what is one of the most important things
you can give you a baby something every
child needs love food my answer might be
slightly different from yours in my
opinion one of the most important things
you can give her is a live polio vaccine
let me tell you why I am a medical
doctor and a researcher and for the past
25 years I’ve been working in the small
West African country Guinea Bissau and
Here I am at the maternity ward together
with the nurse Gina in the crib in front
of us lies a little baby girl she was
born the previous evening I know for you
to relate to her it would be better if I
could tell you her name but she hasn’t
got a name yet mother’s in cannabis I do
not name their children until later they
know there’s a high risk they will die
currently 1 out of 15 children newborns
do not live to see their first birthday
right here in this video the little girl
gets a live polio vaccine a few drops of
weakened polio virus in the mouth
according to the current understanding
of vaccines this you should do nothing
to the risk of surviving or dying
because there’s no polio in Guinea
Bissau
but our research has shown that this
vaccine will train her immune system and
make her so strong that she can combat
all kind of different diseases and this
was significantly reduce a risk of dying
a super vaccine which can train your
baby’s immune system and make her so
strong that she can combat all kind of
diseases who wouldn’t want that why
haven’t you heard about this before in
my opinion one of the main reasons is
that vaccines have become such a tense
battlefield between vaccine supporters
and vaccine skeptics arguments have
become black and white vaccines are good
vaccines are bad there’s no room for new
perspectives there’s no room
our research findings but for the next
15 minutes I ask you to kindly set aside
any opinion you may have about vaccines
and allow me to tell you what we
discovered in Guinea Bissau we have a
field station where we follow 200,000
people with regular home visits and we
register all deliveries all vaccinations
all hospitalizations health center
visits all child deaths and with this
information we started doing what nobody
else had done before us we evaluated the
effect of vaccines on overall health
this may come as a surprise but normally
vaccines are not assists
for their effects on overall health
they’re only assessed for their
protective effects against the vaccine
disease everybody has been so convinced
that vaccines only had protective
effects against the vaccine disease so
it didn’t seem necessary to assess their
effects on overall health but when we
started looking at the effect of
vaccines on overall health it quickly
became clear to us that there was
something wrong something was simply
missing in this equation because some
vaccines had a much bigger effect on
overall health than could be predicted
based on their specific protective
effect and other vaccines had much much
less effect than was expected so we
realized that vaccines also affect the
risk of other diseases they had what we
called nonspecific effects and with this
insight we started to the closer at all
the childhood vaccines we wanted to
throw light and then nonspecific effects
before I tell you what we found I need
to tell you because it’s very important
that there are two major types of
vaccines the live vaccines and the non
live vaccines and they are fundamentally
different the live vaccines contain a
little bit of the weakened disease and
it creates a mild infection a mild
natural infection in the body which is
so mild that it usually doesn’t cause
these are vaccines are really good at
stimulating the immune system so you
know them because these are the vaccines
you only need one shut off to get a good
protection the non live vaccines also
contain the disease but only it has
already been killed
so these vaccines
than online vaccines oh yeah they also
contain the disease but it has already
been killed
so these vaccines are not very good at
stimulating the immune system and you
know that because these are the vaccines
which he needs to get several shots off
of the same vaccine to get good
protection but on the positive sides
these non live vaccines can never cause
the real disease in the body not even in
people with very weak immune systems so
most doctors prefer them over the live
vaccines and nowadays most newly
developed maxine’s are non live when you
are born your immune system is a
beginner when it comes to battling
infections it’s like somebody who enters
the tennis court for the first time and
has to learn how to play tennis and the
real infection it’s a really skilled
opponent which may beat the hell out of
you and even send you off the court of
life live vaccines can be seen as a
tennis coach who challenges you and
makes you run around to the court to
return her strokes non-live vaccines on
the other hand can be resembled to a
tennis ball machine you learn how to hit
one particular stroke when the ball
comes at you but with a very specific
speed at a very specific spot both types
of vaccines create protection against a
vaccine disease but it turns out that
they have very very different
nonspecific effects and this is the
moment to remind you that I asked you to
set aside your opinions about vaccines
for full 15 minutes we have now
evaluated ten vaccines for the
nonspecific effects for alive and six
not alive and the results are very
consistent all the live vaccines are
associated with very beneficial
nonspecific effects they improve overall
health much more than could be expected
based on their protective effects it is
as if playing with the tennis coach
teaches you a wide variety of new tricks
which make you able to combat all kind
of new and different opponents in the
future non live vaccines on the other
hand all have negative nonspecific
effects they simply do not improve
overall health
as much as expected based on the
protective effects and in fact most of
them have negative effects on overall
health
so to stick with the metaphor playing
with the ball machine only teaches you
one particular stroke so you’re actually
really ill prepared and even worse off
when a real opponent enters the court
and the balls start coming and hitting
elsewhere then would you train for I’d
like to give you two examples of the
studies we did of these vaccines and
let’s start with the live vaccine the
live polio vaccine as I said in the
beginning nobody really expects any
effect of this vaccine on overall health
because polio is almost eradicated but
when we tested the effect of live polio
vaccine in Guinea Bissau
we saw in a randomized trial among
newborns that the newborns who were
randomly allocated to live polio vaccine
their mortality was reduced by 1/3
compared with the children who didn’t
this very big effect of live polio
vaccine on the risk of dying was clearly
purely nonspecific there was no polio so
live polio vaccine made the babies more
stronger and more able to combat all
kind of other diseases we have seen
these very beneficial nonspecific
effects of live polio vaccine and many
other studies now and then even more
studies we’ve seen very beneficial
nonspecific effects of three other live
vaccines measles tuberculosis and
smallpox vaccines all the live vaccines
seem to come with a bonus in the form of
increased protection against a wide
range of diseases let’s take an example
of an online vaccine and there I’d like
to talk about DTP vaccine it’s a vaccine
against three deadly severe and
potentially deadly at least diseases
diphtheria tetanus and pertussis before
we started looking closer at DCP vaccine
it had only been studied for his
protective effects in one study we went
back to historical data from when DTP
vaccine was introduced in Guinea Bissau
in the 1980s and the results were scary
in spite of being protected against
three deadly diseases
the
duction of TTP was associated with
increased overall mortality children who
received DTP vaccine had five times
higher risk of dying than those who
didn’t and this is just one example of
many studies now ton of DTP vaccine and
they all showed the same DCP vaccinated
that children have higher mortality than
those who didn’t get DCP so it appears
that DCP vaccine has negative
nonspecific effects the protection
against the three deadly diseases comes
at a very high price namely increased
risk of dying so with the best of
intentions the use of DTP vaccine may
kill more children than it saves
I know these results are extremely
uncomfortable and most people including
myself just wish they weren’t true
intriguingly
the negative effects of DTP vaccine are
strongest for girls and that’s a parent
we’ve seen for all the non live vaccines
so for all six non live vaccines we’ve
seen that they have very strong negative
nonspecific effects in females and we
haven’t got a 2y yet so our findings can
be summarized in one sentence we
discovered that vaccines train the
overall these results are fantastic in
my researcher point of view because they
open for a whole new understanding of
the immune system we used to think it
was quite simple and it turns out it’s
much smarter it’s much more complex than
we ever imagined it’s more like the
brain and the findings also opened for
completing new questions that we never
thought about asking before like should
boys and girls really have different
vaccines maybe should we consider using
live vaccines as immune trainer vaccines
even after their disease has been
eradicated and this is a characteristic
of a really new research finding it’s
disability to open new questions this
finding really
open so many new interesting pathways
but they also have very important
implications for healthier and now
because with this new knowledge we can
design vaccination programs much more
efficiently we can actually get much
more health for the same money
an Australian professor Frank Jean
calculated based on these observations
that if we modify the existing
vaccination schedule in low-income
countries using the same existing
vaccines but just emphasizing live
vaccines over non live vaccines then we
could save 1.1 million children every
year 1.1 million children that’s
equivalent to more than three thousand
children every day with minor
modifications of the vaccination program
and you may wonder if this is
implications in our part of the world in
high-income countries and it does
fortunately the risk of dying from
infections is low here but many get
hospitalized and when we and others
recently started to look for nonspecific
effects of vaccines and hospitalizations
we found exactly the same patterns for
instance in a recent study from the US
children who had a live vaccine had only
half the risk of getting hospitalized
compared with children who had an online
vaccine so it appears that also in
high-income countries we can train our
immune systems we can make ourselves
stronger against all kind of diseases
with live vaccines and this may have
implications also for other types of
diseases more chronic diseases which
depend on the immune system such as
asthma and allergies autoimmune diseases
diabetes cardiac diseases even some
cancers so what I’m telling you here is
that with this new knowledge we can save
millions of children in low-income
countries and we can reduce disease
burden significantly in high-income
countries and this makes vaccines the
largest onset resource for improving
now there’s a but coming you can feel it
coming up yeah if only it were that easy
because we are having a really hard time
getting the world to listen nobody ever
proved that vaccines only have
protective effects and we’ve been
accumulating data for 25 years now is
showing that vaccines have important
nonspecific effects yet the world only
focuses and the protective effects our
research results are not widely accepted
and I’ve spent literally years I think
pulling out my hair and speculating why
it’s so difficult to get these promising
results acknowledged and I think the
main reason is the polarized vaccine
debate the people who have the power to
do something to follow up and respond to
these findings the World Health
Organization and the health authorities
are all vaccine supporters and in my
interpretation they are reluctant to
accept our findings because they imply
the possibility that some vaccines may
sometimes be harmful so it’s easier just
to dismiss the whole thing the vaccine
skeptics on the other side may find that
our observations are non-live vaccine
confirmed their worst fears vaccines can
be harmful but they may be more
reluctant to accept the beneficial
effects and their focus on the negative
effects may make the vaccine supporters
take an even more rigid stance in my
opinion neither side is right or wrong
both sides miss the new perspective and
worst of all we are missing out on the
potential to save millions of children
with minor changes to the vaccination
program and things are moving in the
wrong direction live vaccines are being
stopped more non live vaccines are being
developed for instance live polio
vaccine has already been replaced
completely by non live polio vaccine in
high-income countries and the little
girl you saw in the video in the
beginning might be one of the last in
the world to receive live polio vaccine
because the plan is to stop live polio
vaccine completely by 2020 22 and
replace it entirely with non-life
earlier vaccine based on all the
available data this global switch from
live to non live polio vaccine will be a
public health disaster so I’m here with
a plea for immediate action and the
results we already have I’m here with a
plea for more research into nonspecific
effects we research as we’ve done the
first steps now the engaged
collaboration from the World Health
Organization the health authorities the
my talk is coming to the end and you’re
free to pick up your opinions about
vaccines again but I hope I’ve inspired
you to join me in the new era of
vaccines as immune trainers because with
you on board we are one step closer to
benefiting from the full powers of
vaccines thank you very much
[Applause] [Music]
you can give you a baby something every
child needs love food my answer might be
slightly different from yours in my
opinion one of the most important things
you can give her is a live polio vaccine
let me tell you why I am a medical
doctor and a researcher and for the past
25 years I’ve been working in the small
West African country Guinea Bissau and
Here I am at the maternity ward together
with the nurse Gina in the crib in front
of us lies a little baby girl she was
born the previous evening I know for you
to relate to her it would be better if I
could tell you her name but she hasn’t
got a name yet mother’s in cannabis I do
not name their children until later they
know there’s a high risk they will die
currently 1 out of 15 children newborns
do not live to see their first birthday
right here in this video the little girl
gets a live polio vaccine a few drops of
weakened polio virus in the mouth
according to the current understanding
of vaccines this you should do nothing
to the risk of surviving or dying
because there’s no polio in Guinea
Bissau
but our research has shown that this
vaccine will train her immune system and
make her so strong that she can combat
all kind of different diseases and this
was significantly reduce a risk of dying
a super vaccine which can train your
baby’s immune system and make her so
strong that she can combat all kind of
diseases who wouldn’t want that why
haven’t you heard about this before in
my opinion one of the main reasons is
that vaccines have become such a tense
battlefield between vaccine supporters
and vaccine skeptics arguments have
become black and white vaccines are good
vaccines are bad there’s no room for new
perspectives there’s no room
our research findings but for the next
15 minutes I ask you to kindly set aside
any opinion you may have about vaccines
and allow me to tell you what we
discovered in Guinea Bissau we have a
field station where we follow 200,000
people with regular home visits and we
register all deliveries all vaccinations
all hospitalizations health center
visits all child deaths and with this
information we started doing what nobody
else had done before us we evaluated the
effect of vaccines on overall health
this may come as a surprise but normally
vaccines are not assists
for their effects on overall health
they’re only assessed for their
protective effects against the vaccine
disease everybody has been so convinced
that vaccines only had protective
effects against the vaccine disease so
it didn’t seem necessary to assess their
effects on overall health but when we
started looking at the effect of
vaccines on overall health it quickly
became clear to us that there was
something wrong something was simply
missing in this equation because some
vaccines had a much bigger effect on
overall health than could be predicted
based on their specific protective
effect and other vaccines had much much
less effect than was expected so we
realized that vaccines also affect the
risk of other diseases they had what we
called nonspecific effects and with this
insight we started to the closer at all
the childhood vaccines we wanted to
throw light and then nonspecific effects
before I tell you what we found I need
to tell you because it’s very important
that there are two major types of
vaccines the live vaccines and the non
live vaccines and they are fundamentally
different the live vaccines contain a
little bit of the weakened disease and
it creates a mild infection a mild
natural infection in the body which is
so mild that it usually doesn’t cause
these are vaccines are really good at
stimulating the immune system so you
know them because these are the vaccines
you only need one shut off to get a good
protection the non live vaccines also
contain the disease but only it has
already been killed
so these vaccines
than online vaccines oh yeah they also
contain the disease but it has already
been killed
so these vaccines are not very good at
stimulating the immune system and you
know that because these are the vaccines
which he needs to get several shots off
of the same vaccine to get good
protection but on the positive sides
these non live vaccines can never cause
the real disease in the body not even in
people with very weak immune systems so
most doctors prefer them over the live
vaccines and nowadays most newly
developed maxine’s are non live when you
are born your immune system is a
beginner when it comes to battling
infections it’s like somebody who enters
the tennis court for the first time and
has to learn how to play tennis and the
real infection it’s a really skilled
opponent which may beat the hell out of
you and even send you off the court of
life live vaccines can be seen as a
tennis coach who challenges you and
makes you run around to the court to
return her strokes non-live vaccines on
the other hand can be resembled to a
tennis ball machine you learn how to hit
one particular stroke when the ball
comes at you but with a very specific
speed at a very specific spot both types
of vaccines create protection against a
vaccine disease but it turns out that
they have very very different
nonspecific effects and this is the
moment to remind you that I asked you to
set aside your opinions about vaccines
for full 15 minutes we have now
evaluated ten vaccines for the
nonspecific effects for alive and six
not alive and the results are very
consistent all the live vaccines are
associated with very beneficial
nonspecific effects they improve overall
health much more than could be expected
based on their protective effects it is
as if playing with the tennis coach
teaches you a wide variety of new tricks
which make you able to combat all kind
of new and different opponents in the
future non live vaccines on the other
hand all have negative nonspecific
effects they simply do not improve
overall health
as much as expected based on the
protective effects and in fact most of
them have negative effects on overall
health
so to stick with the metaphor playing
with the ball machine only teaches you
one particular stroke so you’re actually
really ill prepared and even worse off
when a real opponent enters the court
and the balls start coming and hitting
elsewhere then would you train for I’d
like to give you two examples of the
studies we did of these vaccines and
let’s start with the live vaccine the
live polio vaccine as I said in the
beginning nobody really expects any
effect of this vaccine on overall health
because polio is almost eradicated but
when we tested the effect of live polio
vaccine in Guinea Bissau
we saw in a randomized trial among
newborns that the newborns who were
randomly allocated to live polio vaccine
their mortality was reduced by 1/3
compared with the children who didn’t
this very big effect of live polio
vaccine on the risk of dying was clearly
purely nonspecific there was no polio so
live polio vaccine made the babies more
stronger and more able to combat all
kind of other diseases we have seen
these very beneficial nonspecific
effects of live polio vaccine and many
other studies now and then even more
studies we’ve seen very beneficial
nonspecific effects of three other live
vaccines measles tuberculosis and
smallpox vaccines all the live vaccines
seem to come with a bonus in the form of
increased protection against a wide
range of diseases let’s take an example
of an online vaccine and there I’d like
to talk about DTP vaccine it’s a vaccine
against three deadly severe and
potentially deadly at least diseases
diphtheria tetanus and pertussis before
we started looking closer at DCP vaccine
it had only been studied for his
protective effects in one study we went
back to historical data from when DTP
vaccine was introduced in Guinea Bissau
in the 1980s and the results were scary
in spite of being protected against
three deadly diseases
the
duction of TTP was associated with
increased overall mortality children who
received DTP vaccine had five times
higher risk of dying than those who
didn’t and this is just one example of
many studies now ton of DTP vaccine and
they all showed the same DCP vaccinated
that children have higher mortality than
those who didn’t get DCP so it appears
that DCP vaccine has negative
nonspecific effects the protection
against the three deadly diseases comes
at a very high price namely increased
risk of dying so with the best of
intentions the use of DTP vaccine may
kill more children than it saves
I know these results are extremely
uncomfortable and most people including
myself just wish they weren’t true
intriguingly
the negative effects of DTP vaccine are
strongest for girls and that’s a parent
we’ve seen for all the non live vaccines
so for all six non live vaccines we’ve
seen that they have very strong negative
nonspecific effects in females and we
haven’t got a 2y yet so our findings can
be summarized in one sentence we
discovered that vaccines train the
overall these results are fantastic in
my researcher point of view because they
open for a whole new understanding of
the immune system we used to think it
was quite simple and it turns out it’s
much smarter it’s much more complex than
we ever imagined it’s more like the
brain and the findings also opened for
completing new questions that we never
thought about asking before like should
boys and girls really have different
vaccines maybe should we consider using
live vaccines as immune trainer vaccines
even after their disease has been
eradicated and this is a characteristic
of a really new research finding it’s
disability to open new questions this
finding really
open so many new interesting pathways
but they also have very important
implications for healthier and now
because with this new knowledge we can
design vaccination programs much more
efficiently we can actually get much
more health for the same money
an Australian professor Frank Jean
calculated based on these observations
that if we modify the existing
vaccination schedule in low-income
countries using the same existing
vaccines but just emphasizing live
vaccines over non live vaccines then we
could save 1.1 million children every
year 1.1 million children that’s
equivalent to more than three thousand
children every day with minor
modifications of the vaccination program
and you may wonder if this is
implications in our part of the world in
high-income countries and it does
fortunately the risk of dying from
infections is low here but many get
hospitalized and when we and others
recently started to look for nonspecific
effects of vaccines and hospitalizations
we found exactly the same patterns for
instance in a recent study from the US
children who had a live vaccine had only
half the risk of getting hospitalized
compared with children who had an online
vaccine so it appears that also in
high-income countries we can train our
immune systems we can make ourselves
stronger against all kind of diseases
with live vaccines and this may have
implications also for other types of
diseases more chronic diseases which
depend on the immune system such as
asthma and allergies autoimmune diseases
diabetes cardiac diseases even some
cancers so what I’m telling you here is
that with this new knowledge we can save
millions of children in low-income
countries and we can reduce disease
burden significantly in high-income
countries and this makes vaccines the
largest onset resource for improving
now there’s a but coming you can feel it
coming up yeah if only it were that easy
because we are having a really hard time
getting the world to listen nobody ever
proved that vaccines only have
protective effects and we’ve been
accumulating data for 25 years now is
showing that vaccines have important
nonspecific effects yet the world only
focuses and the protective effects our
research results are not widely accepted
and I’ve spent literally years I think
pulling out my hair and speculating why
it’s so difficult to get these promising
results acknowledged and I think the
main reason is the polarized vaccine
debate the people who have the power to
do something to follow up and respond to
these findings the World Health
Organization and the health authorities
are all vaccine supporters and in my
interpretation they are reluctant to
accept our findings because they imply
the possibility that some vaccines may
sometimes be harmful so it’s easier just
to dismiss the whole thing the vaccine
skeptics on the other side may find that
our observations are non-live vaccine
confirmed their worst fears vaccines can
be harmful but they may be more
reluctant to accept the beneficial
effects and their focus on the negative
effects may make the vaccine supporters
take an even more rigid stance in my
opinion neither side is right or wrong
both sides miss the new perspective and
worst of all we are missing out on the
potential to save millions of children
with minor changes to the vaccination
program and things are moving in the
wrong direction live vaccines are being
stopped more non live vaccines are being
developed for instance live polio
vaccine has already been replaced
completely by non live polio vaccine in
high-income countries and the little
girl you saw in the video in the
beginning might be one of the last in
the world to receive live polio vaccine
because the plan is to stop live polio
vaccine completely by 2020 22 and
replace it entirely with non-life
earlier vaccine based on all the
available data this global switch from
live to non live polio vaccine will be a
public health disaster so I’m here with
a plea for immediate action and the
results we already have I’m here with a
plea for more research into nonspecific
effects we research as we’ve done the
first steps now the engaged
collaboration from the World Health
Organization the health authorities the
my talk is coming to the end and you’re
free to pick up your opinions about
vaccines again but I hope I’ve inspired
you to join me in the new era of
vaccines as immune trainers because with
you on board we are one step closer to
benefiting from the full powers of
vaccines thank you very much
[Applause] [Music]
Please follow and like us: