In so many words — and data — CDC has quietly admitted that all of the indignities of the COVID-19 pandemic management have failed: the masks, the distancing, the lockdowns, the closures, and especially the vaccines; all of it failed to control the pandemic.
It’s not like we didn’t know that all this was going to fail, because we said so as events unfolded early on in 2020, that the public health management of this respiratory virus was almost completely opposite to principles that had been well established through the influenza period in 2006. The spread of a new virus with replication factor R0 of about 3, with more than one million cases across the country by April 2020, with no potentially virus-sterilising vaccine in sight for at least several months, almost certainly made this infection eventually endemic and universal.
COVID-19 starts as an annoying, intense, uncomfortable flu-like illness, and for most people, ends uneventfully two to three weeks later. Thus, management of the COVID-19 pandemic should not have relied upon counts of cases or infections, but on numbers of deaths, numbers of people hospitalised or with serious long-term outcomes of the infection, and of serious health, economic and psychological damages caused by the actions and policies made in response to the pandemic, in that order of decreasing priorities.
Even though numbers of Covid cases correlate with these severe manifestations, that is not a justification for case numbers to be used as the actionable measure, because COVID-19 infection mortality is estimated to range below 0.1% in the mean across all ages, and post-infection immunity provides a public good in protecting people from severe reinfection outcomes for the great majority who do not get serious ‘Long Covid’ on first infection.
Nevertheless, once the COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out, with a new large wave of the Delta strain spreading across the U.S. in July-August 2021 even after eight months of the vaccines taken by half of Americans, instead of admitting policy error that the Covid vaccines do not much control virus spread, our public health administration doubled down, attempting then to compel vaccination on as many more people as could be threatened by mandates. That didn’t work out too well as seen when the large Omicron wave hit the country during December 2021-January 2022 in spite of some 10% more of the population getting vaccinated from September through December of 2021.
A typical mandate example: in September 2021, Washington Governor Jay Inslee issued Emergency Proclamation 21-14.2, requiring COVID-19 vaccination for various groups of state workers. In the proclamation, the stated goal was, “WHEREAS, COVID-19 vaccines are effective in reducing infection and serious disease, and widespread vaccination is the primary means we have as a state to protect everyone… from COVID-19 infections.” That is, the stated goal was to reduce the number of infections.
What the CDC recently reported (see chart below), however, is that by the end of 2023, cumulatively, at least 87% of Americans had anti-nucleocapsid antibodies to and thus had been infected with SARS-CoV-2, this in spite of the mammoth, protracted and booster-repeated vaccination campaign that led to about 90% of Americans taking the shots. My argument is that by making policies based on number of infections a higher priority than ones based on the more serious but less common consequences of both infections and policy damages, the proclaimed goal of the vaccine mandate to reduce spread failed in that 87% of Americans eventually became infected anyway.
In reality, neither vaccine immunity nor post-infection immunity were ever able fully to control the spread of the infection. On August 11th 2022 the CDC stated: “Receipt of a primary series alone, in the absence of being up to date with vaccination through receipt of all recommended booster doses, provides minimal protection against infection and transmission (3,6). Being up to date with vaccination provides a transient period of increased protection against infection and transmission after the most recent dose, although protection can wane over time.” Public health pandemic measures that “wane over time” are very unlikely to be useful for control of infection spread, at least without very frequent and impractical revaccinations every few months.
Nevertheless, infection spread per se is not of consequence, because count of infections is not and should not have been the main priority of public health pandemic management. Rather, the consequences of the spread and the negative consequences of the policies invoked should have been the priorities. Our public health agencies chose to prioritise a failed policy of reducing the spread rather than reducing the mortality or the lockdown and school and business closure harms, which led to unnecessary and avoidable damage to millions of lives. We deserved better from our public health institutions.
Harvey Risch is a physician and a Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine. He is a Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, where this article was previously published.
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.
This was never about a virus!
It was never about the science either.
They got the memo too early!
Lol, if you don’t laugh at this…
Update: I soon descended into sobs.
It’s their country – let them have their own circus.
I expect the uptake is far higher than 10% in the major cities and I don’t think people are going to be checking out in the countryside. its kenya’s guardian reading class having a moral panic
That was my guess too, it will be the urban elite who have taken the vax.
Why should they care about the rural poor not having access to their bars, shops and restaurants?
Rather similar to the Soviet Nomenclatura having exclusive use of such places.
“Kill The Poor” as Jello Biafra would put it.
Might be a problem for their houseboys, cleaners, nannys and other domestic servants.
Might be a problem for their houseboys, cleaners, nannys and other domestic servants.
That’ll be a bonus to the NPD grauniad-reading classes.
Coherent with the general global strategy. Impose the new order on the gentry and the plebs will eventually follow.
At this point the well to do, urbanites are the only ones they care about. For now.
They’ve set up a good system of capture with the vax for travel rules.
Orwell foresaw this quite well in 1984. The regime cared mostly about the upper.echelons. The lower classes were.left to themselves.
That’s what the Kenya thing is about.
Going to be some very empty bars.
Winter surge, in Kenya, in December ???
My thoughts exactly.
Nairobi average temperatures in November and December are 19 – 20 degrees Celsius.
In Africa It’s just a little more obviously a shakedown exercise than about health.
Shit for brains, typical of them!
No longer news and no longer surprising.
Me thinks is about international donors to public health than any attempt to handle their epidemic. He who writes the checks writes the rules. Given a) the young age of the population b) expose to other viruses c) limited benefit in stopping infections from vaccine (trending to nil over time) and d) the larger issues facing Kenya, this rule makes about as much sense as requiring everyone to have their wisdom teeth pulled before entering. I’m not conspiracy theorist but have seen and read of international donors demanding odd thing of nations in return for grants in the best of times.
So, any intrepid investigative journalist want to tackle this? Because the answers could be very illuminating.
Jabbing at risk populations made sense. Jabbing everyone didn’t make sense when we still had high hopes for the vaccine. I wonder if Kenya will be required to jab it’s 5 year olds too?
I sure the Kenyans have the infrastructure in place to police this. Thought not, none story.
Africa skipped/leapfrogged land lines so there are a lot of internet connected mobile phones.
Again, a biased intro taking the official narrative as truth.
Kenya catches up with Agenda 30. Let the backhanders begin.
Didn’t Nigeria introduce a similar policy months ago, with an even lower uptake? Any news how that has worked out for them?
Sturgeon’s 70-page dossier finds no evidence for vaccine passports
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sturgeon-s-70-page-dossier-finds-no-evidence-for-vaccine-passports
Send to your MP, MSP or MS: https://www.writetothem.com/
Headline should read, ‘African nation bows to NGO’ s financial incentives…again’.
NGO colonialism.
Has Gates been talking to them recently?
Roll on the Kenyan riots.
UNcle Bill’s altruism is well understood in Africa….
https://lichtnahrung2015.wordpress.com/2020/09/06/un-forced-tothat-admit-that-gates-funded-vaccine-is-causing-polio-outbreak-in-africa/
Our healthcare system is about to experience a tsunami! Potential side effects of jabs include chronic inflammation, because the vaccine continuously stimulates the immune system to produce antibodies. Other concerns include the possible integration of plasmid DNA into the body’s host genome, resulting in mutations, problems with DNA replication, triggering of autoimmune responses, and activation of cancer-causing genes. Alternative COVID cures EXIST. Ivermectin is one of them. While Ivermectin is very effective curing COVID symptoms, it has also been shown to eliminate certain cancers. Do not get the poison jab. Get your Ivermectin today while you still can! https://ivmpharmacy.com
That’s right, play the game, you wouldn’t want to end up like that Tanzanian president, would you?
Well done Kenya. I should like to see how this works out. Thankfully it’s a warm country and so no one will be left out in the cold so to speak.
That reminds a little bit of “cargo cults” behavior… Just jab enough arms and the cargo will come. After all that’s what all the great white people are doing.
We all know countries are being paid a lot of money to do as they are told.
How did Kenya get the vaccine? Where did they pull the dollars from?