No surge as schools open in the UK, no surge as Texas throws off restrictions, free states like Florida and Georgia doing no worse than lockdown states – is anyone in Government watching the real world or are they too busy gawping at the curves of Neil Ferguson’s latest model?
Jeffrey A. Tucker at AIER has gathered together some of the alarmist predictions made about Texas that have, so far, not come to pass:
- California Governor Gavin Newsom said that opening Texas was “absolutely reckless.”
- Vanity Fair went over the top with this headline: “Republican Governors Celebrate COVID Anniversary With Bold Plan to Kill Another 500,000 Americans.”
- There was the inevitable Dr. Fauci: “It just is inexplicable why you would want to pull back now.”
- Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke of Texas revealed himself to be a full-blown lockdowner: It’s a “big mistake,” he said. “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that it’s also a cult of death.” He accused the Governor of “sacrificing the lives of our fellow Texans… for political gain.”
- James Hamblin, a doctor and writer for the Atlantic, said in a Tweet liked by 20K people: “Ending precautions now is like entering the last miles of a marathon and taking off your shoes and eating several hot dogs.”
- Bestselling author Kurt Eichenwald flipped out: “Goddamn. Texas already has FIVE variants that have turned up: Britain, South Africa, Brazil, New York & CA. The NY and CA variants could weaken vaccine effectiveness. And now idiot @GregAbbott_TX throws open the state.” He further called the Government “murderous.”
- Epidemiologist Whitney Robinson wrote: “I feel genuinely sad. There are people who are going to get sick and die bc of avoidable infections they get in the next few weeks. It’s demoralising.”
- Virus guru Michael Osterholm told CNN: “We’re walking into the mouth of the monster. We simply are.”
- Joe Biden famously said that the Texas decision to open reflected “Neanderthal thinking”.
- The chairman of the state’s Democratic Party said: “What Abbott is doing is extraordinarily dangerous. This will kill Texans. Our country’s infectious-disease specialists have warned that we should not put our guard down, even as we make progress towards vaccinations. Abbott doesn’t care.”
- The CDC’s Rochelle Walensky didn’t mince words: “Please hear me clearly: At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained. I am really worried about reports that more states are rolling back the exact public health measures we have recommended to protect people from COVID-19.”
Are any of these experts and commentators now reconsidering their fundamental assumptions and examining the data? What do you think?
The coronavirus has certainly surprised many of us in the past year, defying expectations by being more deadly in Europe and North and South America than it was in South East Asia, while in Africa and India it surprised by its mildness.
The lazy mainstream assumption that the differences between countries are explained primarily by their restrictions or interventions has not been borne out by any of the studies that have examined the real world data rather than relying on models that bake-in assumptions of lockdown efficacy.
One of those studies, by eminent Stanford scientists Jay Bhattacharya (co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration), John Ioannidis and colleagues, published in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation, has come under criticism since it was published at the start of January. The authors have now responded to that criticism, defending their paper in the journal.
It includes some great quotations from these two pillars of the sceptic movement.
Some suggest that New Zealand’s effective control can be ascribed to its highly restrictive lockdowns. That opinion, unfortunately, has no evidence to support it beyond the anecdotal. As of March 2021, the highest death rates globally have occurred in countries that used prolonged and very restrictive measures, while the lowest death rates occurred in countries with more diverse responses. This is of course no proof of the futility of lockdowns, but it does call into question any claims of a much-worse counterfactual with less restrictive measures.
Experience from past pandemics has shown vast differences in disease spread across different locations, irrespective of measures taken, and we are seeing the same variability with COVID-19. Ignoring these plain-to-see epidemiologic patterns is a disservice to public health and society.
They did admit to one mistake – which actually made their case stronger.
We note that, by mistake, we cumulated the case counts for the Netherlands twice. Correcting this, the trend for the Netherlands points more strongly to enhanced case spread with more restrictive measures (0.08 (0.00-0.17) versus Sweden and 0.13 (-0.11-0.37) versus South Korea.
They do not think much of the models popular among lockdowners, which typically beg the question by assuming what they are trying to prove.
An underlying theme in the letters is that COVID-19’s epidemic trajectories have been difficult to characterise, and have traced trajectories that often seem disconnected from the policies aimed at modifying these trajectories. … The past year has revealed puzzling patterns of epidemic dynamics that have defied models that attribute much epidemic control to policies. At the time of this writing, cases and deaths are declining across most locations, despite models’ predictions to the contrary.
This points to a more generalised and pernicious challenge: how should NPI [non-pharmaceutical intervention] effects be studied? Simulation models are clearly problematic because their results are a direct function of input assumptions. Observational studies, especially using causal inference methods, have advantages. However, when the underlying dynamics are non-linear and the policies are deeply endogenous, as in this case, attribution is precarious. This limitation is shared by all observational assessments of NPI effects.
They conclude that the scientific literature does not support the use of lockdowns, the harms of which are known and large whereas the benefits are unproven and, on current evidence, weak-to-non-existent.
In all, we maintain that the science plausibly supports beneficial, null, or harmful impacts on epidemic outcomes of highly restrictive measures, such as mandatory stay-at-home and business closures. Given their many uncontestable harms to health and society, we believe that the extant literature does not provide strong support for their effectiveness at reducing case spread, and should be subjected to careful, critical, and rigorous evaluation. If the benefits of such measures are negligible (or worse), their perpetuation may be, on balance, detrimental to the health of the public.
Worth reading in full, as is Jeffrey Tucker’s piece in AIER on Texas and the open states.
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well covid doesn’t really affect the under 60s. its only really interesting the vaccine effect in the terminally ill because that’s who’s dying of covid
Expanding on that, Steve, the vaccines would always appear to work well in under 60’s because their natural immune system will stop or lessen infection. Those older are more likely to have poorer immune systems so more likely to be affected.
Allowing young healthy people to build natural immunity is the only way we will ever get out of the pandemic. Vaccinating everyone will only prolong the pandemic, and is incredibly dangerous. What happens to a virus that can circulate indefinitely in hosts that neither die nor become properly immune? We don’t know, because it has never been tried before. By all means protect the vulnerable, but we must allow people who are willing to take the risk to catch the virus and become immune.
its going through our primary school like crap through a goose. half my daughters class are off
Just think if that had been allowed to happen last year – we would have a tremendous reservoir of real immunity.
In my grand daughter’s case, children are being sent home at the emergence of a sniffle, even when known to have had SARS. Doh!
yes. we would have been done by now. closing schools (and universities) was moronic
They didn’t close down Universities, just tried and failed to stop students ‘mingling’ in the way that students do, with fantastic results.
They were to all intents and purposes closed – campuses largely off limits, most or all teaching online, social and club/society activities and trips shut down, various restrictions in uni accommodation. A shit experience.
A shit experience no doubt but it didn’t prevent them mingling round our way.
When the entire student body were asked to test prior to going home for Xmas all bar 6 were found to be negative having recovered and so safe to share Xmas lunch with Granma.
If AIUI it’s no more dangerous to children than chickenpox, why’s the policy not the same as for chickenpox? (aka let people live as normal.)
Not that it’s overly important but am curious to understand why it didn’t do that last year. Was it school closures, delta variant or simply more testing now?
I think the vaccines caused it. They caused the delta variant to appear in the first place (the virus mutating in a successful attempt to evade the vaccine), and the vaccinated caught the Delta variant in their droves but were less symptomatic than the unvaccinated. They were therefore the superspreaders responsible for the most recent “wave” amongst younger people.
I’m nostalgic for the Kent variant that was looming on the horizon a year ago.
What is Latin for
I came
I saw
I disappeared?
Veni
Vidi
?
in peak 1 in march 2020 I knew about 3 people that had covid mildly
almost everybody I know had it in the last 6 months – mainly double vaxxed
I had it milder than anyone I know and unvaxxed – my unvaxxed wife had it even milder (tickly throat for a day)
Same here – OH jabbed and Covid tested positive a couple of weeks ago as have a number of colleagues in the last couple of months. Me, unjabbed and exposed to all of these people, not even a sniffle!
As advised by irrelevant NHS 111 recorded message en route to getting put through.
‘Most people who contract Covid19 will experience minor symptoms comparable to a cold. Please stay indoors and self medicate with over the counter flu and cold remedies’.
If that doesn’t spell it out, nothing will.
By virtue of being at a state school with lots of parents who work in the NHS, I think it has already been through everyone in my kids’ classes; parents as well. Parents have given up on masks and are ignoring the head teachers request to keep wearing them in the playground. It’s over in that school, despite the best efforts of the authorities to keep the panic alive.
our primary is totally normal. lots of covid, no masks, no special rules, no shits given by anyone
As per usual since mass schooling began, just like Freshers flu?
Are any ill? The most sensible course would be to get them all infected asap then get back to normal.
The only ‘pandemic’ we witnessed was a pandemic of PCR false positives.
What happens to a virus that can circulate indefinitely in hosts that neither die nor become properly immune?
It’s promoted to a proper, unicelluar organism.
Viruses cannot do this because they aren’t bacteria and are not capable of independent reproduction. Virus replication works by killing host cells as a side effect (slightly simplified), hence, the only way to stay healthy after getting infected with one is immune system stops virus reproduction by eliminating it and the only other possible outcome is death.
I note a sentence in the recent UKHSA vaccine surveillance reports:
This suggests that the vaccinated are not forming a complete immune response when they become infected with covid19. Given that the vaccines give all vaccinated people an identical immune response (to the original spike protein from 2 years ago) it is rather likely that once fully vaccine escape variants come along they will find it more difficult to form an effective protection (this is almost certainly Original Antigenic Sin in action).
This will likely have the effect of prolonging this epidemic and increasing the impact of each infectious season once it becomes endemic.
By vaccination everyone we look to have made things worse for everyone.
But its not about what they say its about.
‘Worse for everyone’?…..not quite.
Yes, that’s what I was alluding to. It’s an incredibly dangerous experiment to perform on the entire world population. At the very least, vaccinating the world with a “leaky” vaccine almost certainly prolongs the pandemic. At worst .. we just don’t know what happens.
‘Allowing young people to build natural immunity is the only way to get out of the pandemic . . .’
We would never have been in a ‘pandemic’ if they had taken note of S.Korea before UK Lockdown one.
Initially they had been reporting X per hundred mortality (hospitalisations/deaths) until they randomly tested several hundred of thousands of citizens and found that a high proportion of mostly young people had already had Covid but barely noticed.
As the number of deaths remained the same this reduced mortality rates to X per 10,000.
Not an epidemiologist or nothing but it struck me as significant at the time.
Can we now just accept that the ” vaccines ”
Do not stop transmission. Do not stop infection. Offer very limited mitigation of symptoms and are, for want of a better word, Pish!
Worse than that. If being “vaccinated” makes you more likely to test positive for covid than being unvaccinated (if you’re over 30), and vaccination offers no significant protection from death with covid in the over 60’s, doesn’t that mean that you are more likely to die “with covid” if you are over 60 and vaccinated (v unvaccinated)?
Something is affecting bozo,
Here he has a half minute Biden moment.
The Guardian YouTube slags him off for talking about Pepa Pig but of more interest is the first thirty seconds.when he loses his place in his speech, cannot ad lib and repeats himself.
Bullingdon boys are supposed to be good at recovering from lapses like this.
spike proteins backing up in his brain?
Sorry about the Guardian link, most others edit out those very illuminating first thirty seconds.
You really think he had the full monty?
probably. I think they actually believe it works. boris had covid and now 2 jabs and a booster. he’s probably addicted to spike proteins
I really believe they all have had it. I don’t believe the saline-jab theory. The point is, these people are true believers in the vaccine, and for a true believer to have a saline-jab, would be to betray thrie faith.
I think some believe up to a point, but probably they figured it was best to have it to avoid anyone discovering that they had cheated, which would be politically disastrous
The truth is probably above their pay grades. If you were a super-villian like Gates, would you trust the truth to a bumbling bafoon like Bozo?
Bumbling bafoon in this clip certainly.
He’s certainly not oozing confidence these days but I think he’s far from a buffoon. It’s an act.
I don’t think it is an act. He is a corrupt P.O.S. psychopath who would probably sell his kids’ kidneys if it meant he could keep nut nuts happy with some new designer wallpaper. A conniving bafoon perhaps.
Corrupt, POS, psychopath – I would not disagree
I don’t think you can get to be PM if you’re stupid.
Political parties can get any malleable turd into a safe seat.
Very normal behaviour in a functioning alcoholic!
That doesn’t seem to follow where the risk is being over 60. If initial vaccination does not prevent death, why would a third be expected to do so?
Soo, how did they find out that the individuels in the tested group had Covid, only with a Pcr Test ? Hopefully not, that would make the study completely useless.
“ those who had been vaccinated at least 14 days prior to infection”
Get back to me on the stats for death within 14 days of injection….
Also, let’s get the data on cancer diagnosis for jabbed and non jabbed.
TIA
It seems that even amongst the sceptical, there needs to be a constant reminder that SARS-CoV-2 really is no big deal – even for the ‘vulnerable’ groups. The increased mortality in the older spectrum largely reflects increased mortality from anything :
and Sweden showed zero excess mortality. its just old people dying of old age and this entire panic is being driven by people writing the name of a novel coronavirus on the death certificate instead of writing ‘old age’
of course they will find younger people that died and go on about them. I had a friend die of a heart attack in his 30s. and another died of sepsis at 40. shit happens but this is not a pandemic of note
look at Sweden – no lockdown, no masks and no bloody deaths!
its all bullshit
Yes, the zero-to-small excess mortality (depending on country) is the give away. Absentia Covid, the people who dies of Covid would have died of something else.
No vaccine protects against infection itself. What they do is enable the body to combat the virus once infected, so that you don’t develop the disease or it’s symptoms.
The question for me is; how effective are the vaccines at protecting against developing symptoms of the disease vs naturally acquired immunity?
I find it fascinating how amazing the immune system is. it can literally fight off anything but chooses not to because there are evolutionarily other things of importance (getting food, finding a mate). so it dials it down to the minimum to conserve energy (something we have in abundance) and sometimes gets wrong footed.
I’ve posted this a couple of times myself. Pfizer also never demonstrated that the vaccine supposedly prevented infection, only that it supposedly prevented mild cases of COVID-19 and not asymptomatic cases of PCR-positivitis. Efficiency against infection is just another propaganda lie from the Covid forever for all the others! camp.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC8546144/
and the jabs have effects…
our study recommends additional caution when vaccinating people with pre-existing clinical conditions, including diabetes, electrolyte imbalances, renal dysfunction, and coagulation disorders.
as does lockdown
https://metro.co.uk/2020/07/20/coronavirus-lockdown-cause-200000-extra-deaths-13014848/
Coronavirus lockdown could cause ‘200,000 extra deaths’
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1161/circ.144.suppl_1.10712
Mrna COVID Vaccines Dramatically Increase Endothelial Inflammatory Markers and ACS Risk as Measured by the PULS Cardiac Test
Any study that begins by saying “Vaccination has proven effective against infection with SARS-CoV-2, as well as death and hospitalisation following COVID-19 illness” cannot be trusted. We already know the absolute efficacy is close to zero and during the ‘trial’ more people died in the ‘vaxed’ group than in the placebo group. So we dont meed any more number fiddling thank you.
As last year people were locked down in the ‘peaks’ now they can act like that the vaccines are working. As there is almost 0 control group left you will never be able to prove otherwise.
Anyone that’s studied the medical literature, particularly the Pfizer study is aware that these jabs have NO efficacy and a horrendous safety profile. Slowly but surely the facts are becoming undeniable. It is becoming patently obvious with every passing day and the news from Europe, that this is fundamentally about one thing; Control of the ‘Useless eaters’. There is no Science anymore only politics. If we halt this. Which we must. We must forever be vigilant. We became complacent while the enemy infiltrated all our institutions and slowly erroded the Christian values that this country is based upon. Hold the line. We will succeed!
The 95% confidence intervals for >65 are very large. This means the difference is statistically insignificant but it could be quite big. Also it is curious that the mean difference between vaccine and unvaccine in >65 seems to get larger as the time after vaccination gets greater.
The virus is yesterdays news.
The pandemic now is the injuries and deaths caused directly by the experimental jab, but will be blamed on Covid, which will become worse with each so-called booster.
Just as well since most are brain dead already…
They test for the flu since they’ve never isolated Covid-19. Which makes me wonder how they can tell there is a delta variant. They never isolated the virus but they use a test to show the damage of a solution does on monkey kidney cells then show the cellular debris as proof of the virus. So, they can use this method to claim an UNENDING! amount of variants. A lot of cancers and “viruses” are probably just different forms of parasites. Since the tests can’t differentiate between cold and flu and covid then doesn’t that mean ivermectin cures both the cold and the flu? Welcome to “they’ve been lying to us our entire lives about everything”. Get your Ivermectin while you still can! https://ivmpharmacy.com
Just say it, the mRNA toxic chemical cocktail is a dud.
“To the extent that the vaccine protects against infection, it will protect against serious illness and death too”.
What the heck does this even mean?
The vaccine doesn’t stop transmission, so it won’t stop you getting infected with the Kung Flu or passing it on.
Let’s all stop tap-dancing around the pseudo-vaccines ponzi scheme and call it out for what it is – the greatest medical scam in history.
Why even the argument for over 60s. It was never meant to and never have been proven to protect anyone from anything. On the contrary it has been designed to do harm.
“This inclusion criterion thus excludes patients with obvious vaccine hesitancy (so-called ‘anti-vaxxers’) as this is correlated with other health-related behaviours that might confound associations with COVID-19 outcomes”
Which people < 60 don’t get the annual Flu vaccine? I would wager the healthiest ones who don’t see Flu as a problem. Since when has skipping the Flu vaccine become an anti-vax position?
This study could also say: having the Flu jab increases your chance of death from Covid in the < 60’s.
Could the declining vitamin D status of the elderly be playing a part here? Among the elderly, might this not be a relevant critical component in their immune response capacity?
Hi there, I just wanted to comment that I do not agree with what you have said a few times recently and having coined the expression ‘healthy vaccine effect’ I would say it’s the opposite from personal experience, as an extremely healthy 55 year old nutritional therapist who has decided not to take the jab: i am on no medication, I eat very well, i am a good weight, i look after myself etc etc there are many many like me who decided to trust in our immune systems being able to cope rather than taking an unknown, experimental vaccine. I am not an anti Vaxxer just never felt the need to have flu jabs ( never had flu) and although I had COVID it was very mild, after an antibody test I see I am still naturally protected after a year, thus this offers better protection than the vaccine which wanes after 6 months supposedly…I believe in the power of good food, and relevant supplements like vitamin c, d, zinc etc. So although there may be some who cannot take the vaccine as they may have an underlying condition – especially an autoimmune disease which the vaccine may make worse – or they may have had an adverse reaction to the first jab and decided not to continue…I think there are many like me who do not rely on a a’ magic bullet’ to solve this crisis but prefer to see it out naturally…also I think I am actually quite sensible and risk averse – just not fear averse! in good health to you all…