The logic of vaccines had always been very clear. If you were vaccinated you didn’t need to be concerned about unvaccinated people. The disease was their problem. C-19 inverted that logic.

UPDATES:
February 7, Robert Zimmerman, whose blog normally focuses on space exploration, has a good collection of the latest links on the vaccine problems.

The Office for National Statistics recently published an update on deaths by vaccination status in England and it has shockingly revealed that the vaccinated population accounted for 95% of COVID-19 deaths in the 12 months between 1st June 2022 and 31st May 2023, and 94% of those deaths were among either the triple or quadruple vaccinated population.

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Those comments on the effectiveness of the C-19 vaccines represent halcyon days – were it not for the permanent memory of the Interwebby.

From a purely technical point-of-view I was quite interested in the race to develop mRNA vaccines, simply because I’d been following for three decades the advances in using genetic therapy approaches to treating cancer. I figured that surely sometime in the 21st century humanity would nail it and we would regard surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy with much the same horror that Star Trek’s Dr McCoy did:

Cancer cells emerge all the time in our bodies and it’s our immune system that destroys them – usually. But occasionally a cancer cell turns up that appears to the immune system to be just an ordinary cell rather than something that needs to be destroyed. If we could get immune systems to recognise those cells the problem would be solved. Genetic therapy is the only known way of identifying whatever obscure tags such cells have and “teaching” the immune system to see them, plus other methods including using genetically engineered viruses to attack the cancer. Whatever method is chosen it’s that specific targeting capability which is the strength of genetic therapy in treating cancer.

But when it comes to viruses that strength becomes a weakness. Cancer cells don’t mutate beyond the original change. Virus mutation is ongoing and can be quite rapid if under severe evolutionary survival pressure. Something like Smallpox hardly mutates at all, which is why it could be killed off. In the case of Rhinoviruses and Coronaviruses a new version appears every few months. What’s great about your immune system is that when exposed to these viruses it recognises many of their features rather than just one. That’s why catching the flu usually protects you against the subsequent mutations for some years, until the virus mutates enough that it can’t be recognised and the cycle starts all over again. That’s also why people not exposed to such things because they’re isolated can find themselves in lethal danger when their isolation ends, as any number of indigenous peoples discovered after encountering European explorers.

So when I heard about the infamous SARS-Cov-2 “spike protein” identification I suspected the vaccines based around that precise factor would not be good for very long. In a race between genetic analysis in laboratories, production and distribution of each tailored mRNA vaccine and the genetic mutation of viruses in the wild, my bet was with the virus. Moreover, I was confident enough about my immune system, given my age, health and multiple exposures to the flu over the decades, that I felt I didn’t need the vaccine, as I explained here in June, 2021. What I didn’t say at the time was that I’d probably caught the Alpha version back in January 2020: sniffles, mild aches, etc for 24 hours. At the time I just dismissed it as a cold but since I’ve not caught Covid since then despite exposures to a lot of sickies I’m guessing that I gained natural immunity.

None other than Pfizer agreed:

“When somebody is naturally immune— like they got COVID— they probably have…more antibodies against the virus because what the vaccine is…that protein is just on the outside.”
…
“It’s just one antibody against one specific part of the virus. When you actually get the virus you’ll start producing antibodies against multiple pieces of virus, not only the outside portion but the inside portion, the actual virus so your antibodies are probably better at that point than the vaccination.”

Well, you all know the rest of the story. The hysteria and coercion we’d already seen for lockdowns and masks cranked up another few notches, culminating in Prime Minister Ardern – panicking over low vaccination rates after her government was slow acting on the vaccine through the first half of 2021 – went back on her word that people would not be forced to take the vaccine, and decided to divide New Zealanders into two classes via a vaccine passport system with her now-infamous, “That is what it is, so…Yep, Yep.“

Of course, just as in Spain, there were people who simply cheated the easily beatable system and gained fake passports (I was offered several and refused them):

Wealthy individuals paid to be added to the National Immunisation Registry without actually having to take the vaccine. The most notable name on the list is President of PharmaMar José María Fernández Sousa-Faro, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Spain and a firm that has researched COVID-19 drug treatments.

“The 76-year-old businessman, who has not yet been summoned to testify, was included in the lists to reflect that he had received the third dose,” states the report.

A nursing assistant at La Paz University Hospital has been arrested by police for his role in the fraud. He made more than €200,000 euros in return for illegally adding 2,200 people to the national vaccine database. The more famous the person, the more money he charged.

I cannot say that the slowly developing news that the vaccinations weren’t all they were cracked up to be is worse than all those violations of civil liberties, but the news certainly didn’t help. The first public vaccinations were in October 2020 in the US, Europe and other places and the authorities determined that only something like 95% rates would be sufficient, including teenagers, little kids and babies, even as the CDC calculated at the end of 2020* the IFR (Infection Fatality Rates) of Covid-19 (Alpha) and broke it up into age-specific estimates:

  • 0.003% for 0–19 years
  • 0.02% for 20–49 years
  • 0.5% for 50–69 years
  • 5.4% for 70+ years.

In any case by December Pfizer was detecting so-called “breakthrough infections”, people who were catching C-19 despite being vaccinated. From there the news for vaccines steadily got worse as it turned out that their efficacy, their ability to stop infection, rapidly dropped in just months, thus leading to the great global booster campaign:

And more, including claims that even if you’d been infected with C-19 a booster would build your resistance even further.

There was plenty of other evidence that the C-19 vaccines were a bust on the traditional measures of preventing infection and spread, even if there was some evidence that they could act as a theraputic drug that prevented the primary target population of the disease (people aged 70+) from getting very sick and dying, making them little different to things like monoclonal antibody treatment (though cheaper).

But by then the terrible, grinding logic of lockdowns and mask mandates had turned into a justification to continue on with this maniacal quest for 95% vax rates: Impfung Macht Frei

“This becomes absolutely a pandemic of the unvaccinated and, when we open everything up, it’s not going to be safe for people who are not vaccinated to be roaming around the place spreading the virus.”

With the MSM doing what they’d done during lockdowns, but even worse on the fear pornography:

I’ve made a LOT of progress encouraging people to get vaccinated lately!!! Do you want to know how? I’m admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very serious COVID infections. One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late. A few days later when I call time of death, I hug their family members and I tell them the best way to honor their loved one is to go get vaccinated and encourage everyone they know to do the same. They cry. And they tell me they didn’t know. They thought it was a hoax. They thought it was political.

As the article points out, that sort of overwrought, hysterical bullshit was multiplied across many MSM sources, with many different “doctors” and “nurses” telling the same story in the same terms with the same words and phrases, despite the facts at the time (July-August 2021):

According to the CDC, there has not been a single COVID-related death in Alabama under 40 in over a month… There have only been 110 such deaths in Alabama since the pandemic started…Only 13 people in Arkansas under 25 have died from the Wuhan virus in Arkansas since the pandemic started. His hospital has a 32% ICU utilization rate.

Incidentally the vaccination rates and progress for Illinois (Democrat) and Alabama (Deplorable) were little different, as were their total population death rates of 0.32% and 0.41% respectively as of December 2022 when the whole panic was pretty much done.

Naturally the MSM that spread these stories have had no interest in returning to them to see how many were true and how many were urban legend. All grist to the mill. The pressure was also very personal, as this guy describes in An Incident in the Cloisters of the Woke, as he watched an educated ‘liberal Democrat’ get reamed by her online “friends” at the Facebook group called “Law Mamas”, when she offered her opinion about getting her kids jabbed with the C-19 vax, given that one of her children had gone into anaphylactic shock some years earlier due to an ordinary vaccination. That didn’t turn her into an anti-vaxxer but did lead her to weigh costs and benefits:

“I’m obviously in the minority here. But I’m not even remotely interested in my 2/4/5 year olds getting a covid vaccine. The relative/absolute risk is so low for this group I couldn’t justify it. I’m pretty crunchy generally, but especially with stuff like this. Totally respect everyone’s choice and Glad it’s our choice to make. It’s all so hard.“

[Note the defensive tone. Perhaps she had already gained some insight into what a Law Mama is really like. The backlash came quickly. One of the group’s moderators replied:]

“This was unnecessary and triggering. You know you are in the vast minority in this group and it’s not a hard decision for most of us. … This is not the group to provide your opinion on this much more deny the statistics.“

She was expelled a few minutes later. As Stromata said:

What “statistics” was Krista denying? According to 2020 World Health Organization data for the world as a whole, children under five years old accounted for about two million Covid-19 cases and fewer than 2,000 Covid deaths. Put another way, if young children contract the disease, their chance of death is on the order of one in a thousand. Other data indicate that their risk of hospitalization is likewise vanishingly low. But woke facts are whatever the wokerati assert. Statistical analysis is just another form of white supremacy.

But, as with all other things Covid-19, by the middle of 2022 we were getting admissions of error, like this from TPTB (H/T fellow blogger NickK):

Which was no surprise when news like this was spreading across the Internet fast at the time: (and Spiked gave a special shout out to DownUnder):

In a little over five months in 2022 until June 7, with very high vaccination coverage, Australia has recorded more than almost three times the total number of deaths with and from Covid compared to the previous 22 months. The figure is more than twenty times higher for New Zealand. Thorsteinn Siglausson notes that deaths in Iceland jumped by 30 per cent in the first quarter of 2022, coinciding with the rollout of booster vaccines. And Alex Berenson highlights how all-cause death rates in Europe are soaring again three months after booster mRNA shots.

The one thing I had neglected to do is to put the Australian and New Zealand experience in global context. Figures 1 and 2 rectify that neglect. For the last two months, Australasian Covid cases per million people have been dramatically higher than African, Asian, European, North and South American, and world averages (Figure 1) at any time throughout the pandemic. While the last part is not true of Covid mortality rates, the current rates in Australasia are nonetheless higher than in any of these averaged death rates by continent (Figure 2).

I ask again: if this is vaccine success, what would vaccine failure look like?

Lets be blunt here, The “Unvaccinated” Got It Right, which runs through the reasoning of one person in response to an admission of famous “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams (caution: he is now a White Supremacist or something, having offended in other ways)

Like many other commentators, he fervently encouraged people to take the Covid “vaccine” and sympathized with measures to pressure people into doing so. Recently, however, he posted a video on the topic that has been circulating on social media. It was a mea culpa in which he declared, “The unvaccinated were the winners,” and, to his great credit, “I want to find out how so many of [my viewers] got the right answer about the “vaccine” and I didn’t.” 

You can read through the commentator’s reasoning for rejecting the shot, some of which line up with mine, and some of which don’t. Of the sixteen reasons he gives I select these out takes:

  • The much more important point was that the “vaccine” was rolled out without long-term testing…
  • The long-term safety of the “vaccine” was a theoretical crapshoot, the unquantifiable long-term risk of taking it could only be justified by an extremely high certain risk of not taking it. Accordingly, a moral and scientific argument could only be made for its use by those at high risk of severe illness if exposed to COVID. 
  • Data that did not support COVID policies were actively and massively suppressed.
  • Simple analyses of even the early available data showed that the establishment was prepared to do much more harm in terms of human rights and spending public resources to prevent a COVID death than any other kind of death.
  • Fear had clearly generated a health panic and a moral panic, or mass formation psychosis.
  • The companies responsible for manufacturing and ultimately profiting from the “vaccination” were given legal immunity. Why would a government do that if it really believed that the “vaccine” was safe and wanted to instill confidence in it?
  • I distrust anyone who distrusts me to determine which information and arguments are good and which are bad when it is my health that is at stake – especially when the people who are promoting censorship are hypocritically acting against their declared beliefs in informed consent and bodily autonomy.
  • The overall political and cultural context in which the entire discourse on “vaccination” was being conducted was such that the evidential bar for the safety and efficacy of the “vaccine” was raised yet further while our ability to determine whether that bar had been met was reduced.
  • Regarding analytics (and Scott’s point about “our” heuristics beating “their” analytics), precision is not accuracy.
  • An honest approach to data on COVID and policy development would have driven the urgent development of a system to collect accurate data on COVID infections and the outcomes of COVID patients. Instead, the powers that be did the very opposite, making policy decisions that knowingly reduced the accuracy of collected data in a way that would serve their political purposes.
  • The dishonesty of the pro-“vaccine” side was revealed by the repeated changes of official definitions of clinical terms like “vaccine” whose (scientific) definitions have been fixed for generations (as they must be if science is to do its work accurately: definitions of scientific terms can change, but only when our understanding of their referents changes). Why was the government changing the meanings of words rather than simply telling the truth using the same words they had been using from the beginning?
  • Whatever the risks associated with a COVID infection on the one hand, and the “vaccine” on the other, the “vaccination” policy enabled massive human rights violations. Those who were “vaccinated” were happy to see the “unvaccinated” have basic freedoms removed (the freedom to speak freely, work, travel, be with loved ones at important moments such as births, deaths, funerals etc.) because their status as “vaccinated” allowed them to accept back as privileges-for-the-“vaccinated” the rights that had been removed from everyone else.

With all this, is it any surprise that we have the assholes who were in charge or in positions of influence at the time running for the hills, like Jacinda Ardern, or sticking around to vomit up bullshit like this.

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* By early 2021 the CDC had updated their IFR stats, but also buggered around with the age ranges for their “most likely scenario”.

  • 0.002% for 0–17 years
  • 0.05% for 18–49 years
  • 0.6% for 50–64 years
  • 9% for 65+ years.