Nobel Laureate’s claim on variants | Experts seek to dispel vaccine fears

ntibody dependent enhancement (ADE), when antibodies to an infection can sometimes aggravate infection or trigger a respiratory disease, is something that vaccine developers must watch out for. However, there is no scientific case that such ADE may actually trigger newer virus variants, says experts.

The controversy was triggered by a much-shared article in the last few days, that claimed the French 2008 Nobel Laureate, Luc Montaigner, 89, to have said vaccination in a pandemic was lethal and there was an association between rising vaccinations and death rates. While it emerged that he did not explicitly say so, he did say that vaccinations were an “enormous mistake” as they were creating “the variants”.

The interview is in French and a translation is available on the website of the RAIR Foundation, which describes itself as an “activist grassroots” organisation to “to combat threats from Islamic supremacists, radical leftists and their allies”.

In an excerpt from the interview, Montaigner, who in 2008 was co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), says that, “It is the antibodies produced by the virus that enable an infection to become stronger. It’s what we call Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE), which means antibodies favour a certain infection