Following a US court order, Pfizer has published a detailed list of the side effects of its COVID-19 vaccines. This disclosure comes after years of controversy and concerns about the safety of these products, whose development was accelerated during the pandemic. The leaked document is nearly 300 pages long and lists the serious and moderate side effects associated with the vaccine.
Late threat detection
Like all COVID-19 vaccines, those developed for this disease have side effects. However, their rapid development during this health crisis has raised legitimate concerns about their safety. For a long time, health authorities in many countries, including France, downplayed the occurrence of these side effects, likely to avoid slowing down mass vaccination campaigns in the face of intense public pressure.
The currently available list illustrates the magnitude of this phenomenon. An additional factor complicates the situation: not all vaccine batches are of the same quality, meaning that, depending on the batch, not all vaccinated individuals were exposed to the same risk.
Biological mechanism of turbocancer
Scientists had already raised the alarm during the first vaccination campaigns of 2021. Among them, Jean-Marc Sabatier, PhD in cell biology and microbiology and head of research at the CNRS, documented a possible link between mRNA vaccines and the development of rapidly progressing tumors, the so-called turbocancers.
According to their explanation, this phenomenon is due to the excessive activation of the AT1R receptor in the renin-angiotensin system. This system plays a key role in cell differentiation and proliferation. The spike protein produced after vaccination binds to the ACE2 receptor, thus interrupting the degradation of angiotensin II. In excess, this leads to overstimulation of the AT1R receptor, which has protumor, proangiogenic, and proinflammatory properties.
The AT1R receptor also promotes oxidative stress, releasing free radicals that damage cells. Antagonists of this receptor have been shown to have antitumor effects in various types of cancer, such as breast, prostate, and lung cancer. In March 2020, well before the first cases were reported, Jean-Marc Sabatier described a carcinogenic effect resulting from the disruption of this system by the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
