Let’s see if we can find a smoking gun. To follow this, you need to read (CNN) AstraZeneca pauses coronavirus vaccine trial after unexplained illness in volunteer. Follow the links back.

(CNN) NIH ‘very concerned’ about serious side effect in AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine trial. Quoting,

“The highest levels of NIH are very concerned,” said Dr. Avindra Nath, intramural clinical director and a leader of viral research at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, an NIH division. “Everyone’s hopes are on a vaccine, and if you have a major complication the whole thing could get derailed.”

The Oxford- Astrazeneca vaccine belongs to the most aggressively novel class of new vaccines: It transfects cells in the recipient with a vector, a carrier virus, to cause them to make COVID spike protein. For a COVID vaccine, transfection  means:

• Deliberate infection of cells near the injection site with an engineered virus, the vector.
• Transport of spike protein DNA into the cell.
• Modification of the cell machinery to make COVID spike protein.

The virus particles of the Astrazeneca vaccine are active micro-machines. This is not as radical as it sounds. Live-virus vaccines were the first devised. They are still used today. Some, such as the live virus polio vaccine, or yellow fever 17D, have known hazards. But in comparing with live virus vaccines of the past, there are meaningful differences:

• Trials were over a much longer period.
• Trials defined age groups, typically juvenile, when the immune system seems to handle well challenge with live virus.
• These vaccines contain large amounts of virus, easy for the immune system to spot, and weakened by multiple passages through nonhuman tissue, cold adaptation, or chemical degradation. This goes back to Pasteur.

There is no rigorous argument for why weakened live virus is usually safe, but it has 150 years behind it. AstraZeneca’s argument is weak, and they have about 3 months behind it.

Is the Astrazeneca event a random event or a smoking gun? Let’s see if we can smell smoke. Details of the event are important, not to establish fact, but possibly requiring the trial be halted.  Let’s begin with rabies, a virus with a stealth trick:

• Somebody gets bit in the deltoid muscle, where you would get the shot. Most immunizations inject into the deltoid muscle of the upper arm.
• Virus in the animal’s saliva incubates silently in muscle for weeks, months, or years. In perhaps 1/3 of bites, it evades the immune system.
• The deltoid muscle is served by the axillary nerve, which, combined with other nerves, exits the spine at the base of the neck. In the deltoid, the nerve has little bulbs, neuromuscular junctions.
• If the rabies virus has evaded the immune system, it breaks into the junctions. It then travels up the nerve, the spinal cord, and finally the brain, where it causes rapid death.

Besides rabies, any virus which incidentally penetrates a neuromuscular junction, or penetrates the brain in some other way, has a chance of infecting the nervous system. Once inside the nervous system, a virus is partly shielded from the immune system, which is why a virus like West Nile can be innocuous or fatal.

So a virus  that does not normally cause encephalitis can be big trouble if it gets into the brain. In a child who has not been vaccinated, measles can cause subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, invariably fatal, with a timeline unaddressed by COVID clinical trials.

Suppose somebody gets the Astrazeneca shot, and the tip of the needle nicks a neuromuscular junction, and virus gets into the junction. The vaccine contains two viruses. One is the Kamikaze, which carries the payload, spike protein, into the muscle cell target. Traces of the helper virus are also present.  But how does a virus which has no experience with nerves know how to climb the axillary nerve all the way to the cervical vertebrae, where it might cause transverse myelitis?

A virus doesn’t have to know a thing. The axillary nerve contains a conveyor belt, reverse axonal transport. Hooked onto the conveyor, even completely inert particles will reach the brain. This was shown years ago by an experiment with patients who had a few days to live. Colloidal gold was sprayed into their noses. When the patients died three days later,  their brains were sectioned, and the gold was found.

The rumored  adverse event is transverse myelitis. Instead of a lesion extending up, down, and sideways, it mainly goes sideways. It’s like nerve block anesthesia, which affects function below the the block. The lesion extends across the whole spinal cord near a few vertebrae. With the Astrazeneca patient, we would expect to see symptoms of a spinal lesion around C5 and C6, the lower cervical vertebrae, at the base of the neck.

This is the smoking gun. If the lesion is not around C5/C6, it could still be the vaccine, but we don’t smell smoke. We would have to consider more typical causes, such as autoimmunity caused by the vaccine. This too has happened.

Are the symptoms caused by the Kamikaze virus, or the helper virus? This is hard, but important. The Kamikaze cannot reproduce, so it cannot cause a slow virus infection, like subacute sclerosing panencephalitis. The helper virus, though present only  in trace amounts, can reproduce. There is a questionable presumption of safety.

This  scenario pertains to vaccines that use a virus to  penetrate cells in the recipient. It cannot happen with:

• Killed virus vaccines.
• VLP (virus-like particle) vaccines.
• RNA vaccines.
• DNA vaccines.

These vaccines have similarity-to-safe; for what this means, see Why I Defend FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn. A single live-virus vaccine in use today, 17D for yellow fever, can cause fatal infection. See Moderna Partial Results Part 1.

Whether a vaccination can introduce live virus into neuromuscular junctions was not formerly a troublesome question. Now it is. Rigorous safety demands an answer to: Why did this  adverse event happen? It cannot be well studied in humans, because the spinal cord of a living person is not available. It can be studied in animals in a far more detailed way. The answer will not come quick.

So do the right thing.