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The Straits Times
Infectious diseases expert David Lye calls out misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines
Salma KhalikSenior Health Correspondent
- Published Jun 7, 2021, 4:36 pm SGT
SINGAPORE – A senior infectious diseases specialist, Associate Professor David Lye, has spoken up against misinformation being spread about Covid-19 vaccines by doctors, among others.
In a Facebook post on Monday (June 7) titled “Why fake science and anti-vaccine groups are dangerous in a pandemic”, the clinician-researcher at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID) said he needs to correct certain messages and petitions making the rounds which have caused him to have sleepless nights.
Some of these were from a group of doctors including a Dr Paul I.W. Yang, and a Dr Oon Chong Jin, a private cancer specialist, he said.
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Comments from Dr Oon, who had been involved in testing the hepatitis B vaccine here more than 30 years ago, on Mount Elizabeth Medical Centre’s website and in various chat groups.
Dr Oon claimed that the Pfizer vaccine “is useless now and obsolete in the presence of mutations”.
He had promoted the use of Sinovac for everyone, including children, saying it could protect against the B1617 variants which had ravaged India. He claimed that the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines could not do this.
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Prof Lye said all those claims are wrong.
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On vaccinating the young, he noted that while they do not usually have severe Covid-19 infections unless they have health problems, they carry as much virus as adults if infected, and can infect adults with poor immunity and older adults, who may become sick.
A study in Britain showed that Pfizer and another vaccine by AstraZeneca reduced household transmission by 50 per cent to 60 per cent. “These doctors claimed that mRNA vaccines do not reduce transmission,” he noted.
The mRNA vaccines are among the most effective vaccines for Covid-19, he said. They reduce symptomatic Covid-19 by 95 per cent, reduce hospitalisation for the severe form of the disease by more than 90 per cent, and prevent transmission by more than 60 per cent.
There is a wealth of data from the United States, Britain and Israel on their safety, he said. “Importantly, mRNA vaccines are effective against United Kingdom’s B117 (93 per cent), South African B1351 (75 per cent to 90 per cent) and (India’s) B16172 (88 per cent) variants.
“There is hardly any data on Sinovac against the variants. Laboratory studies showed that Sinovac may not work well in Brazilian B1128 and South African B1351 variants.”
He said: “Although these doctors claimed Sinovac is superior to mRNA vaccines against variants, there is little data to confirm it is effective for B16172, and there is data to suggest it is less effective against other variants.”
As to claims that mRNA vaccines were developed in a rush, Prof Lye said all Covid-19 vaccines were developed rapidly, and “in fact, Sinovac and Sinopharm were approved in China before the trials were completed”.
“Singapore and China have strong relationships. There is no reason for Singapore not to approve Sinovac. But approval requires data judged to be adequate,” he said.
The Health Sciences Authority (HSA) is still awaiting a reply from Sinovac on its queries, he pointed out. “With the latest update on criteria for mRNA vaccines, there are very few reasons why a person cannot take mRNA vaccines. These doctors are pressuring HSA to ignore rigorous review process.”
He also debunked the oft-cited belief that Sinovac is safe because it uses traditional methods.
“Even though inactivated whole virus vaccine is an old technology, it is not harmless and we still need to watch out for side effects. In the 1960s, two inactivated vaccines for measles and respiratory syncytial virus led to more severe disease, and were withdrawn.”
He added that hepatitis B vaccine, which Dr Oon had championed, is not a killed whole virus vaccine like Sinovac either.
He noted how these doctors quoted a study that showed how RNA from the Covid-19-causing virus could be integrated into human cells and said: “While this has been quickly debunked by scientists as an artefact of the laboratory methods, these doctors failed to understand that mRNA from vaccines do not last for more than two days in our body and are different from viral RNA from Covid-19 infection.”
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Received via WhatsApp: The claims or Dr Gabriel Oon Chong Jin.
Finally a doctor in Singapore talks about the failure if the vaccine most Singaporeans have been administered to.
The message originated from Dr Gabriel Oon Chong Jin, a retired oncologist who is a pioneer in liver cancer research here.
Dr Oon, 82, played a key role in Singapore’s hepatitis B vaccination programme that began in the late 1970s. Hepatitis B is a liver infection caused by a virus.
When contacted by TODAY on Friday, Dr Oon, who last practised at Mount Elizabeth Medical Centre, confirmed that the content of the message was from him.
In the message, he wrote that mutations in the spike protein of the coronavirus causing Covid-19 has altered its antigenicity — or its ability to bind to cell walls.
The spike protein is the part of the virus that it uses to penetrate human cells so that it can bind with the cells more effectively and cause infection.
When the antigenicity changes, vaccines that use the new mRNA technology such as Pfizer-BioNTech cannot recognise the mutant variant such as the B1617 one.
Only a vaccine such as Sinovac that has an inactivated virus “with all its seven antigens” can still produce an immune response even when one antigen of the active invading virus is affected by mutation, Dr Oon wrote.
He added that the B1617 variant had successfully infected vaccinated frontliners and airport staff members, as well as school children in Singapore.
“Pfizer is useless now and obsolete in the presence of mutations on (the) spike gene,” the message read.
He also said in the message that “China vaccines” can overcome the B1617 variant and that he had written in to the authorities to consider using Sinovac.
The Sinovac vaccine may be suitable for children, and even babies, but at a lowered dosage, he added.
When asked by TODAY to comment more about his concerns, Dr Oon stressed again that mRNA vaccines are “useless” against the B1617 mutant and that the variant should be seen as a “new infection”.
“I would say it is a time of emergency, a time to change and use another vaccine such as Sinovac, which we already have in stock,” he said, referring to the shipment of the vaccine Singapore received in February and pending approval for use here.
Dr Oon continued: “If we keep vaccinating people with mRNA vaccines like Pfizer, we are endangering the lives of so many people around us who will still get infected, not to mention the person who is vaccinated.”
It is a doctor’s duty to call immediately for a change of treatment if it is not working for a patient who has a life-threatening condition, he said by way of example.
In offering his views on Covid-19, he said: “I did it for the love of my country and humanity.”
Dr Oon’s circulated message on WhatsApp mentioned that he had reached out to various Cabinet ministers, including Health Minister Ong Ye Kung, on the mRNA vaccines and Sinovac.
Dr Oon confirmed that he had done this, at around the time news broke of the B1617 variant.
He declined to give more details on the recommendations he proposed to the Government as mentioned in the message.
TODAY understands that MOH is aware of Dr Oon’s circulated message since last month and had addressed some of his concerns in the same statement last month issued regarding the open letter by the doctors to parents.
That statement did not address Dr Oon’s concerns on how effective mRNA vaccines are on mutated variants.
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Gabriel Oon’s message received via WhatsApp.
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My Story – By Professor Gabriel Oon
“SAFETY, SAFETY, SAFETY!”
These words were relentlessly drummed upon us during our WHO meetings in Geneva from 1983 to 1987, where vaccine manufacturers from around the globe (Netherlands, Germany, China, Singapore, Korea, Australia, US, UK, France, Russia, Sweden, Israel, etc.) came together. The gathering was initiated by the Director of Biologics, Dr. Frank Perkins, and the Director-General, Dr. Karl Mahler MD, who had appointed me as a WHO Consultant.
Every one of us had created our own variant of the novel hepatitis B vaccine from plasma HBV, employing different inactivation techniques.
Dr. Perkins reminded us of the two monumental vaccine calamities in history.
The Lübeck disaster (1929-33) saw many children inoculated with live BCG instead of the killed vaccine, resulting in thousands of children affected and several deaths.
The Cutter incident (1955) in the USA was when 200,000 received a live polio vaccine; 40,000 fell ill, many became paralyzed, or died.
Such tragedies were not to be repeated. With the then-unknown threat of AIDS transmitted by infected blood, it became crucial to source safe, uninfected blood for the production of hepatitis B vaccines.
Advancements in molecular science led to the discovery of the common “a” antigen present in all serotypes in both humans and animals. Consequently, a prototype yeast recombinant HB vaccine was formulated, safety-tested, and implemented in Singapore as a collaboration between the International Agency for Research in Cancer/WHO and the Singapore Government.
I was then appointed by the Singapore government and IARC/WHO (International Agency for Research on Cancer) to oversee the safety in the manufacture and implementation of the vaccine.
Then Prime Minister of Singapore, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, who mandated the directive to me and my team, insisted on “300% safety, not just 100%.”
Together with my team and WHO oversight, we rejected several unsafe vaccines and identified vaccine-escape mutants in plasma vaccines that were over-treated with chemicals, which damaged the epitopes of the “a” antigen. This product was rejected.
Similar Vaccine Escape Mutants (VEMs) arose with the Pfizer mRNA. Instead of inactivation, nine chemicals were used, including the deep-freezing agent phosphophenolglycol. I believe these VEMs on the Covid mRNA are the cause of the continuous eruption of spike mutants ranging from Delta to Omicron variants seen today, as humans have become reservoirs for these mutants.
On my 80th birthday, July 4, 2019, 34 years since the WHO consultation, I announced the complete elimination of HBV and associated lethal liver failures and liver cancer at a Duke-NUS lecture (video below).
SARS-2/COVID-19
In October 2018, my wife and I returned from a Yangtze River Cruise where we had admired the beautiful and ancient industrial city of Wuhan, home to 8 million people.
START OF THE COVID PANDEMIC: January 2020
We woke to the news that Wuhan was besieged by a lethal coronavirus, resulting in thousands dead daily and several more thousands hospitalized until hospitals reached full capacity. Field hospitals were erected within days. Doctors and nurses arrived from all over China to provide aid; tragically, around a thousand of them died.
Within a week, top Chinese scientists had determined the molecular structure of the coronavirus, which was dissimilar to any of the known viruses in their archives.
The molecular structure seemed akin to the USCDC’s patented invention (No. 7220852/B1 filed on May 22, 2004), with the addition of an HIV glycoprotein insert in the spike protein (later confirmed by Nobel Laureate Prof. Luc Montagnier).
China disseminated information on the epidemic and the virus through premier journals and transmitted details to the International Genomic Bank. They invited the WHO in January 2020, who discovered many corona viruses but not this particular virus.
Singapore
We learned from the news that SG Prime Minister’s wife, Ho Ching, chairman of Temasek Holdings, a Singapore investment company, had invested nearly S$3 billion in Pfizer/BioNTech and had initiated the procurement of Pfizer mRNA vaccines, Moderna, and plans for establishing vaccine manufacturing in Singapore.
Pfizer and mRNA Vaccines
Publications in JAMA 2021 showed that Pfizer was 98% effective. Six of my senior academic staff on the board of journals agreed with me that the end points for assessing efficacy were symptoms.
(Later, a US Texas judge in 2022 ordered the FDA to release 55,000 pages showing thousands of deaths and serious adverse reactions. The US Supreme Court in 2022 also accepted Senator Robert Kennedy’s charge that mRNA vaccines are not vaccines.)
These were not the usual endpoints like antibody levels and virus absence in recipients. This was open to “ghost papers,” which we had discovered at WHO.
I alerted our three Ministers who know me and the 14 medical experts, “The Pfizer mRNA vaccines are not safe for mass immunization as the live lethal virus is still present in the mRNAs.”
Mandatory Vaccination
Then, we received notice from our MOH (Ministry of Health) that all hospital and clinic staff, workplaces, and schools must be vaccinated or they cannot work.
Retirement
I was then 82 years old, and my mission after being recalled/returning from Cambridge with an MD in Cancer Immunology was completed. However, with my vast experience with vaccines, I continued to advise our MOH privately, as well as colleagues and friends in our country and worldwide.
Request to MOH to Release Sinovac
A full-length inactivated COVID virus vaccine, Singapore had 20,000 doses of Sinovac in stock. When the new Delta variant infected frontline workers in five public hospitals and Changi Airport in May 2021, I advised our Ministers that the mRNA vaccines were not preventative and to use Sinovac lest our hospitals be overwhelmed by infections.
I also informed Ministers that many individuals with allergies cannot take mRNA vaccines and to release the Sinovac.
This news was leaked, and I was chastised as peddling fake news by Prof. David Lye of the National Infectious Disease Center and senior Straits Times journalist Shamir Khalid.
The Future
COVID will remain for many years as the reservoirs of VEMs (Vaccine Escape Mutates) are evolving from failed protection in millions but causing deaths, delayed deaths, and illnesses.
The 95% who received Pfizer and other mRNA vaccines, and not inactivated vaccines like Novavax, are developing new mutants.
Losses
Between 2021 and now, I have lost 34 senior medical colleagues. Most were working in institutions and had been vaccinated with Pfizer.
I lost my eminent elder obstetrician aunt on March 31, 2022, who was infected by a Pfizer-vaccinated caregiver who had contracted the Delta spike mutant. She became too weak, stopped playing mahjong, stopped eating, and five days before she passed, she became blind. She died in my arms.
I also lost my elder brother, a senior physician at 85, who received Moderna followed by two boosters of Pfizer. He contracted COVID and died two months later.
How to Eliminate
Wear masks to reduce aerosol transmission.
Use antiviral drugs like Tamiflu, 75mg daily for 7 days. It is a potent neuraminidase inhibitor of COVID and the flu. As with most serious infections, take it early at the onset. Usually, ART is negative on day 2-3.
Vaccine Research – With the many combinations of mutations, we need to find common antigens and make new inactivated vaccines.
Sinovac and Sinopharm
My wife and I have had three doses of Sinovac and two of Sinopharm. We have nucleocapsid spike antibodies and are well.
1.6 billion people, including children in 150 countries, have taken the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines. They are safe, protective, and have caused no fatalities. Countries can copy or learn from China. Save lives, not politics first.
Retired, we stay at home and wear masks in crowded areas.
Lessons
It’s essential to control and eliminate lethal airborne/aerosol infections.
A healthy population is a robust workforce.
A healthy youth is the future of our country.
God bless all,
Gabriel Oon
Retired Professor of Medicine
Former WHO Consultant for Biologicals for Human Use
Some final comments by Aussie17:
I am fully aware that there are people who are against any kind of vaccine, people who are against wearing masks, and people who believe there is no such thing as viruses. Whatever your opinion is on these matters, I’d just like to say that I know Professor Gabriel personally, and he does not have a single nefarious bone in his body. The world is such a divided place right now that even when you agree with someone 99%, people start calling names and scolding each other over the 1% disagreement, which only serves to deepen our divisions. I hope we can accept diverse views and come together.
Signing off for now
A17
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weehingthong 
[Even though inactivated whole virus vaccine is an old technology, it is not harmless and we still need to watch out for side effects.] I have yet to come across a doctor who dared to say this and keep his licence. D Lye is not my relation – I wish to make this clear. I choose to stand on the other pan of the scale to bring equilibrium to the universe.