As we’ve come to expect from the US, “innovative” movements often carry a strong dose of chauvinism and seem to focus quite a bit on America itself (MAGA, MAHA) while paying less attention to truly novel concepts.
I’m not going to launch into yet another abstract speech about how public health in our decadent Western societies could be restored—there’s no shortage of protocols and advice floating around. Many people agree we should bring our lifestyles closer to nature and, above all, strengthen our natural defenses. Which is why I find it incomprehensible that public health authorities fail to put those two objectives on the same line. When we talk about a “healthier lifestyle,” the focus is usually on physical fitness, supplements, or exotic treatments. What gets far less attention is mental health—and especially the fact that it can be boosted, not by medication but by a positive and human-centered mindset. Generosity and solidarity make people far happier and healthier than greed and selfishness ever will. In a world already flooded with AI, anyone can quickly pull up the studies and stats to confirm this. For physical health, simple factors matter most: maintaining a healthy weight, consistent regular exercise (preferably outdoors) and adequate sleep. Combine that with a positive, socially engaged mindset, and you’re essentially guaranteed a solid baseline of health. That doesn’t mean supplements are worthless—take vitamin D in winter, for instance—but the foundation is lifestyle.
There’s plenty of evidence showing that good health goes hand in hand with strong innate immunity against infections and even immune-related diseases, including cancer. Anyone still unaware of this can easily find countless references through AI tools. Which makes it all the more baffling—especially after the undeniable blunder of the COVID-19 mass vaccination campaign—that interventions to strengthen our immune defenses remain almost entirely focused on adaptive immunity rather than innate immunity.
Adaptive immunity takes time to adjust to threats, which is why you usually get sick before it protects you against a later exposure. That’s also why prophylactic vaccine booster shots are needed after short intervals—unless we’re talking about live-attenuated vaccines. And adaptive immunity is very specific, so it often fails against subsequent exposure to pathogenic variants-despite immunological memory. This means ramping up adaptive responses is pointless if someone has already been exposed, or if exposure happens before the booster has taken effect or against a variant the antibodies (Abs) don’t match.
Of course, vaccinologists will claim traditional vaccines do also stimulate innate immunity—but apart from live vaccines, that’s only cytokine-related innate immunity boosted by adjuvants. This type of stimulation can’t eliminate virus-infected or otherwise abnormal cells early on. So, when non-replicating vaccines are rolled out during a pandemic of an acute, self-limiting viral infection, they don’t effectively reduce viral production or transmission. In contrast, cell-mediated innate immunity can. Along with natural Abs[1] in young children, it forms the most reliable early defense line in immunologically naïve individuals. And this defense protects against a broad spectrum of pathogens, not just one. That’s why it would make a lot of sense for movements like MAHA to focus on strengthening this kind of immunity instead of wasting time testing traditional vaccines in endless randomized, double-blinded placebo-controlled trials, or developing new vaccines based on the same outdated approach (see my recent comment about this on X: https://x.com/GVDBossche/status/1954073069380661608).
Because natural Abs (sometimes also called ‘innate’ Abs) in children fade with age and cell-mediated innate immunity only has a short memory (3 to 5 months?) and can be overwhelmed under high infectious pressure from the pathogen, it’s crucial to train it. Plenty of research shows that epigenetic reprogramming of innate immune cells through “training” can strengthen both their memory and functional efficiency. In this way, a well-trained innate immune system becomes a powerful first line of defense, keeping the invader in check long before the adaptive “special forces” even need to be mobilized. When innate immunity does its job, Ab levels after natural infection stay low. This is a very positive sign as it shows the body kept the pathogen in check early on. Still, the activation of the “special forces” is usually sufficient to stimulate adaptive memory, so that upon reinfection, an immediate and very strong resistance is mounted against the invader — first by the previously trained innate immune system, and second by a powerful and rapid recall effect that quickly brings protective immune effector cells (i.e., primarily Ab-secreting B cells in the case of SARS-CoV-2 infection, for example) back into play, thanks to the presence of a fully developed immunological memory. Hence, natural breakthrough infections that cause mild illness are nothing to panic about as long as they don’t cause severe disease. Because such natural breakthrough infections provide a guarantee for adaptive immune memory, the special forces will be rapidly mobilized upon reinfection to immediately eliminate the enemy. Hence, getting “just sick” from an acute, self-limiting infection is the most natural thing in the world. Only when the individual is weakened, or when reinfections are caused by heterologous variants, is this robust defense mechanism put at risk. Hence the problem of mass vaccination during a pandemic of an acute self-limiting viral infection. Such a vaccination strategy, by exerting stringent immune selection pressure through the vaccinated population, actually accelerates the evolutionary dynamics of the virus, whereby the immunological memory causes more harm than it provides benefit (due to the “antigenic sin” effect).
So yes, it would be great if MAHA’s promotion of a healthy lifestyle went hand in hand with encouraging the strengthening of our innate immune defenses. One promising idea is intradermal (ID) exposure to small protein fragments derived from pathogens that resemble immune-relevant protein molecules of our own body without being identical to them. This educates Natural Killer (NK) cells to target and kill infected or abnormal host cells at a very early stage of infection or pathologic alteration. Think of it as training the immune system like an athlete before competition season—done ahead of periods of higher pathogen exposure (like winter). Similar training effects have been noted with ID vaccination using BCG, and even back in the 1980s with Bayer’s Baypamun (Parapoxvirus ovis), originally for horses, which veterinarians sometimes used off-label to boost innate immunity!
Conclusion: If we want robust immune protection, we shouldn’t only focus on lifestyle but also on strengthening our first, always-on innate defense line—rather than relying mainly on the highly specific adaptive immune response, which is powerful but slow and dangerously narrow in focus. I would love for MAHA to focus on this truly novel combinatorial concept, which really just builds on nature and common sense.
[1] For supportive references on natural (or: innate) antibodies: https://www.voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org/blog/supportive-references-from-literature
Geert Vanden Bossche received his DVM from the University of Ghent, Belgium, and his PhD degree in Virology from the University of Hohenheim, Germany. He held adjunct faculty appointments at universities in Belgium and Germany. After his career in Academia, Geert joined several vaccine companies (GSK Biologicals, Novartis Vaccines, Solvay Biologicals) to serve various roles in vaccine R&D as well as in late vaccine development.
Geert then moved on to join the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Discovery team in Seattle (USA) as Senior Program Officer; he then worked with the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) in Geneva as Senior Ebola Program Manager. At GAVI he tracked efforts to develop an Ebola vaccine. He also represented GAVI in fora with other partners, including WHO, to review progress on the fight against Ebola and to build plans for global pandemic preparedness.
Back in 2015, Geert scrutinized and questioned the safety of the Ebola vaccine that was used in ring vaccination trials conducted by WHO in Guinea. His critical scientific analysis and report on the data published by WHO in the Lancet in 2015 was sent to all international health and regulatory authorities involved in the Ebola vaccination program. After working for GAVI, Geert joined the German Center for Infection Research in Cologne as Head of the Vaccine Development Office. He is at present primarily serving as a Biotech / Vaccine consultant while also conducting his own research on Natural Killer cell-based vaccines.
Email: info@voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org
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