The Lockdown Files have dished up a curious exchange among Britain’s top policy advisers in early 2020. On February 29th, responding to a WhatsApp message from Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Chief Adviser Dominic Cummings that Israeli scientists were just weeks away from developing a Covid vaccine and if this was credible, Chief Scientist Sir Patrick Vallance replied “Short answer is no”.
Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty explained: “For a disease with a low (for the sake of argument 1%) mortality a vaccine has to be very safe so the safety studies can’t be shortcut. So important for the long run.” England’s highest mortality rate was in April 2020 at 0.6%, falling to 0.55% in January 2021 and 0.04% by January 2023.
Based on the original Phase 3 trial data, Bart Classen showed as early as August 2021: “Results prove that none of the vaccines provide a health benefit and all pivotal trials show a statically significant increase in ‘all cause severe morbidity’ in the vaccinated group compared to the placebo group.”
This is nicely (though grimly) book-ended by a recent (March 16th) CDC report showing U.S. maternal mortality jumped to 1,205 in 2021 compared with 861 in 2020 and 754 in 2019.
The 2021 rate of 32.9 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births is the highest maternal mortality rate since 1965. Hmmm, let’s see. What was the newly introduced pharmaceutical intervention in 2021 that begins with ‘v’, that must not be named in connection with unexplained deaths, that also exacerbated the damage to healthcare access caused by the nonpharmaceutical interventions?
As Sonia Elijah comments, drug regulators withdrew 20 common cough and cold remedies earlier this month “because of concerns about a ‘very rare’ risk of anaphylaxis”. The European Medicines Agency identified anaphylaxis as an important risk from Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine way back when in December 2020 and flagged it again in August 2021.
So the vaccine was withdrawn immediately, you ask? I like your sense of humour. And please do try to remember that anyone dying within 14 days of a Covid injection was in reality ‘unvaccinated’.
Thomas Buckley summarises it succinctly:
Tetanus boosters are not scheduled every four months… and polio is an awful memory of the past.
Covid is still around and, most likely, will be forever, as will the growing list of health problems associated with the shot itself…
From two weeks to stop the spread to get a not-vaccine shot every four months, the pandemic response has been full of lies and suffering for the general public and money and power for the autocrats and oligarchs and their clerisy.
The malfeasance was compounded by the cowardice of political leaders hiding behind ‘follow the Science’ that mistook a slogan for policy and let loose upon democratic societies previously unimaginable acts and scenes of censorship, coercion and brutality that have eroded trust in authorities and institutions.
Sadly, regulators have become vaccine enablers first, more committed to defend vaccines from criticism than protect people from harmful vaccines.
Panic saw 100 years of evidence-based pandemic response programmes junked. The accumulated wisdom was to quarantine the sick, not those feeling well; to prioritise the most vulnerable, not coerce the least vulnerable. I’ve gone back to read the CDC’s 2017 ‘Community Mitigation Guidelines to Prevent Pandemic Influenza‘. Among its conclusions:
- The CDC “might recommend the use of face masks by ill persons as a source control measure during severe, very severe, or extreme influenza pandemics when crowded community settings cannot be avoided.” However, “little evidence supports the use of face masks by well persons in community settings”.
- “Persons in community settings who show symptoms consistent with influenza and who might be infected with (probable) pandemic influenza should be separated from well persons as soon as practical, be sent home, and practice voluntary home isolation.”
While Sweden was a lonely outlier in sticking with existing science and plans, almost all others chose experimentation over decades of experience. Bizarrely, with lockdown normalised as the default response, Sweden was the one called on to explain staying with its existing plan.
This happened because superstition-driven diktat took over in the wish to be seen to be doing something. Fear was instrumentalised to terrify citizens. A Yale study in November 2021 concluded that public health messaging was effective in shaming and embarrassing people into getting vaccinated to protect themselves, in the belief that this would also expedite the date on which the entire community could be released from the restrictions.
Yet vaccines were tested for reducing the likelihood of infection leading to serious illness and death, not for protecting against infection and transmission. Robert Blumen has noted how manufacturers and health authorities ignored the more troublesome numbers of absolute risk reduction (ARR) and numbers needed to vaccinate (NNV). Instead, they put front and centre the relative risk reduction of 95% so that people were misled into believing it meant 95% protection against being infected, rather than a 95% reduction in the risk of having symptoms and being PCR-positive conditional on the risk of being symptomatic and test-positive in the first place. “Covid injections were a treatment, not a vaccine,” observes Blumen.
There would never have been the widespread public backing for vaxports if people had not been misled into exaggerating the threat from Covid by several factorfold and mistaking relative for absolute risk reduction. This led them into the false belief that mass vaccination would end the pandemic and the unvaccinated were selfishly prolonging that day of release.
The brainwashing was so effective that to this day many insist that the high rate of vaccination protected Novak Djokovic from Covid.
The virus and the disease are two different things that became conflated in the public discourse. ‘Coronavirus’ is a generic term that includes a large family of viruses with spiky projections on their surface that look like crowns. SARS-CoV-2 is a specific virus. Covid is the respiratory illness caused by the virus (just as measles is the disease caused by the virus rubeola).
Anyone could catch the virus, but the health risks from the disease were steeply age-dependent. So yes, the virus doesn’t discriminate, but no, we were not in it together. The conflation of the virus and the disease led directly to the policy confusion that dismissed targeted protection in favour of universal prescriptions.
A Covid vaccination helps the body to build immunity against the disease. A person with enhanced immunity to developing the disease owing to being vaccinated can still carry and transmit the virus that causes the disease.
The three key and distinct numbers for assessing vaccine efficacy are absolute risk reduction, relative risk reduction, and number needed to vaccinate (NNV). The vaccine manufacturers and promoters engaged in a misleading campaign.
A Lancet article gave the relative risk reduction of five vaccines from 67% to 95%, but their absolute risk reduction ranged from 0.84% for Pfizer to 1.3% for AstraZeneca: not so impressive but far more realistic. A 95% efficacy within a 1% subgroup will barely register as a blip on the mortality curves.
On the number needed to vaccinate, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky tweeted on June 25th 2021 that among 12-17 year olds, one million vaccinated prevent one death. To estimate the benefit-harm ratio, therefore, we would need to know the injurious side-effects for that age group.
This is where Dr. Aseem Malhotra’s calculations are pertinent. The NNV to prevent one Covid death for 18-29 year olds (figures for the younger cohort are not given) during the Delta variant’s dominance in the three months after vaccination was 93,000. The risk of a serious adverse event (that results in hospitalisation or disability) from an mRNA vaccine is 1 in 800. In summary, therefore, Pfizer’s original trial data suggest that there is “a greater risk of serious adverse events from the vaccine than from hospitalisation because of COVID-19”.
The puzzle of why there was a worldwide cascading abandonment of a hundred years of accumulated knowledge by scientific and policy advisers will occupy researchers for many years. The result is that old lessons are having to be relearned. Judging by the rush of studies now coming through to contradict key tenets of the 2020-22 narrative, there’s hope that the wall of silence rooted in groupthink and fear of consequences to career and reputation might have been irreparably breached.
At the community level, neither isolation nor vaccination but socialisation confers the best immunisation. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last July showed that lack of household exposure to kids increased Covid hospitalisation of grown-ups by 27% and ICU admission by 49%.
The state turned out to be the most efficient Granny killer along with the biggest purveyor of mis- and disinformation. A study of almost 300,00 people in California found that adults have sharply elevated risks of being diagnosed with heart, skin and psychiatric conditions in the three months following Covid injections. In February, three years late, the Lancet published a meta-analysis of 65 studies confirming that immunity conferred by prior infection is real, robust and long-lasting – at least as protective as two doses of the mRNA vaccines.
A study from George Mason University in February found that vaccine mandates in nine U.S. cities did not increase vaccine take-up, undermining one of their key justifications. Data released in February by the Office of National Statistics showed that in England, deaths among the vaccinated was disproportionately higher for all age groups for most of 2021 and 2022.
A study in 2022 found that across 19 European countries, birth rates fell nine months after vaccine rollouts gathered speed. Pfizer began a clinical trial in February 2021 to examine the safety and efficacy of its mRNA vaccine in pregnant women and their newborns but the release of data from the trial is still awaited.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is an article in Cell Host & Microbe published on January 11th 2023 with Anthony Fauci as one of the co-authors. Contrary to the good doctor’s many absolutist claims while still in office, this article concedes that “it is not surprising that none of the predominantly mucosal respiratory viruses have ever been effectively controlled by vaccines”.
Non-sterilising Covid vaccines could and should never have been expected to significantly reduce infection or transmission. Here is a five minute compilation of Anthony Fauci’s many inconsistencies, contradictions, and denialism.
Dr. Guy Hatchard has drawn attention to two studies by authors from the New Zealand Ministry of Health that show (1) a statistically significant association between Pfizer Covid vaccines and myocarditis and acute kidney injury, (2) correlation between vaccination status and mortality in 2021-23 inclusive, and (3) compared to the 73% of those eligible who had received Pfizer booster shots, the boosted account for a disproportionate 80% of all Covid deaths (though how much of this is age-related is unclear).
Other studies show successor doses are less effective and repeated doses may be driving infections. A study in December in Science Immunology by German scientists indicated that the third and subsequent doses of mRNA vaccines could be weakening the immune system, increasing the risk of infection and of prolonging and making the illness more serious.
In the same month, another study of employees of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio also found, contrary to the authors’ expectations, that infection rates increase incrementally with each successive dose of a Covid vaccine. The triple-vaccinated had infection rates three times higher than the unvaccinated.
A study published in February found that mRNA vaccines contain billions of particles of self-replicating DNA that can turn human cells into permanent factories for COVID-19 spike protein. This could explain the persistence of spike protein in the body for months after injection.
An analysis of the situation in Western Australia (WA) is especially interesting, because although four million vaccine doses were administered in 2021, border closures to interstate and international travel were zealously enforced to protect the state as an infection-free-zone. Subsequent adverse events therefore cannot be attributed to Covid.
In an analysis posted on March 14th, Rebekah Barnett notes that the rate of adverse events for Covid vaccines (264.1 per 100,000 doses) was almost 24 times higher than all others (11.1). The number of adverse events in 2021 – remember, there was almost no Covid in WA that year – was 10,726, 39 times higher than the average of 276 per year in the 2017-20 period. She quotes the annual WA Vaccine Surveillance Report:
The number of adverse events following immunisation… was significantly higher in 2021 than in previous years… due to the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccination program.
The impact of the Covid vaccination campaign in 2021 on reported adverse events is visually quite dramatic in her first chart (Figure 1). Some of the key takeaways are:
- Women were disproportionately affected (64%);
- Contrary to claims from the national drug regulator, 57% of those adversely affected required treatment in the emergency department of hospitals;
- The hardest hit age bracket was the 30-49 year-olds;
- Background rates of myocarditis and pericarditis increased by 35% and 25%, respectively.
The lockdown harms are showing up in excess death counts, job losses, supply chains chaos and rising costs of living. This may get worse in the next two to five years before it begins to normalise. Sweden appears to be a standout in bucking this trend (Figure 2).
I wonder why? Could it be that if we hadn’t shut down the economy and healthcare, cancelled cancer and coronary work, induced mass fear in the general populace, stopped people exercising in the open air and not intensified social isolation by preventing people talking to one another, we might, just possibly might, have had lower excess deaths? While Sweden’s excess deaths over the whole pandemic period are relatively low, it’s worth noting that it saw considerable excess deaths during the latter part of 2021 and throughout 2022, including up to 32% in December.
The Lockdown Files show U.K. Health Secretary Matt Hancock getting increasingly riled by the Swedish counterexample. I am sick of the “fucking Sweden argument”, he said, and demanded “three or four bullet [points] of why Sweden is wrong”. He didn’t inquire if Sweden was wrong. Assuming that, he wanted to be able to show why it was wrong: a perfect example of policy-based evidence-making.
That said, Sweden’s low excess death count may be a cautionary note against arguments conflating vaccine-excess deaths correlation with causation. Will Jones, editor of the Daily Sceptic, explores several alternative hypotheses on the link between excess deaths, the virus, lockdowns and vaccines.
The vast majority of Covid deaths in many countries by now are among the vaccinated and boosted. This proves conclusively the ineffectiveness of vaccines at the community level, totally discredits the premise of vaccine mandates, but leaves open the possibility of net protective benefits for target groups like the elderly and people with comorbidities.
The policy conclusion is to lift mandates in public settings and prohibit companies from imposing them in most business settings, leaving it instead for people to make informed decisions in consultation with their doctors, without pressure on the latter from drug regulators.
For all the eye-watering amounts of money transferred from taxpayers to Big Pharma, the Covid vaccines would seem mostly to bear little causal relationship to mortality outcomes:
- Not every death listed as a Covid death was caused by Covid;
- Not every vaccinated person who died was killed by the vaccine;
- Not everyone who was vaccinated, infected by the virus and got sick with Covid but didn’t die, lives because of the vaccines;
- Among the unvaccinated also, conversely, not everyone who died from Covid, did so because they avoided the jabfest;
- Not every unvaccinated person who was infected by the virus and got sick with Covid but didn’t die, lives because of avoiding the vaccine.
The important point is the imperative need to investigate the phenomenon. The refusal of governments to do so is exasperating but perhaps also very telling: never ask a question to which you don’t know the answer.
Lockdowns also locked in generational poverty and inequality in and across nations. Historical illiteracy is now a job requirement for ‘experts’. Recalling Margaret Thatcher’s comment on the trouble with socialism, politicians don’t learn from mistakes made with other people’s health and money. The media too lived down to their description as stenographers with amnesia. The state dictated every aspect of people’s lives, down to the most ridiculous, absurd and intimate details.
With no known cure for blind faith in governments, people embraced compliance with draconian directives from politicians proffering iron fists as a magic bullet.
On every major point of contention in managing the pandemic, the Great Barrington Declaration was right. The commonsense distilled into the few words of the Great Barrington Declaration was an uncommon virtue. Fearmongers-in-Chief like Neil Ferguson, Anthony Fauci (whose omniscience deserted him during deposition) and a host of PUIs (Pfizer’s useful idiots) were wrong. The three eminent scientist-authors were taken down savagely and belittled as “fringe epidemiologists.”
From Twitter Files #18 and #19 released by Matt Taibbi, we now know that Government agencies, NGOs, academia, Big Tech, media, and the intelligence community colluded in the Virality Project led by Stanford University to censor as mis- and disinformation even true stories if their effect was to promote vaccine hesitancy. This included true accounts of vaccine injuries.
As Andrew Lowenthal puts it, rather than highlight safety signals to protect the public, the censorship-industrial complex “ran cover to protect Big Pharma, smearing and censoring critics. The moral depravity is astounding and quite possibly criminal”.
This misuse of government power is a genuine threat to democracy, not a confected one.
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.
As good a summary as I have yet read, thank you. What an absolute clown show. I live in hope that those responsible are brought to justice however unlikely that may seem.
Great article. The dead post Stabbinations. Obvious to us who were switched on. The correlation is causation. Always was. LDs, Midazolam, Hancock’s ‘Gates owes me one for injecting millions with his mircro-chips’, all planned, all premeditated, all coordinated. Not a cockup. You can’t lock down the the entire G20 without organising it like a war.
And oh, what happened to those countries that did not participate in the scam? Nothing. Nothing at all (except 5 of their leaders were murdered and replaced by WHO-WEF puppets).
The point we are at appears to be the result of many years of decline in science as a discipline. Here are two eminent scientists talking about the state of science back in the last century:
“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.” – Carl Sagan
“We live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television-words, books, and so on-are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.” Richard Feynman
Sadly it will be totally and absolutely unlikely. Turkeys do not vote for Christmas
Sadly from my personal observations the normies have moved on – nothing short of confessions from the main players that the whole thing was a scam will wake them up. They don’t want to know, don’t want to be reminded of it, don’t want to learn any lessons.
“The narrative in retreat” – in the hope that the critics will go away, and let the politicians and their advisers carry on. It certainly appears that almost all politicians and everyone else are behaving like that. Maybe it’s a combination of forgiveness and sweeping things under the carpet.
This is a good summary of it, so far; well done. However, the troubles that they have created are not going away, any time soon.
I always find it amusing how the sceptics always provide referenced facts and figures as not to be ridiculed as providing mis, dis, mal information. The opposition talk in sound bites provide only modelled figures refuse open discussion and cancel those that don’t follow the religion. I wonder why that is?
Yes, a good point which we should have made sooner.
If we work from the premise that everything we’ve been told by TPTB since the scamdemic began was just a pack of lies, it would be interesting to have an article from Will or other DS colleague which covers anything that’s happened which was actually true and based on sound science, because I literally cannot think of anything off the top of my head. Something tells me it’d be a very short article, if not non-existent.
This has been shared a few times now but I think it’s a valuable resource ( to also share with the Blue-Pilled, if they’ll even bother to glance at it ) and illustrates just how effectively the world has been conned;
”No, the only story which holds together is that “covid” was a psychological operation on a global scale. The biggest and broadest propaganda campaign of all time, with the singular aim of breaking the world apart, and remaking it in a new globalist image.
“Covid” was – and is – a deceptive means to a malignant end. We need to see that, understand it, and remember it. Because unless we properly disect and comprehend the scale and methodology of this propaganda, we will be similarly vulnerable to the same methods the next time they are deployed.”
https://off-guardian.org/2023/03/24/40-facts-you-need-to-know-the-real-story-of-covid/
Agreed. Back in 2006 Ralph Baric (the man responsible for the technology behind covid) wrote a paper which included a section on bioterrorism. In it he wrote “As a principal of bioterrorism is to inspire fear, highly pathogenic outcomes may not be necessary as large scale panic would likely result after the release of designer pathogens in US cities“. Sound familiar to me.
Yes I shared that the other day as it was on Igor Chudov’s substack.
This really was the mother of all PsyOps wasn’t it?
Rand Paul confronts a squirming Antony Blinken on covid research funding. What are they hiding?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7TKiRkmiIkk&t=9s
Much more attention should be given to the harmful effects of mRNA jabs on the biomolecular level. In other words the effect they have on our tragically misunderstood immune systems. This was the first paper I read on the subject :-
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027869152200206X
The paper explains how the mRNA adversely effects both innate and acquired immunity.
The temporal effects are mainly CV events largely explaining “excess deaths” but even these are knowingly ignored by the MSM no doubt on the orders of The RPTB and our ridiculously poorly educated medics.
We have a situation whereby even the dimmest sheep, courtesy of the above, seems unable to grasp the fact that the jab just might explain the increase in heart attack/strokes etc.
Given that’s the case, there would seem to be little chance of the mRNA jabs ever being held responsible for long term adverse effects ie auto immune diseases – cancers, neurological problems etc.
Soon all “vaccines” will be mRNA based. Billions are at stake you see…
They must be stopped otherwise the health of every human (and animal) on the bloody planet will become compromised.
Hot off the press :-
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.16.484616v2.full
Courtesy of DR Paul Alexander
“Soon all “vaccines” will be mRNA based. Billions are at stake you see…”
Actually the ‘billions at stake’ are lives, not dollars.
mRNA technology is deliberately dangerous. It was designed to maim and kill thus the refusal to accept the “vaccine” damages cases. If mRNA is acknowledged for the kill shot that it actually represents those new “goodies” that Billy has in development are consigned to the waste bin – along with billions of his dollars – and the depopulation agenda, that’s Agenda 2030, comes to a grinding halt and a Plan B is required.
Like many people, I was made fearful of the virus and accepted the lockdown programme as a necessity.
It was when friends started sharing their experience of relatives dying and having the cause of death recorded as Covid, despite the deceased having no Covid symptoms and no positive Covid test, that I finally smelled the rat.
As soon as I started delving for more information I started finding the counter argument, which seemed to make logical sense. I had some doubts because the sources and their credentials were unknown to me at the time, but thanks to the frankly bizarre behaviour of the media, I once again smelled the rat. It was at that point my wife and I decided we would reject the jabs when they became available, regardless of the pressure to submit and conform. We left our adult kids to make their own decision, but they too felt something was amiss and rejected getting any jabs, most notably our pregnant daughter who pushed back against immense NHS pressure to get jabbed, including horror tales to scare her into changing her mind.
It would seem to be the best decision we ever made. What had previously been a mild suspicion of the motives of the “elites” that had developed over the years, morphed into a default position of not believing anything they said. When the outrageous statistical manipulation of what counted as Covid deaths and how jabs were discounted for weeks when injuries were obvious, and the disgusting media campaign moved on to demonising vaccine-holdouts, and focussing on people who refused the jabs but died, complete with the “hahaha, we told you so”, our mistrust became entrenched distrust.
The damage has been done. The state is no longer benign and cannot be trusted. My family are not conspiracy theorists, we are not libertarian absolutists, we are not Magna Carta obsessives. We are just ordinary people who have seen that the state has ceased to be our servant and has positioned itself as our master, and that is unacceptable. Change needs to come to bring some honesty back to the political sphere. It won’t come by electing the same parties who foisted this lunacy upon us.
Depressingly, I have come to the conclusion that the powers that be don’t give a toss about us little people. They should work for us, indeed they are paid by us, but it’s actually more feudal than anything in the Middle Ages (please no pedants telling me what feudalism was really like, you know what I mean). The scamdemic highlighted it but it was thus for ages before.
Terrific post and well said.
“What had previously been a mild suspicion of the motives of the “elites” that had developed over the years, morphed into a default position of not believing anything they said.”
And I suspect that summarises the position of a large percentage of many of us on here.
An honest comment and a worthy one. Don’t forget, everyone here can get involved in persuading people not to vote for the main stream parties by ordering some NotLibLabCon leaflets and delivering them in their local area – easy! https://www.notliblabcon.org/
Very well said. Great post.
Is that mortality rate in paragraph 2 of 0.6% true, should it be 0.06?
A bit too much for a cockup, me thinks.
But even if, Peter Hitchens’ paraphrased thoughts from the FSU speakeasy on Monday should resonate: “No doubt the (now safetyism prone) public (and Media) WANTED lockdown (and, lest we forget, later the magic ‘vaccines’). But it is the role of government (and the civil service/regulators) to keep a level head in any panic and not to give in to it (or even egg it on further).”
Oh – it was all just a big, global cock-up. Public Health “experts”, “scientists”, Governments, Big Pharma, Big Tech, mainstream media ….. all around the world ….. got it wrong. All at the same time. What a remarkable coincidence.
It most definitely wasn’t very planned over decades and done to advance a Great Reset on the world: oh dearie me no. That’s just the stuff of conspiracy.
Vote for the Westminster Uni-Party (and therefore the WEF). You know it makes sense.
Indeed.
Probably one of the best, possibly THE BEST articles I have ever read on the Scamdemic. There are also enough links to keep me busy for a month.
Absolutely outstanding
Thank you Ramesh Thakur.
Yes Ramesh never disappoints and always produces top quality articles.
vaccines were tested for reducing the likelihood of infection leading to serious illness and death
They weren’t tested for those outcomes though. The trials weren’t powered for that. They were tested for reducing the likelihood of COVID-19 symptoms confirmed by a positive PCR test starting at 7 days after the second shot. And as emerged from Pfizer’s briefing document to the FDA, most people who developed COVID-like symptoms weren’t even counted, only the few that were actually tested were mentioned in the published trial report. The true efficacy could have been as low as 19% as Peter Doshi pointed out when the rollout was just starting https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/01/04/peter-doshi-pfizer-and-modernas-95-effective-vaccines-we-need-more-details-and-the-raw-data/
‘Covid is the respiratory illness caused by the virus..’
Not ‘the’ virus, any coronavirus – 4 of which cause coronavirus disease (Covid) aka Common Cold.
For which ,despite decades of post-war research no ‘safe & effective’ vaccine or treatment had been found, for all the reasons effective vaccines are not possible for RNA viruses, and can and do via Antigen Imprinting, render the vaccinated more susceptible to infection and severity of disease from evolved variants. It is why UK policy is not to vaccinate against Foot & Mouth disease.
Another bit of science that was ignored.
‘The puzzle of why there was a worldwide cascading abandonment of a hundred years of accumulated knowledge by scientific and policy advisers will occupy researchers for many years.’
Puzzle?
Not centrally coordinated by a coalition of international agencies, business interests, ideological groups, rich and powerful people?
Not part of the coordinated attempt to deny us energy, mobility, food, independence, freedom and revert to a global feudal hierarchy with the peasants herded into 15 minute ghettos. whilst their overlords live in riches and splendour?
Or just another one of those conspiracy theories which now are revealed as truth?
It’s no puzzle to some of us, despite the attempt to bury it in a mire of supposed, accident, incompetence, error, over-reaching nitwits.
I do not want to detract from this excellent and comprehensive analysis of what must be the biggest medical blunder in all of history, but as a small piece of evidence for why we shouldn’t do lockdowns here is an extract from Factfullness by Hans Rosling and the dangers of the Urgency Instinct.
Chapter 10 – The Urgency Instinct
“If it’s not contagious, then why did you evacuate your children and wife?” asked the mayor of Nacala, eyeing me from a safe distance behind his desk. Out the window, a breathtaking sun was setting over Nacala district and its population of hundreds of thousands of extremely poor people, served by just one doctor – me.
Earlier in the day I had arrived back in the city from a poor coastal area in the north named Memba. There I had spent two days using my hands to diagnose hundreds of patients with a terrible, unexplained disease that had completely paralyzed their legs within minutes of onset and, in severe cases, made them blind. And the mayor was right; I wasn’t 100% sure it was not contagious. I hadn’t slept the previous night but had stayed up, pouring over my medical textbook, until I had finally concluded that the symptoms I was seeing had not been described before. I’d guessed this was some kind of poison rather than anything infectious, but I couldn’t be sure, and I had asked my wife to take our young children and leave the district.
Before I could figure out what to say, the mayor said, “If you think it could be contagious, I must do something. To avoid a catastrophe, I must stop the disease from reaching the city.”
The worst-case scenario had already unfolded in the mayor’s mind, and immediately spread to mine.
The mayor was a man of action. He stood up and said, “Should I tell the military to set up a roadblock and stop the buses from the north?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think it’s a good idea. You have to do something.”
The mayor disappeared to make some calls.
When the sun rose over Memba the next morning, some 20 women and their youngest children were already up, waiting for the morning bus to take them to the market in Nacala to sell their goods. When they learned the bus had been cancelled, they walked down to the beach and asked the fishermen to take them by the sea route instead. The fishermen made room for everyone in their small boats, probably happy to be making the easiest money of their lives as they sailed south along the coast.
Nobody could swim and when the boats capsized in the waves, all the mothers and children and fishermen drowned.
That afternoon I headed north again, past the roadblock, to continue to investigate the strange disease. As I drove through Memba I came across a group of people lining up on the roadside dead bodies they had pulled out of the sea. I ran down to the beach but it was too late. I asked a man carrying the body of a young boy, “Why were all these children and mothers out in those fragile boats?”
“There was no bus this morning.” he said. Several minutes later I could not still barely understand what I had done. Still today I can’t forgive myself. Why did I have to say to the mayor, “You must do something”?
I couldn’t blame these tragic deaths on the fisherman. Desperate people who need to get to market of course take the boat when the city authorities for some reason block the road.
I have no way to tell you how I carried on with the work I had to do that day and in the days afterward. And I didn’t talk about this to anyone else for 35 years.
(continued)
…Fourteen years later, in 1995, the ministers in Kinshasa, the capital of DR Congo, heard that there was an Ebola outbreak in the city of Kitwik. They got scared. They felt they had to do something. They set up a roadblock. Again, there were unintended consequences. Feeding the people in the capital became a major problem because the rural area that had always supplied most of their processed cassava was on the other side of the disease-stricken area. The city was hungry and started buying all it could from it’s second largest food producing area. Prices skyrocketed, and guess what? A mysterious outbreak of paralyzed legs and blindness followed.
Nineteen years after that, in 2014, there was an outbreak of Ebola in the rural north of Liberia. Inexperienced people from rich countries got scared and they all came up with the same idea: a roadblock!
At the Ministry of Health, I encountered politicians of a higher quality. They were more experienced, and their experience made them cautious. Their main concern was that roadblocks would destroy the trust of the people abandoned behind them. This would have been absolutely catastrophic: Ebola outbreaks are defeated by contact tracers, who depend on people honestly disclosing everybody they have touched. These heroes were sitting in poor slum dwellings carefully interviewing people who had just lost a family member about every individual their loved one might have infected before dying. Often, of course, the person being interviewed was on that list and potentially infected. Despite the constant fear and wave after wave of rumors, there was no room for drastic, panicky action. The infection path could not be traced with brute force, just patient, calm, meticulous work. One single individually delicately leaving out information about his dead brother’s multiple lovers could cost a thousand lives.
When we are afraid and under time pressure and thinking of worst-case scenarios, we tend to make really stupid decisions. Our ability to think analytically can be overwhelmed my an urge to make quick decisions and take immediate action.
Back in Nacala in 1981, I spent several days carefully investigating the disease but less than a minute thinking about the consequences of closing the road. Urgency, fear and a single-minded focus on the risks of a pandemic shut down my ability to think things through. In the rush to do something, I did something terrible.
Come on Professor, don’t be coy – what are you trying to say?
As a put in another comment – never vote for Lib/Lab/Con again – even in local elections. Join the campaign and deliver some well crafted leaflets – https://www.notliblabcon.org/
Assuming the ‘Virus’ actually exists!
Science has become politicized.
“A Covid vaccination helps the body to build immunity against the disease.” Really? By producing endless spike proteins and turning the immune sysyem in on oneself?
Stockholm Syndrome should be renamed Melbourne Syndrome, because #SwedenGotItRight.