Mithridatism is the practice of ingesting small amounts of poison in order to develop immunity, or at least tolerance, to the substance. The practice is named after King Mithridates VI, who ruled over the ancient Kingdom of Pontus in Anatolia from 120 to 63 BC and began the eponymous practice after his father had been assassinated by poisoning. Mithridatism can work in two ways: either by producing antibodies that neutralize toxins, or for the same reason that alcoholics and drug addicts develop a tolerance: the body begins producing more enzymes to catalyze the metabolic pathways responsible for detoxifying the substances being ingested. The same process may be reversed when the addict ceases to consume the substance – the body will downregulate the enzymes necessary for the now unused pathways. This fact often kills heroin addicts who relapse and take the same dose that they had been taking when they had a high tolerance for the substance.
Mithridatism works with a small variety of compounds, mostly complex biological molecules that can be handled by the immune system, or specific compounds that the body has metabolic pathways to detoxify. Examples of the former are animal venoms, and examples of the latter are toxins like alcohol and cyanide. Mithridatism generally does not work on heavy metals, most of which are toxic, as they tend to bioaccumulate, though resistance to arsenic has developed over evolutionary time spans in areas with heavy arsenic exposure[1]. Even acquiring immunity to cyanide is relatively ineffective, since the ability of the body to detoxify cyanide is not limited by the enzyme, rhodanese, but by the body’s stores of thiosulfate, which donates a sulfur atom in the detoxification process. So, while increased levels of the rhodanese enzyme may aid survival, it is ultimately the level of internal thiosulfate which will be the determining factor (indeed intravenous thiosulfate is sometimes used to treat cyanide poisoning)[2].
Because of the limitations it suffers from, mithridatism is rarely ever a practical endeavour, but it has been applied historically. According to the historian Appian, King Mithridates had failed to commit suicide by poison after his defeat by Pompey and the Romans, and thus had to ask his bodyguard to kill him with his sword. American herpetologist Bill Haast (1910 – 2011) furnishes a more recent example. Haast was a venomous snake handler who operated the Miami Serpentarium and would perform live demonstrations of himself collecting venom from his snakes[3]. He practised mithridatism throughout his life, which allowed him to survive the more than 172 bites from venomous snakes he received over his career, including by a king cobra. The antibodies within his blood were used to treat over 20 patients who had been bitten by snakes. In fact, this is how anti-venoms are produced commercially, though the antibodies are harvested from the blood of mammals like rabbits and horses, rather than humans.
Vaccination proceeds from the same logical foundation of deliberate poisoning to achieve immunity, but with the target being pathogenic microorganisms rather than poisons or venoms. This is easy to see if we look at Edward Jenner’s attempts to vaccinate against smallpox by infecting his subjects with cowpox. Clearly inoculating subjects with cowpox could not but be deleterious to their health – the only possible justification being that if some small harm now may avert the possibility of larger harm later then it may be justified by some lines of reasoning. Though modern vaccination is more technologically advanced, it still proceeds by the same method of poisoning to evoke an immune response.
Most modern vaccines include adjuvants that increase the immunogenicity (ability to provoke an immune response) of the vaccines. Some of the most common adjuvants in use today are aluminum salts, like aluminum hydroxide or aluminum phosphate, which were discovered to increase immune response in the 1930s. Since aluminum is a toxic metal that is not required for any part of human metabolism, any vaccine that contains it is therefore toxic. Aluminum adjuvants have been shown to induce immunological disorders and neurological pathology, and may also be carried across the blood-brain barrier by macrophages[4,5]. Adjuvants other than aluminum salts, such as squalene and mineral oil, have been associated with the development of autoimmune/inflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants (ASIA)[6]. Another review remarks that “[t]he inflammatory or danger-signal model of adjuvant action implies that increased vaccine reactogenicity is the inevitable price for improved immunogenicity,” meaning that the vaccines that are most effective at producing an immune response must also have the highest rates of adverse reactions[7]. Although not all vaccines contain adjuvants, they all necessarily function by polluting the body with foreign substances in order to trigger an immune response.
Given these facts, which are just a small subset of those proving vaccine toxicity, it is not unreasonable to say that the practice of vaccination inherently involves poisoning the individual. US law would agree that vaccines are unavoidably unsafe, as per the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (42 U.S.C. §§ 300aa-22) which lists, under heading (b) Unavoidable adverse side effects; warnings that
(1) No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine after October 1,1988, if the injury or death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings.[8,9] [emphasis mine]
Such side effects may include allergic reactions, Guillain–Barré syndrome or other neurological disorders, and death. Vaccine manufacturers are not held liable for any of the possible side effects, and vaccine injuries in the US are adjudicated by a special “vaccine court” established by the act[10].
Separate from the risks inherent to vaccination is the fact that some1 vaccines may not actually function in their stated objective of reducing mortality and morbidity from disease. The most immediate goal of vaccination is to induce the production of antibodies in the inoculated person. The effectiveness with which it will do this depends on a large variety of factors, including the person’s age, sex, health, etc., though it is generally the case that being poisoned will induce the body to produce antibodies that are protective against the poison. But, while antibodies may be produced, it is not at all certain that they will have a beneficial effect on the person, and there are many ways in which vaccination can produce a more serious disease state, even apart from the initial poisoning.
One way in which vaccines can increase disease severity is through antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) whereby antibodies allow non-neutralized virus particles to enter into (be phagocytosed by) immune cells, which then allows the virus to replicate. This happened with Sanofi-Pasteur’s 2016 Dengvaxia vaccine for Dengue fever, which was responsible for killing at least 14 children through ADE when they were subsequently exposed to wild virus after vaccination[11]. Another mechanism through which vaccines can have the opposite of the desired protective effect is through original antigenic sin, whereby previous exposure to one set of antigens in a vaccine may result in the body subsequently fighting similar but not identical antigens with the originally learned antibodies, which are now mistargeted[12]. Since the antibodies were developed in response to similar but not identical antigens, the body may use the original antibodies – which do not properly neutralize the new antigen – rather than produce new ones which are better suited to the new infection. Of course, it is not possible to reliably predict the direction of antigenic drift in viruses, which makes original antigenic sin a practically insoluble problem, especially in viruses that mutate quickly.
Beyond vaccines producing paradoxical reactions, they may also disrupt selection pressures in virus-host co-evolution. One classical example of this is the viral Marek’s disease in chickens. Marek’s disease was first described in 1907 by an eponymous Hungarian veterinarian, and, though mortality was low, the disease was costly for the poultry industry. This led to the development of a vaccine, which was introduced in 1970. The vaccine, while preventing symptoms, did not prevent birds from becoming infected with the virus or spreading it – also known as a leaky vaccine. This modified the selection pressures on the virus, which was no longer selected for low mortality when transmitting among vaccinated populations (transmission being difficult if the host has died)[13]. The result is that after several decades of these selection pressures being active, modern viral strains approach 100% mortality in unvaccinated birds. This is a negative outcome from vaccination that affects those outside the inoculated group, while being rewarding for pharmaceutical companies due to continued demand for their products.
Humans also coexist and have co-evolved with viruses. There are several viral diseases of childhood like measles and chicken pox which effectively comprise a part of the human life cycle. If vaccines are to reduce the occurrence of these diseases during childhood2, this will have ramifications at the level of the group. Adults who previously had chicken pox as children would have been likely to come into contact with young children in their families who would be sick and shedding the virus. This exposure (exogenous boosting) would serve to periodically “remind” the immune system about the pathogen, and hence strengthen cell-mediated immunity. Far from improving community health, surveillance data indicates that since the introduction of widespread varicella vaccination in US children, cases of shingles have increased in older populations[14]. Given that shingles is more expensive to treat that chicken pox, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation in the UK concluded that “[c]ost-effectiveness modelling indicates that a two-dose childhood vaccination programme […] could be cost effective but only after 80-100+ years of vaccination […] for the first 30-50 years [the] programme would have a high probability of being cost ineffective.”[15] That is, cost-ineffective for the taxpayers funding vaccination programs, not for the pharmaceutical companies producing the vaccines.
Even apart from group-level effects and paradoxical reactions, vaccines may simply fail to work at all, rendering the point moot and the price paid in vain. According to vaccine trials, anywhere from 2-10% of healthy vaccinees do not mount a sufficient immune response to vaccination[16]. This rate is higher for elderly or immunosuppressed individuals. This is in addition to the fact that many kinds of vaccines are not capable of effectively inducing cell-mediated immunity, which is a crucial half of the immune system[17]. Immunity also wanes over time, apparently lasting only six months in the case of COVID vaccinations. Of course, even if the vaccines do result in the production of long-lasting antibodies, that fact may ultimately have no relation to the more relevant outcomes of sickness and death. In a 2006 review, Tom Jefferson noted that “[e]vidence from systematic reviews shows that inactivated [influenza] vaccines have little or no effect on the effects measured”[18]. A 2010 Cochrane Library systematic review of 50 studies, primarily randomized controlled trials, found that “Vaccination had a modest effect on time off work and had no effect on hospital admissions or complication rates. Inactivated vaccines caused local harms and an estimated 1.6 additional cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome per million vaccinations.”[19] Given that more flu vaccines are given each year than any other (until COVID vaccination campaigns), and that great effort goes into increasing flu vaccination rates, the fact that their effectiveness is limited to non-existent is important yet largely ignored[20].
Vaccination, then, like mithridatism, can be compared to a form of insurance. It is gambling with your health, under the assumption that certain poisoning now will be worthwhile to potentially avoid the possibility of illness of uncertain severity in the future. If vaccination were presented this way, with a full disclosure of risks and no pressure applied to refusers (as is required under Western bioethics) then vaccination would surely be a much less contentious issue. The fact that adverse events of clinical significance are relatively rare allows vaccines to be promoted as “safe and effective”, but it is far from true that the gamble pays off for everyone, as all those who have been killed or maimed by vaccination would attest to (if they were able).
Given the certain cost and uncertain benefits, vaccination, as with insurance, must be left to the personal choice of the individual. To require everyone to follow the same course would be to nullify one of the most important psychological characteristics that differentiates people: risk assessment and risk preference. It is well known that some people prefer feeling safe to having the freedom to make risky choices. This preference is expressed in all domains of life, from choice of recreation, to investment, to health decisions[21]. Clearly many moderns believe that the risk of disease far outweighs the risk of vaccination, which is their prerogative, but others may decide differently. Any society that holds liberty in high esteem must allow people to freely make these choices, and will subsequently benefit from the entrepreneurship and innovation of people who choose to step off the beaten path. To do otherwise is to force society into the mould of Nietzsche’s last man, who takes no risks and seeks only comfort and security, while preempting the emergence of those who would aspire to accomplish great deeds or produce great works.
To mandate vaccination of any kind is to pathologize the essence of being human. Those who might otherwise be considered a hale and hearty individuals are in fact dangerous disease vectors, who must be preemptively fixed. It is an Original Sin that can only be purged through the products of modern pharmaceutical companies, as in Catholicism where Original Sin can only be erased through baptism. To recast humanity as fundamentally flawed in this way has long been used as a motivator for political goals, notably by the Club of Rome: “In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. […] The real enemy then is humanity itself.”[22] Substitute disease outbreak for global warming and you have the perfect pretext for the biosecurity state.
Of course, carrying the idea of treating humanity as a disease carrier to its logical conclusion implies a host of other reforms beyond mandatory vaccinations. Obese people are more susceptible to infectious disease from a variety of pathogens, and are therefore more likely to transmit those pathogens to others[23]. The same goes for immunocompromised individuals, or those with low levels of vitamin D, who are more susceptible to respiratory disease[24]. At the level of sex, women mount stronger adaptive and innate immune responses than men, something that is not unique to humans but is evolutionarily conserved among creatures across the spectrum of complexity, from lizards and birds to higher mammals[25]. This affects not only disease response generally but vaccination specifically: for instance, women’s antibody responses to seasonal influenza vaccines are at least twice as strong as those of men.
To maintain internal consistency the biosecurity state should, ostensibly, privilege young, fit women with no pre-existing conditions, due to their robust immune systems, while forcing everyone else to the periphery in some strange form of immunological Darwinism. However, that is not what is playing out. Under the pretext of “protecting the vulnerable” the state is forcing everyone to receive vaccinations, insouciant of the individual’s immunological state before or even after the injection, or whether the vulnerable actually desire to be protected or not. The apparent disconnect between the stated intentions and the resulting actions belies those intentions: vaccine mandates are not about safety, but about removing the right to bodily autonomy, if not in law then in practice and the public consciousness. The libertarian tradition argues that all rights are grounded in property rights: murder is a crime because it violates ones rights to ownership of their physical body; slander is a crime because it defaces ones reputation, which may be considered to be a form of self-property; theft is a crime that violates property rights in a self-evident way. If one no longer has the right to bodily autonomy, then they can no longer be considered to have ownership of their own body – their body is now owned by the state.
The reason that governments worldwide are now making steps to abolish bodily autonomy is because technology now exists to track humans that must be installed on or in the body. As the World Economic Forum puts it, “We’re entering the era of the “Internet of Bodies”: collecting our physical data via a range of devices that can be implanted, swallowed or worn,” and they make sure to mention that this data could “prove crucial in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.”[26] Of course, many people would find the idea creepy and intrusive, and refuse it, making arguments that they are solely responsible for what they wear or have implanted in their bodies. That is, until the precedent is set that purported public health concerns trump bodily autonomy. It will be at least several years before the technical challenges behind the Internet of Bodies can be solved, but when and if the Internet of Bodies achieves widespread adoption, there may no longer be any culturally acceptable arguments for refusing a wearable continuous blood solute & hormone monitor[27]. After all, it’s for public health.
- I have seen this issue hit from several angles: vaccines work and you should get all of them; vaccines work but some are unnecessary; some vaccines work and some don’t; vaccines don’t work they are just poison; and viruses aren’t real so vaccines are just poisoning for profit. I take the position that viruses exist and can in some circumstances cause disease, and that vaccines can be successful in stimulating the production of antibodies, though they inherently involve poisoning and generate massive profits for pharmaceutical companies. Whether specific viruses are or are not real, or are capable of causing disease is outside the scope of this paper, and tangential to the question of vaccination in general.
- I do accept that the chicken pox vaccine provides resistance to the chicken pox virus. I have known several people who received the vaccine and subsequently did not contract chicken pox in childhood (though one suffers from weakened immune function and did come down with shingles as an adult). One individual was vaccinated while his two younger sisters were not, and while his sisters both came down with chicken pox he never became sick despite repeated exposure. I personally was not vaccinated, contracted chicken pox as a child, and recovered with no complications.
References
[1] Carina M. Schlebusch, Lucie M. Gattepaille, Karin Engström, Marie Vahter, Mattias Jakobsson, Karin Broberg, Human Adaptation to Arsenic-Rich Environments, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Volume 32, Issue 6, June 2015, Pages 1544–1555, https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msv046
[2] Hall AH, Dart R, Bogdan G. Sodium thiosulfate or hydroxocobalamin for the empiric treatment of cyanide poisoning? Ann Emerg Med. 2007 Jun; 49(6):806-13. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annemergmed.2006.09.021. Epub 2006 Nov 13. PMID: 17098327.
[3] Bill Haast extracts venom from a king cobra live on the Mike Douglas Show, 1965 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoByplZraSY
[4] Tomljenovic L, Shaw CA. Aluminum vaccine adjuvants: are they safe? Curr Med Chem. 2011;18(17):2630-7. doi: https://doi.org/10.2174/092986711795933740. PMID: 21568886.
[5] Vaccine Aluminum Travels Into The Brain http://vaccinepapers.org/vaccine-aluminum-travels-to-the-brain/
[6] Vera-Lastra O, Medina G, Cruz-Dominguez Mdel P, Jara LJ, Shoenfeld Y. Autoimmune/inflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants (Shoenfeld’s syndrome): clinical and immunological spectrum. Expert Rev Clin Immunol. 2013 Apr;9(4):361-73. doi: https://doi.org/10.1586/eci.13.2. PMID: 23557271.
[7] Petrovsky N. (2015). Comparative Safety of Vaccine Adjuvants: A Summary of Current Evidence and Future Needs. Drug safety, 38(11), 1059–1074. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40264-015-0350-4
[8] The Supreme Court did not deem vaccines “unavoidably unsafe,” Congress did https://nexusnewsfeed.com/article/health-healing/the-supreme-court-did-not-deem-vaccines-unavoidably-unsafe-congress-did/
[9] National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 (42 U.S.C. §§ 300aa-1 to 300aa-34) https://www.hrsa.gov/sites/default/files/hrsa/vaccine-compensation/about/title-xxi-phs-vaccines-1517.pdf
[10] National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Vaccine_Injury_Compensation_Program
[11] Antibody-dependent Enhancement (ADE) and Vaccines https://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety/antibody-dependent-enhancement-and-vaccines
[12] Vatti, A., Monsalve, D. M., Pacheco, Y., Chang, C., Anaya, J. M., & Gershwin, M. E. (2017). Original antigenic sin: A comprehensive review. Journal of autoimmunity, 83, 12–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaut.2017.04.008
[13] Read, A. F., Baigent, S. J., Powers, C., Kgosana, L. B., Blackwell, L., Smith, L. P., Kennedy, D. A., Walkden-Brown, S. W., & Nair, V. K. (2015). Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens. PLoS biology, 13(7), e1002198. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002198
[14] Goldman, G. S., & King, P. G. (2014). Vaccination to prevent varicella: Goldman and King’s response to Myers’ interpretation of Varicella Active Surveillance Project data. Human & experimental toxicology, 33(8), 886–893. https://doi.org/10.1177/0960327113512340
[15] Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation Statement on varicella and herpes zoster vaccines (2009) https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20130107105354/http://www.dh.gov.uk/prod_consum_dh/groups/dh_digitalassets/@dh/@ab/documents/digitalasset/dh_114908.pdf
[16] Wiedermann, U., Garner-Spitzer, E., & Wagner, A. (2016). Primary vaccine failure to routine vaccines: Why and what to do?. Human vaccines & immunotherapeutics, 12(1), 239–243. https://doi.org/10.1080/21645515.2015.1093263
[17] Bodewes, R., Fraaij, P. L., Geelhoed-Mieras, M. M., van Baalen, C. A., Tiddens, H. A., van Rossum, A. M., van der Klis, F. R., Fouchier, R. A., Osterhaus, A. D., & Rimmelzwaan, G. F. (2011). Annual vaccination against influenza virus hampers development of virus-specific CD8⁺ T cell immunity in children. Journal of virology, 85(22), 11995–12000. https://doi.org/10.1128/JVI.05213-11
[18] Jefferson T. (2006). Influenza vaccination: policy versus evidence. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 333(7574), 912–915. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.38995.531701.80
[19] Jefferson T, Di Pietrantonj C, Rivetti A, Bawazeer GA, Al‐Ansary LA, Ferroni E. Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2010, Issue 7. Art. No.: CD001269. DOI: https://doi.org//10.1002/14651858.CD001269.pub4. Accessed 06 December 2021.
[20] Kristine Sheedy, PhD (2011) Communication Strategies for Increasing National Seasonal Influenza Vaccine Usage https://www.who.int/influenza_vaccines_plan/resources/sheedy.pdf
[21] Frey, R., Pedroni, A., Mata, R., Rieskamp, J. & Hertwig, R. Risk preference shares the psychometric structure of major psychological traits. Science Advances 3, (2017). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1701381
[22] Alexander King & Bertrand Schneider. The First Global Revolution (The Club of Rome), 1993. p. 115
[23] Karlsson, E. A., & Beck, M. A. (2010). The burden of obesity on infectious disease. Experimental biology and medicine (Maywood, N.J.), 235(12), 1412–1424. https://doi.org/10.1258/ebm.2010.010227
[24] Hughes, D. A., & Norton, R. (2009). Vitamin D and respiratory health. Clinical and experimental immunology, 158(1), 20–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2249.2009.04001.x
[25] Klein, S., Flanagan, K. Sex differences in immune responses. Nat Rev Immunol 16, 626–638 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nri.2016.90
[26] Tracking how our bodies work could change our lives https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/internet-of-bodies-covid19-recovery-governance-health-data/
[27] What to Know About Continuous Glucose Monitoring https://www.verywellhealth.com/continuous-glucose-monitoring-the-arrival-of-dexcom-5-3289566
Overdue Revolutions 