Not up to snuff: AstraZeneca's nasal spray Covid vaccine FAILS to protect against virus
AstraZeneca's leading Covid nasal spray vaccine does not protect well against the virus, a study has shown — dashing hopes it could replace traditional jabs.
The University of Oxford — which is developing and running trials of the vaccine — said only a minority of patients mounted an immune response.
Even those who did react to the jab had lower antibody levels than someone given a shot-in-the-arm vaccination.
It is another blow for AstraZeneca which has so far failed to break the US vaccine market — after concerns about its original jab's link to blood clots.
Researchers across the world have placed high hopes on nasal spray vaccines because they may have the potential to stop Covid infections entirely.
It was thought that prompting an immune response directly in the airways would be able to shut the virus down before it spreads to the rest of the body.
But Dr Sandy Douglas, who ran the UK-based AstraZeneca trial, said the spray did not perform 'as well as we had hoped'.
China and India have already approved nasal spray Covid jabs, although there is no public data on how well they work.
The US has spent billions purchasing more than 800million doses of Covid vaccines, but a third of Americans are still yet to get their first shots.
It was hoped that nasal vaccines could offer an alternative inoculation because they are easy to administer and don't cause pain. Scientists also believed they might 'enhance' protection because they target the lining of the nose, where the virus infects first.
But today's results — thought to be the first on a nasal spray for Covid — suggest more research is needed.
What is the advantage of nasal sprays for Covid vaccines?
Scientists have been chasing a nasal spray Covid vaccine as an alternative to the needle-based method. They hope that it could 'enhance' immune responses because it is administered to the lining of the nose, the first place the virus infects.
Experts also say it can help people with a fear of jabs get the vaccine. The fear — known as trypanophobia — affects about 10 per cent of adults.
There is still little evidence that they are as good as standard jabs, however. Oxford University found they only sparked immunity in a minority of participants.
The sprays have been approved for use in China and India. But studies on this are yet to be released.
In the Phase I clinical trial scientists recruited 30 healthy volunteers who had not previously been vaccinated. The purpose of the study was to perfect the dosage size and timing.
All received a first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine as a nasal spray, and half also got a second dose. These were given as low, medium or high doses.
Blood tests and swabs showed 'little evidence' all those who got one dose had an immune response.
After the second spray just four participants — or 30 per cent of the total — had evidence of an immune response.
But this was much weaker than that triggered by standard vaccines.
In a second arm of the trial, 15 double-vaccinated people were given the nasal spray as a booster dose.
But again this did not appear to trigger an immune response — with antibody levels remaining 'indistinguishable' from the unvaccinated individuals.
No adverse safety effects were spotted during the trial.
The results were published today in the journal eBioMedicine.
Dr Douglas, from Oxford University's Jenner Institute, said: 'The nasal spray did not perform as well in this study as we had hoped.
'One possibility is simply that the majority of the nasal spray vaccine ends up being swallowed and destroyed in the stomach – delivery to the lungs could avoid that.
'A further challenge is that researchers don’t fully understand the relationships between the strength and types of immune responses within the airways and protection against infection.'
She called for more research into these vaccines, to determine whether another method could help develop a nasal version.
'[Our results] were quite different from recent data from China, which has suggested good results can be achieved by delivery of a similar vaccine,' she said.
'A nasal spray vaccine has recently been approved for intranasal use in India and we are looking forward to the peer-reviewed publication of the clinical trial data used to support that.'
China gave emergency approval for a nasal spray Covid vaccine — from CanSino Biologics Inc — last month.
CanSino said studies indicated that its vaccine induced a strong immune response, although trial data is yet to be released.
Unlike AstraZeneca's it is given via a nebuliser device, a machine that turns a liquid into a fine mist that is then breathed in.
India's health ministry also approved a nasal spray Covid vaccine last month by Bharat Biotech.
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Dangerous vaccines
More on the great unravelling of the Covid vaccine story
It’s Dreamtime down under as Australian politicians and the media, led by their health authorities, sleepwalk through 2022.
Last Saturday, Florida’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, released analysis showing that Covid-19 mRNA vaccines increased the risk of cardiac-related death by a staggering 84 per cent among men aged 18 to 39 within 28 days of injection. Ladapo had already recommended against Covid vaccination in children aged 5 to 17 in March. Now he has added children aged less than five and men aged 18 to 39, tweeting, ‘Florida will not be silent on the truth’.
Ladapo is not alone. In mid-September Denmark recommended against Covid shots for any healthy person under 50 years. A fortnight later, Norway recommended against the jabs for healthy people aged under 65. In the UK healthy children who turned five on or after 1 September will not be vaccinated until they turn 12 unless they live with someone with a weakened immune system.
Esteemed UK cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra, an erstwhile TV talking head in support of Covid vaccines has gone further. His peer-reviewed paper published a fortnight ago calls for their immediate suspension. ‘Until all the raw data on the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines have been independently analysed, any claims purporting that they confer a net benefit to humankind cannot be considered to be evidence based,’ he says.
On 16 September, an international group of scientists and doctors, led by French scientist Alexandra Henrion-Caude and American doctor Sally Priester issued a declaration of an international medical crisis due to diseases and death related to Covid vaccination. They pointed to high excess mortality in countries with high vaccination rates, ‘the large number of sudden deaths in previously healthy young people’, ‘the high incidence of miscarriages and perinatal deaths’, and the ‘large number of adverse side effects, including hospitalisations, permanent disabilitie, and deaths’.
Yet, it is as if none of this happened to the somnambulists running Australia. This week, Karen Andrews, the former minister for Home Affairs who cancelled Novak Djokovic’s visa twice ranted that he must not be allowed to compete in the next Australia Open just because ‘he’s a high-ranking tennis player with many millions of dollars’. ‘It shouldn’t be just one rule for (him) and a different rule for everyone else,’ she pontificated. Yet preventing Djokovic from entering applies a harsher rule to him than anyone else, since nobody has been required to be vaccinated to enter Australia since 6 July. And if Florida and the dissenting doctors are correct, Andrews should be apologising to Djokovic for trying to coerce him to get a vaccine that could have killed him.
Equally, if the dissenting doctors and scientists are right, it is also the ongoing mass Covid vaccination campaigns that underlie Australia’s shocking excess mortality which started rising in March 2021, just when the Covid vaccines started to be rolled out and is now running at 17 per cent. This year, there had been 13,524 excess deaths by 30 June of which less than 40 per cent (5,387) were due to Covid. What caused the deaths of the other 8,137 Australians? And why is it that Australian health officers who lamented every Covid death when there were only 905 in 2020 and 1,342 in 2021, have said nothing about excess mortality in 2022 which is ten times worse than Covid mortality in 2021?
Australian Medical Association president Professor Steve Robson described Australia’s excess mortality as a ‘worrying’ trend that mirrored countries such as the UK but said he couldn’t explain it adding, ‘there needs to be some research into why this is happening’. There has been none. Why not? Instead, Australia’s health authorities still recommend repeatedly jabbing everyone from the age of six months up intoning the mantra that the vaccines are ‘safe and effective’.
Yet that’s not what the NSW data, the most complete in Australia, shows. Vaccinated people in NSW are six times more likely to get Covid than the unvaccinated, 77 times more likely to be hospitalised, ten times more likely to end up in ICU, and 1.1 times more likely to die even though the people most likely to die of Covid – people in palliative care, severe illness, the frailest elderly – are often unvaccinated because they are so close to death.
NSW does not release the data it collects on the comorbidities of those who are hospitalised or die with or of Covid. If it did we could compare like with like and establish the risk of the virus to healthy or sick people in each age group, and the risks or benefits of vaccination to those same groups. Why don’t health authorities do this? Are they just woefully obtuse or do they fear that the results would reveal that the vaccine is neither safe nor effective?
Despite the incompleteness, the NSW statistics strongly suggest that the vaccine is increasing the risk of illness and death. This was a known danger. Are Australia’s health authorities actively monitoring for it? It seems not. Yet Dr. Fauci warned in May 2020 that there was a ‘possibility of negative consequences’ because ‘certain vaccines can actually enhance the negative effect of the infection’. This was true for a vaccine developed for respiratory syncytial virus which was never approved and a measles vaccine developed in the 1960s which was withdrawn.
Why are the Covid vaccines not being withdrawn, asks Dr Malhotra. He notes the swine flu vaccine developed in 1976 was withdrawn because of a 1 in 100,000 risk of Guillain-Barré syndrome and the rotavirus vaccine was withdrawn because of a 1 in 10,000 risk of bowel obstruction. He estimates the true prevalence of serious adverse events from Covid-19 mRNA vaccines is between 1 in 800 and 1 in 1,000.
What about excess mortality? The easiest way to establish whether vaccination is contributing would be to identify the vaccine status of all those who died since Covid immunisation commenced, together with their age and comorbidities. It’s not hard.
That’s what Florida, and presumably Denmark and Norway have done. But not Australia. Its leaders slumber on at the wheel as the nation careens towards a calamitous awakening.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/dangerous-dreamtime
****************************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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