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.
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Doesn’t DS believe in freedom of speech?
By all means attack the undoubted hypocrisy of these platforms and demand consistency, but let’s try not to encourage micro policing of language
As I’ve said I am naturally sort of pro Israel by instinct but let’s allow both sides to say exactly what they think and allow us to judge for ourselves
Many would disagree with you.
Jon, I am one of your downtickers. You deserve them. Are your views supported by your having ever been to Israel or Gaza or the West Bank. Or is your ill-expressed negativity about Israel through your unquestionably having swallowed the counter-narrative ?
I have worked in nearly 100 countries in my career and have formed many relationships with people who are generally educated and intelligent. I learnt in my 20s that the real situation is always orders of magnitude more complex that the press would have you believe and cannot be meaningfully reduced to concepts like Israel = Zionism in the style of football teams.
I don’t claim profound wisdom; I merely cite some level of world experience from an everyday work perspective that I feel has informed me.
There is nothing new in what you say about a lack of balance in every single media outlet regarding the current middle eastern situation. I completely agree with you. It has been thus since my observations from, in my case, working for a year’s project engineering in Belfast working with people on both side of the sectarian divide in ‘the 70’s troubles’. All great people if you detach the baggage-laden layer of historical cultural difference. Concerning more recent emergences such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Brexit Covid, Ukraine Gaza/S Israel, the already tenuous link between media and some version of the truth was completely severed some decades ago. In which case your ire might be better directed against the state controlled propagandists. But I do caution against regressing to a simple binary. I recognise that Israel as a nation and culture exists and has done for many decades and origins go back millenia. As do the Palestinians. I have contacts who I regard as friends in both camps. We agree on the complexity of the problem if not the detail and that as always, emotion and idealism inhibit our natural human desire to make the best future opportunities for our families which means co-operation and resolving ideological differences. War and hatred and conflict are so much simpler, so much easier that no one needs to think and do as we are told by those captured by the evil in all of us who will despicable things and then, monstrously seek to justify them.
Cop out?
Maybe – though my opinion hardly matters. I just seem to see merit in both sides of the debate and think it’s not simple
My point was that I think both sides of the argument should be heard – I mentioned which side of the argument I am half-heartedly on merely because it emphasises that I am not making a partisan point, but one in favour of free expression. My reasons, whatever they may be, for my “instinct”, are not relevant to the point I was making.
The reasons are not relevant to the point I was making. The article is about speech. I think we’ve done the Israel thing to exhaustion for now.
I’m pro Israel. In general I support Jews.
Draw a Venn diagram, 3 circles, Israeli/Jewish beliefs, interests. Palestinian/Moslem beliefs, interests. My/Christian beliefs, interests.
Far more overlap between me/Christian & Israeli/Jewish than with Palestinian/Moslem.
I think most people here are aware of the things you are referring to
I’m not sure you are really in a position to tell me what I am aware of, especially as I’ve just written that I’m aware of the things to which you refer. I may even agree with some of your sentiments but not necessarily all of your conclusions
Yes.
You are tarring all Jews with a brush when like anything it’s a handful of rotten apples. I take ppl as I find them and I think you are the one falling for what you accuse others of.
Interesting DS covers this but never mentioned Facebook (along with twitter, Google etc) and the FBI censoring the hunter biden laptop 2 weeks before an election, claiming it was “Russian disinformation”. Every one of these chancers at the time knew the laptop was real because the FBI had already interviewed the repair guy Hunter had left it with (and not paid).
Perhaps they see this as a moral issue and the other as political. There’s been no coverage to speak of regarding US politics here. I think there’s a resistance among UK intellectuals regarding Trump – Hitchens is always snide about him.
I see a good variety of views on this subject expressed BTL here
Ok, let’s attribute blame for the current situation. You’ve got 100% blame to be spread between Israel & Hamas.
Hamas provoked the Israeli reaction. Hamas could release hostages. Hamas could turn in their murderers.
Israel could now be a bit more careful with their tactics.
I’m laying nearly all the blame Hamas way.
That statement’s not mine.
As ABBA Eban said “the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
Regardless of what went before, (though what went before, included 1m Jews being expelled from Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon in the late 40s, as 250,000 Palestinian Arabs left Israel) Oct 7th was a war crime not an ‘act of war’.
The perpetrators deserve punishment. The kidnapped deserve release. The dead deserve justice.
Hamas indulges in Munchausen by proxy towards the Palestinians who voted them in.
Jon
I’m disappointed in you exchange with NickR and you misattribution of my “I have worked in nearly 100 countries in my career and have formed many relationships with people who are generally educated and intelligent”..
Ps you’ve just blown that self congratulary statement of yours out of the water…”
Your arguments will have more credibility if you do some work on their coherence. As I said ” I have formed many relationships with people who are generally educated and intelligent… ”
You have some way to go to fit my criteria. And I suggest you post only when sober
Ok maybe you will read what I have written, digest it and reply in a considered and probably more sober frame of mind. I stated I had downticked one of your posts; the one your posted “1 hr ago” that I replied to. It might be convenient to you to laugh off dissent with your worldview as “ Some inconvenient historical context fucked (my) head ” but that avoids the real issues why people disagree with your simplistic and binary stance and engage in discussion several levels more nuanced than yours. I leave it with you….
The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable… therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty. —Likud Party Platform, 1977
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/its-time-to-confront-israels-version-of-from-the-river-to-the-sea/
Yes the inconvenient fact that phrase is originally a Zionist call to imagine a Land for the Jewish people only. A Jewish ethnostate in Judea and Samara.
So was it anti Arab then and anti Semitic now or is it a phrase used by both sides to describe a single unified polity?
Binyamin Netanyahu <a href=”https://www.npr.org/2023/11/07/1211133201/netanyahus-references-to-violent-biblical-passages-raise-alarm-among-critics”>has said</a>, concerning Gaza, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible”.
To Netanyahu’s religious allies, the commandment to blot out the tribe of Amalek is a mitzvah, a divine obligation, one of the 613 commandments of the Torah (Deuteronomy 25) and held to be in force to the present day.
Outside politics, the only profession Netanyahu has practised is pro-Israeli public relations and lobbying. He is a cheap, shallow man who believes nothing much and practises nothing much, and he supposes that he can use words like these for his own ends. But to insinuate that Palestinians are Amalekites comes at least as close to a call for genocide as anything the leadership of Hamas have said.
Who is happy about systematic murder?
Who here considers Israel “beloved”?
Who here is unaware of Israel ever doing anything wrong?
We’re not stupid.
In many ways it may have been better for everyone had the modern state of Israel not been created as it hasn’t turned out great for anyone, but it was created and here we are. I hope that one day the two sides will reach a way to coexist peacefully, though that sadly seems unlikely.
Never going to happen. Not with this hateful, fanatical attitude towards the Jews. Jihadis and Islamist extremists don’t do tolerance and now we see how the results have been amplified and spread worldwide. The propaganda campaign has been a great success. There will never be peace, as we know it here in Europe, for Israel. Just sporadic ceasefires interspersed between the next inevitable attacks from ‘The Neighbours From Hell’;
”Hamas Leader calls for a genocide against Jewish people worldwide.
“We must attack every Jew on the face of the planet…How much is a Jews throat worth? 5 sheckles? Or even less, God Willing. All of our people are ready to blow up.”
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1734375624679039456
Speaking of the very successful propaganda campaign, the evidence is all around us, but it always seems to start and gain momentum in a certain demographic. These ‘useful idiot’ terrorist supporters are everywhere and their attitude is hugely toxic and concerning;
”A majority of young Americans said they believe Israel should “be ended and given to Hamas,” according to a shocking poll.
The survey, conducted THIS WEEK by Harvard-Harris polling, found 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 said they believed the long-term answer to the Israel-Palestinian conflict was for “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.”
Only 32% said they believed in a two-state solution, and just 17% said other Arab states should be asked to absorb Palestinian populations.
The figure was in stark contrast to other age groups, which all dramatically preferred a two-state solution. Just 4% of Americans 65 and over said they felt Israel should be ended.
“These individuals siding with evil over democracy should be a wake-up call,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) told The Post. “Ideological rot among young Americans, driven by woke values and victim culture, has gotten so bad they’ve convinced themselves to sympathize with actual terrorists who hate America,”
https://nypost.com/2023/12/16/news/majority-of-americans-18-24-think-israel-should-be-ended-and-given-to-hamas/
Isn’t Zuckerberg Jewish?
100% correct.
It amazes me how virtually all on here realise the covid/mRNA/climate truth wheres most just can’t see the genocide happening in Palestine.
Moral/mental gymnastics at its finest