We’re in the middle of 2024, and the ‘experts’ still won’t give up their ridiculous defence of Covid mandates.
By now, the evidence against the effectiveness of Covid policies and so-called ‘interventions’ is overwhelming. Mask mandates were a spectacular failure, with the most heavily masked populations often seeing worse results than cities, counties or countries with little to no masking.
Vaccine mandates and passports were an unmitigated disaster; coercion created mistrust, and resistance and in some cases may have led to unnecessary, damaging side effects.
School closures, as we have clearly learned, were a tremendous, world-changing disaster. And it was made all the more frustrating by the fact that we had examples across the globe showing that they weren’t needed.
None of that’s stopped those committed to maintaining the fantasy of Covid mandates from desperately seeking to validate their belief system. And that desperation just led to one of their most absurd claims yet.
Covid Social Distancing and Vaccines Saved 800,000 Lives, Don’t Ya Know?
Two researchers from formerly reputable institutions, the University of Colorado, Boulder and the University of California, Los Angeles, just recently published a paper claiming to have cracked the fantastical code on just how effective the social distancing, lockdowns, mask mandates and Covid vaccines were at saving lives during the pandemic.
And what do you know? They found that the policies they supported were tremendous, highly successful interventions! Who would have ever guessed?
According to the headline, they claim that: ‘Mitigating behaviour and vaccines saved around 800,000 American lives.’
How did they arrive at this awe-inspiring conclusion? With a model, of course!
Mechanism: Around 68% of Americans got vaccinated before first infection
First Covid infection much less dangerous after vaccinationBack of the envelope estimate of lives saved
Full structural model of epidemic with behaviour and vaccines
This is what we’re dealing with here; a model based on a “back-of-the-envelope” estimate of lives saved, with their esteemed educated guess as to how many Americans were vaccinated before becoming infected.
Well, ‘guessing’ might not be accurate… completely guessing is more like it. According to their methodology, they used serology data on the timing of infections and vaccinations, though, of course, without direct links between individuals who were infected and those who were vaccinated, there’s little we can learn from population-wide serology data.
Not to mention that to create their model on the benefits of vaccination, they examined data from just 30 states on “COVID-19 deaths by vaccination status”.
Serology data on timing of infections and vaccinations
30 states: COVID-19 deaths data by vaccination status
But as anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Covid data knows, this type of data is hopelessly corrupted.
Thanks to public health experts and their pharmaceutical company allies, most jurisdictions only count individuals as being vaccinated starting 14 days after their second dose. Those with just one dose are effectively viewed as ‘unvaccinated’ for purposes of data collection. This type of counting skews the reliability of deaths by vaccination status, as does the fact that there were mountains of mistakes made by public health administrators and jurisdictions regarding data collection throughout the pandemic.
But especially when it comes to deaths by vaccination status. Not to mention that the supposed efficacy of Covid vaccines is highly reliant on when the data were measured. Even the CDC’s own data in late 2023 effectively acknowledged that the original vaccination series had waned to reach zero efficacy.
Regardless, the poor methodology used to create this model is evidenced by one of their first examples of measuring combined and infection seroprevalence.
The blue dots in this photo represent “cumulative percent infected plus vaccinated without infection” while the red and yellow are “cumulative percent ever infected”.
First, these numbers rely on seroprevalence estimates, which while useful are hardly definitive. Secondly, the researchers apparently ignore that the percentage of infected skyrockets starting in late December 2020, accelerating significantly after the vaccines were introduced.
They also then suggest that behavioural modifications were responsible for saving nearly 800,000 lives because they delayed infections until after vaccination.
This though is nonsense.
The charts below use the blue line as the estimate of what would have resulted if behaviour had remained the same, with no vaccination. The red line is the actual course of the pandemic.
But these charts assume as a given that behaviour was responsible for lowering the curve of deaths in 2020 and early 2021, then use a faulty assumption of vaccine efficacy based on corrupted data from 30 states to suggest that there were hundreds of thousands of lives saved.
Their model relies on their assumptions being accurate when we know for a fact that they aren’t. How do we know? Because states and countries that did not have similar behavioural modifications often had better results.
They ignore this fact to create the model. Literally.
“Behavioural response had a lot in common across U.S. states,” they say. But we know that’s not true. People living in California, particularly in 2021 and 2022, had very different experiences than those living in Florida or Iowa. Mask mandates and vaccine passports continued in California and New York deep into 2022, while Florida banned vaccine passports and had virtually no masking by spring 2021.
They claim that behavioral modifications were responsible for “delaying deaths”, but there’s no evidence that that’s true since different areas with different responses often had similar results.
Somehow, they also then claim that people “would have gotten infected without protection of vaccines”, a nonsensical fantasy given we know that the vaccines provide zero protection against infection.
So they both credit behaviour with reducing infections and delaying deaths, based on nothing, but also credit vaccines with reducing infections, and thus deaths. Also based on nothing.
Their assumptions prove their results, a classic failure of modeling.
It also ignores the importance of more transmissible, less virulent variants. Omicron resulted in an explosion of infections, though with lower mortality rates. Testing also exploded in 2021 and 2022, meaning that more people could test positive and thus be counted as ‘Covid deaths’ without it being the underlying cause.
Of course, this also doesn’t account for the harms these policies caused: the increased deaths from lockdowns, despair and substance abuse and addiction, and the harms from increased obesity and learning loss, or physical abuse suffered by children no longer in schools.
This model is a farce; a politically motivated tool for media outlets to use to justify their advocacy and the activism of people like Fauci and organisations like the CDC. “Covid vaccines and masking and behaviour saved lives, because we assumed they did,” would be an accurate headline for the research paper.
Even though all the evidence suggests a much more complicated picture.
You’d think these efforts would have ended by now, given that we’ve reached the middle of May in 2024. But as long as there are researchers committed to upholding their ideological biases, we’ll continue seeing poorly reasoned, misleading publications.
And boy oh boy are there researchers committed to upholding their ideological biases, almost as if they’d put in place yet again the mandates for their next pandemic.
Ian Miller is the author of Unmasked: The Global Failure of Covid Mask Mandates. He writes a Substack newsletter, where this article first appeared. It was also published by the Brownstone Institute.
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When Billy’s next release arrives the level of resistance will be instantly visible with the sheep masking up and locking in as directed. Obviously this research paper from two Americans will be plastered all over the MSM as it seeks to satisfy its government and pharma paymasters and promote more restrictions on our liberties.
I do hope we realists have woken a few and will be able to promote resistance. We certainly must try.
I don’t think “we realists” will awaken many people by telling them it’s all a massive conspiracy, there was no lab leak because there was no virus, it was all concocted so that the elite can cull the population and control the world, etc, and then they ask for evidence for this theory, and you can’t because you don’t have any evidence, just belief, and then they dismiss you, rightly or wrongly, as a ‘crazy conspiracy theorist’ and in comparison the BBC reporting seems quite sensible.
What parts of “Covid” were not a massive conspiracy?
The BBC specialises in seeming sensible but that’s not the point. They are pushing a variety of related political agendas that one might term
left wing though that term is perhaps not that useful.
It’s quite possible there was a lab leak, deliberate or accidental, or that Covid doesn’t exist as a novel virus (prove to me that it does). But in some ways those things don’t matter too much because the main point is that there was never a deadly pandemic.
We were lied to about “Covid” repeatedly, egregiously, systematically, by multiple national and international bodies. I’m not sure what to believe about anything any more.
What parts of “Covid” were not a massive conspiracy? I don’t think it was a massive conspiracy that there was actually a virus which made a lot of people ill, some very ill, and caused some susceptible people to die. But we will never know how many died due to fear and loneliness rather than Covid, or how many died with Covid rather than because of Covid. I don’t think it was planned, but many dishonest and corrupt people – such as the pharmaceutical companies – took advantage of the situation, and many may have initially made honest mistakes but then dishonestly refused to admit and tried to cover up their mistakes, and many believed in “the noble lie” that for the good of society as a whole it was best to give the impression that the Covid vaccines were much safer and more effective than they actually were, so that people would not be put off getting the vaccines. And many people probably lied to themselves too. Those are just a few thoughts, I certainly haven’t got it all figured out!
I certainly don’t have it all
figured out either. It sounds like you believe there were multiple conspiracies, much like most people here.
I think there was a mixture of the usual corruption in the medical industry along with a lot of people being easily misled and misunderstanding and some people eventually realising they got things wrong but were unwilling to admit it, and some people probably cannot admit it to themselves. I don’t know how much of that could be described as conspiracy.
I don’t believe that people like Whitty and Vallance can possibly have got anything wrong- they are experts in their field – but sadly honesty is not their field.
Any conspiracy needs useful idiots and there were plenty of those, but not everyone can claim to have been swept away by events as they played a big part in creating those events and the atmosphere that prevailed.
In any case, if you make a mistake and realise it later and instead of admitting your mistake you compound it then you are guilty as hell, and if you do that as part of a group then that’s a conspiracy.
Matt Hancock texted someone (can’t remember who) something along the lines of “is it time to deploy the omicron variant?”. Just a cockup.
It’s difficult to know exactly what Matt Hancock meant by that isolated comment without context. It could easily be misinterpreted. I’m not even sure what you’re suggesting and what you think his motive might have been. Most of these people’s motive is not wanting to lose their jobs.
Those words are not those of someone who believed there was a deadly pandemic, nor was his behaviour, and that of others (Cummings, Johnson, Ferguson). I doubt I will get much change out of St Peter when the time comes but I will have plenty of company among those who endorsed the scam so enthusiastically.
What do you think was the motive of so many people who “endorsed the scam”?
Many and varied, ranging from active malevolence to cowardice. I tend to think that senior leaders and “public health” officials in most countries must have had more information than they let on, otherwise they would have cried foul. I tend to think the US security state was behind it, possibly once the leak had happened they decided to conduct a huge military exercise.
But that’s obviously a crazy conspiracy theory that gives sensible sceptics like you a bad name.
I think the many and varied motives are mainly centred around greed and/or ignorance and being easily misled and psychological difficulty changing their minds and admitting, even to themselves, that they were wrong.
Indeed an element of that, but where did the idea that this was an “emergency” start?
There is still way too much trust in the BBC including my mother. On the radio was Gardner’s Questions. How can a show with polite, middle class people, who have a little laugh on the BBC be part of a World Order. They had me fooled for a while, that is their deception and they lie by omission. To me, the Globalists have shown their hand.
The BBC is the world’s best funded political campaigning organisation- with our money
Technocracy is perhaps at this point the biggest threat to society.
As technology improves it will become easier to enforce the rules that too many of our fellow citizens seem to crave
$cientocracy. The unholy church of ‘The Science’, evangelised at the point of a gun with digital technology.
That reminds me…Patrick Wood ‘Technocracy News’ is a good website.
“fact that there were mountains of mistakes”
Why do you guys assume ‘mistakes’, Is all the coercion & censorship just a cockup too?
The fact that Ivermectin & HQC were available and that Africa had few Lockdowns and even less Jabs, yet nothing extraordinary there. How do they explain that!