The flu was substantially suppressed across much of the world for the first two years of the Covid pandemic.
Many, many people disagree with me on this point, more than ever before. While I’m generally happy to let ideas I think are wrong persist alongside my own point of view, this is an exception, because it touches on the phenomenon of viral interference, which is very real and very important.
Properly understood, viral interference calls into question the entire rationale for non-pharmaceutical interventions to slow the transmission of viruses, and suggests that mass vaccination against old endemic pathogens like influenza is a very bad idea – even in a fantasy world where those vaccines are absolutely safe, and especially if they’re in any way effective.
I want to be as clear about this as I can, so I’ll pull a Pueyo and tell you what I’m about to say before I say it:
- I’m going to explain how we know influenza infections were heavily suppressed, especially in the first year of the Covid pandemic, from data that have nothing – zero – to do with mass pandemic testing.
- I’m going to explain why viral interference is such a conceptual problem, and how it becomes easier to understand if we drop one of the core assumptions of epidemiology.
- Finally, I’m going to suggest that ordinary endemic viruses are an important defence against potentially dangerous novel pathogens.
This is not a post about mass PCR testing and its reliability. Even without mass testing data, we have good reason to conclude that Covid coincided with the widespread suppression of influenza.
That said, it’s very important to acknowledge that influenza testing changed drastically after March 2020. Equally important is the fact that influenza was never diagnosed via mass PCR testing, as Covid was, and this makes it easy to get lost in meaningless apples-to-oranges comparisons. Furthermore, there is no denying that the raw number of flu tests fell nearly to zero for the entire space of the pandemic period. Finally, there existed in most jurisdictions considerable financial incentives for diagnosing Covid infection in as many patients as possible, especially when those patients died.
These points raise grave questions about the integrity of our pandemic-era influenza data, but they don’t make a positive case in either direction. In what follows, and for the sake of argument, I’ll assume that ordinary diagnostic influenza testing ceased the world over on March 1st 2020. I’ll assume that the WHO FluNet statistics and CDC numbers are hopelessly confounded.
Evidence for influenza suppression after 2020
I’ve made my case for what happened to influenza during the pandemic multiple times, and I suspect that none of you want me to rehearse that in detail ever again. If you are, however, interested in links to the data and closer discussion, please see this piece on the ‘Mysterious Disappearance of Influenza‘ and this piece on the phenomenon of viral interference.
Here I’ll simply spell out the main points. There are four of them:
1. Various jurisdictions have small self-contained influenza surveillance programmes. Mass Covid PCR insanity did not affect these programmes. In Germany, participating sentinel clinics swab patients with respiratory symptoms and send these swabs to a testing centre. During the pandemic, they tested each of these swabs for each of seven viruses: rhinoviruses, ordinary human-infecting coronaviruses, influenza, RSV, parainfluenza, human metapneumovirus and SARS-2. They’ve been doing this for a long time, yielding a wealth of data going back years about the seasonal patterns of the endemic viruses we live with. And this is the key point: after March 2020, influenza disappears entirely from German sentinel clinic swabs. Other viruses are heavily suppressed but not totally gone; only rhinoviruses seem unaffected.
2. The behaviour of influenza, at the population-level, is seasonally distinct. In most places, flu infections peak in February or March. Rhinoviruses, by contrast, are most active in the autumn and the spring, and other respiratory viruses are most prevalent around the winter solstice in late December. If influenza were merely rebranded as Covid or overlooked by the pandemic-era testing regime, we’d expect fever gauges like Grippe Web to show the usual double-peak of virus respiratory systems, with one peak for the solstice viruses in December and another peak for flu after January. We don’t see that. For the crucial 2020/21 season, the post-January influenza peak is totally missing, and the solstice peak is anomalously low, in fact barely perceptible. These data are independent of all virus testing.
3. Very much in contrast to Covid and the other common respiratory viruses save RSV, influenza causes a small yet nontrivial number of hospitalisations and deaths in very young children. If flu were overlooked or rebranded as Covid during the pandemic, we’d expect to see the usual flu-related February and March hospitalisations and deaths in this age cohort, but we don’t. They’re totally missing. This is another data point totally independent of mass testing.
4. Viral interference is very real, and it has been observed for a long time. Some of the most convincing data emerge from studies of the 2009 Swine Flu. In this over-hyped ‘pandemic’, a new H1N1 flu strain spread across the globe, causing mild symptoms in almost everyone. For humans, it was a nothingburger, but for the world of viruses, it was very disruptive, because viruses don’t have to be extra special or especially dangerous to upset the viral ecosystem. Ordinary human-infecting coronaviruses were heavily suppressed across the entire 2009-10 season. Almost nobody locked down for the Swine Flu, there was no mass PCR insanity, and yet multiple studies attest to a clear interference effect.
How viral interference probably works and why standard epidemiological assumptions are wrong
Viral interference does not – cannot – involve the direct competition of viruses within the same host. Only a small minority of the population (generally 2-10%) suffers symptomatic respiratory virus infection at any given time. Many influenza-shedding hosts will never encounter a single SARS-2-shedding host for the duration of their symptoms. And yet, viral interference happens.
What is going on?
Here it will help to consider all the other phenomena we’ve been treated to since 2020 that the virus ‘understanders’ are equally powerless to explain:
- How is it that waves of infection generally collapse of their own accord, well before burning through the entire population?
- Why were non-pharmaceutical interventions, especially lockdowns, so powerless to do anything about Covid mortality?
- And, above all, why were the virus models so invariably, irretrievably wrong all the time?
We are labouring under a serious error, and that error is to be sought somewhere in the SIR model of virus transmission. In the deceptively logical, simple world of SIR (which underpins not merely virus computer modelling but much epidemiological thought) immunologically naïve people are held to be Susceptible until they encounter the virus. They are then Infected, after which they either die or Recover and are immune.
This model is particularly attractive to the vaccinators of the world, who believe that they can snatch people out of the Susceptible pool by jabbing them, and drop them into the Recovered/Vaccinated column, thereby skipping the dreaded Infected part.
Well, dear readers, we have endured an unprecedented exercise in mass vaccination. It had many effects on virus transmission, but none of it looked like SIR told us it would. Many theories are possible, but anyone who seriously attempts to understand how viruses actually behave must sooner or later throw SIR into the trash.
R. Edgar Hope Simpson, in trying to account for the many oddities of influenza transmission, effectively located the error of SIR in its overly simplistic conception of what it means to be Infected and Recovered.
As for Covid, SIR looks to be entirely too simplistic in its conception of the Susceptible. An ordinary population not subject to a multi-year Chinese hygiene regime has substantial resistance to viral infection in general. Scroll up and look at the German fever-gauge data once more. Note how, across the entire German population, symptomatic infections seem to have serious trouble breaching the 10% threshold. Whenever they scrape it, a collapse is imminent.
Here’s how I read that: innate immune defences are powerful, and they make a solid majority of everybody invulnerable to respiratory virus infection at any given time. Viruses don’t have free run of the entire uninfected population; only a small minority of respiratory tracts are open to them. That Susceptible minority waxes and wanes with the seasons. In the summer, it’s very small indeed, and many viruses drop to nearly undetectable levels. In the winter, the number of Susceptible increases substantially.
We have a good explanation of viral interference, if we posit that prior infection with one respiratory virus knocks the recovered person out of the Susceptible column for many other viruses. Interferon is one likely mechanism here, but there are probably others. If you’re in the minority 5% susceptible and you get influenza, you’re most likely invulnerable to Covid for a while afterwards, and vice versa.
Once we revise our conception of who is susceptible, a lot of things come into focus. We wasted much effort locking down and vaccinating people who were invulnerable to infection in any case. This was entirely useless if not actively harmful, because Covid vaccination, it turns out, does not necessarily take you out of the susceptible column. On the contrary, it has bizarre and unexpected effects on virus susceptibility, often increasing it both in the near- and longer-term. Infection waves collapse well before they burn through the whole population because only a minority of people are susceptible at any given time. Models are wrong because they drastically overestimate susceptibility.
SIR, on closer consideration, is not an empirical attempt to understand virus transmission at all. Instead, it’s a heavily politicised paradigm, useful for exaggerating the threat of respiratory pathogens and justifying technocratic public health interventions like mass vaccination. It persists not because it’s right, but because it’s useful.
Ordinary endemic viruses are a defence against novel pathogens and lockdowns are very bad
The problem isn’t that lockdowns do nothing. It’s that they’re just effective enough to be dangerous. Endemic viruses that have been around forever face the standard constraints of seasonality and the drastic limitations our innate immune systems place on susceptibility, but they’re also boxed in by adaptive immunity. They face antibodies everywhere because they’ve been infecting billions of people since childhood. A newer pathogen, like SARS-2, faces fewer adaptive immune constraints.
When you lock down and put hand sanitiser on every corner, it’s the old endemic viruses that take the hit first. In preventing these infections, you effectively reserve precious susceptible respiratory tracts for the somewhat faster novel virus. We know that SARS-2 was circulating widely as early as autumn 2019, and yet it only coincided with serious mortality as influenza infections collapsed in the course of February and March.
The chronology suggests that influenza, already at the end of its season, was being out-competed in many places by Covid as early as February. Lockdowns are far from the only factor in play here, but everywhere the story is the same: collapsing influenza is a precondition for pandemic mortality.
Influenza is far from the only virus with which SARS-2 competes. It’s almost surely no accident that SARS-2 was at its deadliest in heavily restricted care home environments. These were spaces in which a draconian hygiene interventions spared SARS-2 all competition. Compare the case of the Diamond Princess, where Covid also had access to a lot of old people but could rack up very few deaths, no doubt because of endemic virus competition.
Mass vaccination initiatives to reduce the prevalence of endemic respiratory viruses, including vastly milder Omicron-era Covid, are a very bad idea for the same reason that lockdowns are. Even if they’re totally safe and effective, the risk is that they’ll end up reserving hosts for other, newer pathogens and the unknown risks that these pose.
At the end, a side matter: influenza suppression in the absence of Covid
A common objection is that flu appeared to vanish in many regions that also had very few Covid infections in 2020, such as Eastern Europe and Taiwan. Thus, it is said, we must be dealing with artefacts of testing or behavioural changes rather than a real biological phenomenon.
The problem with this view is that influenza has many unique characteristics that set it apart from other viruses. In some respects, it seems to behave like one pan-regional viral super-organism, evading human immunity via constant mutation and reassortment in millions of hosts. When it’s denied these substantial reservoirs, it suddenly faces significant disadvantages everywhere.
In the past, I’ve written of the ‘disappearance’ of influenza, but here I’ve tried to speak more precisely of its suppression. Mass flu testing in 2020 would have undoubtedly uncovered cases across the world, and perhaps it would have even uncovered somewhat more cases in places where Covid was less prevalent. However that may be, it’s important to emphasise that influenza merely seemed to disappear, because it was not prevalent enough for our (often rather crude) flu surveillance programs to detect. (Some combination of Covid competition and pandemic restrictions does seem to have wiped out the Yamagata strain of Influenza B forever, though.)
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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Some musings……I wonder why the Davos Deviants picked England to spark off civil unrest? Australia has ANZAC day and I understand that is venerated in the same way as Remeberance Sunday, so why us?
Does any other prominent nation honour and remember its war dead in quite the same way as we do?
Have they decided to inflict martial law or lockdowns or is the intention simply to set our towns and cities alight?
Dark days indeed.
Maybe just testing their new “draconian” anti-protest powers as laid out in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, to see how it works in practice?
Edit: could be Public Order Act, either way the police now have new powers.
It would appear that freelance photojournalists who work for CNN and the New York Times just happened to be within the Gaza strip at the time Hamas and many psychopath citizens blasted through the barrier and commenced their assault. What a scoop for them;
”On October 7, Hamas terrorists were not the only ones who documented the war crimes they had committed during their deadly rampage across southern Israel. Some of their atrocities were captured by Gaza-based photojournalists working for the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies whose early morning presence at the breached border area raises serious ethical questions.
What were they doing there so early on what would ordinarily have been a quiet Saturday morning? Was it coordinated with Hamas? Did the respectable wire services, which published their photos, approve of their presence inside enemy territory, together with the terrorist infiltrators? Did the photojournalists who freelance for other media, like CNN and The New York Times, notify these outlets? Judging from the pictures of lynching, kidnapping and storming of an Israeli kibbutz, it seems like the border has been breached not only physically, but also journalistically.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20231108181516/https://honestreporting.com/photographers-without-borders-ap-reuters-pictures-of-hamas-atrocities-raise-ethical-questions/
Good reporting Mogs
Wow.
Now you’re on the right track.
Implication…
Slightly off topic. With many papers reducing staff due to competition from on-line, editors rely more and more on pre-cooked articles from Reuters and AP etc. Who these days are far from neutral:
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/02/23/when-i-covered-climate-change-for-reuters-i-thought-co2-was-to-blame-for-rising-temperatures-i-was-wrong/?highlight=AP%20reuters
Reuters have links to the WEF….
CEOs of the big media companies have links to the WEF….
Hammas leader is a member of WEF….
Netanyahu is a member of WEF….
Braverman attended WEF….
Sunak is a member of WEF….
They’re all working for the same sponsor.
The DS, all the MSM are promoting the agenda of the WEF
Arguing here about who is right & who is wrong is following the agenda of the WEF.
Can you see it yet??
This lady who is Israeli and Arab Muslim, and is one of many, puts paid to the accusation of Israel being an ”apartheid state” ( 1min 30sec );
https://twitter.com/BrotherRasheed/status/1722121368232206476
How many Arabs live in Israel – how many have left since Oct 7th….. if so who is reporting on this – CNN, NYT, a n other of the TNI cabal?
I was in Bradford in 1991 and it was a tinderbox of cultural tension. Fighting between Pakistan Muslims and the English was commonplace. I knew then that this country had a big problem with immigration; after all, most of the refusal to integrate was coming from second generation immigrants. It could only get worse.
I haven’t been back since, but I doubt that all the hundreds of thousands of Muslims that have chosen to loudly protest on what has become England’s most sacred day of the year are doing so because they’ve integrated well. This idea amongst many sceptics that any trouble from all the ‘peace-loving’ Muslims would only stem from ‘agents’ is crazy. Batshit crazy. There are, at the very least, hundreds of thousands of Muslims living amongst us that hate Western values and need the smallest of excuses to show it. We will know what they really think of their adopted country this weekend. Anyone that turns up to protest is telling us what they really think of our values – I’m sure that will include hordes of virtue-signalling middle-class English.
Whatever happens this weekend the state wins. They are just a few moves away from the end of their game.
I think that Britain is about to reap the whirlwind of its much laudered and blinkered approach to multiculturalism!
We’re about to celebrate the lives of those who gave all, only for us to be defeated in our own country
I’ve come to believe the only people wearing the blinkers were us. It’s very hard to draw any conclusion other than mass immigration has always been the plan. Dilute Britishness, dilute a sense of belonging, generate panic, sow division and voila! You have a population ripe for the picking. The State will provide the answers to social unrest with more control, more surveillance, more restrictions. And it’s a 2-for-1 deal, as they also now have an abundance of people willing to work for less, so more ‘resource’ at lower cost. That’s all we are to these people – a tiny cog in their machine.
The destruction of European Christian civilisation has been the plan.
Mass immigration is just one of the means of achieving it.
Where did “we the people” go wrong I wonder? I guess many of us got lazy and missed what was going on at a global level, too busy bickering over local issues.
Not limited to us though. Consider France, or some USA states. There is no shortage of immigration across the Mediterranean at present, nor via central America.
So Rowley says no Law exists to stop the protests by our wonderfully integrated brethren ! There will be one afterwards that covers all of us , with maybe other familiar measures as well ! You couldn’t make it up !
Just one incident of a breach of the peace by a protester, just one, whether Plod acts or not, and Rowley is “decareered” in a heartbeat.
Climate Change Conference Cops And Robbers
latest leaflet to print at home and deliver to neighbours or forward to politicians, media, friends online.
Well done, Sir Mark Rowley.
This is exactly the kind of leadership with backbone that is required.
The Police will do an outstanding job at the weekend, again, and deserve our support, gratitude.
Corbyn had 13m supporters, and these marchers are Corbynites.
Of course they should be allowed to march peacefully so that the whole nation can see them for what they are.
Placards marked ‘Socialist Worker’ always give the game away.
This mini clip of Douglas Murray shutting Piers Morgan’s nonsense down, with his ”..but they’re not all Hamas supporters” garbage, is what I’ve been saying for some time. There is no way anyone going out on a march by week 5 wouldn’t know what ”from the river to the sea” meant, so yes they are all terrorist supporters, therefore I shall continue to accurately refer to these protests as ”pro-Hamas”, because it would appear that at this point in time it is factually correct.
https://twitter.com/GSpellchecker/status/1722385754322559421
One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.
Anyone who claims to know what everyone in a group of thousands believes is deluding himself.
The anti lockdown marchers were branded far right, radicals, anti-vax looneys, everything under the sun.
All I nanowire is that someone is making hay from all this division and conflict.
“Met chief says ‘no law exists’ to stop pro-Palestine protest on Armistice Day”
That horse has long bolted!
Why didn’t the local authority just deny permission for the protest in the first place??
Then offer any other days on which they wanted to have it?
Why did they allow it on this particular weekend?
Have there ever been other marches and protests allowed in London during the remembrances? If not, why this one?
(I really don’t know if other protests have been allowed on Armistice day? Please enlighten)
In recent years, Remembrance with all the military marches etc has been scheduled for the nearest Sunday to Armistice day. It just happens to be Saturday & Sunday this year – next year it’ll be Sunday & Monday. Some calendars are erroneously labelled as if they were always together.
Khan didn’t or should that be Khouldnt….
Actually it’s Khant but drop the ‘h’ and give it a cockney accent and…well
Listening to Toby on this week’s Weekly Sceptic podcast:
“People just seem to lose their reason and discount prior experience when they start to panic under the threat of tens of 1000’s of deaths which they think they might be held accountable for not doing more to prevent … I wouldn’t be prepared to bet that we wouldn’t lock down again in the event of another pandemic”.
It is clear, 3.5 years on, that Toby still believes that there really was a pandemic and that those implementing the lockdown policy were acting in good faith in response to what they thought was a genuine public health emergency but simply panicked.
I’m not sure what to make of this…
Is he wrong that the hysteria of the population was used against it?
It doesn’t matter whether the covid terror was planned or just happened for the purpose of his point. Without the public’s hysteria and total buy in of the danger, there is no covid terror.
Thanks for that Michael. Actually I find this quite disturbing. Toby Young is not unintelligent so clinging to cock-up in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary seems absurd.
This line from Julie Burchill’s piece in Spiked – Queers for Palestine – made me chuckle:
“Didn’t the LQBTQ+ ‘community’ already have enough internecine squabbles, between those who believe that women can’t have penises and those who are insane?”
‘Police must be even handed with protests’.
So, if in 1942, Nazis wanted to march down the Mall, would they have stood by?
Every loathsome individual who takes part in these pro Hamas marches signals their Jew hatred.
Their slogan: first the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.
First they came for the Jews.
This is a common fallacy used to argue for limits to free speech. Basically, if we allow everything, then you can end up with the Nazis.
It’s completely the other way around. It was the Nazis that suppressed free speech and went on to commit the atrocities they did and to jail and murder anyone who disagreed with them.
A population committed to free speech would not have allowed the Nazis to do what they did.
“‘It’s controversial, but I think Hamas are freedom fighters’” – The organisers of the anti-Israel marches say they are peaceful. The Campaign Against Antisemitism spoke to attendees to see for themselves…”
Just like the Waffen SS then.
Good to know.
The ignorance displayed by those interviewed was staggering.
Worth looking into, following and wishing well.
But Michael Gove attending?
Seriously?!
https://www.dossier.today/p/inside-the-arc-a-dispatch-from-the?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=69009&post_id=138726321&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=97oj4&utm_medium=email
Thanks for the link. Excellent work there.