Before the vaccines arrived, lockdown proponents argued that the only way to prevent large numbers of Covid deaths was by completely suppressing viral transmission. A focused protection strategy, they maintained, was just not workable.
The basic argument is as follows. Because the virus is so transmissible, and society is so interconnected, it would have been impossible to protect vulnerable people if we’d allowed community transmission to proceed unchecked. Without a lockdown, the virus would inevitably have found its way into hospitals and care homes, leading to lots of deaths.
It’s not an unreasonable argument, but I don’t buy it. (And let’s put aside the fact that even if lockdown does prevent more Covid deaths than focused protection, the total costs almost certainly outweigh the benefits.)
We already know that places like Utah, Sweden and South Dakota, which refused to lock down last year, did not do substantially worse than places that did lock down. We can argue about exactly how to do the comparison; the fact is that none of the dire predictions made for these locations actually came to pass.
But is there an example of a country that achieved focused protection? Denmark might well be the closest. If we zoom-in on the second wave, and compare the country’s infection rate to that of the U.K., it isn’t dramatically lower:
Assuming the numbers are indeed comparable (which I’ll admit is a big assumption), Denmark saw 30% fewer infections between August of 2020 and May of 2021. Denmark did do more testing over this time period, but the U.K. had a higher share of positive tests.
If the lockdowners’ argument against focused protection is right, we’d expect Denmark to have had only 30% fewer deaths than the U.K. during the second wave; or at most, perhaps 50% fewer. After all, the country’s infection rate peaked at over 600 per million.
But this isn’t what we find. According to Karlinsky and Kobak, Denmark has had only 1% excess mortality since the pandemic began; the U.K.’s figure, by contrast, is 20%.
Now, more than half of Britain’s excess mortality was sustained in the first wave (which Denmark managed to avoid). But suppose that eight percentage points of the 20% were sustained in the second wave.
This would mean that Denmark’s deaths were not 30% or 50% lower than the U.K.’s, but almost 90% lower. Despite experiencing a moderately high infection rate in the winter, Denmark managed to keep deaths to a minimum.
Note: I’m not suggesting the country didn’t lock down; it did. (Though there was never a stay-at-home order, and the average stringency index was much lower than in Britain). My point is that some degree of focused protection apparently is achievable. There’s no necessary relationship between the infection rate and the death toll.
It doesn’t follow that Britain could have done as well as Denmark, which tends to finish at the top of every international league table. But with a bit of ingenuity, we could have done better than we did – in terms of both lives saved and collateral damage avoided.
The recent House of Commons report described the U.K.’s initial approach as “fatalistic”. But what was really fatalistic was assuming the only way to stop people dying of Covid was shuttering the economy and throwing civil liberties out the window.
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The scepticism on vaccine death numbers from Toby Young has become almost vanishingly small.
The only way you can compare deaths for vaccines with Covid to get a risk/benefit metric is with the same standards for vaccines as for deaths attributed to Covid.
How many deaths occur within 28 days of a Covid vaccine? The government have flat out refused to provide this data, saying that all vaccine related deaths are recorded under the MHRA’s Yellow Card system. Furthermore, there is no way of knowing what the effects of this experimental treatment are at least until the clinical trials have concluded.
The resistance to this incoming tyranny is starting to look infinitesimally small.
https://dailyexpose.co.uk/2021/03/30/f-o-i-request-shows-2207-died-within-28-days-of-having-the-covid-vaccine-in-scotland-during-february/
F.O.I Request shows 2,207 died within 28 days of having the Covid Vaccine in Scotland during February
It’s not quite correct WRT just during Feb… But I think it IS over 500 a month dying WITH experimental COVID jab in just Scotland alone..
I took that FOI to mean since the beginning of vaccination. I then went to the governments coronavirus website
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
and from there used 9th December as the start of vaccination and found that approximately 3,300 had died in Scotland within 28 days of a positve test over the same period. This was a while ago I did this though so may require double checking.
The above link was sent in reply to a comment I made earlier in the week.
Others looked and it seemed the timeframe (just one month) was off but the numbers weren’t
I’m guessing we still need the numbers for dying without COVID and without being jabbed.
Thanks for posting the Daily Expose article, I was going to do so myself. I posted it yesterday as well.
I want to add the caveat again that there is no way of verifying if that document is real or not. The only way to be certain would be to submit a FOI request yourself.
I don’t know if Daily Expose is a reputable website either, so we need to be careful with things like this before making any claims.
With that said:
Extrapolating the quoted Scottish numbers across the whole of the UK would give 25,524 deaths.
63,182,000 – UK population
5,463,300 – Scottish population
Death rate in Scotland for the entire population = 0.00040397 (2,207/5,463,300)
0.00040397*63,182,000 = 25,524
If anyone has a better way of doing it, let me know.
The problem with this is the age breakdown.
This is an issue that gets rapidly bigger the younger people get so using an all-age average isn’t going to be that accurate.
I agree, it’s a mess.
Also, I feel extremely bad even talking about this. I hope no-one thinks I’m ever being callous. This BS is breaking my heart, which is why I’m doing all I can to warn people.
But it’s not just deaths. As Sucharit Bhakdi has pointed out – less severe outcomes can also be associated with a thrombosi(e)s.
Govt .Yellow Card Vaccine deaths and Adverse Reactions can be found in The Light newspaper monthly.
The best alternative is to avoid a jab.
Yup: that’s my strategy!
The more newspaper headlines containing the words Vaccine and Risk the better.
It just gets worse doesn’t it ?
I mean we’ve gone from complete denial that there was any risk to the vaccines – to admitting that there maybe a tiny risk – to now offering a completely different vaccine to under 40’s because of a potential risk of blood clots from the previous vaccine that was being given to all the over 40’s.
Anyone out there still eager to roll-up there sleeves for this vaccine must be completely insane. I wouldn’t take an asprin from these people if it was offered to me nevermind an experimental jab that appears to have so many question marks hanging over it.
Nobody has started on the more “normal” thrombosis associated with all the spike protein producing vaccines yet. Obviously COVID can also cause these….but it’s quite hard to catch COVID right now. You can’t avoid them in the vaccines though.
“I wouldn’t take an asprin from these people”
In the end – detail apart – this is the sane position, given the stack of reasons not to trust the political and financial issues involved and the sheer lies that have been told.
I mean – buying ‘guaranteed’ snake oil from the producers who have been given immunity against harms on the recommendation of a PR firm that has spent billions on shares in it?
You’d have to be mad.
To Toby: I think they meant when they say the risks outweigh the benefits in the under 40s is that VIPIT is more likely (death or not….even if not death, a debilitating stroke that leaves you long term disabled aged under 40 has to be included as a major harm) than a healthy under 40 dying of COVID.
Of course, healthy doesn’t mean low risk. The obese are at far greater risk, so the younger, slimmer and fitter you are, the greater the relative risk of the vaccine. If you are a fit 40, 50 or 60 something, the vaccine may still not make any sense.
And then of course there are all the other risks of the vaccine, that nobody mentions. The people spending a week or more in bed. That’s not normal! And that’s at the mild end of the spectrum.
Its not just deaths. You don’t want to end up in hospital for a vaccine you don’t really need even if it doesn’t kill you.
“This might not kill you but you might need 2 weeks in hospital to fix it” isn’t appealing.
The 2 people i know of that have had clotting issues weren’t killed. One ended up in hospital for tests, the other was there over a week until it resolved.
And all of this for a vaccine thats far less effective than the others.
“resolved” – If you’ve small blood clots in the brain, do they not invariably do irreparable damage? Perhaps the impact is not readily discernable, but you’re less of the person you were, and the specific damage may take its toll years later.
Wrong. The Az and JJ vaccines may have an immediate effect because of their delivery system. But in the medium and longer term the mRNA vaccines are far more pernicious. The immune system can eventually identify the problem with the AZ and JJ vaccines. But the gel surrounding the mRNA vaccines disguises the effect and the problem may well appear much later in say the brain before the immune system attacks with potentially deadly consequences.
Yes and people will probably end up on lifelong medication for problems they didn’t have before taking the vaccine.
If I was still under 40 I’d be demanding my freedom, not an alternative jab.
My group of sheep (friends) are in the 40 bracket, boy will they be glad they took the AZ poison these last two weeks….
That’s OK; I’m in my 60s and I have a great alternative to AZ – nada!
Me too – absolutely no chance of me having any of the so-called vaccines.
The more I read the more I disagree with them.
Why anyone who is otherwise healthy wish to have these is beyond my comprehension.
i agree. What is also baffling is how little it’s mentioned that the Jabz are being rolled out in spring and summer for a winter seasonal disease!
Could this be the amazing reason why they are so ‘effective’.?
Funny that this news didn’t come out just before “Super Thursday”, when it might have slightly flattened the wave of “vaccine” “success” Boris’s party was riding.
Funny too, that the bad news is being broken on results day, when so many people are distracted by the theatre of party politics.
What an excellent opportunity to ‘help’ those in a particular populous country where the media say there is a crisis by giving them all the dodgy AZ jabs that would have been given to under 40s… and when I say giving, I mean not challenging them to fulfil the UK’s order and agreeing that they can keep the stuff for themselves…
‘If we assume that at least a half of the 35 million Britons who’ve been inoculated got an AZ jab…’ – Why don’t you look it up? It’s 22.6M AZ jabs (twice the amount of Pfizer). There are a ‘reported’ 49 blood clots biut it’s not just blood clots when calculating risk vs. reward of the vaccines. There’s anaphylaxis, Bell’s Palsy, blindness, Guillain-Barre Syndrome and capillary leak syndrome to consider. The Yellow Card currently shows 1102 deaths immediately following vaccination – that’s 6.3/day for AZ and 2.6/day for Pfizer (longer rollout). There were 9,942 (with multiple AEs) single Yellow Card reports in the week April 21-29th alone – which represents only 0.3-0.6% of reporting. For a 0-19 year old, the chances of dying of COVID is 0.00015%. Chances of dying from the vaccine – 0.2%. While the true number of deaths from vaccines (and this won’t include those who developed and died ‘from’ COVID as a result of a weakened immune system following the vaccine – which will go down as COVID deaths) won’t be known until it’s too late for the majority – anyone can look at the ONS and Yellow Card data and judge for themselves. What you will find is that the death toll from COVID for a healthy under 65 year old for the whole of 2020 (Eng & Wales) was 1,549 – once you factor in the 33% over reporting and the under reporting of the Yellow Card, only the highly innumerate would conclude that the rewards of a vaccine outweigh the risks. A healthy under 65 year old is statistically more likely to die from the vaccine than COVID.