World vaccination campaign is not any biological weapon

The portal Latin American Information Agency (ALAINET) has published a paper with the arguments of Geert Vanden Bossche, a Germanvirologist who in the past worked for the the Vaccine Alliance (GAVI) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, questioning the massive vaccination campaign that is taking place all over the world. Specifically, Vanden Bossche claims that it is one of the most effective strategies “to turn a relatively harmless virus into a biological weapon of mass destruction” This is FALSE: to date, vaccines are working and are preventing, in most of the cases, the most severe forms of the disease.

"I could think of a few strategies more effective to turn a relatively harmless virus into a mass destruction weapon", Vanden Bossche says about the mentioned globally used measures to slow down the pandemic

In one part of the text, Vanden Bossche is quoted as saying that vaccination and social distancing measures are an effective strategy for a “relatively harmless virus to turn into a biological mass destruction weapon”. It is true that the virologist states this in his open letter to the World Health Organisation (WHO) but this is false information: to date, the vaccination campaign is proving effective. Deaths by covid-19 have been reduced up to the maximum in countries where vaccination is more advanced —at the end of May, the UK reported for the first time in 10 months a total of 0 deaths associated with SARS-CoV-2—. This is an example that, for the moment, vaccines are working and are preventing the most severe forms of the disease from occurring in most cases.

In any case, vaccine manufacturers are currently developing alternatives, in case that a new variant being sufficiently different for vaccines losing their effect suddenly appeared. Redesigning the injections to adjust them to new variants is not anything new or extraordinary: for instance, every year, injections against influenza must be redesigned because the old ones become obsolete.