Science Committee hearing: Testimony of Dr. Peter Hotez

Hotez: “One of the things we’re not hearing a lot about is the unique, potential safety problem of coronavirus vaccines. This was first found in the early 1960s with the respiratory syncytial virus vaccines in children, and it was done here in Washington at NIH and the Children’s National Medical Center, that some of those kids who got the vaccine actually did worse, and I believe there were two deaths as a consequence of that study. Because what happens with certain types of respiratory-virus vaccines, you get immunized and then when you get actually exposed to the virus, you get this kind of paradoxical, immune enhancement phenomenon… When we started developing coronavirus vaccines and our colleagues, we noticed in laboratory animals that they started to show some of the same immune pathology that resembled what had happened 50 years earlier. It was, ‘Oh my god, this is going to be problematic.’… The clinical trials are not going to go quickly because of that immune enhancement.”