed to the unbridled nature of this pathogen. The risk is high that people who have refused or postponed a corona vaccination will be hit in the next wave. Then the inexorable statistics of the disease will strike again and a certain percentage of those affected will die again.
Could some infectious diseases be eradicated if more people vaccinated themselves and their children?
The prerequisite is always that the pathogen can only multiply in humans and not in other hosts. If the pathogen can still multiply outside of humans, eradication is practically impossible. Smallpox, for example, was eradicated worldwide through vaccination campaigns. In the case of polio, this has almost succeeded. There are crisis countries like Afghanistan, where unfortunately there are still cases. In the rest of the world, polio is essentially eradicated. That’s a huge achievement. In Europe and North America in the 1950s there were still tens of thousands of polio infections each year, resulting in death or lifelong paralysis. We don’t have that anymore, it’s gone. If we could achieve 95 percent global measles immunization coverage for a while, measles would be gone. Even today, that would save the lives of tens of thousands of children every year.
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