So do the vaccines not work then? That’s certainly the impression you’d get from the way various members of SAGE are carrying on, warning of new waves and new variants and the need to delay the end of lockdown even further (completely ignoring the fact that half of America is now open without any problems so far).
As Sherelle Jacobs asks in the Telegraph, why is the debate continuing as though nothing has changed despite half the country – the most vulnerable half – being vaccinated?
Instead of discussing how quickly vaccines could spell the end of restrictions, the commentariat fixates on the risk of another wave as if absolutely nothing has changed. Somehow, despite low deaths, the Indian variant rather than the vaccine has become the game changer.
We have become wearily used to these media interventions from SAGE members in the build-up to key decisions around lockdowns, usually pushing some skewed version of the scientific evidence to frighten the public and pile pressure on the Government to tighten or maintain restrictions. This was bad enough in the autumn before the vaccines were on the scene, but now it leaves you wondering if they know something we don’t about how well the vaccines prevent death and serious disease.
The Government has been continually putting out new research showing how effective the vaccines are, including against the Indian variant, and while I have written on a number of occasions about the shortcomings of these studies, I had been assuming that the vaccines do work, or at least that the Government and its scientists believe they work. With all this talk of third waves and extending lockdown, you have to wonder.
The latest line to justify extending the lockdown is from NERVTAG member Professor Ravi Gupta, who argues for just a few more weeks to let more people get vaccinated, saying there are signs an “explosive” third wave is on the horizon.
Yet according to the latest figures, 51.3% of the adult population has now had one vaccine dose and 31.4% has had two. Over 90% of the over-70s are now fully vaccinated.

The vaccines are supposed to be up to 90% effective at preventing symptomatic infection, including in the over-65s. They are also claimed to be a 90% effective at preventing hospitalisation or death (though presumably their efficacy is reduced somewhat in the frail elderly). This means any new “surge” will have something like one tenth of the infections of earlier waves, while hospitalisations and deaths should be up to a hundred times less – a non-event in infectious disease terms. While these are likely overestimates of vaccine effectiveness, especially among those most susceptible to the disease, there is also naturally acquired immunity and prior immunity that will help to bring the disease burden down.
However you look at it, if the vaccines are going to do their thing then they are already doing it and there’s no point postponing the unlocking. If they’re not working then there’s nothing we can do about it now anyway so we might as well get back to living fully. Either way, the SAGE prophets of doom should be roundly ignored.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
“We also need to think hard about what kind of research should be allowed and what should be banned.”
Big pharma, “public health”, governments, medicine/vaccine “regulators”, the entire medical establishment globally with few exceptions, those working in academia in related fields, have colluded and doubled down in the most damaging and costly “public health” action in global history, by some margin. They are a menace and cannot be trusted. It’s hard to imagine that anything other than banishing the lot of them and starting again is going to fix that. Deeply corrupt and dishonest.
GOF research needs to be banned yesterday, worldwide, NO exceptions! It is all risk and no benefit. No real cures or safe vaccines have ever resulted from it, only dangerous viruses, which can leak out at any time.
Is it all incidental ? and even true – could it still be a smokescreen ?
https://bailiwicknews.substack.com/p/why-all-the-breathless-finger-wagging?
Is Pfizer the fall guy for the oligarchs, in other words?
Some may think it a backward step for humanity if all biomed/genetic/viral research/defence, lol,/ labs were fire bombed to a crisp, with, unfortunately all those responsible involved inside. Oh, as an aside, all bigpharma conglomerates as well.
Others may think that would be doing a service to humanity.
If that were to happen, do you think humanity would be better off?
Apointless question because it is not going to happen.
This did make me chuckle though. Good on them. Wonder how long it was parked there for. It seems totally fitting that this bloke goes viral…
https://rumble.com/v27wiby-project-veritas-rented-an-led-truck-and-parked-it-outside-of-pfizer-world-h.html
Brilliant
We could perhaps ban GOP (“gain of Pfizer”) research, to prevent the creation of more medical products which end up being a gain for Pfizer and a loss for everyone else.
That scientists were trying to ‘mutate viruses’ emerged in December 2011, when Ron Fouchier announced at the European Scientific Working group on Influenza (ESWI) meeting that his team had “mutated the hell out of H5N1”.
This was very alarming…research that was first called ‘dual use’, and them became known as ‘gain of function’.
At the time, I questioned if this research, which was funded by Fauci’s NIH, was in breach of the Biological Weapons Convention, see:
An open letter to the NSABB re the political and ethical implications of lethal virus development, 31 January 2012.
A submission to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) re Opposition to Lab-engineering of Potentially Lethal Pathogens,17 December 2012.
But here’s something interesting to think about re Fouchier and co ‘mutating the hell out of H5N1’…
As I note in my letter to the CDC and HHS in December 2012, linked to in my previous comment:
So it wasn’t deadly after all… All that beat up for what exactly?
Just like Covid, which also isn’t so deadly after all… But Covid was a manufactured crisis that created the highly lucrative Covid industry, which was also used as the excuse to implement controls over the population.
Speaking of gain of function, consider an interview re controversial influenza H7N9 gain of function experiments, broadcast on Dispatch Radio in August 2013, in which Vincent Racaniello, Higgins Professor of Microbiology & Immunology, Columbia University, stated:
Vincent Racaniello says “we do gain of function studies all the time. We don’t make a big deal of it, we don’t write letters telling the world that we’re going to do them because that’s not the way science works. Science works by just doing your experiments.” Vincent Racaniello seems to infer that it is acceptable for scientists to manipulate viruses, e.g. make a “virus drug resistant…to see if a drug resistant mutant would have any properties that would make it scarier in people” without telling “the world about it”. (I challenged Vincent Racaniello about his comments on his Virology blog post “Virologists plan influenza H7N9 gain of function experiments” in August 2013, but he did not respond.)
I suggest Vincent Racaniello’s attitude is arrogant and irresponsible.
How many other scientists are undertaking this type of research “without telling the world about it”, and with scant regard for potentially disastrous consequences? For example, are scientists manipulating the ebola virus to “make it scarier in people”?
See more on my webpage: Arrogant scientists and dangerous ‘gain-of-function’ experiments – a letter to the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB)
Science works by observing nature in order to derive theories about its working which are then to be tested with repeatable experiments. Making perfectly random changes to nucleotide acids in order to see what happens is not science.
The one argument agains the Sars-CoV2 lab leak theory is It worked.
The discussion on gain of function research has been going on for decades.
I personally am on the side of thinking it is a bad idea. Any possible upside of this kind of research does not weigh up against the potential danger of tinkering with nature. And there have been multiple lab leaks over the years…
Until we have a complete understanding of the chemical processes which occur in complex organisms, any tinkering with them at the molecular level is – at best – hapless fumbling of children who have no idea what they’re actually doing. There’s no point in even discussing this seriously.
In tens of thousands of years time, an inter-stellar craft will land on an Earth with no homo-sapiens. The travellers will perform their tests and determine that the planet was previously populated with a highly intelligent life-form. Not sufficiently so however to prevent it wiping itself out. The Captain of the visiting craft will quip, “Serves ’em right.”
Dr John Campbell’s podcast about the Pfizer sting is hilarious. Do watch to the end when he quotes Shakespeare.
https://rumble.com/v27jm5o-prizer-allergations.html
Wow, they are more diabolical than I thought!
If Gain of Function testing isn’t happening then why is there a name for it? Here is a Wiipedia extract:
“Gain-of-function research (GoF research or GoFR) is medical research that genetically alters an organism in a way that may enhance the biological functions of gene products. This may include an altered pathogenesis, transmissibility, or host range, i.e., the types of hosts that a microorganism can infect. This research is intended to reveal targets to better predict emerging infectious diseases and to develop vaccines and therapeutics. For example, influenza B can infect only humans and harbor seals.[1] Introducing a mutation that would allow influenza B to infect rabbits in a controlled laboratory situation would be considered a gain-of-function experiment, as the virus did not previously have that function.[2][3] That type of experiment could then help reveal which parts of the virus’s genome correspond to the species that it can infect, enabling the creation of antiviral medicines which block this function…”
And here is a Nature.com extract:
“In Greek mythology, the Chimaera was a fire-breathing monster, a horrifying mishmash of lion, goat and snake that laid waste to the countryside. In 2015, virologists led by Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill reported the creation of their own chimaera. They took a version of the coronavirus responsible for the deadly outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in the early 2000s — now known as SARS-CoV — and adorned it with surface proteins from a different coronavirus taken from Chinese horseshoe bats. In the laboratory, this particular mash-up was able to break into human cells and also make mice ill1. This chimaera came with a message: other coronaviruses have the potential to spark a human pandemic. In just a few years’ time, that warning would prove prescient, as a distant cousin of SARS-CoV has now killed more than 4.9 million people worldwide…”