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Immunity Passports: A Debate Between Jay Bhattacharya and Alberto Giubilini

Today we’re publishing a debate about the pros and cons of immunity passports between Dr. Alberto Giubilini, a Senior Research Fellow in the Oxford Philosophy Faculty, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. If any readers would like to participate in this debate, please send your contributions to lockdownsceptics@gmail.com and we’ll publish a round-up in a few days’ time.

Here is an extract from Dr. Giubilini’s contribution:

There are many people among the most vulnerable to COVID-19 who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. These would be exempted from passport requirements – medical exemptions are normally applied where vaccine mandates are in place. Besides, there are many people in the most vulnerable groups who, even if they have been vaccinated, are not protected, given that vaccines are not 100% effective. We need to maximize the chances of protecting these people as far as is reasonably possible. (Which excludes lockdown. These are unreasonable measures.)

Their freedom to have a normal life, to travel, to go to public spaces, to socialise – in other words, their fundamental freedoms (the very same ones that lockdown denies) – presuppose that they are able do all these things as safely as possible. If I am an unvaccinated vulnerable person and I have reason to think very few people in my local pub or in my community are vaccinated, in an important sense I am not free to go to the pub or to the shops. (I would only be free in a legal sense, but that is not the kind of freedom that matters the most.) Doing that would mean taking on quite a large risk (I am in a vulnerable group after all), and that would be true even if I am vaccinated (vaccines are not 100% effective, after all).

Because my liberty matters and arguably the state has a responsibility to protect it as much as is reasonably possible, I can reasonably expect some safeguards to be in place to guarantee that it is safe for me to do all these things.

An immunity passport scheme can offer some extra level of protection to vulnerable people by significantly reducing the chances of transmission without all the costs of lockdown. Vaccines might not be as effective at preventing transmission as they are at preventing disease, but even a reduction of risk can be important.

And here is an extract from Dr. Bhattacharya’s reply:

Vaccine hesitancy among those most susceptible to severe outcomes after Covid infection (primarily the elderly) is the key public health problem at this point in the epidemic. Age is the most important risk factor for severe Covid infection outcomes; there is a thousand-fold difference between the mortality risk faced by the oldest individuals and the youngest after infection. A comprehensive meta-analysis of seroprevalence studies published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organisation finds that people aged 70 and over have a 95% infection survival rate. In comparison, people under 70 have a 99.95% infection survival rate.

In the U.S., more than 80% of the elderly population has already received one vaccine dose (of the two shot regimens), and 70% are fully vaccinated. It has been difficult for states to move that fraction higher for various reasons, but perceived doubts about the vaccine’s safety features prominently among the explanation. While the adenovirus vaccines have triggered a safety signal in younger populations that have led regulatory agencies to issue black box warnings, there have been no safety problems established for these vaccines in the older population. But the issue is one of perceived safety rather than actual safety.

To that specific population that is already largely distrustful of public health authorities (and with much good reason given their manifest failures during this pandemic), the imposition of immunity passports will have the paradoxical effect of reducing vaccine demand. A certain kind of person, over-represented in the vaccine-hesitant group, will respond to an immunity passport requirement by wondering why, if the vaccine is so great, public health authorities and businesses are coercing him to get it? I confess that I have had this thought, even though I have read the vaccine trial data closely, think that the vaccines are great, recommended vaccination strongly to my older friends and family members, and am fully vaccinated myself. Worse, there is the distinct possibility that the distrust of public health created by Covid immunity passports will foster further erosion of the popular support for other vaccines such as the MMR vaccine that protects against measles, mumps, and rubella. If this occurs, it would be a disaster from a public health perspective.

The debate is very much worth reading in full.

By Toby Young  /  7 May 2021 • 11.01
 
88 comments

Face Mask Requirement in Secondary Schools Expected to End on May 17th

After being urged not to “pander” to the pro-mask teaching unions, the Prime Minister is expected to stick to his plan to end the face mask requirement in secondary school classes when the next step of the Government’s “roadmap” out of lockdown comes into force. Mask-wearing will, however, continue to be encouraged in school corridors. The Telegraph has the story.

The Prime Minister will confirm that the Government guidance is changing from May 17th, when England moves into stage three of the reopening roadmap, according to multiple senior Whitehall sources.

Officials at the Department for Education are already drafting the new guidance, which will drop the recommendation that English secondary school pupils should wear face masks in class, while still encouraging their use in corridors.

Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, told the Telegraph that the success of the vaccine rollout and the current low level of Covid cases in schools had paved the way for the move.

“As infection rates continue to decline and our vaccination programme rolls out successfully, we plan to remove the requirement for face coverings in the classroom at step three of the roadmap,” he said.

However, on Thursday night education trade unions – which have been pushing to keep masks in classrooms into the summer – threatened to defy the change.

Kevin Courtney, the Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union, said he would stick by teachers who still wanted pupils to wear masks, adding the coverings remained in place as a “precautionary measure”.

The Government guidance is only advisory rather than backed by law, meaning teachers will retain some autonomy about what to do in the classroom.

Meanwhile across the rest of society, rules on mask wearing are expected to stay in place even past the “end” of lockdown in June.

The Telegraph report is worth reading in full.

By Michael Curzon  /  7 May 2021 • 10.30
     
32 comments

Was a Passenger Train the First Victim of the Lockdown Policy?

A reader has emailed us the details of what might have been the first victim of lockdown: a passenger train.

This story of a somewhat unusual victim of lockdown may be of interest: a CrossCountry passenger train. A freight driver went to work shortly after Boris Johnson’s announcement of lockdown number one. Mr Johnson’s edict had placed him, like many others, in the very difficult position of trying to arrange childcare in order to continue his work. He became so distracted by trying to resolve the sudden predicament in which he found himself, via his mobile phone, that he drove his train into a buffer stop. The train derailed and partially blocked the adjacent passenger line.

Less than a minute later, a CrossCountry passenger train came hurtling by at 85mph and collided with the derailed vehicle, suffering extensive damage as a result. Was this the first victim of lockdown? The Rail Accident Investigation Branch has the full report.

Thankfully, no humans were injured, but with a modicum of imagination, it is easy to see how the event almost led to major tragedy. Sadly, the more than 13 year run without a passenger fatality in a U.K. train accident did come to an abrupt end just a couple of months later. The BBC were quick to blame climate change, but we await the findings of the official investigation report.

By Michael Curzon  /  7 May 2021 • 10.11
   
5 comments

Study Claims Pfizer Vaccine is 95% Effective in Over 65s. But Should That Be 74%?

A new population study from Israel, published in the Lancet on Wednesday, finds that the Pfizer vaccine is 95.3% effective against SARS-CoV-2 infection once a person is fully vaccinated (defined as being a week past their second dose). It also finds the vaccine is 94.8% effective in those aged 65 or older once fully vaccinated.

This is in line with other studies and is a very encouraging result. However, as with previous studies, it’s not clear how well the researchers have taken into account the fact that infections were declining anyway during the study period and whether this has led to an over-estimation of vaccine effectiveness.

To test this I accessed the data available from the Israeli Government. I looked at how many cases occurred in each age group each week alongside the proportion of that age group that had been fully vaccinated by that week. This allowed me to calculate how many infections we would expect to occur among vaccinated people in each age group each week if you assume the vaccines don’t have any effect. I then added these together to give a baseline number of cases in each age group to compare against the number of actual cases among the vaccinated as reported in the study. The results are shown below.

I calculated we would expect 43,826 infections among the vaccinated out of a total of 237,700 in the study period (January 24th to April 3rd) if the vaccines have no effect, which is 18.4%.

The study reports 6,266 infections among the vaccinated out of a total of 232,268 during the study period, or 2.7%. (I wasn’t able to discover why the study had about 2.3% fewer infections than the Israeli Government data broken down by age, but by using proportions we can avoid this discrepancy affecting the calculation.)

A proportion of 2.7% is 85.4% lower than a proportion of 18.4% that we estimated if the vaccines had no effect. This suggests a vaccine effectiveness of more like 85% than 95%.

Looking now at the crucial older age group, if the vaccines had no effect I have calculated we would expect 11,332 infections among the vaccinated aged 60 and over out of a total of 29,489 infections in that age group during the study period. The study found 2,201 infections among the fully vaccinated aged 65 or more. (It doesn’t state how many infections there were in total in this age group so we can’t calculate a straightforward proportion from the study.)

We need to adjust our expected figure of 11,332 to allow for the fact that it includes those aged 60-64 (the study uses different age brackets from the publicly available Government data). From the table above this will be about half of the infections in the 60-69 age group, or 2,834. We also need to reduce the expected figure by around 2.3% to allow for the different infection totals of the study and Government data. This gives us an expected figure of 8,329 infections among the vaccinated over 65s.

The 2,201 figure from the study is 73.6% smaller than 8,329, suggesting a vaccine effectiveness among the over 65s of more like 74% than 95%.

It’s not clear why the authors of the study did not do an analysis similar to this one. Taking into account the background prevalence of the virus should be basic, to avoid over-estimating the effectiveness of vaccines when they are rolled out during the decline of the epidemic.

The study (which was funded and approved for publication by Pfizer) briefly mentions lower vaccine effectiveness 2-3 weeks after the first dose, but does not give any information about effectiveness or infection incidence in the first 14 days. This means it gives no more information about the post-vaccination infection spike observed in other studies, though the silence here may be telling.

A further question is why the researchers gave no finer-grained detail about those older than 65 when they must have had the data to do so, and more than half of Covid deaths are in those aged over 80.

An effectiveness of 85% overall and 74% among the over 65s is still good, but it is not as good as the 95% figures in the study. As so often with vaccine studies, on closer inspection you’re left wondering whether you’re getting the full and accurate picture.

Study Claims Pfizer Vaccine is 95% Effective in Over 65s. But Should That Be 74%?Read More

By Will Jones  /  7 May 2021 • 02.17
   
34 comments

News Round Up

By Jonathan Barr  /  7 May 2021 • 01.56
 
54 comments

There Are More Downsides to Vaccination Against Covid Than People Think, Says French Microbiologist

There follows an extract of an interview published by French news website Entreprendre with Professor Didier Raoult, the Director of the Méditerranée Infection Foundation – translated from French to English by Google. Professor Raoult argues that there should be more clarity about the benefits and risks associated with taking Covid vaccines.

For the moment, the vaccine is not compulsory. Medical practitioners must advise their patients whether or not to take the vaccine.

The most important point is, of course, to ask: what is the balance between the risks and the benefits?

When people tell you there is no risk, that is not true. We are starting to understand some of the risks of taking the AstraZeneca vaccine. There are really dangerous risks of allergy due to the compound we use, polyethylene glycol, with people who have anaphylactic shock which may be fatal and people who have thromboses. So the numbers suffering in this way need to be solidified so we know how many people are in potentially fatal accidents. Is it 1 in 100,000 or 1 in 10,000? These are things we need to know so we can say “this is the risk you are taking with the vaccine”.

What is the risk you take when you are not vaccinated? Well, it’s a mix between the proportion of people who are infected and the proportion of people who are infected with a severe form. So, to avoid severe forms, this vaccine is probably of interest. We must give people the choice to think. For those over the age of 75 or 80, the number of sick people who are at risk of dying is significant. Mortality among those over 85 is over 20% so the benefit to be hoped for in a period when the virus is circulating for people over 80 is very good.

And if, in these great times of terror we live in, people are reassured to be vaccinated, they must be vaccinated. But there are more downsides than they say. There is work that just came out in Nature that shows 75% of participants in a Pfizer vaccine trial reported side effects. We have never seen this with another vaccine: it is two to three times more than the flu shot. There are also some lethal effects. Is the risk worth taking? Certainly when you are part of a population at risk, but when you are part of the population without risk, you can ask yourself the question. It is everyone’s choice.

Professor Didier was asked: at the community level, is it worth getting vaccinated to avoid infecting others?

Current data does not allow us to say that we will control the circulation of the virus in England with the vaccine. There is a decrease in the severity of infections when one is vaccinated. As for a decrease in the circulation of the virus, there is, as yet, no work that convinces me. The target of this vaccine is so narrow that it will be very easy to see new variants appear which will resist the antibodies generated by this vaccine. So again, the vaccine is not the magic wand hoped for to keep this virus and its variants from circulating.

I think we have to come back to the idea of ​​what a disease is… We need to maintain credibility with the population if we want to be able to implement effective public health measures.

By Michael Curzon  /  6 May 2021 • 21.25
     
39 comments

Alcohol Deaths Rise to Highest Level Since Records Began in England and Wales

Alcohol killed more people in England and Wales last year than in any other year since records began, according to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), as many Brits turned to drink to cope with the isolation – and other forms of suffering – caused by the lockdowns. MailOnline has the story.

An ONS report published today revealed there were 7,423 fatalities linked to drinking last year, which was a fifth more than in 2019 and the highest number since records began in 2001.

People living in the poorest parts of the countries were four times more likely to have died from alcohol abuse compared to those in the wealthiest areas.

Alcohol-related deaths have been rising for decades. But they rose quickest from March 2020 onwards, after the first national lockdown came into force, and got progressively worse as the year went on.  

Most deaths were related to long-term drinking problems and dependency – with alcoholic liver disease making up 80% of cases. 

But experts told MailOnline that a year of social restrictions likely exacerbated Britain’s drinking problem. Dozens of surveys found people drank more than usual during lockdowns to cope with isolation, boredom and anxiety about the pandemic.

One in 10 of the alcohol-related deaths were from mental and behavioural disorders due to alcohol misuse and 6% were from accidental alcohol poisoning…

Professor Paul Hunter, an Epidemiologist at the University of East Anglia, previously told MailOnline it was possible some of the increase was caused by excessive drinking during lockdown speeding up the deaths. 

“If people with liver disease start drinking again, especially binge drinking, that would certainly be very bad for their liver and could lead to liver failure and subsequent death,” he added. 

He added the spike in liver disease deaths could be down to patients struggling to access healthcare. Waiting lists have soared to record levels as a result of the NHS focusing on Covid patients. 

The number of people dying because of alcohol got worse as lockdowns progressed through 2020.

Compared to 2019, there were just 8% more fatalities by March last year, compared to 30% more between October and December.

But between 2019 and 2020 the rise was 19.6%. 

The spike highlights the “devastating impact” of the pandemic on problem drinking, according to the Portman Group – a regulator for alcohol labelling, packaging and promotions.

The increase in people dying from drink may partly explain last year’s drop in registered suicides – along with delays to coroner inquests – since they would be recorded as unintended injury deaths rather than as suicides.

The MailOnline report is worth reading in full.

By Michael Curzon  /  6 May 2021 • 15.31
     
43 comments

Tucker Carlson Asks: How Many Americans Have Died After Taking the Covid Vaccines?

We are told a lot about the upsides of Covid vaccines but rarely discuss the risks. Fox News host Tucker Carlson has taken it upon himself to ask how many Americans have died after taking the vaccine.

Here is a transcript of part of the video.

How many Americans have died after taking the Covid vaccines? Not Americans who’ve been killed by the virus, that’s a huge number, but how many Americans have died after getting the vaccines designed to prevent the virus? Do you know the answer to that question? Do you know anything about the downside? We know a lot about the upside of the vaccine. We’ve been completely in favor of vulnerable people taking vaccines. 

But what about the potential risks? You’d think you would know more about that than you do. We talk about vaccines constantly, not just on this show, but in this country. Joe Biden was on TV yesterday talking about vaccines. He wants you to get one. Everyone in authority wants you to get one. In fact, you’ve probably already had your shot, and good for you. If you haven’t had your shot, you’re under enormous pressure to get your shot. You understand that soon you may not be able to fly on commercial airplanes or go to work at the office or send your children to school if you don’t have the shot. Meanwhile, the social pressure is enormous. Friends may have already informed you that you’re not welcome at their parties or weddings if you haven’t been vaccinated. There is a lot of pressure to comply. At some point, you probably will comply. It’s just too difficult not be to vaccinated in this country.   

But before you make the appointment: do you know anything about the potential risks? Probably you don’t know much. We all assume the risks are negligible. Vaccines aren’t dangerous. That’s not a guess, we know that pretty conclusively from the official numbers. Every flu season, we give influenza shots to more than 160 million Americans. Every year, a relatively small number of people seem to die after getting those shots. To be precise, in 2019, that number was 203 people. The year before, it was 119. In 2017, a total of 85 people died from the flu shot. 

Every death is tragic, but big picture, we don’t consider those numbers disqualifying. We keep giving flu shots, and very few people complain about it. So the question is how do those numbers compare to the death rate from the coronavirus vaccines now being distributed across the country? That’s worth knowing. 

We checked today. Here’s the answer, which comes from the same set of Government numbers that we just listed: between late December of 2020, and last month, a total of 3,362 people apparently died after getting the Covid vaccines in the United States… That’s an average of 30 people every day. So, what does that add up to? By the way, that reporting period ended on April 23rd. We don’t have numbers past that, we’re not quite up to date. But we can assume that another 360 people have died in the 12 days since. That is a total of 3,722 deaths. Almost 4,000 people died after getting the Covid vaccines. The actual number is almost certainly much higher than that – perhaps vastly higher.

The data we just cited come from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) which is managed by the CDC and the FDA. VARES has received a lot of criticism over the years, some of it founded. Some critics have argued for a long time that VARES undercounts vaccine injuries. A report submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services in 2010 concluded that “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported” by the VARES system. Fewer than 1%. So what is the real number of people who apparently have been killed or injured by the vaccine? Well, we don’t know that number. Nobody does, and we’re not going to speculate about it. But it’s clear that what is happening now, for whatever reason, is not even close to normal. It’s not even close to what we’ve seen in previous years with previous vaccines.

Worth reading – or watching – in full.

Stop Press: Pradheep J. Shanker says in the National Review that Tucker Carlson deliberately misrepresented the VAERS data to promote a dangerous strain of vaccine skepticism

By Michael Curzon  /  6 May 2021 • 14.40
   
104 comments

Health Scientists “Haven’t Seen Any Hint” That Covid Variants Can Fully Evade Vaccines

Over-50s will be offered a third Covid vaccine dose before winter, in part to tackle new variants. But according to the Head of the Covid Genomics U.K. Consortium (COG-UK), there is currently “no hint” of a variant that can fully evade the effectiveness of vaccines. If anything, future variants could be less infectious. The Express and Star has the story.

Sharon Peacock, Head of COG-UK and Professor of Public Health and Microbiology at the University of Cambridge, said it could be the case that coronavirus mutates to become less infectious, though she warned it could take years for it to become like the common cold.

Asked whether a variant will emerge somewhere across the globe that is resistant to current vaccines, Professor Peacock told Times Radio: “That’s what we’d call it, a variant of major concern. We haven’t seen anything like that to date, and the question you’re asking is the million dollar question in many ways, everybody wants to know what’s the likelihood and when is it likely to occur, if at all.

“What we don’t know is if it is likely to occur. We know that as mutations accumulate in the virus, it can actually make it more fit in terms of avoiding our immune system, but the more mutations it accumulates, it could actually lead to a virus that is less infectious, for example.

“So there’s a trade-off for the virus in terms of how many mutations it can tolerate.

“Now, some people have predicted that a virus could emerge that is pretty resistant to vaccines, but we haven’t seen any hint of that at the moment.

“And the idea that this could arise is based on models from previous viruses, not this current one, so at the moment, I remain optimistic that we’re in a good place – that the viruses that are circulating are susceptible to vaccinations.”

Despite the continual fall of Covid cases and deaths, and the success of the vaccine rollout, the Government and media narrative around the virus continues to be fairly pessimistic – largely due to the perceived threat of variants. Imperial College’s Danny Altmann said last month that the Indian Covid variant could “scupper” Britain’s “roadmap” out of lockdown – a statement which a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation criticised as “pessimistic“. Professor Neil Ferguson also believes that life in Britain will “not [be] completely back to normal” by summer because of Covid variants, despite advisers to SAGE saying last week that Pfizer’s vaccine does protect well against the South African variant after people have had both doses.

The Express and Star report is worth reading in full.

By Michael Curzon  /  6 May 2021 • 10.58
   
78 comments

More Companies Tell Their Staff to Work From Home Post-Lockdown

An increasing number of companies are telling their staff to work from home at least some of the time, confirming previous reports that, for many, “hybrid working” could become “the norm” post lockdown. HSBC moved 1,200 staff in Britain to permanent working from home contracts last month – many of them willingly – in an effort to cut costs, despite a study finding that working from home is less productive (not to mention the impact on staff socialisation). The latest companies to take this approach are Google and KPMG. The Guardian has the story.

Accounting and consultancy group KPMG has told its 16,000 U.K. staff that they will have to work only an average of two days in the office each week from next month, as the firm revealed its plans for a post-pandemic hybrid working model.

Under the new initiative, which the company has called the “four-day fortnight”, staff will spend the remaining days working either from home or at client sites.

In addition, over the summer, staff will also be given an extra 2.5 hours off each week “to give people time away from work and to re-energise”. 

All staff will be given an extra day off on June 21st, the date the Government plans to end all social distancing restrictions – which many see as marking the end of the pandemic.

The new KPMG working arrangements were unveiled as Google said it expected 20% of its staff to work from home permanently in the future. The search engine group said it anticipated 60% of workers being office-based, 20% working in new office locations and 20% staying at home.

Those proposals are in stark contrast to the approach taken by investment bank Goldman Sachs. On Tuesday, Goldman moved in the opposite direction, telling its U.S. and U.K. bankers to prepare to return to offices next month.

Jon Holt, Chief Executive at KPMG UK, said: “We trust our people. Our new way of working will empower them and enable them to design their own working week. The pandemic has proven it’s not about where you work, but how you work.”

Worth reading in full.

Stop Press: Almost all of the U.K.’s 50 biggest employers say that they do not plan to bring staff back to the office full-time, according to BBC News.

By Michael Curzon  /  6 May 2021 • 09.43
   
42 comments