The amount of misinformation being put out by Government ministers and senior medics about the proportion of unvaccinated people in hospital with Covid is reaching a new level that is beginning to feel disturbingly sinister.
When lockdown sceptics are joining in with the condemnation, you know the problem has ratcheted up a notch or three.
The normally reliable Philip Johnston in the Telegraph points the finger at the unvaccinated for threatening the capacity of the health service, citing a number of misleading claims.
The panacea, we are told, is to get boosted. Yet by definition the refuseniks will not get a third jab when they have not been vaccinated in the first place. I understand if someone does not want to get jabbed. It is their body and they are entitled to say they do not want to be medicated. We cannot force them to. But if the consequence of that decision is to place others at risk then it cannot be allowed to pass by default. We all understand, too, that some people for a variety of medical reasons cannot have the vaccine.
In order to persuade a greater take-up of jabs, the Government wanted to bring in vaccine passports for certain settings but watered these down to include proof of a negative test, which rather defeats the object. Scores of Tory MPs voted against even this on the grounds that such a measure was illiberal.
But the Conservative Party has never been a libertarian movement. It is supposed to believe that with rights come responsibilities. Opponents of heavy-handed state action against the citizen often quote J S Mill’s famous dictum: “The only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised society, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” I agree with that. I don’t see why I should have restrictions placed on me when I am unlikely to cause harm to others.
But that is not necessarily true of the unvaccinated. According to Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, nine in 10 Covid patients needing the most care are unjabbed. A similar point was made by Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, who said the “vast, vast majority” of seriously ill people were unjabbed, identifying “black Londoners, Muslim Londoners, Jewish Londoners and eastern European Londoners” as groups that are proving particularly resistant. Why is this?
In the absence of comprehensive official data, we are having to rely on anecdotal evidence, but I know several hospital consultants who tell of seriously ill patients being transferred to critical care units who are still unvaccinated, taking up emergency beds needed for other patients.
One told me that so far he had not seen anyone in intensive care who had been jabbed, suggesting that even if vaccinated people are getting sick, they’re not getting as sick. This should be good news, even with the onset of Omicron, and yet here we are again facing a lockdown to preserve the NHS from collapse.
The claims Johnston repeats here are, at best, highly misleading. Take Sajid Javid’s line that “nine in 10 Covid patients needing the most care are unjabbed”. This stat has been repeated often by the haters-of-the-unvaccinated in recent days, but their source is rarely stated. It appears to refer to the claim made by NHS England at the start of December that, as the Times reports, “between July and November more than nine in 10 patients receiving the most specialist care, in which artificial lungs were used to try to save their lives, were unvaccinated”.
That raw statistic may be true (it is not in the public domain), but any implication that it means the unvaccinated are adding considerable pressure to health service resources doesn’t withstand scrutiny since the numbers involved here are miniscule. As Dr Clare Craig points out, over recent weeks there have only been one or two new Covid admissions being put onto an ‘artificial lung’ ECMO machine each week.
What about Sadiq Khan’s claim that the “vast, vast majority” of seriously ill people are unjabbed? It is, once again, asserted without providing a source, and in this case it appears to be flatly contradicted by the published data.
According to the latest data published by the UKHSA, a minority of Covid hospital admissions in the month ending December 12th – 42.9% – were unvaccinated. According to the latest data from ICNARC, a minority of Covid ICU admissions in October – 46.7% – and a minority in the two-week period November 1st to 14th – 47.5% – were unvaccinated. ICNARC has not published any more recent data than that on the ratio of unvaccinated to vaccinated Covid patients in ICU. If it has changed dramatically since then, that data is not in the public domain.
A Telegraph editorial on Monday drew on the same set of myths and even followed it up with an implied threat.
We were assured that if we were vaccinated – and most of us answered the call – the Government would pursue a different policy, of learning to live with Covid. The main reason that this is being abandoned is not because the new strain is especially dangerous to most people but because hospitals risk being overwhelmed, mainly by people who have refused the jab. What is to be done about them?
Et tu, Telegraph?
In January, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (the organisation which includes the European Court of Human Rights), adopted a resolution urging member states and the European Union to ensure that “citizens are informed that the vaccination is not mandatory and that no one is under political, social or other pressure to be vaccinated if they do not wish to do so” and that “no one is discriminated against for not having been vaccinated, due to possible health risks or not wanting to be vaccinated”.
There are many reasons a person may choose not to be vaccinated, particularly if he or she is young, healthy, or has had Covid already, and is wary of the novel genetic technology and unusually high level of reported adverse events. This should be respected, without prejudice or discrimination. There should be no question of penalising him or her, anymore than, say, smokers, drinkers or motorcyclists should be penalised for making what is deemed by health authorities to be a higher risk choice.
Previously the haters-of-the-unvaccinated focused on infection rates and the claim that the unvaccinated spread the disease far more than the vaccinated. Once that claim collapsed they switched to hospital admissions. When the data there is lacking, they either make stuff up, use data from six months ago, or find obscure statistics involving tiny numbers of people to find something, anything, that sounds sufficiently scary to demonise the unvaccinated.
Apart from anything else, whatever happened to simply being a decent human being?
Discussion
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It’s all about power – they don’t like the fact that there’s a group of people out there that they have no control over. It’s why they find emotive and incorrect facts about the situation and unvaccinated people, and then promote such rubbish in MSM. Unfortunately, they’re believed by most people who are then unprepared to have any sort of intelligent discussion. There is no room for manoeuvre in these people’s minds – the unvaccinated are always extremists causing harm to others and being irresponsible. In my experience, the unvaccinated seem to be more open-minded and enquiring, and more likely to ‘live and let live’.
To plagiarise ‘Blazing Saddles’ – prairie shit.
Ukhsa Vaccine Surveillance Report week 49. Vaxxed are x5 over represented in ICU and deaths. Check it out.
The real data on ICU and deaths in fact show that there are 5 times as many in the vaxed group, especially in the over 80s. From PHE (or might be ukhsa own data). I’ll return with the link
The possibility of medium or long term adverse side effects from the mRNA and viral vector vaccines cannot be discounted at this stage, especially as it is becoming evident that multiple shots are now required and there is strong evidence of serious short term problems in some cases. If there are such longer term effects, then the presence of a significant percentage of unvaccinated people may well turn out to be a major benefit to society in the future.
The other basic error by the UK government – and no doubt many others – has been to effectively place all its eggs in one basket. If the groups of people “vaccinated” with mRNA and viral vector vaccines had been kept distinct, the potential for long term harm to society from adverse side effects from one or other of the vaccines could have been minimised. However, in the UK, the third and fourth “boosters” given to those who had viral vector vaccines for shots 1 & 2 are now mRNA, so adverse effects from the mRNA type can now affect all the vaccinated.
The UK government has cancelled its order for the Valneva attenuated live virus vaccine, which is another mistake.… Read more »
There Are Now 365 Studies that Prove the Efficacy of Ivermectin and HCQ in Treating COVID-19. Any hospital administrator who mandated the shots to employees to comply with the government mandate for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement and who refused to allow alternative treatments to be tried, doctors who pushed their patients to take the EUA drug without giving fully informed consent, anyone who forcefully administered the shot, the AMA, AAP, Boards of Health, CDC, FDA, NIH, WHO, scientists who participated in the development, Big Pharma (Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, Astra Zeneca, et. al.), anyone who pushed the sick into nursing homes resulting in deaths, all must be arrested, prosecuted, tried and if found guilty sentenced to prolonged imprisonment and fines or death for intentional homicide. Get your ivermectin before it is too late! https://ivmpharmacy.com
As I said in my comments on this hit-piece in the News Roundup, you have to either wonder at who IS controlling what these journos say – are they or via the Editorial team being coerced into doing such things because those who ‘pay the bills’ are telling them to OR were they always like this and just change their tune to suite the prevailing wind direction in order to keep their jobs or get promotion in the industry?
Very few journos these days care what their readership thinks. That Johnson’s ‘article’ has attracted 5500 reader comments (I’m surprised that they were allowed at all, given the nature and tone of the piece) in around 15 hours just shows how angry at him readers are.
I’m staring tho think that some of those at the DT who ‘appear’ to be on our side are just ‘going through the motions’ to keep large swathes of subscribers from unsubbing, because, as many have noted, Philip Johnson was previously on the other side of the fence not that long ago. Quite a few other columnists have now ‘softened’ their tone as regards rejecting the COVID response – especially on the ‘vaccines’.
Thos who… Read more »
The “othering” seems to be working.
I overheard a work colleague yesterday saying that she had had “her booster”, and that she was “angry” at those would would not get jabbed. She stated that she thought it was the unvaxxed “who are stopping us from getting back to normal”. She further said that she had no problem with the covipass, as it would keep people “safe”. Oh, and no problem with demanding care workers and healthcare workers are jabbed in order to “protect people”.
Another colleague claimed that the hospitals are full of the unvaxxed. Didn’t back this up, just said it.
I felt quite intimidated by the feeling – they were so sure that they were right – that I kept my head down and said nothing. I need to keep my job, and so far everyone assumes that everyone else is jabbed, so nothing is said. But with things as they are, who knows what might happen if one person revealed their un-jabbed status?
And yes, it is simply appalling that in just under 2 years we have reached this state of being.
Keep your head down. Lie, if you need to keep your job. This will be largely over by spring. The government will delay any announcement until summer, then Boris (if he’s still around) will crow about his success in defeating covid.
I reckon you are right.
Don’t give your medical status to anyone, and as RedHotScot says keep your head down. These people are just bleaters and parroters of the guff the MSM push out. They don’t do ANY research of their own and they’re basically terrified of everything. These are not the ones you have to fight. Don’t waste your energy. Tell them mind their own business if they ask. Stand in your truth if really contested.but basically starve them of information about yourself. That will makes feel far more uncomfortable than if you challenged them. Just let them be. You owe them nothing.
Yes. Remember why the State was so angry with Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner. It wasn’t that McGoohan had resigned. It was that he wouldn’t tell them WHY he’d resigned, and they couldn’t get that information out of him.
Keep ’em guessing. Uncertainty is torture to these people.
Excellent series, never bettered.
I’m in a similar position though not, thank God, likely to lose my job (I’m self-employed).
I was supposed to meet a friend for coffee a couple of weeks ago in a coffee shop. She messaged me just beforehand to say she’d gone home after her booster appt and would I come to hers instead – so I did.
During the chat it came out that I wasn’t jabbed; no reaction – we wound up our chat and I went home.
The morning after BJ did his broadcast at his desk, I found a venomous WhatsApp message saying how shocked she was by what I’d told her, and how dare I put her at risk, and do my customers know I’m unvaccinated?
Since then I’ve been a bit paranoid about telling people. Two women at church were discussing their jabs, which they had had, and which booster, etc. I was filled with dread that they would start asking me, so I pretended to be distracted by something on the other side of the building, and prepared to leave my seat if necessary.
I know exactly how you feel, Hypatia, and also wonder how we have come to this state… Read more »
Reported by Alex Berenson from Dec 7th-
‘Also, check out those hospital statistics from Wales. Even among people under 60, the vaccinated are three in five of inpatients (and nine in ten of inpatients over 60). The shots are doing a tremendous job at stopping severe disease!’
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/yet-another-reason-vaccines-dont?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo0NTgxMjc5MywicG9zdF9pZCI6NDUxMTYxNDAsIl8iOiI5eDhOZCIsImlhdCI6MTY0MDE3Njc1NSwiZXhwIjoxNjQwMTgwMzU1LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMzYzMDgwIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.7L5a2bsqSaWmKGmkasKzhuEc5SpzuXtokU_5An4yrpI
My sister is a care worker and she is rushed-off her feet at the moment … not because of more new patients to care for but because of lack of staff – quite a few care workers where she works have quit and the care agency she works for is having trouble finding replacements.
Yes, I am on Faceache, and I get 2 or 3 adverts for care work pop up every single day!
And I have never shown any interest in this either.
Perhaps they’ll have to start paying a decent wage to attract people.
This claim seems to be based on the use of artificial lung and heart systems called ECMO. There are probably about 30 ECMO units in the entire country. And given the low number, probably younger age groups, pregnant women are prioritised over others. So yes, it’s another (…….deliberately…..?) completely misleading statistic.
This disgusting article is the most egregious example of fearmongering I’ve seen yet. Interestingly the comments on it have now been closed down but they were coming in thick and fast (30-40 per minute).
The misinformation, the spurious data, the ‘othering’ of the unvaccinated and attempts to paint them as a selfish, dangerous sub-class of society (seen that before somewhere…)
I am shocked that the DT allowed it to be published, but as Will Jones rightly points out they are themselves fully bought into this at an editorial level. It goes without saying that they are beneficiaries themselves of the Billinda Gates largesse, to the tune of £3-4 million annually I believe.
Not that I have any expectations, but I have submitted a formal complaint, and would encourage others to do likewise
Links to the complaints page and the article itself below,
#Editorial complaints (telegraph.co.uk)
I’m fed up with the unvaccinated rump who risk pushing us back into lockdown (telegraph.co.uk)
This disgusting article is the most egregious example of fearmongering I’ve seen yet. Interestingly the comments on it have now been closed down but they were coming in thick and fast (30-40 per minute).
The misinformation, the spurious data, the ‘othering’ of the unvaccinated and attempts to paint them as a selfish, dangerous sub-class of society would not be out of place in 1930’s Germany. I am shocked that the DT allowed it to be published, but as Will Jones rightly points out they are themselves fully bought into this at an editorial level. It goes without saying that they are beneficiaries themselves of the Billinda Gates largesse, to the tune of £3-4 million annually I believe.
Not that I have any expectations, but I have submitted a formal complaint, and would encourage others to do likewise
Links to the complaints page and the article itself below,
Editorial complaints (telegraph.co.uk)
I’m fed up with the unvaccinated rump who risk pushing us back into lockdown (telegraph.co.uk)
Thank you for this rebuttal Will. Sadly the once great Daily Telegraph has lost the plot, dangerously so. There are now over 5,000 comments btl on that article, and many are disturbingly from folk who clearly have swallowed the propaganda hook, line and sinker, unless there is suddenly a huge well of jokers who take pleasure in being deeply unpleasant for fun.
The tone is reminiscent of a society prepared to look the other way as the cattle trucks trundle by, and I find it chilling. I also find it difficult to believe that a journalist for whom I have had the greatest respect over decades as a DT reader has published this apparently carefully constructed article without understanding it’s potential impact.
“The amount of misinformation being put out by Government ministers and senior medics about the proportion of unvaccinated people in hospital with Covid is reaching a new level that is beginning to feel disturbingly sinister.“
Well, many aspects of this folly and evil have seemed sinister to a lot of us from the start. Not sure why it is taking DS so long to cotton on. Deliberately lying about this, which is without doubt what is being done, is inexcusable. It is encouraging persecution of a minority by the majority, for political purposes. There is only one word for that – EVIL.
I paraphrase:
“The new scariant is not particularly dangerous yet hospitals are at risk of being overrun by those who have not been injected.”
So what’s making them poorly?
Philip Johnston used to try to be accurate. His copy was always markedly clean. He’s an opinion writer who is a former reporter, used to checking facts, and he can write unbiased copy.
However, you don’t rise as he did, and stay in place, without extreme sensitivity to what the boss class wants of you.
Everything he says here will be superficially true in that he quotes others accurately – I am sure his posh friends have told him this. And note his careful caveats. But completely unverified. Pure propaganda, Philip.
I imagine the Torygraph had the same big wrapper urging boosters paid by taxpayer cash as the other papers. How is their profit margin currently?
It’s almost as if they have to draw lots for who has to write this week’s propaganda piece and Philip was the unlucky one this week. It’s very out of character for him, as you say.
The Telegraph has been going downhill for a long time but this really is a new low for them. There are comments under that article in the four figures now, overwhelmingly hostile to it.
When the pandemic ends, a lot of newspapers are going to go to the wall because they are entirely dependent on funding from government and the likes of Gates.
They are in receipt of funding from the Gates Foundation, which from the webpage advertising that fact apears to terminate sometime in the first quarter of 2022.
We’ve been DT subscribers for many years, and were a few months ago offered the facility to offer one free Digital subscription to a friend lasting as long as we remain subscribers. We’ve recently been offered two more of the same. Someone at the DT is desperate to get the paper a higher profile, for whatever reason.
It could well be deliberate, part of the psyop.
It could be that people, maybe especially media types, are incapable of holding two thoughts simultaneously in their heads any more.
1) So-called vaccines do not stop transmission, indeed vaccinated may carry higher viral load without knowing it.
2) The vast majority of people at risk are elderly with existing commorbidities.
The logic of those two statements means passes, mandates etc are nothing to do with health or even NHS pressure. They are purely political , ‘we demand you do this, or else’.
Either the commentators supporting action against unvaxed actively support this ‘politic’ or they are as thick as shit, or both. Its probably an even spread.
The medical reason I have for not wishing to be ‘vaccinated’ is the same reason I have for not drinking antifreeze just because it’s a bit chilly outside.
“. . . Previously the haters-of-the-unvaccinated focused on infection rates and the claim that the unvaccinated spread the disease far more than the vaccinated. Once that claim collapsed they switched to hospital admissions. When the data there is lacking, they either make stuff up, use data from six months ago, or find obscure statistics involving tiny numbers of people to find something, anything, that sounds sufficiently scary to demonise the unvaccinated.
Apart from anything else, whatever happened to simply being a decent human being?“
Absolutely spot on Will – sums the whole thing up perfectly! Sadly, decent human beings are becoming as rare as hens teeth these days – even (one of) God’s representatives can’t be counted among them and has jumped on the bandwagon to condemn those with pure blood. Grrrr!
There is slight of hand going on here.
I have been studiously accumulating the official Govt Weekly Covid Surveillance reports (England & Wales) from week 36 to Week 50. This is published every Thursday.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-vaccine-weekly-surveillance-reports
When one takes the simple position that the “unvaccinated” are those with zero jabs, the statistics are clear:-
Simply put, either this report is 100% B.S – which I doubt or those with a loud enough mouth-piece (MSM) are defining the “unvaccinated” rather conveniently as those without a booster jab.
I suspect the reality of the matter is the booster shot is to overcome short-term/winter AED as it is clear to my simple view that those who have had a shot are the ones consuming resources in hospitals and the morg.
“Apart from anything else, whatever happened to simply being a decent human being?”
That went out the window very early on when the gov focussed on scaring the crap out of people in order to push lockdowns, masks and vaccines for population groups who would derive no net benefit
I’m very pleased I stopped buying the DT about 4 years ago. I even stopped looking at the free content online 2 years ago – I don’t want to boost their online viewing figures!
A despicable rag – as they all are now.
I say again , great for the crossword, the letters page, Charles Moore etc and Hedgehog bedding – not much else.
Politicians should be forced to publish all background data to their pronouncements. As it stands they could well be cherry picking statistics that supports their policies (or even just making it up).
Even when they do they are being deceitful.
Yesterday’s technical briefing of the OMT had charts and graphs with numbers. One chart showed the clear text that 47% of people in hospital were unvaxxed, 53% vaxxed. Yet the coloured graph next to it was based on number of unvaxxed proportional to the whole group of unvaxxed people at risk (i.e. those over 60), approx. 10% of the population compared to 90% vaxxed. The graph then showed a red line which was almost at a 90 degree angle to indicate the unvaxxed, with an almost flat green line at the bottom to indicate the unvaxxed, whereas a true graph would have shown two lines side by side. As shown, it appeared at first glance as if 90% of the people in hospital (in absolute numbers) were unvaxxed.
They are also fiddling the infection numbers, they are 50-50, but the number says they don’t know the vaxx status of 25% of the positive tests. BS, they have the numbers, they are intentionally withholding them as it would skew the numbers to far toward the vaxxed group.
I think this is very important data from ONS. It shows that unvaccinated people are the least likely to get infected with Omicron & triple vaxxed 4.5x more likely. The data looks at 1,760 people who tested positive for the virus from 29th Nov to 12th Dec. 30% of them (536) were unvaccinated.
Of these 1,760 testing positive the likelihood that they had the Omicron variant was as follows:
Will anyone in the MSM pick this up?
“This analysis uses data from the COVID-19 Infection Survey for the fortnight, 29 November 2021 to 12 December 2021.
These early results show the characteristics of people more likely to be infected with the Omicron variant compared with the Delta variant.
These early results are based on the first fortnight’s data that have sufficient cases for analysis on the Omicron variant, so caution is advised”
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/adhocs/14107coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveyukcharacteristicsrelatedtohavinganomicroncompatibleresultinthosewhotestpositiveforcovid19
“In the absence of comprehensive official data”.
Well, this dipstick just showed his total (and undoubtedly wilful) lack of knowledge on the subject, so he should now refrain from opening his gob on the matter. What does he think the UKHSA virus surveillance reports that are published every week are? The numbers of people infected, admitted to hospital and dying, per age cohort, are quite comprehensive indeed. They show unequivocally, and have done for months, that the vast majority of people ‘burdening’ the health care system (i.e. becoming ill and then seeking health care, the raison d’etre of a health care system) are in fact the fully vaxxed.
A nonsense, shameless article that not only shows the writer to be a bigot seeking to cause harm to a specific group, he also makes himself appear outrageously stupid. A simple point, but worth repeating: if the vax works, the vaxxed are safe from the unvaxxed. The fact that an unvaxxed person might be more in need of hospital care is neither here nor there. Has the writer ever complained about the number of drunks clogging A&E every single weekend?
It is high time for legal action to be taken against such… Read more »
Like others, I get the feeling that this is part of a coordinated drive by the government through the ‘bought and paid for’ media to drive up ‘vaccinations’. It can’t be a coincidence that such articles have appeared in various MSMs over the last week. The only good thing is that where comments are allowed, such articles have so far been unceremoniously panned by readers. But I fear that attitude might not last if new restrictions are bought in and the ‘unvaccinated’ are specifically blamed for them.
Can someone explain the difference between being admitted and being “seriously ill”?
I find the so-called “Independent” and it’s smaller rag to be the worst offender of misinformation and bias. They have an insatiable desire to stoke up as much fear and poison against the rebellion as possible.
Who are they supposed to be independent of? Can’t be the government or the government’s masters, since they’re in tune with everything the government peddles.
You’d need to see their funders to answer that question.
I was a so-called “founder member”, ie had a job with them when the Independent started. It never really tried to apply the idea of lack of bias to news copy – too much work for the desk – though Andreas attempted to keep up standards. Journalists as a breed tend to Guardian politics (other than a few opinion writers) so inevitably it slid and slid in that direction once Andreas had gone.
Now it is openly an on-line propaganda sheet, as you say. And a gun for hire.
Thank you so much Will for this article. It is getting very very sinister out there. My feeling is blaming and scapegoating is being used to shift the focus away from other analysis.
It is getting very very sinister out here
But it could be the storm before the breakthrough among the public.
If some are blaming us, the general unease among the jabbed may equally be against their own fate: caused by gov.