Recently, Danish health authorities decided to stop making Covid vaccines and boosters available to the general population under the age of 50. Note, the general population, not absolutely everyone under 50.
This interesting development, and the fact that the rationale for this decision has not been properly explained, has clearly wrought havoc among those whose day job it is to protect the reputation of these medications.
Flora Teoh, the Science Editor of the “fact checking” website Health Feedback, has now written an article which supposedly refutes the standard summary of this decision, i.e., the Danish health authorities have banned vaccines and boosters for nearly everyone under 50. Teoh‘s article is a typical fact-checking piece. She starts by stating a claim – “Denmark banned COVID-19 vaccines for anyone under 50” – which she then proceeds to refute, but the problem is no one has made that claim.
Two sources are listed, although the “facts” being “checked” are both supposedly contained in a headline above a video and a tweet linking back to an article, not in the YouTube video and article themselves.
The first headline, which refers to a video by Clay Travis, reads: “Denmark Bans Covid Shot For People Under 50 Years Old.“ The second, which is a tweet posted on Toby Young’s account linking to a piece by me in the Daily Sceptic, reads: “Denmark has banned the use of COVID-19 vaccines for people under 50 saying the benefits are too low. What it conspicuously fails to mention (though surely knows it) is that the risks are also too high.”
Unfortunately, neither the headline or the tweet state what Teoh claims they state, namely, that Denmark has banned the covid shots for anyone under 50. The word “anyone“ is crucial here. Instead, all that’s being claimed is that the vaccines have been banned in general for people under 50 and the discussion that follows in both cases contains details on which under-50s are exempt from this ban.
And those are, in effect, headlines. Headlines routinely generalise and exaggerate the contents of the videos and articles they’re flagging up. Let‘s take some examples:
“Food crisis if we ditch Russian oil,” The Times claimed on September 19th, 2022, while the article itself details that this is in fact the opinion of one central banking institute. In other words, it is not a fact that ditching Russian oil means food crisis, it is the opinion of some.
“High-profile Dems silent when asked about housing migrants,“ Fox News said in a headline the same day. But if you read the main text it turns out this does not at apply to all high-profile Democrats, only a handful. If Fox had said “All high-profile Dems silent…” its headline would be wrong. But it doesn‘t, thus it isn’t wrong. By the same token, while Denmark’s ban on Covid shots for people under 50 applies to almost everyone, there are a few exceptions. Headlines are headlines. Branding a video description or a tweet as “misinformation” because they contain condensed and generalised information, with a more detailed discussion in what follows, has nothing to do with checking facts. It’s just about creating strawmen, especially when the “fact-checker” even distorts the quoted headline to make it fit her narrative. This is what Flora Teoh does in her article by adding the crucial word “anyone“.
Teoh then moves on, claiming the Danish ban on vaccinations only applies to boosters. This is incorrect. The first section of the Q&A on the official website explains to whom COVID-19 vaccines should be made available in general, not just boosters:
Question: Who will be offered vaccination against COVID-19?
Answer: People aged 50 years and over will be offered vaccination. People aged under 50 who are at a higher risk of becoming severely ill from COVID-19 will also be offered vaccination against COVID-19.
Staff in the healthcare and elderly care sector as well as in selected parts of the social services sector who have close contact with patients or citizens who are at higher risk of becoming severely ill from COVID-19 will also be offered booster vaccination against COVID-19.
In addition, we recommend that relatives of persons at particularly higher risk accept the offer of vaccination to protect their relatives who are at particularly higher risk.
Before the start of the vaccination programme, the Danish Health Authority will publish guidelines for which persons aged under 50 are recommended booster vaccination.
This is the full list of the groups to whom the vaccination will be available. People under 50 who neither work in the service sectors mentioned, nor are at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19, are NOT eligible for vaccination. Vaccinating them is banned.
Then on to the boosters:
Question: Why are people under 50 not to be re-vaccinated?
Answer: The purpose of the vaccination programme is to prevent severe illness, hospitalisation and death. Therefore, people at the highest risk of becoming severely ill will be offered booster vaccination. The purpose of vaccination is not to prevent infection with COVID-19, and people aged under 50 are therefore currently not being offered booster vaccination.
People aged under 50 are generally not at particularly higher risk of becoming severely ill from COVID-19. In addition, younger people aged under 50 are well protected against becoming severely ill from COVID-19, as a very large number of them have already been vaccinated and have previously been infected with COVID-19, and there is consequently good immunity among this part of the population.
It is important that the population also remembers the guidance on how to prevent the spread of infection, including staying at home in case of illness, frequent aeration or ventilation, social distancing, good coughing etiquette, hand hygiene and cleaning.
Notice the words in the first question: “not to be re-vaccinated“. This is a pretty definitive prohibition.
Flora Teoh then moves on with a number of claims which appear to be unsubstantiated or false:
She explicitly claims, referring to general vaccination, not boosters, that people “can still choose to get the vaccine if they wish”. While this may have been the message last April, it is clear from the Q&A quoted above that for the general population under 50 this is no longer the case.
She claims the “benefits” of the COVID-19 vaccine “outweigh their risks”, without providing any reference to support this statement, let alone acknowledge how research and real-life data already show how the risks in fact outweigh the benefits for younger age-groups, especially young males.
Discussing the reason the vaccination programme was halted last spring, Teoh says: “It was this level of high vaccine coverage, coupled with falling numbers of COVID-19 cases that enabled Denmark to stop broad vaccination efforts,” quoting a CNBC story. The CNBC story, however explains that the immunity rested on not only vaccination, but also on natural immunity. Teoh fails to mention this crucial fact.
Claiming the COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous is a “false narrative” Teoh says. This is wrong. As studies have already shown, there are multiple risks associated with those vaccines, and for many groups the risk of vaccination is higher than the risk of the disease. Thus, they are dangerous for people in those groups.
Flora Teoh‘s article has nothing to do with checking facts or correcting wrong statements. All it has to do with is creating and then attacking strawmen, by distorting headlines, ignoring the crucial difference between headlines and the text they refer to, and presenting a number of unsubstantiated or false statements. Her “key takeaway” does not even address the issue in question – it is simply pure propaganda for the vaccines:
KEY TAKEAWAY: COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective at reducing a person’s risk of developing severe COVID-19 and death. More than 80% of Denmark’s population were fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by April 2022. Booster doses are now being offered to groups with a high risk of developing severe COVID-19. This will enhance protection against severe disease and death in the most vulnerable, as a large wave of infections are expected in the autumn and winter.
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Indian variant continues to suppress all cause mortality
Latest data out – its dropped off a cliff
There is 1 person in hospital who has tested positive for covid in the last 28 days in the entire of my county of Buckinghamshire
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=nhstrust&areaName=Buckinghamshire%20Healthcare%20NHS%20Trust
and still the restrictions go on. But then its data not dates you see
just to add – if the pandemic isn’t ‘officially’ over now then it’s never going to be over
maybe they will lift the final restrictions when no-one can remember anyone being in hospital with covid?
Well, if they end the status of ‘pandemic’, they will have to stop with emergency use of so-called ‘vaccines’. I can’t see that happening soon!
Exactly – and why the definition of ‘pandemic’ was altered to include a cold virus crossing borders.
Spot on !
Can’t do that. There are vaccines to sell.
yes exactly, so basically never…. glad everyone gets it… now what?
For the nation to wake up and smell the Covid con coffee?
They haven’t run out of countries yet for variants, and possibly when they have, there will be claims that aliens have landed and we now have the Mars variant
It ever ceases to amaze me anyway, that many people are so fearful when they hear of a high, bogus anyway see link, incidence number, as those people who made up that number are all sitting at home or in a hospital then, meaning that they can’t run into them anyway, but which is exactly what the fearful fear and think it means for them.
https://www.rubikon.news/artikel/die-inzidiotie
Keyboard playing up?
Good reason to lockdown to 2030
Would be nice, but not explain why he and red state US governors fell for and participated in the authoritarianscam in the first place.
Much more likely, they just play good cop/bad cop here and give the plebs/frogs some breathing space, before being ordered to turn the heat back up again from the autumn.
And it’s booster gene therapies forever anyway, as all ‘vaccine’ manufacturers publications and applications, including Valneva and Novavax, already show.
Problem is that there will be another invented “scary” variant coming along, probs early September, and with our frightened jelly- spined leader Johnson, who has said that he is not afraid of getting really “draconian”, its just a delaying of execution regarding lockdowns. Hope i`m wrong though.
no I don’t think you are wrong at all and I reckon it could be here far sooner than September
I’ve got the discovery of the xxxx Variant in my calendar for June 14th. I put it there 2 months ago!
They are just waiting for the ADE variant. Unfortunately there may not be enough wild virus going around to trigger it yet, unless they have something specially crafted and ready to release when enough have been “vaxxed”.
Bat Lady is winding up her charm.
It’s here! The Sheffield variant. September would be far too late. What we need is to release people just late enough that should the cases of this endemic virus begin to rise somewhat during the autumn then they can say “you see! It’s because we let you out! It was absolutely fine during April, May and June when you were locked up. Then in July and august when you started mingling and spreading it, cases have risen in September!”
Aliens.
Is this supposed to make us think the Government is reasonable??!
I suspect this is all political showboating just to make Boris Johnson look tough and in charge of the situation.
it will all have changed by this time next week – like a cat playing with a mouse before going in for the final kill
Most probably, as they then continue in the spirit of being reasonable and responsible of course, to insist that injection passports are the way forward in order to monitor the ongoing safety of the people. It will be crucial that there is stringent surveillance of the people – for the time being, for a period of 3 months, 3 years (insert whatever) – so that the government can take appropriate steps when deemed necessary to protect everyone…and some people will fall for it.
Official Govt positions will change as frequently as the wind direction. There will be no end to this while ever the same criminals remain in their positions. Regardless of what does happen 21st June, the wider population are now just Pavlovian dog’s. We’ll be trapped in another ‘lockdown’ soon enough.
Bozo ‘thinks’?
There’s newfor you.
Should the headline read
‘Pig Dictator changes course when threatened with violence by the population of Bolton’
Trans : So Mr Toad is keeping his options open, pending the wind direction.
Yes. I suppose it might be mildly interesting to those interested in Westminster politics to try to read the tea leaves but setting much store by anything that comes out of his mouth is madness.
More importantly, the real focus should not be on whether we’re to be granted X or Y “freedom” but on ways to discredit the narrative and un-brainwash people.
Yes. Inalienable democratic rights can’t be ‘granted’ in any philosophical sense by temporary governments in a true democracy. By definition.
The de-programming of people is indeed the real problem where the most common channels of communication have been commandeered as propaganda streams in North UKorea
Correct.
well if the indian variant wont keep them locked up and keep my online business booming maybe a new one will come along… where there is a profit, there is a way
No he doesn’t. It’s all scripted.
And whose fault is that that it was overdone? You great fat undisciplined, thoughtless, whim-driven communist fraud.
Surely, the primary measure of a virus or a new strain of a virus in view of its impact on the health of a nation should not be its transmissibility, but it’s severity.
It is widely known in the epidemiology community that viruses tend to mutate and evolve to become less severe but more transmissible.
From the virus’s perspective, this makes sense, for all organisms in the biosphere have one thing in common: The “biological imperative”, or the instinct to act in a way that ensures one’s survival and replication. This is true also of a virus. A virus evolves mind-bendingly quickly and this one has produced literally thousands of variants of itself, due to the ordinary Darwinian selection pressures driving its evolution. Crucially, it is not in a pathogen’s best interest to kill its host, as this ensures the opposite: that is CANNOT survive OR replicate.
Therefore a virus will evolve over time to become more transmissible but less deadly, so that it can live and replicate (mostly harmlessly) in its host’s body without killing it (like the common seasonal cold).
Once again, a new, more informative metric needs to be analyzed concerning the Indian variant. This should be the case rate compared to the death rate. Of course the situation in, for example, Bolton currently is that the death rate has increased slightly, in parallel with (but not in proportion to) a sharp increase in cases.
But the inevitable culmination of that state of affairs is that a higher proportion of unvaccinated people will gain natural immunity to the Indian variant, and push this variant down to insignificant death and hospitalization rates, even when the cases may be increasing (also depending on the test-rate of course).
This trend will be bolstered by the fact that vaccine uptake is increasing in all parts of the country, including Bolton.
The people need to act like viruses: “ in a way that insures their survival and replication.”
Spread firstly within households and then within the community? Sounds like the point of lockdown then is to ensure everyone you live with is also infected first and then everyone else too…
Rise in number of Indian Covid variant cases means plans to scrap maximum of 30 attendees likely to be pushed back
More nonsense brought to you by the United Kingdom government, supported b their “advisors and who else? I think we all know. So much cash has flowed during the past 15 months between hands. The current cash cow are private COVID tests for travel. You are NOT ALLOWED to use an nhs test, even though there is a COVID test centre on every corner in the country without one person being tested. You would have thought with just a soupçon of ingenuity, the nhs would have seen this as an opportunity to recover some of their losses. Charge a traveller £ for a COVID swab test. But no, that cash is going to someone else. Who? Who were awarded these contracts? How did, overnight, hundreds of companies pop up who were licensed to collect and perform COVID swabs. God I wish everything in government ran this efficiently such as border control at the airport.
The government has been very clever. They have appeased the travel industry by “opening up” travel corridors. They have appeased the uk citizen by saying you can travel to,these few places. On the other hand, they are going making it as difficult and expensive as possible and continue to use scare tactics about your risk of travel. You cannot make this stuff up. What is next? There will be something. We all know that.
It is vital to society that if these predictions are seen to be as foolhardy as they appear, that these individuals are held to account. Those scientists epidemiologists and Public Health advisors have been responsible for deaths of patients who would have survived pre pandemic. The use of alarmist predictions has wilfully engendered a fear in society by promoting the Covid19 first health service and requires external investigation.
He does more U turns than a dodgy sat nav. He is a mess in every respect, yet the great British public are still hanging on his every word judging by local elections. I am a lifelong Tory voter, no more. I voted Freedom Alliance, but as expected, the candidate got very few votes.
I suspect that Boris is becoming rapidly aware that the nation with so many vaccinated, are now wanting action to lift the Covid regulations.His SAGE cohorts are in a mood to hang him out to dry if he goes against their advice, which we all consider to be flawed. Fear is a popular weapon for the politicians to control the populace (False Evidence Appearing Real).
Dr Yeadon has explained that this so-called variant is so close to the original as to be of no consequence and is certainly milder, which, even if it were a little bit more infectious, doesn’t matter. All that needs to happen it seems to me and in view of Boris’s apparent dislike of removal of our freedoms, is he needs to find his spine and declare it’s over, everyone should stop being fearful, open up and travel nearly freely.
If you start with the assumption that everything Govt & their advisors tell you is a LIE, you’ll find life gets a lot easier.
Ain’t that the truth? Works for me!!