To judge from recent scientific and media output, there appear to be two parallel realities currently existing side-by-side in Covid world. In one, the vaccines are highly effective at preventing infection and transmission, and any data that suggests otherwise is being misrepresented or is biased or contains some kind of basic error. In the other – the one that bears a much closer resemblance to the one we actually live in – vaccine effectiveness against infection has been declining significantly and after six months is basically zero. At some point, one of these realities is going to have to give way because they can’t both be true. I know which one my money’s on.
An example of the first appeared in New Scientist this week, headlined: “How much less likely are you to spread COVID-19 if you’re vaccinated?” The answer: at least 63%, according to a new population-based pre-print study from the Netherlands.
A recent study found that vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant are 63% less likely to infect people who are unvaccinated.
This is only slightly lower than with the Alpha variant, says Brechje de Gier at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands, who led the study. Her team had previously found that vaccinated people infected with Alpha were 73% less likely to infect unvaccinated people.
What is important to realise, de Gier says, is that the full effect of vaccines on reducing transmission is even higher than 63%, because most vaccinated people don’t become infected in the first place.
De Gier and her team used data from the Netherlands’ contact tracing system to work out the so-called secondary attack rate – the proportion of contacts infected by positive cases. They then worked out how much this was reduced by vaccination, adjusting for factors such as age.
The data comes from August and September 2021, when Delta was dominant in the Netherlands. The key table, breaking the figures down by whether the index case and contacts were vaccinated, is below.
When you see this table you realise why the headline claim focuses on how easy it is to infect people who are unvaccinated. There the SAR drops from 22% to 13% when the index case is vaccinated (a 41% drop; the rest of the 63% vaccine effectiveness comes from adjustments). However, look at the results for infecting vaccinated contacts (bottom half). There the SAR rises from 11% to 12% when the index case is vaccinated.
The authors say this is due to confounding by age and that the adjusted vaccine effectiveness against transmission works out at 40% (though with a wide confidence interval of 20-54%). Be that as it may, note that for those aged 50-74 the SAR still rises from 18% to 21% when the index case is vaccinated, and that isn’t confounded by age (though the sample size for the 18% figure is small). Since one of the main claims in the paper is that the lower SAR for vaccinated index cases is a result of them being less infectious, it’s hard to explain why vaccinated people aged 50-74 appear to infect more of their vaccinated contacts, not fewer.
There are other problems with the study. One is that on July 8th, the Netherlands changed its rules to allow vaccinated contacts not to self-isolate while unvaccinated contacts were still required to do so: “On July 8th, 2021, a policy change was implemented, and fully vaccinated household contacts of confirmed cases no longer had to quarantine.”
This means the unvaccinated contacts were confined to the home with their infected housemate while the vaccinated were permitted to get out of there and breathe God’s clean air. Without seeing data from before this change it’s hard to know how much of a difference it made, but it may be significant.
Another problem is the authors didn’t exclude infections being counted as secondary even if they were discovered the following day, meaning the study will likely include many co-primary cases which are normally excluded. This may explain why the SAR values are much higher than those reported by Public Health England (typically around 10%). What difference this would make to the difference between the vaccinated and unvaccinated figures is uncertain, however.
A bigger problem is that it appears the unvaccinated cohort includes those within 14 days of their first jab, a period shown in numerous studies to be one of heightened infection risk. This will inflate the infection rate in the ‘unvaccinated’ so it would be good to see the analysis with these infections excluded.
The New Scientist article goes on to cite the Oxford/ONS study from August claiming it supports these findings, but that study also had numerous flaws that I have discussed previously.
In any case, whatever the reason this study found a significant impact on transmission, a new study from Sweden has appeared that brings tidings from the other reality – the one where high observed levels of spread among the vaccinated translate to a decline to zero vaccine efficacy within months.
The study (a Lancet pre-print) finds that Pfizer vaccine effectiveness wanes from 92% at day 15-30 to 47% at day 121-180, and from day 211 (seven months) and onwards “no effectiveness could be detected”. For AstraZeneca, vaccine effectiveness “was generally lower and waned faster, with no effectiveness detected from day 121 [four months] and onwards”. (The figure they found was actually negative, minus-19%.)
While effectiveness against severe outcomes held up for many groups over nine months, it was found to wane significantly among men, older frail people, and people with comorbidities, contributing to an overall fall from 89% at day 15-30 to 42% from day 181 (six months) and onwards, with a number of subgroups even showing negative efficacy against severe outcomes.
The graphs included in the paper are reproduced below. Note the negative effectiveness against infection at nine months (top chart) and the effectiveness against severe outcomes down to around 20% at eight months (bottom chart).
The confirmation here of vaccine effectiveness against infection declining to zero will not come as a surprise to readers of the Daily Sceptic, though it may baffle readers of the New Scientist and others living in the parallel reality of highly effective vaccines. The sharp waning against severe disease is more of a surprise given recent data from PHE/UKHSA, and is worth watching closely.
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A study of 52,238 workers of an American healthcare system system found,”… the reinfection rate among individuals who had recovered from Covid-19, even if they had gone on to get the vaccine after recovering, was “almost zero.”
“Not one of the 1359 previously infected subjects who remained unvaccinated had a SARS-CoV-2 infection over the duration of the study. Individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from COVID-19 vaccination…”
A study out of Israel… which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, found “… vaccinated individuals are 13x more likely to have a breakthrough infection and more likely to be hospitalized when compared to those who had already recovered from the virus.”
Will the FDA, CDC, NIH, or any healthcare official for that matter, that is dictating Covid policies in the US, ever acknowledge that natural immunity even exists? Did the WHO memory-hole the existence natural immunity too?
96 Research Studies Affirm Naturally Acquired Immunity to Covid-19: Documented, Linked, and QuotedBY PAUL ELIAS ALEXANDER OCTOBER 17, 2021
https://brownstone.org/articles/79-research-studies-affirm-naturally-acquired-immunity-to-covid-19-documented-linked-and-quoted/
How can a jab that isn’t a conventional vaccine be any ‘effective’?
1) we are dealing with a virus that doesn’t exist.
20 we are dealing with a jab that isn’t a vaccine.3) so everything else, including ‘variants’, are lies!!
“Individuals who have had two vaccine doses can be just as infectious as those who have not been jabbed.”
That is from the BBC, no less, quoting the Lancet! (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59077036)
To quote further:
Since households are where most Covid transmission occurs, making sure every member who is eligible for a vaccine has had one and is up to date with their doses makes sense, say experts.
According to the study, which ran from September 2020 to September 2021 and included 440 households in London and Bolton doing PCR Covid tests:
Does this mean that the sceptic view is now official: telling people to stay at home as much as possible increases infection rates, and vaccination does not reduce transmission, only hospitalisation?
A buddy of mine contracted covid right around the 6 month mark after his 2nd vax. He was quite ill too – in bed for a week. I did reassure him that he now has ‘proper’ immunity after recovering from the real deal
Still no idea how they measure “vaccine effectiveness”. Unless they have an isolated pathogen (which they don’t) and can somehow prove (all) people get ill from the pathogen (which they can’t) and that vaccinated people don’t get ill from the pathogen, the whole thing about vaccine effectiveness is a load of garbage.
The numbers of contacts are too small to support anything other than a “it seems that” conclusion. Now add in the requirement that the un-jabbed were forced into close contact, due to quarantine, whilst the jabbed were not- then you cant take seriously any conclusion from this study as the two populations were operating under very different conditions. A pathetic exercise in “clutching at straws”
What do they claim is the mechanism of infection? The jab targets the spike protein, not the virus capsule.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/swedish-study-shows-covid-vaccines
The cat’s take on the Swedish study.
When I see this table, I’m seeing another instance of cherry-picking data about a miniscule number of people (less than 5000) to do a one-off analysis of observable correlations.
I see (COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report – week 43) that the UKHSA has bowed to the pressure and stopped charting the rates of infection by age group between the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
Nevertheless, they have tabulated the results, albeit with even more caveats and the label ‘unadjusted’. See below.
Still the rate is more than double in the vaccinated for ages 40 – 79, and also significantly higher in the 30 – 39 and 80+ age groups.
The ‘negative efficacy’ continues to increase in most age groups (rate now 232% higher in the age 40s vaccinated), and the small positive vaccine efficacy in the 18-29 age group continues to be eroded.
So, really what the vaccinated should be saying is, “Thank goodness I’ve had hundreds of regular jabs”.
To my mind the reason for waning “efficiency” is completely straightforward and logical. Just look at the “science”.
Synthetic/foreign and dangerous mrna is normally recognised by the innate immune system and destroyed before it can invade your cells.
This was always the fundamental problem with any mrna/gene therapy vax.
Unfortunately geneticists found a way around this problem – they simply tweak the mrna (the uridine is altered) so that it turns off the parts of the innate immune system which would otherwise destroy it.
Even more unfortunately the bits tuned off include the p53 – guardian of the genome/cancer suppressor gene and certain Toll receptor cells which otherwise spot infections and mark cancerous cells for destruction.
The way the dam things work is by antibody production only. There is little or no memory response.-no T or B cell involvement nor the production of long life plasma cells such as natural recovery gives you.
So we have “breakthrough infections” – aka and more accurately, “vaccine failures” to use old terminology. Not to mention OAS an ADE.
No problem with waning antibody levels though, just keep boosting your immunity with more of the same poison.
This is insanity personified.
“This is insanity personified.”
It’s a good business model. “Take the vaccines and make our friends rich or you will be punished.”
good simplified summary. Also explains why the Valneva jab is not being supported by anyone. It works in a conventional sense, it aims at stimulating T-cells. Can’t have that can they, it destroys their business model.
https://www.deconstructingconventional.com/post/17-more-reasons-i-won-t-be-getting-a-covid-vaccine
Worth reading and filing, together with the initial 18 reasons.
Great article and very important to debunk that line of argumentation.
In light of all their previous narratives (pandemic of the unvaccinated, unvacvinated only in hospital) being destroyed by reality, it seems that they are now mainly clinging onto this one, that you might infect fewer people as a vaccinated person, however flimsy the evidence for and dubious the way of establishing just that is.
And: The most recent data from Scotland confirms the Swedish study with regard to the negative effectiveness against severe disease too!
https://theexpose.uk/2021/10/28/85-percent-of-covid-19-deaths-among-the-fully-vaccinated/
So does the Weimar data.
That district made headlines recently when it stopped publishing data on how many vaxxed and unvaxxed are hospitalised, ‘because this would only help the anti-vaxxers’.
It had to reverse course, and the data just released confirms the ridiculousness in veneral AND the vaccine failure in particular:
2 people are on an ICU for Covid, 1 of them is vaxxed, 1 unvaxxed.
5 others are in hospital ‘with Covid’.
They didn’t disclose the vaxxed/unvaxxed numbers here, which indicates by itself that it will likely be heavily skewed to the vaxxed, if not all vaxxed.
https://norberthaering.de/news/weimar-2/
The sheer, mind-bending hellscape of horror that these injections are creating has not even begun to make itself known. We must remember who was responsible for them.
I’ll tell you what though, however ineffective this vaccine is, I would have probably just gone ahead and got it before now had I not been put off by all the vaccine passport threats and other discriminatory measures.
EU vax pass system private key may have leaked:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/eu-investigating-leak-of-private-key-used-to-forge-covid-passes/
I’m quite surprised to see the effectiveness against serious disease dropping, and that s a little concerning, because if the vaccines don’t stop serious disease they are completely worthless. We could be all the way back to 2020, where if we’d just held our nerve covid could have been coped with like a bad, and out of season, winter flu season. Ineffectivness against transmission is no new news at all though, but good to see yet another reason why vax passes must be destroyed.
They are all doing this, it really is outrageous. We KNOW from january carehome vaccination that this first 14 days typically sees a huge blow to individual immunity, and a high rate of infection, but these people are vaccinated! it is a dishonest and obviously false claim to say they are not vaccinated.
The medical and scientific establishment, along with the media, have totally discredited themselves. This is simple fraud.
“The medical and scientific establishment, along with the media, have totally discredited themselves. This is simple fraud.”
Yet they have got away with it.
I had to laugh when 2 colleagues were arguing over vaccine effectiveness the other day. One was slagging off a female colleague as “she hasn’t had both jabs”. It turns out she had at least 1 jab, so my other colleague said “yes but studies show that 1 jab has 80% effectiveness”. Both of these colleagues are thick as sh*t, but they suddenly think they’re ‘experts’ after watching the BBC.
That they know the Sweden study to be more representative of reality is indicated by the booster campaigns being carried out across the world and the rise in their hectoring of folks to get their boosters. It was my gut feeling it would be as the Swedish study finds. I imagine the study will come in for attack, perhaps with the attackers saying the third dose will make the vaccine course long lasting ( I doubt that but time will tell).
When younger friends have said they got the 2 shots this year so they can travel freely next year and I asked them gently if they thought this year’s vaccine would still be viable next year they looked at me with incredulity, they have been convinced these vaccines are a one off course and they are done.
And how could governments get away with mandating a new vaccine for workers, our care home workers, without having the studies of effectiveness?
Like playing the lottery once and expecting to win.
“I asked them gently if they thought this year’s vaccine would still be viable next year they looked at me with incredulity, they have been convinced these vaccines are a one off course and they are done.”
The EU ‘Covid Pass’ gives you 12 months after the 2nd jab. I think it’s pretty obvious that the ‘boosters’ will be required to keep the ‘Vaxx Pass’ valid.
Question now is …. what’s to be done? Another peaceful demo? Another on-line petition? Another e-mail to your local MP?
Well, you can still go abroad if you want to pay for two PCR tests on your return and have 10 days ‘quarantine’ – and wear a face mask in the airports and on the plane. Can anyone guess at how many more years this is going to go on for? Very tough virus to get rid of, isn’t it? 20 months of Government-imposed misery behind us. But Boris and chums are having a mighty fine time, and that’s really all that counts.
The two weeks worry window.
Seems to be quite a common trick in almost all data coming from governments on this topic.
A paper is needed to focus specifically on that two week window, analysing just how robust it is calling someome unvaccinated. For, if that is tbe correct definition, there should be no difference between infection rates pre and post vaccine. We know there appears to be but some statistical robustness is required.
All with the caveat that PCR is underlying all of this data and so we scrambling around in the dark for the most part.
Even Pfizer admitted to the FDA on September 17 that their review of Israeli data (in line with their own findings from the trials subjects they vaccinated last year) found that after a few months the effectiveness of their vaccine against infection was ‘not statistically significantly different from zero’.
Analysis of the data from everywhere else tells the same story.
It really is long overdue for the vaccine drug pushers to face up to reality and stop persecuting and demonizing those who will not join them on their crazed drugs fantasy.
As with much else in this farce it doesn’t matter what is wrong or right but to simply convince the majority that we are living in dangerous times. From that viewpoint it has worked beautifully. Governments know full well there are completely valid counter arguments but they confidently know they won’t get much (if any) traction so arrogantly continue with the doom-laden rhetoric completely unflustered.
Yes, these are real vaccines – they protect the income for the pharmaceutical giants 100%.
Is the penny dropping now? 5 year olds to be injected next (another source of income!), and ‘booster’ jabs to be rolled out forever.
If your ‘vaccine pass’ is kept up-to-date and valid then you will have ‘privileges’ that the “filthy diseased super-spreading Unvaccinated” won’t have – as is the situation right now where the ‘fully vaxxed’ are not required to quarantine for 10 days upon entering the UK whilst the ‘unvaxxed’ are.
Probably those who refuse to take the ‘Covid vaccines’ won’t be forced to, but also they’ll not be leaving the country – which is OK for most, as there are lots of nice things to see and do in the UK. But these old fogies will eventually die out and be replaced by their children who will be compliant face-mask-wearing-vaccine-taking members of ‘The New Society’.
Kids have already been brainwashed for 20 months.
There has been resistance of sorts, but has it been enough? I can see the Christmas presents of this year – face masks embroidered with your name, and bottles of Aloe Vera hand sanitiser. And adverts for ‘Only Santas… Read more »
My hope is that 10% are unvaxxed.
Another 10% are actual friends of the unvaxxed
10% are vaxxed but think the idea of vax passports are wrong
An increasing % will start getting tired of their boosters and will become ‘unvaxxed’
Eventually the penny will drop
See the Roundup below which includes a, flakey and badly written, piece from the Daily Express.
Sad sob story about a girl ‘bullied’ at school for taking the ‘vaccine’.
I’d rather celebrate that she was the only one who took it.
I particularly liked the bit where her mother said she was mature enough to make her own decision having done the research. Pity she wasn’t also mature enough to stand up to her classmates and defend her position which brings her mature decision into question somewhat but few people can see inconsistencies.
The problem with not doing RCTs is that you end up comparing cohorts where you assume the only difference is vaccination status. But it isn’t true – vaccination status – as its voluntary – has other confounding variables. Unvaxxed correlates with poverty and deprivation (to some extent) – the poorest areas are the most unvaxxed. They are also likely to die 20 years earlier than the most vaxxed richest areas. Unvaxxed people will tend to have been working through the pandemic rather than lounging about behind the sofa. They are more likely to already have got covid – they have a different risk assessment criteria.
To find whether the vaccines work you would need to compare 2 cohorts that have been perfectly aligned for confounding variables.
I am sceptical as to how well they work because a) covid is only a danger to the mortally ill b) the mortally ill may not respond well to a vaccine (or it might kill them). For everyone else the vaccine is just an added risk of long term effects – unknown as yet because the vaccine was rushed out in a panic.
“There appear to be two parallel realities currently existing side-by-side in Covid world.”
Well, strictly speaking one is Reality and one is a Big Lie.
I caught covid from a double jabbed guy at the end of September. 6 of us got it, 3 unjabbed and 3 jabbed. I sailed through it using the Zelenko protocol. Most people I know are double jabbed and getting covid. What bugs me the most is that in this scam natural immunity counts for nothing as they make up crap like “it only last 6 months!”. After 6 months traces of antibodies in the blood may seem to be insignificant but that’s because they have moved into the bone marrow (B cells) , not to mention my T Cells which essentially have taken pictures of this virus and stored them for recall should it try and attack me again. Imagine getting measles or chicken pox and then being told you need those vaccines as your immunity only last 6 months!! Such a load of crap and something has to give soon as this scam is now starting to cost children dearly.
all the double vaxxed people I know suffered badly from covid. all the unvaxxed sailed through with barely a sore throat.
I got covid pretty bad (from a hospital waiting room I think) and I’m unvaccinated, my 20 year old daughter got it bad (from me!) and she’d had one jab. It just seems to affect different people differently, and I suppose there are different strains which could partially explain that.
However we both made a full recovery and are pretty much back to normal. I’ve never had a bad case of flu, but I imagine it’s not too dissimilar to what I experienced.
My son (mid 20’s) got a bit of a cough for a week – I think he probably had it mild. My wife who I would class as vulnerable didn’t get it at all. Both had been AZ jabbed months ago.
So there’s a lot of variation out there in response to the bug.
“I’ve never had a bad case of flu”
I have – I copped a bad dose of the 1958 version, and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. So I’m not naive about what viruses can do.
But this doesn’t alter my stance one iota.
Great stuff Will. I come on here for a little dose of skeptiscm and it is duly delivered whilst it seems the rest of the world (or at least the media, most institutions, people on the street) have gone mad.
The mainstream newspapers pump out taglines demonising the unvaccinated but this very article alone seems to pop their bubble.
Are these ‘vaccines’ in their current form even vaccines?
Judging them to other actual vaccines, they seem entirely uselesss if they only last 6 months or so. It just doesn’t seem like vaccinating the bulk of a population bi-annually for infinity is a realstic outcome.
If it was one jab, with life long immunity, or even two, or even one every 10 years, then fine…but every six months? I can’t even begin to fathom how dangerous that will be with regard to additional side effects either..
It does seem we’re living in a post-truth age now and questioning the official narrative is becoming increasingly hard to do without repercussions..
Let’s hope that a sense of..common sense..re-emerges eventually. Surely anyone can see this farce for what it is now?
Your penultimate paragraph would be better without the word ‘now’.
Been this way for ages, redefining words started with ‘Pandemic’. They greatly lowered the bar that defines ‘Pandemic, the key word used by the WHO to authorise, or indeed mandate, member governments to start procuring vast stocks of vaccines from Big Pharma.
Then, of course, they changed the definition of ‘vaccine’ 12 months ago to fit the experimental serums that were churned out.
There have been many many more.
My favourite was changing the weight that should be given to positive PCR tests in the asymptomatic during Biden’s innaurgartion speech. Pretty clear agenda.
then redefined “herd immunity”
And decided that healthy people were asymptomatic carriers!
If they just became useless after 6 months then this could be put down to experience as a horrifically expensive white elephant. But the efficacies of the various brands don’t just fade asymptotically to zero, they turn negative sooner or later (and within only a few months), as numerous studies show, and it’s anyone’s guess how deeply negative they will end up as the months clock up. They are doing medium to long term damage to immune systems, never mind the harms in other ways.
The ‘solution’ to administer another dose of something that is causing real harm is a catastrophic error and morally indefensible.
“Are these ‘vaccines’ in their current form even vaccines?”
They are clearly not vaccines in the traditional, familiar sense of the word, because vaccines always worked by exposing the patient’s immune system to something like the pathogen, and thus triggering a response that provides ongoing protection.
These novel therapies work differently, by manipulating the patient’s own cells at the genetic level to produce something that the body then produces antibodies to.
They are dishonestly called vaccines because that is a familiar term to people, who are thus less reluctant to have it tested on them. Charitably we can call this marketing or a “noble lie”, objectively it is manipulation by dishonest misrepresentation.
The fact that it does not provide much protection long term does not itself make it not a vaccine, it makes it a “leaky” vaccine (if it were a vaccine).
That, of course, has its own problems (as well as rendering the whole idea of discrimination between injected and uninjected futile (from a population health pov), as well as evil).
Oh, I’m quite sure that the Settled Science will Resettle at the point where it is declared that the merely double-jabbed have become filthy anti-vaxxing spreaders of disease.
Given that the “boosters” are being inflicted on everyone over 50, it won’t be long. We may even see triple-vaxxports to Save Our Christmas.
The order will go out to stop calling the double-vaxxed “fully vaxxed”. The use of the word “fully” in this meaning will probably stop overnight. It will be as if it had never happened. It will be replaced by words meaning “up to date”.
Has there been a single study yet of the effectiveness of any of the SARSCoV2 vaccines relative to the effectiveness of sensible non-pharmaceutical ways of strengthening the immune system? Even a single study?
I mean effectiveness against either a) suffering severe symptoms caused or facilitated by a SARSCoV2 infection, or b) spreading SARSCoV infection?
It’s as if … the rulers want to reduce the size of the population…
Interestingly the population of Russia is reported as falling by 1 million in the past year.
More importantly – is there a single study about the effectiveness of early, home-based pharmaceutical interventions?
Fascinating article.
The big overall question is whether there is a case for taking any of these ‘vaccines’ i.e. which people would actually benefit and for how long versus those who would disbenefit?
Many factors need to be considered and there is a limited amount of trustworthy unambiguous data available.
The evidence accumulating mostly points one way:
Waning then negative effectiveness against infection
No to negative impact on infectiousness
Waning then negative effectiveness against severe outcomes
Increasing evidence of short term safety issues
Emerging evidence of medium term safety issues
Early evidence of some apparent long term safety issues.