Koopman speaks out against anti-vaccination warnings
Due to many in the scientific and medical communities who have spoken against both the short and long-term safety of receiving COVID-19 vaccinations, Pine Islander Dr. James Koopman addressed the issues of supposed Antibody Dependency Enhancement (ADE) and spike proteins’ permeation of the entire body.
“In our community, there are these scientific issues causing people to be hesitant about the vaccine,” Koopman said.
ADE is the thought that the vaccine could produce antibodies that help the virus get into our cells. This travel throughout the body, he said, and is very characteristic of coronavirus infections. The infection attaches to a receptor found everywhere in the body, allowing it to get into various places, such as the heart muscle. The concern is that the vaccine could be doing the same thing as the infection.
To a small extent, that is true, according to Koopman, an epidemiologist and member of the Pine Island COVID-19 Task Force.
“This is where you have to weigh the consequences of the vaccine against the wild virus,” Koopman said.
ADE can only be accomplished if you’ve had the immune system stimulated. The wild virus (natural infection), he said, stimulates a lot of antibodies, generating a risk thousands of times greater than the antibodies helping the virus get into the cells.
“The vaccine, on the other hand, has a tremendously potent component that stops infection,” Koopman said. “The vaccine mainly generates antibodies to this component.”
Although the vaccine is capable of generating small quantities of antibodies to the particular antigens that would contribute to ADE, he said the protection provided by the vaccine is strong enough to render these antibodies powerless, whereas after a natural infection this would not be the case. This virus has clear neurologic effects, he said, without a strong or long-term natural immunity, causing various potential complications as well as re-infection. This re-infection, he said, is behind the emergence of variants, including the Delta and Delta Plus Variants, described by Koopman as “frightful.”
“The changes in the virus since it first started have more than doubled the number of people an infected person will infect on average,” Koopman said. “In order to stop the new variants, you have to have a high level of vaccination. Fortunately the vaccines we’re using in the United States produce those high levels — especially the messenger RNA vaccines. They do produce the primary protective antibodies at a high enough level to stop the virus from getting into the cell.”
The other issue is the circulating spike protein generated from the mRNA vaccines. According to Koopman, the basic issue being brought forward is the vaccine, once administered in the arm, puts out a protein that travels throughout the entire body.
“The idea of engaging more of the immune system is a positive element of the vaccine,” Koopman said. “We can show that it’s a very positive element of the vaccine by examining which parts of the immune system are stimulated and how those different parts of the immune system are effective at keeping the coronavirus from causing COVID and from spreading from one person to another. Even though people have expressed this being a bad aspect of it, it’s not a bad aspect.”
This comparison, he said, is measured most easily when you study the people who have been vaccinated along with the people who have gotten natural infections. Koopman emphasizes the emerging variants spread rapidly and avoid immunity stimulated by prior infections. It is his contention that although this is not an insignificant problem, there is no real problem with this.
“A small fraction of people can get myocarditis — inflammation of the heart muscles,” said Koopman. “This is a big issue for me because when I was a pediatrician, I had a patient — an 11-year-old girl — that developed myocarditis back in the early ’70s. I spent so much time with this patient and got to know her well. I loved her so much. Unfortunately, she just kept getting worse. Eventually I had to intubate her. I remember looking into her eyes so intently and she was looking into mine, and she went on to die.”
While Koopman admits myocarditis is a treacherous disease, he says it hasn’t been related to the vaccine. According to him, his patient had an infection that caused myocarditis, and limited studies and technology kept him from finding the cause, whereas that would not be the case with today’s advanced medical knowledge. The level of risk associated with vaccine-related myocarditis in today’s world is minute in comparison to getting naturally infected with COVID.
“We have a system of surveillance called VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System),” Koopman said. “It takes every little piece of information about any illness regarding anyone who’s been vaccinated. A lot of good-hearted anti-vaccination people have distorted what the VAERS system does. They indicate that the vaccines are causing high numbers of diseases, when in reality these diseases are occurring in people who have been vaccinated. Whenever there is a certain number of those, that gets investigated very carefully. That’s how the issue of myocarditis came about. You get thousands of different problems people have and they get investigated and for almost all of them, you see that there’s no difference in the rate of those things that people are experiencing between those who got vaccinated and those who didn’t get vaccinated.
“When there are small differences, like there were in the myocarditis, it can be that certain people are susceptible to it,” he continued. “The complications you hear in these huge numbers — hundreds of thousands of people had these symptoms after vaccination, would have been experienced at the same rate. Sometimes the vaccine could make them come a little faster, but not raise the total incidents.
“The scientific community is very alert to these kinds of things. If they have serious thoughts about it, they do the investigations and get the responses of other people. They generate the hypothesis that a vaccine could be doing this or that and they make sure that they have solid proof. You have to balance the risks of the vaccine versus the risks of the disease. We are not going to eliminate this virus. People could get this virus every two to three years with some pretty negative consequences. You have to think beyond yourself. You should be getting vaccinated for the rest of society.”