Tuesday, November 02, 2021

Inbox: Less Serious Side Effects

Our old friend Dave B. writes:

“I’d be curious to hear your opinion on the ‘expert’ claims that those vaccinated develop less serious side effects, should they catch the dreaded COVID virus. Is this legit?”

Dave, you ask the best questions. I’m game to share my current opinion about the effectiveness of the vaccines so long as we all recognize it is just that, and that new data is emerging daily.

Tom Speculates a Bit

A Catholic archbishop recently called the worldwide program of COVID vaccination a crime against humanity and a satanic action against God. So, are the vaccines evil?

There is a legitimate argument to be made about the use of aborted fetal cells in their development (every one of the COVID vaccines contains MRC‑5), but this could be said of many drugs currently on the market which Christians are already taking. Beyond that very obvious concern, I have yet to see irrefutable proof of malicious intent on the part of the vaccine developers and promoters. Like the archbishop, I suspect shenanigans, but good luck getting to the bottom of all that.

Are the vaccines deadly? Well, yes, certainly for some people. We now have VAERS stats from early October which officially acknowledge a bare minimum of 18,000 U.S. deaths from adverse reactions to the shots. That is not a small number, especially if one of them happens to be your relative. And, unlike the deaths from COVID, every single death from the vaccines is entirely preventable.

The real issue is whether the seriousness of the COVID crisis justifies writing off the deaths of so many Americans as the inevitable cost of doing business. To answer that, we need to know if the vaccines actually work.

Here is where Dave’s question becomes of the greatest possible relevance. We know they don’t stop us getting infected or stop us retransmitting the virus; that much has already been conceded. The question is whether the vaccines mitigate the side effects of the virus in any significant way. The experts, as Dave points out, claim they do.

If they are wrong, all those vaccine-reaction deaths in the U.S. and hundreds of thousands more worldwide — maybe millions — were for absolutely nothing. Worst case scenario, they died for a lie; best case, a really egregious mistake.

With the information available currently, I can’t see how the experts are not wrong.

The Test Case

Let’s go back to the Israel situation. The Israelis were among the earliest vaccine adopters and one of the quickest countries in the world to reach 80% fully-vaccinated status, so what’s going on there currently is highly suggestive of what things might look like a few months after the much-ballyhooed 80% threshold is finally achieved in the U.S. (As of October 25, 2021, only 58% of American citizens were fully vaccinated. Thought it was higher, didn’t you? Even the UK is only just getting there now.)

So then, what has happened in Israel?

The graphic below is a cropped and marked-up (and very fuzzy, sorry) version of the official WHO data, which you can find in its un-fuzzy state on their website. For our purposes today, fuzzy is fine; we are only interested in the broad strokes. The two graphs map the progress of the pandemic from January 2020 through October 26, 2021, showing confirmed cases of COVID-19 (top) and deaths (bottom) officially attributed to it:

You will note that Israel has experienced a similar pattern of outbreaks to the U.S.: (1) a relatively insignificant early “bump” in the data peaking in early April 2020; (2) a second wave peaking in July for the U.S. and September for Israel; (3) a third wave peaking in mid-January 2021; and (4) a fourth wave that peaked in late August to early September 2021. Israel has a population of only 9,000,000 to America’s 330,000,000, but the four-wave outbreak pattern in both countries is consistent.

The Thin Red Line

The thin red line running vertically through both graphs represents the mid-summer attainment of 80% fully vaccinated status in Israel. Here’s the interesting part: Israel’s fourth (and first post-80%) wave was by far its worst in terms of raw numbers of infections. Total deaths were a fraction of Wave 3, but this has been true all over the world.

As in the UK and elsewhere, the lower death rate in Israel is not attributable to the success of the vaccines in mitigating symptoms, but rather to the comparative mildness of the Delta variant, which is 50% more contagious than earlier versions of the virus, but notably less deadly. Daily deaths in the UK from Delta were the merest fraction of deaths from the earlier variants, at one point as low as 2% and topping out in September 2021 around 12% of January’s death rate. Had this pattern held true in Israel, we should have seen approximately 50 deaths per day at the end of August 2021, the worst week of Wave 4. In fact, there were 203, more than four times what we might have expected in what was at the time the third-most fully vaccinated country in the world.

Worse, 62% percent of Israel’s August deaths were among the double-vaccinated, with 10% of these among the triple-vaccinated. It’s hard to come up with a side effect more serious than death.

Three Possible Answers

What can explain this? The immediate “expert” reaction was to double down and decide that the 80% threshold was too low, and that 100% vaccination is required to end the pandemic in Israel. Alternatively, it has been suggested that the beneficial effects of the vaccines waned quicker than anticipated. As a result, Israel’s government mandated a third shot in order to qualify as “fully vaccinated” and enjoy the benefits and freedoms conferred on the compliant. So the answer to an ineffective vaccine campaign was to order more vaccine faster. Big Pharma is understandably delighted.

The UK has done much the same. Double-vaccinated English citizens are now receiving letters advising them to book what their government calls a “third primary shot”. Not a booster; that’s in addition to the booster. One wonders how long people can be persuaded to play this game of perpetual Russian Roulette for no apparent benefit.

After all, there is another very real possibility, and all available evidence points directly toward it: the vaccines simply don’t work as advertised. They don’t stop infection, they don’t stop transmission, and they don’t mitigate the symptoms of COVID‑19 in any measurable way. There is even an argument to be made that they might be making things worse. The unvaccinated immune system is untargeted, and recognizes and responds to all new variants of COVID once it has been introduced to any one of them, while the vaccinated immune system has been re-engineered to combat a specific version of the virus no longer in circulation, and may not cope as effectively with the variants.

What appears certain, at least in Israel’s case, is that the benefits of vaccination to individuals over sixty are somewhere between small and non-existent. And, if vaccine deaths and adverse reactions are as severely underreported as has been credibly alleged, then everyone under thirty is at greater risk from the vaccines than from the virus. 80% vaccination has not given the authorities any measurable degree of control over the pandemic in Israel, and there is no real-world evidence to suggest 100% vaccination would accomplish what 80% has not.

Doubling Down: Not KFC, But Definitely Chicken

I will repeat here what I said in the comment section of that earlier post: I don’t know what’s going on for sure. Then again, neither does anyone else in the general population, no matter how confident they come across. My current opinion is that “expert” claims that the vaccine reduces side effects are either flat-out lies or an understandable reluctance to come to grips with the truth.

Understandable, because who wants to admit they have mismanaged the biggest crisis of the 21st century to date, and that untold numbers have been killed or permanently injured as a result? Understandable, because how can governments justify their ongoing commitments to build facilities and buy billions of dollars worth of vaccines over the next three years if the vaccines don’t actually do anything other than kill and cripple? Understandable, because how can we expect Big Pharma to ritually slaughter its cash cow — worth up to $33 billion annually to each manufacturer — just because it looks like it might be a goat?

Understandable, because only Christians are taught to admit “I was wrong”, and even we sometimes have trouble with it.

2 comments :

  1. Thanks Tom, very informative. If this is all true, the whole argument being pushed to get vaccinated for the good of yourself and those around you, crumbles into yet another pile of worthless dust. Hard not to be cynical and maintain a Romans 13 attitude. Finding the right balance between standing up for our human rights and being a light for the Gospel of Jesus Christ has never been more challenging!

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    1. For me, it's less a rights issue than it is the powers-that-be exceeding their sphere of God-given authority. We are to give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's. Caesar may think our bodies are his property, but I'm not sure he's correct about that. I'm very sure my children's bodies are not his property.

      It would be interesting to know what Daniel and his friends would have done in the event their request not to defile themselves with the king's food had been denied. So far it is all threats and loss of privileges (crossing borders, dining out, working for a living). Let's hope it doesn't go further.

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