Self spreading vaccines are attracting increasing interest, but can easily become bioweapons

The John Hopkins Center For Health Security writes on page 47 of its document ‘Technologies to address global catastrophic biological risks’ the rather disturbing quoted sentence above, which points out where the journey with self-spreading vaccines could go.

But let’s start from the beginning.

A team of Bill-Gates linked research scientists have announced they are developing a vaccine that spreads “like a virus,” meaning people will “catch” the vaccine like they would a cold or flu, and without consenting to vaccination.

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The research is being subsidized by high-profile funding organizations, including the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), which has longstanding and close financial ties to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Self-spreading vaccines have roots in efforts to reduce pest populations. Australian researchers described a virally spread immunocontraception, which hijacked the immune systems of infected animals—in this case a non-native mouse species in Australia—and prevented them from fertilizing offspring.

Researchers have been working on experimental “self-spreading vaccines” that could stop a virus from leaping from animals to humans — a phenomenon scientists call zoonotic spillover.

A virus that confers immunity throughout an animal population as it spreads in the wild could theoretically stop a zoonotic spillover event from happening, snuffing out the spark that could ignite the next pandemic.

The earliest self-spreading vaccine efforts targeted two highly lethal infectious diseases in the European rabbit population.

In 2001, Spanish researchers field-tested a vaccine in a wild rabbit population living on Isla del Aire, a small Spanish island just off Menorca. The vaccine spread to more than half the 300 rabbits on the island, and the trial was deemed successful.

While researchers may intend to make self-spreading vaccines, others could repurpose their science and develop biological weapons. Such a self-spreading weapon may prove uncontrollable and irreversible.

We don’t have to dig very deep for a historical example of weaponized biology. As the apartheid-era South African biowarfare program shows, social, political, and scientific pressures can lead to the misuse of biological innovation.

Codenamed Project Coast, South Africa’s program was primarily focused on covert assassination weapons for use against individuals deemed a threat to the racist apartheid government.

In addition to producing contraptions to inject poisons, Project Coast researchers developed techniques to lace sugar cubes with salmonella and cigarettes with Bacillus anthracis.

While there have been many biowarfare programs, including several that were far more elaborate and sophisticated, the South African program is particularly relevant in thinking through malicious uses of self-spreading vaccines. One of Project Coast’s research projects aimed at developing a human anti-fertility vaccine.

Schalk Van Rensburg, who oversaw fertility-related work at a Project Coast laboratory, told South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a forum for examining the sordid history of the era and laying the foundation for future peace and tolerance, that he thought the project was in line with the World Health Organization’s attempts to curb rising global birth rates.

He believed it could bring his lab international acclaim and funding. According to Van Rensburg, Wouter Basson, the director of the biowarfare program, said the military needed an anti-fertility vaccine so that female soldier would not fall pregnant.

While some of the scientists involved in the project denied awareness of ulterior intentions or even that their fertility work was part of a military endeavor, Van Rensburg and Daniel Goosen, a lab director, told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that the real intention behind the project was to selectively administer the contraceptive in secret to unwitting Black South African women.

In the end, the anti-fertility vaccine was not produced before Project Coast was officially closed down in 1995, 12 years after it was initiated. An early version was tested in baboons but never in humans. South Africa isn’t the only country trying to forcibly sterilize parts of its population.

European countries, including Sweden and Switzerland, sterilized members of the Roma minority in the early half of the 20th century, and some, like Slovakia, continued even beyond that. More recently, analysts have alleged that the Chinese government is sterilizing women in Xinjiang, a province with a large population of Uighur Muslims.

It doesn’t take a massive leap of the imagination to see how the aims of South Africa’s anti-fertility vaccine project would have benefited from research into self-spreading vaccines. These strands of research could help enable ultra-targeted biological warfare.

Recently, DARPA has gotten involved in the research.

According to a pamphlet, the project is “creating the world’s first prototype of a self-disseminating vaccine designed to induce a high level of herd immunity (wildlife population level protection) against Lassa virus … and Ebola.”

WITHOUT CONSENT?

But some ethics experts say there are parallels for ‘treating’ mass populations for public health issues without first getting individual consent.

For example, the fluoridation of mains drinking water to prevent tooth decay already happens in some parts of the UK, and the Government is considering extending it to all of England.

‘Nobody is asked whether they give consent, even those who disagree with it,’ says Professor Dominic Wilkinson, a medical ethics specialist at Oxford University. ‘Instead, we entrust elected officials to examine the likely health benefits and make decisions based on the evidence.

‘I don’t think that there is anything intrinsically different regarding the idea of self-spreading vaccines.’

However, some scientists have serious misgivings about the risk that weakened viruses could mutate into a more potent form once they are free to spread in the population.

Dr. Filippa Lentzos, a senior lecturer in science and international security at King’s College London, warns of the danger that the science behind self-spreading vaccines could be hijacked to make biological weapons.

‘Such a self-spreading weapon may prove uncontrollable and irreversible,’ she says.

And Professor Jim Bull, an infectious diseases expert at Idaho University who monitors developments in transmissible vaccines, told Good Health: ‘The big hurdle right now is knowing whether we can make them.’

The Department of Health and Social Care told Good Health that no trial for a self-spreading vaccine ‘would take place without undergoing stringent regulatory and ethics approval’.

The Johns Hopkins Center For Health Security writes on page 47 of the document ‘Technologies to address global catastrophic biological risks’ the following rather disturbing scenario:

“In the event of a grave public health threat, self-spreading vaccines could potentially be used to broadly inoculate human populations. Like the approach in animals, only a small number of vaccinated individuals would be required to confer protection to a larger susceptible population, thus eliminating the need for mass vaccination operations”