Could the flu vaccine usher in a "second wave" of Covid?

Video transcript:
I often feel as if I'm living in an Alice in Wonderland world these days. We've had our entire lives turned upside down, supposedly to combat a virus whose effects are so mild in the vast majority of the population, that most people don't even realise they've had it! And in order to find out, they have to submit to a reportedly excruciating test.

And yet, at the same time… there does seem to be a nasty bug going round, which supposedly is Covid19. There are so many questions around this. I want to discuss some of the anomalies around this current pandemic, because I have an idea about a possible factor, which might explain some of these anomalies.

I know of two or three people who have recently had an unpleasant flu-like illnesses lasting about seven days. I say two or three, because one of them I haven't been in touch with recently, but I know that he had it, and I think that the symptoms lasted for less than a week. I know that he's recovered.

My other two friends who had it, in February and March, gave me blow-by-blow details as it was happening.

I also know anecdotally about 10 people who suffered very badly from what was probably Covid19. A few of them were relatives of friends or friends of friends. One of my friends lost two older relatives – an uncle and a more distant relative, and a younger friend of hers got it really badly and was ill for weeks.

I also know of a couple of other people through online contacts, who suffered very badly from Covid, and one of them sadly died. One of the bloggers I follow who was ill for weeks with Covid and has thankfully since recovered, is a young woman in her 20s who is very fit, a mountaineer. I don't know whether she has any underlying health issues.

Why is is that some people seem to get seriously ill from this disease, while most others who get infected seem to barely notice it? In the early days of the pandemic, we were told that it was primarily the elderly and immune-compromised people who were more likely to become very sick or dying from Covid19.

But there are also those relatively low numbers of young people who don't seem to have underlying comorbidities, but who also get really sick from Covid-19, and some of this group have tragically died from it.

Why is this, when the vast proportion of people who are infected just get very mild illnesses or don't even realise that they have it?

I started thinking about the idea of "cofounders" – this is when events point to an apparently obvious reason for something, or a correlation, but when you look further, there are other factors behind it.

And this could be the case where Covid19 is concerned.

From the early days of the crisis, the data from Italy and Spain indicated that the vast proportion of people who were dying from Covid-19 were aged over 50, and they were often people who had underlying medical conditions, or comorbities.

Initially I wondered if the reason that Italy was so badly affected might have been because it has the world's second-highest population age.

But the country with the highest population age, or number of older people, is Japan, and its fatality rate from Covid19 is much lower than Italy's or most other countries in Europe.

A couple of months ago, there was some discussion around the idea that the influenza vaccine might be an underlying reason behind some of the respiratory effects attributed to Covid19. Most of those discussions pointed to a scientific research paper entitled Influenza vaccination and respiratory virus interference among Department of Defense personnel during the 2017 to 2018 influenza season.

I read this paper, but at the time I didn't think it seemed particularly conclusive, apart from the suggestion that this "respiratory virus interference" is a phenomenon.

But I keep thinking that this possibility should not be disregarded, because so many elderly and immune-compromised people have the flu vaccine every year, and the fact that there has been a suggestion – even if it's a non-proven one – that certain vaccines could lead to "respiratory virus interference" – surely this is something that warrants further investigation at a time when this strange pandemic is leaving most people barely affected, but with a small proportion of people being severely affected or losing their life.

One way of doing this research might be to look at the number of people under 50, with no underlying health issues, who got seriously ill or died from Covid19, and to find out how many of them had recently had the flu vaccine – and if so, what specific type of flu vaccine they had.

This question becomes even more pertinent when we look at the new types of influenza vaccines that are introduced each season. In 2019, a new cell-based vaccine was introduced in the UK and other parts of Europe, offering protection from four strains of flu.

According to an article that appeared in the Daily Mail in October 2019, Britain was the first country in Europe to introduce this particular type of flu vaccine, which was grown in cells that originated in a dog's kidney instead of the usual chicken's eggs. Apparently this is not unusual in vaccines, because canine cells are more similar to human cells than chicken cells.

I can't say whether virus interference from this new type of vaccine is linked to the more serious aspects of Covid19. But with new types of flu vaccine being developed each year, I would have thought it's something that researchers should be looking into, especially with the northern hemisphere winter just around the corner.

So just to recap…

The vast majority of people who become infected with Covid19 suffer such mild symptoms that most of them don't even realise they've had it.

But there's a small percentage of people who get very ill from the disease, often with acute respiratory problems, and some of them sadly die.

Those people are predominately from older age groups and/or with underlying health conditions.

And those are precisely the same group of people who would normally be advised to have the flu vaccine.

The other group of people who often have the flu vaccine are health workers. They are advised to get it because they are coming into contact with infected people, and they could become infectious to others.

And it seems that health workers, NHS staff, have been disproportionately affected by the most serious respiratory effects of Covid19. I initially thought this was because they were getting exposed to a higher viral load – and that might well be the case, but I really think the possible effects of the flu vaccine should be looked into.

I'm not suggesting that the flu vaccine makes people more susceptible to Covid19. But I do wonder if the flu vaccine could potentially turn Covid19 from a very mild disease into a serious respiratory condition. If that is the case, with the northern hemisphere winter just round the corner, we are definitely going to get a second wave, and there will be many more unnecessary, preventable deaths.

I don't want to needlessly deter vulnerable people from having the flu vaccine, but I personally think this issue needs to be looked into, urgently.

SHOW NOTES

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X19313647#b0060

Could new flu jab made in dogs' kidney cells be the most effective ever?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7573211/Could-new-flu-jab-dogs-kidney-cells-effective-ever.html

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