Brian Monteith’s article in the Scotsman, highlighted here on Monday, makes a good point. None of our political parties care to talk about lockdowns. None remind us of how fervently they supported masks, social distancing or the Rule of Six. The Tories don’t wish to remember how stringently they enforced futile strictures. Labour and SNP don’t care to recall how they demanded greater restrictions. You could be fined £6,400 for persistently not wearing a mask on a train. Or £10,000 for a birthday party. Remember? They have taken a vow of silence. Including, in the SNP’s case, about the notion of lopping six inches off schoolroom doors to blow the virus away.
This is understandable. In civvy street, it’s becoming hard to find anyone who still thinks that lockdowns were wise. Everyone sees the wreckage – of educations, mental health, livelihoods, the work ethic and healthcare. The NHS stumbles on, less productively than pre-pandemic, whilst facing a backlog of sicker folks with delayed diagnoses. Inflation has impoverished us and driven interest rates higher. These, in turn, cause vast losses on Government bonds that the Bank of England bought during lockdown’s Quantitative Easing. We, as taxpayers, are on the hook for the tab. Raised taxes will cover debt interest, not better public services.
Pro-lockdown views are becoming confined to fanatics, unable to grasp any wider horizon. One such lodged a ‘formal complaint’ against me after I asked a lockdown-critical question following her lecture at ESCMID Global in Barcelona, alleging ‘harassment and distress’. How can I ‘harass’ anyone with a single question, articulated in a minute? Only if I prick a mental bubble, maybe?
What’s more interesting, and Mr. Monteith fails to mention, is the equal omertà on Covid vaccines. Unlike lockdowns, sold as a painful necessity, vaccines were touted as great achievements by Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock, Rishi Sunak, the BMJ, and the press at large. The FT – no friend of Boris – wrote in February 2021 that vaccines gave the then PM a second chance. Ahead of the May 2021 council elections Keir Starmer opined that the vaccine rollout gave Boris a “very significant boost”. Developers and deployers received public honours.
As late as February 2023 the PM began his response to a Parliamentary Question (apropos a vaccine-injured constituent) by saying:
It is important to start by recognising the importance of vaccines in protecting us all, not least the fantastic roll-out of the Covid vaccines across the U.K.
Now, come the election, no candidate hails the vaccines or the rollout. Nary a word. This is odd, to say the least. This Government hasn’t much to crow about. So, you’d think it’d highlight what, three years ago, was hailed as a world-beating success? Is it an admission it has all gone sour?
The vaccines’ mediocre efficacy was evident by the summer of 2021, as people found themselves infected despite recent vaccination. Nevertheless, most people dutifully queued for a third shot, bamboozled by propaganda that this would do the trick. It didn’t. Omicron struck and vast numbers, vaccinated or not, were infected.
Fewer punters have presented for each subsequent shot, and mistrust has multiplied. The comments below any newspaper article on Covid vaccines are now predominantly negative. Among frontline healthcare workers only 30.2% received a Covid vaccine in the six months between September 2023 and February 2024, compared with 42.8% who accepted the flu vaccine; corresponding figures for workers in GP practices were 44.9% versus 61.8%. These figures tell much about professional scepticism especially as the comparator flu vaccine is only modestly effective and widely declined.
Had the Government stuck to its original plan of vaccinating only the over-50s and the vulnerable it’d be able to claim success. The ratio of deaths to infections fell after the early stages of the rollout. I, doubtless now annoying some readers, continue to believe that some benefit was achieved, though the age bar should have been higher.
But, instead of proclaiming limited victory, our leaders flipped to vaccinating everyone, regardless of age and risk and the Opposition asked no questions. Some readers will see a global conspiracy. Other countries did the same and mandated more aggressively. I think it more likely that our ruling cabal – Johnson, Gove, Hancock and Sunak, plus SAGE – dreamt they could surreptitiously achieve zero-Covid and be lauded as saviours. The vaccines had around 90% efficacy, they believed. So, if they vaccinated enough of us, the R number would slip decisively below one. SARS-CoV-2 would then die out.
As with Lawson shadowing the ERM, it didn’t quite work out. More-transmissible variants – Alpha, Delta and finally Omicron – kept nudging the winning post further away. Or, perhaps more correctly, mass vaccination kept favouring more transmissible variants, pushing the winning post further away. In response, the Government doubled down, vaccinating adolescents, then children, re-vaccinating those already vaccinated. And the virus kept a jump ahead. Finally, late in 2021, SARS-CoV-2 became Omicron and hit full gallop. The race ended.
In retrospect the response looks ever more foolish. Pushing ahead after it was plain – in mid-2021– that the vaccines were failing to stop transmission was like raising your bet after you’ve noticed your nag only has three legs. Worse, those who drove the strategy – and the Opposition who asked no questions – missed a key point. With vaccines, unlike drugs to treat the sick, the people you save cannot be identified whilst those harmed become very visible. This indicates a need for greater caution when developing a vaccine. Surely the JCVI reminded them?
Yet, the most-used vaccines were hurriedly-developed mRNA and DNA-vector products with novel modes of action. Their tissue distribution and side-effects were incompletely examined. They are clearer now. As Robert Redfield, a virologist who headed the CDC from 2018 to 2021 puts it:
When I give you an mRNA vaccine… I don’t know how much spike protein you make because I give you mRNA and then your body goes and makes it… You may make it for a week… You may make it for a month.
He adds that the spike protein is inherently toxic (it binds to heart cells, among other targets). And it comes to be made, sometimes for long periods, in parts of your body that a natural SARS-CoV-2 infection would never reach, not just at the respiratory mucosa.
It is beyond dispute that mRNA and DNA-vector COVID vaccines injured sizeable numbers of individuals, causing death, blot clots, myocarditis and Bell’s Palsy among other harms. Many of those harmed were too young to be at any real risk from Covid infection. They were vaccinated ‘for the greater good’, under policies supported by every U.K. political party. John Watt, a Scot with a cardiac injury, confronted Rishi Sunak about this on GB News last February. The PM responded by talking of the Vaccine Damage Payments Scheme and how it might need tweaking. But he avoided the core issue of why a 35-year-old (as Mr. Watt was in 2021) was vaccinated at all.
Perhaps it is the fear of individual confrontations like this that keeps our candidates off their ‘Great Achievement’? They’d have to admit that many younger folk risked harms for no personal benefit in an ill-judged failure to stop viral circulation. And continued to do so once the inevitability of failure was clear.
Or perhaps a bigger, niggling, fear haunts the political class, despite walkouts when Andrew Bridgen MP rises to speak? The vaccines may (or may not) be a factor in the persistent excess deaths that have followed the pandemic. Many of these are cardiac or circulatory – common settings for Covid-vaccine side effects. Any honest scientist, or interested citizen, must ask if there is a connection. There is also the issue of turbo cancers, highlighted here by Professor Angus Dalgleish. In Japan – the world’s most-vaccinated country – long-falling cancer rates turned upwards after booster deployment. Perhaps this is coincidental. Perhaps not. Again, questions must be asked. If one accepts that cancers arise repeatedly during our lifetimes, but mostly are aborted by the immune system, it is eminently plausible that a hazard arises when products perturb this system. And, genetic vaccines, particularly the mRNA products, cause numerous complex perturbations far beyond the simple induction of antibodies and T-cell responses seen with conventional protein and killed-pathogen vaccines.
I do not wish to scare-monger. Much of the evidence for wider (as against individual) harms is circumstantial. I am not yet convinced that these vaccines triggered excess deaths or will bring a spate of cancers. These may largely be contingent on incipient illnesses that were missed or untreated during lockdown. But I am convinced that the novel-vaccines-for-all policy of 2021-2022 was reckless and unwarranted. Its consequences need rigorous examination, as does the lack of Parliamentary scrutiny in which it took place. That is why I deplore the U.K. Covid Inquiry kicking its vaccines module into the long grass of 2025 and wholeheartedly welcome the People’s Vaccine Inquiry along with the BMJ’s brave decision to publish a paper asking awkward questions.
And it’s why I’d like to hear our candidates say something about their great vaccine rollout. Do they still think it was a good idea. Or a madness? All the major parties of the time backed it. If Reform becomes the next Government it says that it’ll have an inquiry into excess deaths and vaccine harms. Good for them. Do the Tories, Labour, Liberal Democrats, SNP et al. agree that this is needed? And urgently, given that boosting continues for the elderly and healthcare workers. Or do they still believe in the Great Achievement?
Dr. David Livermore is a retired Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia.
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.