Regardless of what we think about the cause of the peak in April, we are now in December and observing what has every appearance of a normal profile of winter deaths from respiratory infections (covid + flu + rhinovirus etc).
I’m by no means the only one who thinks so.
So a number of pharmaceutical companies have spent a lot of money, as little time as possible, and a huge investment in publicity, to develop and sell a vaccine for Covid.
Let us for the moment be trusting and assume that these vaccines will be both “safe” and “effective”.
Do we need to take a vaccine – as in “if there wasn’t one available, would I want one?” ?
If we are over 65, then maybe.
If we are under 45 then the benefit seems hardly worth the trip to the doctor.
Between 45 and 64 your chance of hospitalisation becomes noticeable if you follow the statistics, but if you are in “good health” (no co-morbidities, healthy lifestyle, good nutrition and adequate levels of vitamins D and C) then I suggest that you are unlikely to succumb.
So we are left with the “unhealthy” and the “over-65s”.
We might estimate that 10K people in England die every week from all causes. In the end, it is a fact of life on Earth that we will all die of something at some time, and the risk of dying unsurprisingly rises with advancing years, due to both deteriorating health and declining numbers in your age cohort.
This is entirely consistent with the statistics.
So perhaps we might better frame the questions that we should ask:
- “Is there evidence that a vaccine will safely protect those in failing health?”
- “Is a Covid-specific vaccine likely to effect any real change to our life-expectancy? Or might Covid deaths simply be displaced by Virus-X deaths?”
A recent article in the British Medical Journal reviewed the protocols for these vaccine trials and concluded that:
“none of the vaccine trials are designed to detect a significant reduction in hospital admissions, admission to intensive care, or death”
That might imply that these vaccines may not be not of much use to the healthy, let alone to the unhealthy, but it does leave open the possibility that they might reduce the chances of catching the infection in the first instance, so they may indeed effect a benefit.
Another thing that we do know is that no vaccine program has ever been free from adverse effects (ADRs in the trade).
The vaccine companies have even insisted that they be accorded legal immunity from prosecution in the event that someone’s health is seriously damaged by a vaccine, because they are not prepared to take the risk of legal action.
The UK’s own MHRA has recently purchased a new AI system in order to ensure that it can track such ADRs (let us hope that it succeeds in putting in a working national computer system in record time, despite all precedents).
So who will be taking the risk? (No prizes for answering this question!)
Lastly we can certainly say that in view of the short testing time-frames we cannot possibly know how long the protection offered by vaccination will last, so vaccinating young people cannot really be held to confer likely benefit (although it will confer some risk).
So here are six questions that we might ask:
- In view of the short testing time-frame, how confident can we be that health problems due to vaccination will not appear down the road (remember thalidomide)?
- Why would we want to vaccinate young people against a disease that the vast majority don’t suffer from, when we have no idea that such protection will be life-long and better vaccines may become available in the future?
- Is a Covid vaccination likely to extend our life-expectancy by any measurable amount?
- What is the basis upon which our government has invested millions of taxpayers’ pounds on developing these vaccines, and has reportedly purchased more than 350 million doses in advance of approval by the regulatory authorities?
- Why are they in such a rush that they are even bypassing the normal approvals procedures to mandate immediate vaccine roll-out?
- Why is there talk of issuing “immunity passports” and suchlike, and why does the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care not rule out the possibility that vaccination for such a relatively inconsequential disease will become mandatory?
Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but as I’m only in my young 70s and “healthy”, I may not rush to be first in the queue.
First. Put on one side that my competence is peculiar.. Mathematics and therefore Statistics, Economics ( Factories), and also to give some perspective, I’m 87 or close .I have been on the fringes of chemistry, involved in spectroscopy and many other sciences and borderline pharma manufacturers
IMHO many factors have foolishly but understably led to this.
Second…Education, or lack of it, A) Political elite, bureauocrat, and other secure and remunerative classes are almost totally innumerate and frightened of facts , numbers, real logic, and Doctors of any kind . Those that are are too valuable to do the entitled jobs, and become instantly rareified.into upper echelons. B)Scientists themselves. Generally and sadly, the stresses preclude too much generality.C) Medical profession itself. A huge learning process for a ridiculously big job produces a rational, learned and valuable member of society. But do not ask him to tie your shoelaces.D All the way down the line, education seems to have lost its aims and to be infected by political aims to mess.
I am splitting this comment not because of rules , but because I can only be trusted to manage a small amount without wrecking what I’ve already with innapropriate corrections or punctuation. ( What happened to all our delicius Secretaries )
I came to the conclusion that for the answers to any one of a large number of possible or useful and unknown questions and/or infornations in a huge array of ignorance, needs to be discovered., From Political pressure responses to statistical data , to individual erks uninformed responses. To Media trustworthyness and understanding,and a thousand ignorances.
For these answers a designed and tended and almost danger free pandemic could be safely released. to be handled by politicians, scientists and bureaucrats This was done. How wrong can you be ..?
I decided and have tried to explain this since February . In a way I’m happy about thid. I’ve had an extra few months with my faithful comorbidities
SO Nigels answer of the wotsit declaration etc was on the money. OUR POLITICIANS and BUREAUCRATS AND BMA Will NEVER accept this
This entire experiment highlights the foolishnesses of Committees/Poliics. The importance of broad / condidered educations . Too important to be left to politics.
The drop in infections looks like the arrival of herd immunity in which case a vaccine is not really needed to end an epidemic that is ending anyway – If the supplier of the vaccine feels the need to demand legal immunity then they obviously do not have confidence in its safety so why should we – It would build confidence if all our leaders and their families lined up and all received their jabs on TV but they will not do that so why should we – They will have to blackmail a way of enforcement as per Qantas in order to achieve the national and international control intended through enforced vaccination leading to World Health Passports and the creation of the new Trillion Dollar Vax-Industry where repeat and new vaccines will be compulsory.
The real problem with the vaccine is that you will have no choice but to have it. The little pass you will have to carry with you will make sure of that. No pass, no pubs, no shops, no holidays etc.
I hate to think what will happen if everyone takes this attitude. Sometimes you have to assert your freedom. No assertion – no freedom (Pericles – although he put it better).
“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”
George Bernard Shaw
Looking at the overall death total in the month of October in 2019 and 2020 there is a difference of just 7. In other words the death toll this year is the same as last. Compounding all the fear is the belief that there is a measurable incidence of infection using the PCR test. That is the first failure in any statistical analysis as the figures cannot be believed using a testing method that is not even suitable for the task.
Most interesting of all is Matt Hancock’s belief that all those that test negative are still all infectious. With that level of idiocy how can anyone believe what we are being told.
The pharmaceutical companies are in a win win situation as their risk is negligible with the threat of future claims having been removed.
I have not believed that anything other than a usual flu outbreak happened last April/May and nothing that has happened since has changed my mind.
We are suffering from a political virus from which there seems no cure at this time. It seems the world is paralysed by ongoing fear about a virus that only exists in their minds.
In response to a request from a constituent in Hertfordshire to the information supplied by the Health Secretary prior to the vote on the Coronavirus 2020 Act last March neither he nor any of the other Ministers in the Department of Health advised the Commons that Covid -19 had been removed from the register of HCIDs (High Consequence Infectious Diseases). This fact has been backed up by the HoC Library and so Matt Hancock had deliberately misled parliament before the vote because with such information the vote to lockdown the country and deprive us of our liberties could have gone the other way.
He is a disgrace and should resign and the Act should be suspended pending its reappraisal and repeal.
Of course, Ministers have misled the House before and on every occasion they have resigned. But in the case of Hancock my advice is “don’t hold your breath”.
A look at the background and make up of the MHRA is enough to raise eyebrows.
Another question:
Why would we trust government and the pharmaceutical companies to deliver a safe vaccine in such a short time when the normal development process is several years longer?
In determining our answer we only need look up the results of the Gates’ promoting such vaccines in Africa. As a layman in such matters it also seems that the working of the proposed vaccine is sufficiently different from the norm to mandate long term testing, perhaps even longer than would be normal.