The real-world effectiveness of Covid vaccines has not matched the hype of the 95% efficacy claimed in manufacturer trials on the basis of which they were granted emergency-use authorisation. They’ve proven disappointingly leaky with a surprisingly swift waning of effectiveness, necessitating boosters every few months.
In many cases vaccine rollouts coincided with an upsurge in infections, substantiating the concerns expressed by many experts that a mass vaccination campaign in the middle of a pandemic will drive the evolution of vaccine-escape variants and generate self-perpetuating waves of infections from the mutating variants.
A study from Oxford University in June showed the infection risk increased by 44% in the double-vaccinated in England. An analysis in July by El Gato Malo showed that U.S. states with higher vaccination rates were experiencing higher Covid hospital admissions. By the end of 2022 the vast majority of Covid deaths in many countries were among the vaccinated and boosted.
This has discredited officials and health experts from President Joe Biden on down who claimed that the vaccines would prevent infection, onward transmission, severe illness and (initially) or (as a fallback justification) death. Hence their early but by now abandoned claims about the pandemic of the unvaccinated.
By contrast, by the end of 2022 stories like the video documentary Anecdotals, which simply give voice to the vaccine injured, and studies alleging a wide range of serious side-effects and injuries from the vaccines were challenging the official narrative of the vaccines being safe and effective.
Neither safe nor effective was the growing chorus instead. On November 25th 2022 the physician-scientist Dr. Masanori Fukushima from Kyoto University warned that “the harm caused by vaccines is now a worldwide problem” and that “given the wide range of adverse events, billions of lives could ultimately be in danger”.
There is nothing objectionable in principle to harnessing revolutionary new mRNA technology to improve public health. Major medical advances in the past have been made possible by technological breakthroughs. But a revolutionary technology increases the testing burden for ensuring safety, even while a raging pandemic heightens the urgency of accelerated vaccine development and manufacture. If granted emergency use authorisation to cater to the second demand, prudence strengthens the imperative to rigorous monitoring of short, medium and long-term side effects in numbers and severity.
This is where authorities have fallen short and caused significant long-term damage to public confidence in the major institutions. Attempting to force-vaccinate the whole world with a new and untested technology was the height of irresponsibility and ignoring the mounting evidence of serious adverse events amounts to criminal negligence.
The best, if not the only true measure of the whole of society impact of an epidemic or pandemic is excess mortality. Norman Fenton and Martin Neil subjected worldwide excess mortality data to linear regression models and found no significant link between excess deaths in 2022 and (a) Covid cases in 2020, (b) long Covid, (c) lockdown stringency, or (d) healthcare quality. But they did find “a statistically significant linear relationship between countries that are highly vaccinated and excess deaths”. Elliot Middleton calculates that in 2020, Covid deaths (meaning not all were from Covid) accounted for 42% of all excess deaths in the U.S.
Remember, this is before the announcement of a vaccine breakthrough and therefore the excess mortality toll is not affected by the count of vaccine injured. Thus, although Covid deaths comprised a substantial portion of the total toll, the lockdown component was still higher – and policymakers should have known this at the time in 2020 itself but chose to ignore it despite multiple warnings from credible sources.
Ziva Kunda’s influential 1990 article “The Case for Motivated Reasoning” has nearly 10,000 citations. Her thesis was that motivation shapes reasoning. Reliance on a biased set of cognitive processes means that people are more likely to arrive at conclusions they want to arrive at, by using the strategies for accessing, constructing and evaluating tools and data that are the most likely to yield the conclusions they desire. Very hot/cold/dry/wet this year? Climate science tells us it’s because of climate change and therefore the current weather conditions validate the science. Infected by Covid after the sixth jab? Be grateful for the six doses as otherwise you would most likely have died.
As the saying goes, you cannot reason people out of beliefs that they arrived at without the use of reason.
In December, a new ‘hindcasting’ paper from the Commonwealth Fund made claims for vaccine success that were simply too inflated even to be plausible: 3.3 million lives, 18.6 million hospitalisations and 120 million infections averted just in the U.S. alone in 2021-22! It was picked up and reported by the mainstream media. Unsurprisingly, the conclusions are derived from “a model pretending to be data” that cannot be replicated. It’s an internal self-referential circular argument in which the conclusions are contained in the assumptions whose details are not made public.
The authors hold that “The reported ‘mild’ nature of Omicron is in large part because of vaccine protection.” Without vaccines, they estimate that Omicron’s infection fatality rate (IFR) would have been 2.7 times higher than for the original variant.
Alex Berenson writes this is “the dumbest, most dishonest argument for Covid jabs” thus far, long after pretty much universal agreement that vaccines stop neither infection nor transmission but are, at best, modestly effective for a short transient period. According to Our World in Data, Omicron has killed around 450,000 people worldwide (including the U.S.) in the eight-month April-November 2022 period inclusive. Collating the empirical outcomes from Our World in Data and Worldometers, at the end of the year, Africa’s double-vaccinated were 27.5% of the population, compared to 69% in the U.S. and 66.9% in Europe. Their respective cumulative Covid deaths per million people (DPM) were <0.01, 1.00 and 0.71. Only four of 47 European countries have DPM below 1,000. By contrast, only six of 58 countries in Africa have DPM above 1,000, and of these six, five have higher vaccination rates than the African average.
Yet, we are expected to believe that somehow, the vaccines miraculously saved 1 million Americans in that six-month timeframe.
Away from the tautological conclusions of models, there is little reliable data to show clinical benefits of Covid vaccines in preventing hospitalisation and death and much evidence to the contrary.
Japan is among the latest countries to offer evidence of the ‘immunity debt’ phenomenon (Figure 2). Japan is a country where owing to congested conditions, and perhaps out of concern for the elderly in one of the world’s oldest societies (over-65s make up almost a third of the population), mask-wearing has long been a common cultural feature in the November-February winter months.
This was done whenever someone had the sniffles, or else feared catching the cold. It was a sign of consideration for others. Compliance therefore is not an issue for the Government and by all accounts since the pandemic facemasks have become a ubiquitous feature of public life in Japan.
Vaccine requirements were slower to be introduced there but they seem to be making up for lost time. I am due to travel to Japan later this month and one of the entry requirements is three doses of the vaccine or else a PCR test within 72 hours of departure. In 2020, Japan was heavily criticised for tardiness in not taking the novel virus seriously enough to impose restrictions. In an article for the Japan Times in January 2021, I pointed out that given their relative performances, instead of attacking Japan, the most locked down countries should envy its results. Ironically, with heavier restrictions and vaccine mandates, Japan’s Covid metrics have deteriorated substantially. Figure 3 compares it to Denmark where, it will be recalled, authorities dropped vaccine recommendations for under-18s from July 1st 2022 and for under-50s from November 1st. Sweden and Norway swiftly followed suit.
Will the penny drop in Japan, where their own data show they did hugely better before going down the route of heavier restrictions and higher vaccine coverage? That perhaps, just possibly, pharmaceutical and nonpharmaceutical interventions might be driving sustained waves of the virus? Don’t hold your breath. Japan’s ability to look reality firmly in the eye, turn around, and walk resolutely in the opposite direction is no less impressive than in the Western democracies.
Japan isn’t alone. The graphic illustration of the ineffectiveness of Covid vaccines in preventing the infection and mortality tolls can be shown with several countries. All these charts (Figures 2-9) prove the pointlessness of vaccine certificates:
- In Japan, the total number of Covid deaths until 80% of the population was vaccinated on December 9th 2021 was 18,370. In little over one year since then, the death toll was 37,858. That is, more than twice as many have died with Covid in the 12 months since 80% of people were fully vaccinated than in the 19 months until then.
- Israel’s vaccination drive hit 50% of the population on March 28th 2021, on which date its Covid death toll was 6,185. Another 5,838 Israelis had died with Covid by December 28th 2022, meaning nearly half the total Covid dead came after half the population was fully vaccinated. Israel and Palestine are one example of different vaccination rates among adjacent communities (Israelis high, Palestinians low) having little impact on their death rates.
- In the U.S. too the 516,000 Covid deaths after reaching 50% double-vaccination coverage on July 9th 2021 represents 46% of all Covid deaths until December 28th 2022.
- Australia hit the 50% vaccination threshold on October 11th 2011, with the Covid death total being 1,461 on that date. The mortality toll was 16,964 on December 28th 2022. Thus 10.6 times as many Australians died with Covid in the 14 months since 50% were double-vaccinated as in 19 months until then.
- For what it’s worth, New Zealand’s experience has been even worse. Its Covid death toll as at December 28th was 2,331, 78 times higher than 30 at 50% vaccination mark, and 57 times higher than 41 at 70% vaccination.
How anyone can look at the Covid vaccination and mortality metrics of New Zealand, Australia, and Japan and still hold fast to the ‘safe and effective’ vaccine narrative is beyond comprehension. Instead, one more initially plausible hypothesis is that the behaviour of the virus is Covid vaccine invariant i.e., the vaccines make no difference to the virus, and a second hypothesis is that the vaccine may actually be driving infections, serious illness and deaths by some mysterious mechanism not yet identified by scientists – although some studies are starting to point the way.
Earlier, Gibraltar, Cambodia, (Figure 5) and the Seychelles were examples of countries where Covid infections spiked in 2021 despite substantial vaccination in their populations.
The weekly surveillance report from New South Wales (NSW) Health for the week of December 11th-17th, published on December 22nd, is the last one for the year. The next one will be published on January 5th but the reports will no longer include the vaccination status of people hospitalised, admitted to ICU or dead with Covid.
Until the week ending May 21st 2022, the reports lumped together the unvaccinated with those whose vaccination status was not known. Figures 8-9 therefore represent the entire data set for NSW Covid-related hospital and ICU admissions and deaths, from May 22nd to December 17th 2022 inclusive, for which these statistics are available by vaccination status. It’s worth noting that 83% of the state’s total population was at least double-vaccinated, which accounted for 75.3% of Covid-related hospital admissions (slightly underrepresented) and 83.1% of deaths (almost exactly the same as population share).
According to the federal Department of Health, by year’s end 96% of Australian adults (16+) were double-vaccinated, 72.4% had received at least three doses and 44.2% four doses. For NSW the corresponding figures were 95.8%, 70.5% and 45.6%. With all due respect (or not) to the Australian health bureaucrats, it is impossible to spin Figures 8 and 9 as graphic evidence for the vaccines being effective.
A study out in December 2022 in preprint of employees of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio from September 12th to December 12th 2022 found that effectiveness of the new bivalent Covid vaccine – authorised by the FDA on the basis of trial results from eight mice – was only 30%. The real shock was discovering that infection rates increase incrementally with each successive dose of a Covid vaccine.
The infection rates among those vaccinated with three or more doses was three times higher than among the unvaccinated. The authors said: “The association of increased risk of COVID-19 with higher numbers of prior vaccine doses in our study, was unexpected.” Prior infection is relatively more effective against reinfection, they found.
Ramesh Thakur is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy and a former UN Assistant Secretary-General. This article was first published by the Brownstone Institute.
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.
It is only an alleged “cure”.
The “97% consensus”, which we know is highly dubious anyway, is about the only figure the climate zealots produce to prove their point. That’s not surprising in a world which is devoid of proper debate around actual measurements but flush with carefully orchestrated narrative. I’ve no doubt there was once a 97% consensus the Earth was flat and the sun was in orbit around it. Consensus is often not proof of anything except groupthink
This consensus is itself nonsensical. It is well known within the earth sciences that the climate intimately interacts with atmospheric, geological and solar forces. It is arrogantly anthropocentric to claim that we can assert a greater influence than any of these things!
I work a great deal with videos that include material on climate. Old ones from 20-25 years ago, before stuffy old Al Gore and Greta ‘Looney Tune’ Thunberg got in on the act, say humans can’t affect the weather. New ones say we cause it all!
There’s plenty to worry about with pollution. The street I lived next to in London was 15-hour traffic jam, pumping out all sorts of toxins that we’re breathing in. There’s plenty of poison in fuels and other substances used in manufacturing to worry about, which the modern obsession with CO2 has buried.
In fact, part of me wonders if Net Zero is a convenient distraction so all sorts of other poisons can carry on being used, unobserved while people obsess about CO2, which is akin to Boris Johnson’s ‘invisible mugger’.
Actually, there’s a valid comparison between ‘invisible mugger’ CO2, COVID-19 and the Church’s old claims that drove people into a religious frenzy about the Devil hovering beside you, invisibly, manipulating your behaviour.
There’s nothing like claiming something people can’t see is at the root of their woes to make them paranoid.
The 97% is a made up figure.
“Consensus” certainly isn’t science.
When I studied Biochemistry back in the late 1960s our Professor told us that if anyone told us that there was a scientific consensus then they would have their hands in our back pockets
The 97% can only be claimed because the scientists with a contrary view are cut off, censored or denied expressing their views and the clear information which demonstrates that the net zero nutters are wrong. Hopefully in time those with the accurate information will be heard and their numbers will show how wrong the 97% figure is and there is no scientific consensus for net zero.
Congratulations! Top 10, I’m impressed.
We need to get back to honest open discussions without trying to shut down the opposing views before they are heard.
But that would mean the Establishment’s lies would be exposed.
That is why scepticism, dis/misinformation must be crushed.
The entire basis of the modern scientific method was a rejection of the then religion-based consensus about the material world (re the sun revolving around the earth etc.) and its replacement with open-ended experimentation and fact based research.
Challenges followed by potential improvements are not just allowed but positively encouraged. Indeed it is fully understood that the greatest breakthroughs often do emerge from lone projects which go against any current grain of thinking.
Overall it’s not too much of a stretch to call the genuine and progressive scientific approach the sceptical one.
The very fact that the idea of ‘consensus’ is again being used and any technical criticisms rejected outright (eg labelled as ‘disinformation’ / heresy) in relation to ‘Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change’ shows that we have gone full circle back to medieval dogma and ignorance.
The alleged “97 percent scientific consensus” is routinely pulled out of the bag as a blunt knee-jerk response to arguments made by those whom activists fondly refer to as “climate deniers”.
This figure, however, originates in a 2013 meta-analysis of scientific opinion authored by John Cook, an Australian climatologist, who recruited a small team of volunteers to analyse the abstracts of roughly 12,000 scientific papers. In each instance, the volunteer was instructed to fit his or her conclusion of the abstract into one of seven different categories that ranged the spectrum of explicit endorsement of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) all the way down to explicit rejection of CAGW. Of all the papers analysed, around 60% did not express any clear view on climate change (i.e. neutral). These were OMITTED from the final tally, dramatically distorting the actual percentage of those who (either implicitly or explicitly) endorsed the idea that humans primarily cause climate change!
Furthermore, the volunteers got their interpretation of the abstracts completely wrong: A follow-up corroborative analysis, conducted by Cook himself, consisted of him contacting a representative sample of the original authors of the papers to verify whether the conclusions arrived at during the Cook analysis lined up with the conclusions drawn by the scientists who conducted the relevant studies. In a very significant portion of cases, the answer was no, they did not – reducing the real percentage yet further!
If any conclusion could have been drawn from this study, the most sensible one would have been that most scientists agree that humans have some impact on the trajectory of the climate, however negligibly small this impact may be.
An alternative, given the 60% of papers omitted from the final count, would be that the majority of scientists have no clear opinion either way on CAGW!
But that doesn’t go too far in championing the cause of the alarmists and the net-zero fanatics, does it?
The 97% figure is used as a sop to experts ‘Look, the experts agree on this, so theres no need for you to think critically about it, in fact you’ll just confuse and frustrate yourself and come up with the wrong answer. You dont need to do that. We’ve already done it. Let us take care of it all for you.’.
Yeah, right…
I believe I am right that in saying that when the numbers of that study are analysed, the 97% actually represents about 75 scientists. Not really very impressive.
It’s very simple. The AGW protagonists always refer to data that is known to have been gerrymandered and use models that are known not to have accurate constants, don’t actually model the past because the starting points are unknown, and fail to include effects that are very complex and difficult to model in addition to some things that are important but are ignored.
The AGW sceptics point to known data from modern analysis and use satellite data that is accurate and difficult to misinterpret.
AGW is not happening, won’t happen and cannot happen because the laws of thermodynamics make it impossible. Those laws are implacable and anyone mounting a successful challenge to them will have to do a lot of work.
The whole shebang is political and driven by people who both want ever more money and influence and hate their fellow humans. If there’s going to be a cull of population then a fairly small one starting with these deranged idiots is all that is needed.
The anti-truther Times muppets aren’t even showing information. Get Oliver Wright writing on the latest big pharma corruption scandals, you muppets!
Was the Spanish Inquisition interested in a free and open debate about the Articles of Faith the Catholic Church espoused?
No.
Neither are the Cardinals of the Climate Change/Net Zero Religion.
In both cases, extermination is the preferred method of those daring to question their Dogma.
The claims of the Climate Change Religion can’t be substantiated with FACTS. And they know it, hence you are not allowed to present FACTS for debate.
Kudos Toby kudos. Keep up the good work and liked your point about whether The Sunday Times would report the thalidomide scandal today or would they be afraid of “the science”.
This is the same thing we saw in lockdown: people start using a word without entirely understanding its meaning until it enters the public consciousness. Lockdown saw ‘libertarian’ turned into a pejorative term. Climate activists have used the term ‘denier’ fully aware of its Holocaust links. ‘Refuseniks’, with its ties to the Soviet Union and ill treatment of Jewish people, entered regular usage for people using their right not to be injected with an experimental drug. ‘Disinformation’, the deliberate dissemination of lies masquerading as facts in order to sow confusion – with its history in Cold War tactics – is the latest example of the use of language manipulation. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Nudge Unit wasn’t involved in this somewhere.
I think it’s the ultimate revenge of the left: their supporters were caught out in the 1950s by McCarthy and HUAC, who (correctly as it turns out) went after communists in Hollywood seeking to bring down the West, so now they try to use language to try to link people who believe in the West’s historic views on freedom to Russia.
So the Times once a source of accurate information has lost that reputation and its readers should be told. Chris Morrison’s pieces about Climate are always based on facts, which are nearly always uncomfortable for the net zero nutters, and which they do everything they can to surpress. Elon Musk’s takeover of twitter has enabled a more open range of information about climate change, including actual facts that are contrary to the line of those with vested interests claiming that its all the result of human generated CO2 which soon everyone will know it isn’t.
Why are the people who sign up to the green agenda so quick to label those who disagree as ‘deniers’ or ‘conspiracy theorists’?’
Rehearse the following formula, or suitably tailored variation, as a standard reply to the charge ‘denier’:
You are the deniers. You deny that there is nothing to the entire global-warming alarm but the predictions of totally discredited computer models. You deny there has been no global warming at all over the entire 34-year span of the current climate ‘crisis’, inaugurated in July-88 by Hansen and Gore, except a gentle one-third of one-degree C rise, which is entirely in line with the 1-degree-C-per-century re-warming of the earth that has been going on, with no human agency, since the end of the Little Ice Age, 200 or so years ago
.
Here are another 2 pieces of “Misinformation” (1) Climate emergency is not a scientific term, it is a political one, to make it appear that climate emergency is something we can all see in front of us like a pillar box or an elephant. But I have seen pillar boxes and elephants, so I know they exist. (2) When we hear “listen to the science” it isn’t science at all we are being asked to listen to. It is climate models, but models are NOT science, and they are NOT evidence of anything. ———You find that everywhere you look we are presented with pronouncements about a “climate crisis” but it is mostly a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a “climate emergency” for which no real evidence exists in support of politics. Only by understanding those politics can you see why insisting there is a “climate emergency” is essential if you are to achieve the political goal, which is to reduce on demand energy and replace it with unreliable energy because the western world is deemed to have used up more than it’s fair share of fossil fuels. But ofcourse we also see poor countries discouraged from using fossil fuels and bribed to use wind. But this is quite tragic since 2 billion people currently have only enough electricity to power a fridge, and another one billion have no electricity at all. This is a truly unthinkable for people in the wealthy west……….Just imagine it for a second —One billion people with no electricity. It is a diabolical disgrace.
“Anthropogenic…could be true”?
Courage, Mr Young. Yes, urban heat island effect, but that’s about it. The idea that co2 drives dangerous runaway global warming is simply wrong. From low atmospheric concentrations, as at the coldest point of an ice age, you do get some warming as co2 follows temperature in the upswing. It is a “greenhouse gas”, just not very important one. But the effect becomes saturated. Doubling from here would add about one degree centigrade. Great!
https://wvanwijngaarden.info.yorku.ca/files/2021/03/WPotency.pdf?x45936
Kill the co2 connection and you stop decarbonisation, and all its unnecessary harms.
Wondering what bikini to wear in London today. The Guardian/BBC/Times have been telling me for years about global warming and how ‘children will grow up not knowing what snow is’, today will be a scorcher, around 2c. The deeply held religious belief of the climate clowns is one of China’s most successful west-destroying propaganda successes of recent years.