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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The INFTO is a group of concerned nurses and healthcare workers from across Ireland. We would like to raise concerns about a number of issues that have taken place in our healthcare facilities since March 2020.
Some of the issues include but are not limited to:
https://infto.ie/
Of course, the background is that Ireland came nowhere near having an epidemic.
They’ve had a 1/4 reduction in hospital admissions between 2019 and 2020 however. So scared out of their wits has the population been to attend for normal concerns.
Good for you …. blowing those whistles loudly.
I salute you.
The report is about as damning as you can possibly get and will no doubt mirror the vaccine’s toll in the UK if the information was ever to be revealed. And although it’s uncomfortable to acknowledge this is beginning to look like a murderous conspiracy with the full complicity of some of the medical profession. We need nurses and doctors in the UK to find a conscience and spill the beans as well. Since the MSM has gone full Goebbels they need to access alternatives and real journalists and do it now.
Dr Shipman’s got nothing on the murderers we’re dealing with now:
https://dailyexpose.co.uk/2021/06/13/stay-at-home-protect-the-nhs-give-midazolam-to-the-elderly-and-tell-you-they-are-covid-deaths/
Anyone who hasn’t been made aware of it yet, prosecution is being brought against Hancock & co. for what is described as mass murder by policy. It’s described in the above article – pay particular attention to the video with Hancock talking to a very enthusiastic MP called Dr Evans, describing their administration of midazolam to the reallocated hospitalised elderly to care homes as a “good death”.
And anyone who still thinks Hancock was sacked/resigned because of the bizarre revelation of an affair perfectly caught on a “hidden” camera is still living in the fantasy world created by TPTB.
“the impact of the pandemic on mental health referrals in England seems less clear when looking at the entire year.”
I’m afraid that’s inevitable. We are getting a partial picture of the disastrous impact of policies in every field. The true dimension of the cock-ups is hidden in the collateral damage to proper data collection and analysis : starting with the basic one of the actual extent of Covid illness (all we know is that all indications show a vast overestimate).
When it comes to the already impoverished mental health services, one can guess that self non-referral is probably worse than for physical illness.
But, hey-ho, why worry? I’m sure another round of clapping will make it all OK.
Unreal that everyone was outside clapping and cheering and in some instances I’ve seen, quite literally worshipping, a service that abandoned us, gave us the finger and carried on drawing salaries and accruing pension benefits whilst we were left to rot. We all know that lots of staff in A&E worked incredibly hard, (but then so did shop staff, etc.- without protection or acclaim), but equally we all know that mostly they shut up shop. I know more than one person working in the NHS that was embarrassed by all this.
Locking people inside, conducting psychological torture on them and ensuring the rules change so often they have no ability to plan for the future and nothing to look forward to leads to mental health problems.
Astonishing, who could have predicted this?
This was inevitable, lays bare the mendacious nature of the evil thugs, and I don’t use those words lightly, in Government and SAGE spreading fear and uncertainly in the British Public. Never forget, never forgive! Some people will be mentally scarred for the rest of their lives by this.
and it’s even worse for the patients…
Happen I’m a bit deaf, but I didn’t hear mental health charities protesting to the government when all the people they were supposed to care about were abandoned by the National Hell Service.
Fake news keeps on blatantly lying
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-08-india-covid-surge-vaccine-coverage.html
India is preparing for another COVID surge: Low vaccine coverage leaves it vulnerable
Just staggering how far from truthful “The Con” (where this trash gets produced for “free”) seems to be.
The silent mental health problems are in the Cabinet.
According to the SNP lockdowns have been innovative and welcomed by the people. So good in fact that they should be used for other things.
And Guardian readers see lockdown as just “that time when I bought some DIY tools and never used them (silly me)”.
This is a tragic mess.
Guardian readers and power tools- now that is a crisis for the NHS…
Anything you can do, we Downunder can do better. Every national and state government in Australia is quick to brag about their record spending (‘investment’) on mental health but they are also contributing mightily to the demand side by pursuing endless lockdowns to achieve Zero Covid.
Calls to the suicide prevention hotline, Lifeline Australia, are up 18.9% during 2020 and 2021. On the one day of August 3rd, 2021 (when Australia’s three most populous states were in perma-lockdown), Lifeline achieved a 58-year record for volume of calls in one day. Beyond Blue, a depression hotline, has seen its calls increase by 30.7% on average call volume.
Kids Helpline reports 8% more children are calling to talk about self-harm and 33% more are calling about child abuse. The organisation also reports that teenage attempted suicide rates are up 184% and they have been dispatching 53 ambulances a week for kids in Victoria, alone, who have attempted suicide.
Still, if it saves just one false-positive PCR test, and just one politician’s re-election prospects, no doubt it is worth it.
I was surprised to see that the 2020 suicide numbers for Scotland, released this week, show a drop from 2019. I just can’t see how that is possible. My sister’s mate works in a hospital in the Highlands and says there has been a massive increase in suicides and suicide attempts but according to the official record there’s been a considerable reduction in ‘probable suicides’ there, from 67 in 2019 to 44 in 2020…
Pre-covid I might have balked at the suggestion that deaths would be wrongly classified to meet a particular objective, but that’s no longer the case. I’ll be interested to see if there’s been an increase in deaths listed under ‘undetermined intent’ and ‘accidental’.
I had a breakdown couple months back and taken care of by the nursing staff they were great I got loads of help since.