Post by batngat on Sept 26, 2021 11:46:19 GMT 10
from
sebastianrushworth.com/2021/09/23/a-reflection-on-covid-mania/
A reflection on covid mania
by Sebastian Rushworth M.D.
23 September, 202
At the beginning of this year I wrote about how the governments of the world had created a collective state of hysteria so intense that the only way they could dig themselves out of the hole they had made was with a magic bullet. That magic bullet was, of course, the vaccines. I wrote that it didn’t really matter how effective the vaccines were in the real world, or whether they prevented transmission. All that mattered was getting every single person on the planet to take the vaccine, after which the politicians would be able to declare victory.
It’s now eight months later, and we can conclude that the prediction has come to pass. In many western countries, 70+ percent of the adult population is now vaccinated. In the early part of this year, hospitalizations and deaths started to drop, and they stayed low all summer. The convenient explanation at the time was that this was thanks to the vaccines, even though the drop started at a time when very few people were vaccinated – the reduction was clearly driven by something else. My guess is that it was due to the onset of herd immunity to the original covid strain. The decline was halted temporarily due to the arrival of the more infectious alpha strain (which raised the herd immunity threshold due to its higher infectiousness), but was quickly followed by a continued trend downwards as the population reached herd immunity even to that more infectious strain. This was helped in part, perhaps, by the vaccines, and then helped even more by the arrival of summer and the effect of seasonality.
As autumn has come along, cases and deaths have started to rise again in many places, in part due to the seasonal effect, and in part, likely, due to the arrival of the even more infectious delta variant (which raises the herd immunity threshold even further). In the official narrative, the increase in cases and deaths is blamed on the unvaccinated, who are supposedly driving the development of vaccine resistant variants. It’s true that the unvaccinated are more likely to end up in hospital with covid than the vaccinated – the vaccine does offer protection against covid, after all. But it isn’t true that the unvaccinated are driving vaccine resistance.
It seems that the doctors and ”experts” who appear on tv and who drive public policy have completely forgotten how evolution works. Let’s take bacteria as an analogy. Bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics when we use antibiotics too generously. Indiscriminate use of antibiotics puts evolutionary pressure on bacteria to develop resistance, since that’s the only way they can survive in the antibiotic saturated environment. Yet, now, we are supposed to believe that the opposite is true for viruses – they apparently develop resistance when we underuse vaccines! We’re suddenly supposed to believe that up is down and down is up.
Just like with bacteria and antibiotics, vaccine resistance will develop in a situation where the vaccines are being overused – if you vaccinate large numbers of healthy young people who don’t really need to be vaccinated then you put strong evolutionary pressure on the virus to become vaccine resistant. Maybe this could be avoided in an imaginary scenario where you can vaccinate every single person on the planet on the same day, thereby stopping the virus in its tracks. But that’s no realistic. It’s taken six months or more to get to 70% vaccinated in most countries, which has given the virus plenty of time to evolve in response to pressure from the vaccines. If we had stuck with only vaccinating the elderly and other risk groups, then we wouldn’t have put as much evolutionary pressure on the virus to develop resistance to the vaccines, and the vaccines might have been more effective for longer.
After a year of massive fear mongering by governments and the media, it would have been impossible not to offer the vaccine to everyone who wanted it. Even those not at risk believed they were in danger and demanded the vaccine. There was thus always going to be a massive vaccine uptake. But that wasn’t enough. Because it couldn’t be. The logic created by the “deadly pandemic” narrative demands that every single person alive be vaccinated. That is why there is no recognition of the effects of seasonality or of the fact that prior infection provides a level of protection to new infection that is at least as good as that provided by vaccination.
We now see an obsession with vaccinating everyone that can only be described as pathological. The tone taken towards those people who have so far chosen not to be vaccinated is derogatory and dehumanizing to the extreme. They are portrayed as ”anti-vaxxers”, tin foil hat wearing loons, and irresponsible “granny killers”. No effort is made to listen to their real arguments, such as that the vaccine has not been shown to be less risky than the disease for healthy young people, or that it’s hard to trust data from pharmacetical companies and drug regulators when they’ve repeatedly been caught lying and hiding data in the past, or that the vaccine is still only a year old and there is no long term follow-up data. These very valid arguments are portrayed as ridiculous, outlandish, and dumb, when they are anything but.
Peter Goetzche argued in his book, “Deadly medicines and organized crime”, that no-one should take a new drug that’s been on the market for less than seven years, in light of the fact that it often takes that long for dangers to become known and dangerous drugs to be pulled off the market. In recent months, we’ve learned that the Astra-Zeneca vaccine can cause deadly blood clots in the brain, and we’ve learned that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines can cause myocarditis. The authorities say that these events are extremely rare, based on the number of events that are reported to the authorities. But this ignores the fact that most adverse events don’t get reported.
In recent weeks, I’ve personally seen multiple cases of myocarditis that occurred days after vaccination. When I’ve suggested to colleagues that we should report them to the authorities as possible vaccine side effects, the response I’ve been met with has been roughly this: “oh, yeah, maybe that’s a good idea… I don’t know how to do that”. I’ve reported the cases I’ve handled personally, but my guess, based on this reaction, is that most other cases have not been reported. Obviously, if you believe that what actually gets reported is an accurate estimate of the reality, then you will grossly underestimate the case rate.
It’s hard to maintain faith in science when it is so wilfully distorted to accord with a political agenda, and when many doctors and scientists so happily go along with what is handed down from on high. I recently learned that an excellent study on the covid vaccines, carried out at a prestigious institution, has spent months trying to get published in a peer-reviewed journal, but has been denied again and again, because its results don’t align with the official dogma. Clearly, the journals are engaging in politically motivated censorship. When this is the case, peer-review becomes a harmful process, whose only purpose is to determine the political acceptability of research, not it’s quality or usefulness. It becomes impossible for the lay person, and even for doctors and scientists, to know what the truth is, because uncomfortable truths remain buried or remain at the pre-print stage, which makes it all too easy to dismiss them – “Oh, that’s just a pre-print, it hasn’t been peer-reviewed”. That is the world we live in.
I will end on a positive note though. The delta variant ravaged through India in a few months in spring, and the population went from 20% to 70% with antibodies. 50% of the population was infected over a two month period. That’s not the positive part, this is: Since then case rates have remained low, even as autumn has arrived. That is in spite of the fact that only around 15% of the population has currently been vaccinated. It would appear that the country has reached the point of herd immunity. And it only took a few months to get there, due to the incredible infectiousness of the delta variant.
The idea that herd immunity can only be reached with vaccines is perhaps the most laughable idea to be heavily promulgated during the pandemic, at least to everyone with even a little knowledge of immunology and history. Eighteen months in to the pandemic, most countries are at or on the cusp of herd immunity, regardless of how effective they have been at vaccinating their populations. There is no need to force the remaining 15-30% of the population to take a vaccine they don’t want. The end of the pandemic is in sight.
sebastianrushworth.com/2021/09/23/a-reflection-on-covid-mania/
A reflection on covid mania
by Sebastian Rushworth M.D.
23 September, 202
At the beginning of this year I wrote about how the governments of the world had created a collective state of hysteria so intense that the only way they could dig themselves out of the hole they had made was with a magic bullet. That magic bullet was, of course, the vaccines. I wrote that it didn’t really matter how effective the vaccines were in the real world, or whether they prevented transmission. All that mattered was getting every single person on the planet to take the vaccine, after which the politicians would be able to declare victory.
It’s now eight months later, and we can conclude that the prediction has come to pass. In many western countries, 70+ percent of the adult population is now vaccinated. In the early part of this year, hospitalizations and deaths started to drop, and they stayed low all summer. The convenient explanation at the time was that this was thanks to the vaccines, even though the drop started at a time when very few people were vaccinated – the reduction was clearly driven by something else. My guess is that it was due to the onset of herd immunity to the original covid strain. The decline was halted temporarily due to the arrival of the more infectious alpha strain (which raised the herd immunity threshold due to its higher infectiousness), but was quickly followed by a continued trend downwards as the population reached herd immunity even to that more infectious strain. This was helped in part, perhaps, by the vaccines, and then helped even more by the arrival of summer and the effect of seasonality.
As autumn has come along, cases and deaths have started to rise again in many places, in part due to the seasonal effect, and in part, likely, due to the arrival of the even more infectious delta variant (which raises the herd immunity threshold even further). In the official narrative, the increase in cases and deaths is blamed on the unvaccinated, who are supposedly driving the development of vaccine resistant variants. It’s true that the unvaccinated are more likely to end up in hospital with covid than the vaccinated – the vaccine does offer protection against covid, after all. But it isn’t true that the unvaccinated are driving vaccine resistance.
It seems that the doctors and ”experts” who appear on tv and who drive public policy have completely forgotten how evolution works. Let’s take bacteria as an analogy. Bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics when we use antibiotics too generously. Indiscriminate use of antibiotics puts evolutionary pressure on bacteria to develop resistance, since that’s the only way they can survive in the antibiotic saturated environment. Yet, now, we are supposed to believe that the opposite is true for viruses – they apparently develop resistance when we underuse vaccines! We’re suddenly supposed to believe that up is down and down is up.
Just like with bacteria and antibiotics, vaccine resistance will develop in a situation where the vaccines are being overused – if you vaccinate large numbers of healthy young people who don’t really need to be vaccinated then you put strong evolutionary pressure on the virus to become vaccine resistant. Maybe this could be avoided in an imaginary scenario where you can vaccinate every single person on the planet on the same day, thereby stopping the virus in its tracks. But that’s no realistic. It’s taken six months or more to get to 70% vaccinated in most countries, which has given the virus plenty of time to evolve in response to pressure from the vaccines. If we had stuck with only vaccinating the elderly and other risk groups, then we wouldn’t have put as much evolutionary pressure on the virus to develop resistance to the vaccines, and the vaccines might have been more effective for longer.
After a year of massive fear mongering by governments and the media, it would have been impossible not to offer the vaccine to everyone who wanted it. Even those not at risk believed they were in danger and demanded the vaccine. There was thus always going to be a massive vaccine uptake. But that wasn’t enough. Because it couldn’t be. The logic created by the “deadly pandemic” narrative demands that every single person alive be vaccinated. That is why there is no recognition of the effects of seasonality or of the fact that prior infection provides a level of protection to new infection that is at least as good as that provided by vaccination.
We now see an obsession with vaccinating everyone that can only be described as pathological. The tone taken towards those people who have so far chosen not to be vaccinated is derogatory and dehumanizing to the extreme. They are portrayed as ”anti-vaxxers”, tin foil hat wearing loons, and irresponsible “granny killers”. No effort is made to listen to their real arguments, such as that the vaccine has not been shown to be less risky than the disease for healthy young people, or that it’s hard to trust data from pharmacetical companies and drug regulators when they’ve repeatedly been caught lying and hiding data in the past, or that the vaccine is still only a year old and there is no long term follow-up data. These very valid arguments are portrayed as ridiculous, outlandish, and dumb, when they are anything but.
Peter Goetzche argued in his book, “Deadly medicines and organized crime”, that no-one should take a new drug that’s been on the market for less than seven years, in light of the fact that it often takes that long for dangers to become known and dangerous drugs to be pulled off the market. In recent months, we’ve learned that the Astra-Zeneca vaccine can cause deadly blood clots in the brain, and we’ve learned that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines can cause myocarditis. The authorities say that these events are extremely rare, based on the number of events that are reported to the authorities. But this ignores the fact that most adverse events don’t get reported.
In recent weeks, I’ve personally seen multiple cases of myocarditis that occurred days after vaccination. When I’ve suggested to colleagues that we should report them to the authorities as possible vaccine side effects, the response I’ve been met with has been roughly this: “oh, yeah, maybe that’s a good idea… I don’t know how to do that”. I’ve reported the cases I’ve handled personally, but my guess, based on this reaction, is that most other cases have not been reported. Obviously, if you believe that what actually gets reported is an accurate estimate of the reality, then you will grossly underestimate the case rate.
It’s hard to maintain faith in science when it is so wilfully distorted to accord with a political agenda, and when many doctors and scientists so happily go along with what is handed down from on high. I recently learned that an excellent study on the covid vaccines, carried out at a prestigious institution, has spent months trying to get published in a peer-reviewed journal, but has been denied again and again, because its results don’t align with the official dogma. Clearly, the journals are engaging in politically motivated censorship. When this is the case, peer-review becomes a harmful process, whose only purpose is to determine the political acceptability of research, not it’s quality or usefulness. It becomes impossible for the lay person, and even for doctors and scientists, to know what the truth is, because uncomfortable truths remain buried or remain at the pre-print stage, which makes it all too easy to dismiss them – “Oh, that’s just a pre-print, it hasn’t been peer-reviewed”. That is the world we live in.
I will end on a positive note though. The delta variant ravaged through India in a few months in spring, and the population went from 20% to 70% with antibodies. 50% of the population was infected over a two month period. That’s not the positive part, this is: Since then case rates have remained low, even as autumn has arrived. That is in spite of the fact that only around 15% of the population has currently been vaccinated. It would appear that the country has reached the point of herd immunity. And it only took a few months to get there, due to the incredible infectiousness of the delta variant.
The idea that herd immunity can only be reached with vaccines is perhaps the most laughable idea to be heavily promulgated during the pandemic, at least to everyone with even a little knowledge of immunology and history. Eighteen months in to the pandemic, most countries are at or on the cusp of herd immunity, regardless of how effective they have been at vaccinating their populations. There is no need to force the remaining 15-30% of the population to take a vaccine they don’t want. The end of the pandemic is in sight.