The role of vaccine-induced autoimmunity in Duchenne muscular dystrophy

Gene therapy will fail

About 40 years ago a cousin was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. It was described as a genetic disorder. JAMA recently published an article on corticosteroid treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). This suggested immune system involvement.

For those who may not be familiar with the subject, here’s a quick introduction to amino acids, proteins, epitopes, their role in immunity, the relationship between cancer and autoimmune diseases.

Investigating immune system involvement in DMD reveals that target epitopes for autoimmunity in DMD have been identified by Flanigan et al. and documented in the Immune Epitope Database. So DMD is not purely a genetic disease but there can be an autoimmune contribution.

While infections can rarely induce autoimmunity, we have evolved fail-safe mechanisms to avoid autoimmunity during infections. Vaccines depend on destroying these fail-safe mechanisms to induce short term disease protection. Vaccines are contaminated with animal, plant, human, fungal, bacterial and viral proteins. Many of these proteins are similar to human proteins. Vaccines therefore force the immune system to attack all these proteins which results in a cross-reaction that attacks self proteins - autoimmunity is the result.

BLASTP is a tool to compare proteins. Below are results comparing chicken and cow proteins to the human dystrophin epitopes in the IEDB above. Chicken and cow proteins contaminate many vaccines because they are commonly used in vaccine manufacturing.

The protein sequence match scores above are 29.5 and 43.1. During the H1N1 influenza outbreak, the influenza nucleoprotein contaminated Pandemrix vaccine induced narcolepsy. Narcolepsy is another autoimmune disease. This was due to protein sequence alignment between the influenza nucleoprotein and human hypocretin receptor 2. The protein sequence match score in that case was only 19.6. A higher score indicates closer match. This means vaccines can easily cause autoimmunity that results in DMD.

So while genetic defects contribute to DMD, in many cases vaccine injury itself can induce muscular dystrophy or exacerbate the genetic disease. So without vaccine injury some DMD related genetic defects may be asymptomatic.

Gene therapy will fail

During development, the immune system learns not to attack self proteins (self tolerance). If a person’s cell has a genetic defect that produces a defective protein, the immune system perceives this protein as self and learns to tolerate it. The goal of gene therapy is to modify the DNA in the cell’s nucleus to fix the genetic defect. Once fixed, the cell produces the normal protein. The problem is the immune system recognizes this normal protein as foreign. This results in an attack on the protein and the cell that produces it. Thus destroying the gene therapy as Dr. Robert Malone describes. In other words, the immune system surveils for genetic mutations to detect cancer. When detected, the cell with the mutation is killed. To the immune system, the effect of gene therapy is indistinguishable from cancer. A mutation introduced by a carcinogen is indistinguishable from a mutation induced by gene therapy. So for gene therapy to work, the immune system must be suppressed which means increased risk of infections and cancers.

Contaminated vaccines cause numerous diseases including asthma, autism, allergies, autoimmune diseases, COVID-19 severity and leukemia. We can add DMD to that list.