Why I spoke out against lockdowns
Martin Kulldorff on the necessity of challenging the Covid consensus
Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University.
By Martin Kulldorff | spiked | June 4, 2021
I had no choice but to speak out against lockdowns. As a public-health scientist with decades of experience working on infectious-disease outbreaks, I couldn’t stay silent. Not when basic principles of public health are thrown out of the window. Not when the working class is thrown under the bus. Not when lockdown opponents were thrown to the wolves. There was never a scientific consensus for lockdowns. That balloon had to be popped.
Two key Covid facts were quickly obvious to me. First, with the early outbreaks in Italy and Iran, this was a severe pandemic that would eventually spread to the rest of the world, resulting in many deaths. That made me nervous. Second, based on the data from Wuhan, in China, there was a dramatic difference in mortality by age, with over a thousand-fold difference between the young and the old. That was a huge relief. I am a single father with a teenager and five-year-old twins. Like most parents, I care more about my children than myself. Unlike the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, children had much less to fear from Covid than from annual influenza or traffic accidents. They could get on with life unharmed — or so I thought.
For society at large, the conclusion was obvious. We had to protect older, high-risk people while younger low-risk adults kept society moving.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, schools closed while nursing homes went unprotected. Why? It made no sense. So, I picked up a pen. To my surprise, I could not interest any US media in my thoughts, despite my knowledge and experience with infectious-disease outbreaks. I had more success in my native Sweden, with op-eds in the major daily newspapers, and, eventually, a piece in spiked. Other like-minded scientists faced similar hurdles.
Instead of understanding the pandemic, we were encouraged to fear it. Instead of life, we got lockdowns and death. We got delayed cancer diagnoses, worse cardiovascular-disease outcomes, deteriorating mental health, and a lot more collateral public-health damage from lockdown. Children, the elderly and the working class were the hardest hit by what can only be described as the biggest public-health fiasco in history.
Throughout the 2020 spring wave, Sweden kept daycare and schools open for every one of its 1.8million children aged between one and 15. And it did so without subjecting them to testing, masks, physical barriers or social distancing. This policy led to precisely zero Covid deaths in that age group, while teachers had a Covid risk similar to the average of other professions. The Swedish Public Health Agency reported these facts in mid-June, but in the US lockdown proponents still pushed for school closures.
In July, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article on ‘reopening primary schools during the pandemic’. Shockingly, it did not even mention the evidence from the only major Western country that kept schools open throughout the pandemic. That is like evaluating a new drug while ignoring data from the placebo control group.
With difficulty publishing, I decided to use my mostly dormant Twitter account to get the word out. I searched for tweets about schools and replied with a link to the Swedish study. A few of these replies were retweeted, which gave the Swedish data some attention. It also led to an invitation to write for the Spectator. In August, I finally broke into the US media with a CNN op-ed against school closures. I know Spanish, so I wrote a piece for CNN-Español. CNN-English was not interested.
Something was clearly amiss with the media. Among infectious-disease epidemiology colleagues that I know, most favour focused protection of high-risk groups instead of lockdowns, but the media made it sound like there was a scientific consensus for general lockdowns.
In September, I met Jeffrey Tucker at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), an organisation I had never heard of before the pandemic. To help the media gain a better understanding of the pandemic, we decided to invite journalists to meet with infectious-disease epidemiologists in Great Barrington, New England, to conduct more in-depth interviews. I invited two scientists to join me, Sunetra Gupta from the University of Oxford, one of the world’s pre-eminent infectious-disease epidemiologists, and Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University, an expert on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations. To the surprise of AIER, the three of us also decided to write a declaration arguing for focused protection instead of lockdowns. We called it the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD).
Opposition to lockdowns had been deemed unscientific. When scientists spoke out against lockdowns, they were ignored, considered a fringe voice, or accused of not having proper credentials. We thought it would be hard to ignore something authored by three senior infectious-disease epidemiologists from what were three respectable universities. We were right. All hell broke loose. That was good.
Some colleagues threw epithets at us like ‘crazy’, ‘exorcist’, ‘mass murderer’ or ‘Trumpian’. Some accused us of taking a stand for money, though nobody paid us a penny. Why such a vicious response? The declaration was in line with the many pandemic preparedness plans produced years earlier, but that was the crux. With no good public-health arguments against focused protection, they had to resort to mischaracterisation and slander, or else admit they had made a terrible, deadly mistake in their support of lockdowns.
Some lockdown proponents accused us of raising a strawman, as lockdowns had worked and were no longer needed. Just a few weeks later, the same critics lauded the reimposition of lockdowns during the very predictable second wave. We were told that we had not specified how to protect the old, even though we had described ideas in detail on our website and in op-eds. We were accused of advocating a ‘let it rip’ strategy, even though focused protection is its very opposite. Ironically, lockdowns are a dragged-out form of a let-it-rip strategy, in which each age group is infected in the same proportion as a let-it-rip strategy.
When writing the declaration, we knew we were exposing ourselves to attacks. That can be scary, but as Rosa Parks said: ‘I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.’ Also, I did not take the journalistic and academic attacks personally, however vile – and most came from people I had never even heard of before. The attacks were not primarily addressed at us anyhow. We had already spoken out and would continue to do so. Their main purpose was to discourage other scientists from speaking out.
In my twenties, I risked my life in Guatemala working for a human-rights organisation called Peace Brigades International. We protected farmers, unionised workers, students, religious organisations, women’s groups and human-rights defenders who were threatened, murdered, and disappeared by military death squads. While the courageous Guatemalans I worked with faced much more danger, the death squads did once throw a hand grenade into our house. If I could do that work then, why should I not now take much smaller risks for people here at home? When I was falsely accused of being a Koch-funded right-winger, I just shrugged – typical behaviour by both establishment servants and armchair revolutionaries.
After the Great Barrington Declaration, there was no longer a lack of media attention on focused protection as an alternative to lockdowns. On the contrary, requests came from across the globe. I noticed an interesting contrast. In the US and UK, media outlets were either friendly with softball questions or hostile with trick questions and ad hominem attacks. Journalists in most other countries asked hard but relevant and fair questions, exploring and critically examining the Great Barrington Declaration. I think that is how journalism should be done.
While most governments continued with their failed lockdown policies, things have moved in the right direction. More and more schools have reopened, and Florida rejected lockdowns in favour of focused protection, partly based on our advice, without the negative consequences that the lockdowners predicted.
With the lockdown failures increasingly clear, attacks and censorship have increased rather than decreased: Google-owned YouTube censored a video from a roundtable with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, where my colleagues and I stated that children do not need to wear masks; Facebook closed the GBD account when we posted a pro-vaccine message arguing that older people should be prioritised for vaccination; Twitter censored a post when I said that children and those already infected do not need to be vaccinated; and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) removed me from a vaccine-safety working group when I argued that the Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine should not be withheld from older Americans.
Twitter even locked my account for writing that:
‘Naively fooled to think that masks would protect them, some older high-risk people did not socially distance properly, and some died from Covid because of it. Tragic. Public-health officials/scientists must always be honest with the public.’
This increased pressure may seem counterintuitive, but it is not. Had we been wrong, our scientific colleagues might have taken pity on us and the media would have gone back to ignoring us. Being correct means that we embarrassed some immensely powerful people in politics, journalism, big tech and science. They are never going to forgive us.
That is not what matters, though. The pandemic has been a great tragedy. A 79-year-old friend of mine died from Covid, and a few months later his wife died from cancer that was not detected in time to initiate treatment. While deaths are inevitable during a pandemic, the naive but mistaken belief that lockdowns would protect the old meant that governments did not implement many standard focused-protection measures. The dragged-out pandemic made it harder for older people to protect themselves. With a focused-protection strategy, my friend and his wife might be alive today, together with countless other people around the world.
Ultimately, lockdowns protected young low-risk professionals working from home – journalists, lawyers, scientists, and bankers – on the backs of children, the working class and the poor. In the US, lockdowns are the biggest assault on workers since segregation and the Vietnam War. Except for war, there are few government actions during my life that have imposed more suffering and injustice on such a large scale.
As an infectious-disease epidemiologist, I had no choice. I had to speak up. If not, why be a scientist? Many others who bravely spoke could comfortably have stayed silent. If they had, more schools would still be closed, and the collateral public-health damage would have been greater. I am aware of many fantastic people fighting against these ineffective and damaging lockdowns, writing articles, posting on social media, making videos, talking to friends, speaking up at school board meetings, and protesting in the streets. If you are one of them, it has truly been an honour to work with you on this effort together. I hope that we will one day meet in person and then, let’s dance together. Danser encore!
The Global Race Towards Full Vaccination
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | June 1, 2021
Scientists initially estimated that 60 to 70 percent of a population would have to acquire resistance to Covid-19 in order for herd immunity to take effect, a threshold that has been revised upwards since the start of the year with 80 to 85 percent quoted in some cases.
Despite the ever-higher immunity threshold discussed by scientists, Israel’s Covid-19 case count started to tumble when 40 percent of its population received at least one jab and now 59.3 percent of its inhabitants are fully vaccinated. The country’s reproduction rate has been around 0.5 in recent weeks and it appears to be on track to emerge from the pandemic, suggesting that initial herd immunity estimates carried some accuracy.
With 45.4 percent of its inhabitants fully vaccinated, Bahrain comes second on the list.
In the United States, 40.2 percent of people have been fully vaccinated (though do not forget that almost half of unvaccinated Americans have natural immunity from prior infection).
In this case, full vaccination refers to all doses prescribed by the vaccination protocol with data only available for countries reporting the breakdown of their doses.
As Scott Morefield wrote recently, Blue-state lockdown-lovers drunk on their own power like Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer who insist on a 70 percent vaccination rate in order to ease up on mandates and restrictions are ignoring the science completely in order to hold their people hostage to an unobtainable, unnecessary goal.
Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital debunked the desire among some health officials, sometimes referred to as “zero COVID,” that COVID-19 can be eradicated completely.
Well, unfortunately, we have this perception now that’s being created by some public health leaders that we need to reach total eradication. We’re not gonna get to total absolute risk elimination. That is a false goal and quite honestly it’s being used now to manipulate the public. We heard today again from our public health leaders that if we get to 70% vaccination, then we can start seeing restrictions removed. That’s dishonest. Most of the country is at herd immunity.
Other parts will get there later this month. San Francisco had 12 cases yesterday, most asymptomatic. What do you call that? I call that herd immunity. And I think what’s happening is our public health leaders are dismissing natural immunity from prior infection, which changes the path to get to more population immunity. It invokes mandates, it means kids may have to get it and it demonizes those that are hesitant rather than respecting their decision.
Indeed, you don’t have to have a medical degree to know that the formula for herd immunity has always been vaccinated plus natural immunity.
Meryl Nass on anti-vaccine petition to FDA
Listen HERE
Kevin Barrett | May 31, 2021
Meryl Nass, MD discusses her and RFK Jr.’s new Children’s Health Defense petition to the FDA to withdraw COVID vaccines from the market. CHD reports:
“On May 16, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Meryl Nass, MD, on behalf of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), took a landmark step in the COVID crisis that has irrevocably changed billions of lives around the globe by filing a Citizen Petition with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to withdraw COVID-19 vaccines from the market…
“Specifically, the petition calls upon the FDA to:
- Revoke the Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for COVID vaccines
- Refrain from licensing COVID vaccines
- Disallow the participation of minors in COVID vaccine trials
- Immediately revoke all EUAs permitting vaccination of minors
- Revoke its tacit approval of pregnant women receiving COVID vaccines
- Immediately amend its existing guidance for the use of chloroquine drugs, ivermectin, and any other safe and effective drugs against COVID.”
Evidence for the effectiveness of COVID-19 treatments can be found at c19study.com .
At the end of the show, Meryl Nass expresses her concern that the suppression of COVID treatments, in conjunction with the mass vaccination program and draconian censorship, raises a disturbing question: Is there some ulterior and perhaps sinister motive driving this seemingly irrational policy?
Wellcome Trust director Jeremy Farrar and his co-conspirators Peter Horby and Rick Bright
With a Vietnam connection
By Meryl Nass, MD | June 6, 2021
Before Sir Dr. Jeremy Farrar got the plum job of CEO of the wealthiest foundation in the UK and one of the wealthiest in the world, he did research for Oxford University in Vietnam for 18 years. It seems curious how one job led to the other. Will (like Las Vegas) what happened in Vietnam stay in Vietnam? Or will internet sleuths tell us how Farrar was groomed for his current role?
Vietnam is a country where two other co-conspirators on the hydroxychloroquine suppression worked, too. All 3 had something to do with vaccine trials there. Hmmm.
When Dr. Martin Landray approached Jeremy Farrar about starting a large multicenter clinical trial in the UK, Farrar told him to talk to Horby. He did, and Horby and Landray became the Principal Investigators for the trial. Landray was not in on the scheme to overdose patients with hydroxychloroquine. Because when he was interviewed by France Soir, an online newspaper, he made several mistakes discussing the dose of hydroxychloroquine used. He simply had no idea about the overdoses. (France Soir knew.) Landray had been too busy to look up the dose, apparently, that he was responsible for giving to 1600 human guinea pigs.
Dr. Horby then attempted to give Landray cover in some tweets I read last May or June. I think Horby knew what was going on. Horby claimed France Soir did not transcribe what Landray said accurately. But France Soir had the recording, so that excuse didn’t fly. I blogged about this at the time.
Neither Landray nor Horby has so much as apologized for using borderline fatal doses in their subjects. Were the subjects’ families ever told? Probably not.
When the news about the Recovery trial’s fatal doses came out (I learned it from others on twitter) the hydroxychloroquine arm of the trial stopped, and the principal investigators said the drug didn’t work. They acknowledged that there were about 10-20% more deaths in the hydroxychloroquine arm than in the placebo (“usual care,” a.k.a. no drug treatment arm) but have never acknowledged any mistakes or wrongdoing. Using the published Recovery trial statistics, there were about 60 excess deaths over placebo in the HCQ arm (of 400 total) that we can say were likely secondary to an HCQ overdose.
Peter Horby, also a physician and one of the two Principal Investigators of the Recovery Trial, in which 1600 subjects got poisonous doses of hydroxychloroquine and which Farrar supposedly helped found, worked in Vietnam and overlapped with Farrar. They had to have known the proper dose of antimalarial drugs, since they would have been treating malaria patients (Farrar was an infectious disease doctor), and it is likely they may have used the drugs for themselves. Or they may have used mefloquine, another antimalarial with anti-Covid effects, which was also being suppressed but got no press last year.
The third interesting Vietnam connection is Richard Bright, PhD, the head of BARDA who worked with FDA to use the Emergency Use Authorization for donated Covid drugs in the National Strategic Stockpile to interfere with doctors’ use of the chloroquine drugs for patients. He made the mistake of bragging about this after Trump fired him, pretending that he had saved the country from a dangerous drug that Trump had wanted used. Having worked in Vietnam, and probably therefore being very familar with antimalarials; overlapping his time in Vietnam with Horby and Farrar in our cast of characters; and had the job of doling out $1.5 billion per year as head of BARDA. I am convinced Bright is a co-conspirator to suppress the chloroquine drugs. It is of great interest that Collins, Fauci, Farrar and Bright were all given the responsiblity to dole out large pots of money to others. Rita Colwell, too, the former Director of the National Science Foundation who signed the Lancet letter, had had large amounts of money to distribute.
What is BARDA? It is a federal agency within DHHS:
“The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) provides an integrated, systematic approach to the development of the necessary vaccines, drugs, therapies, and diagnostic tools for public health medical emergencies such as chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) accidents, incidents and attacks; pandemic influenza (PI), and emerging infectious diseases (EID).
Together with its industry partners, BARDA promotes the advanced development of medical countermeasures to protect Americans and respond to 21st century health security threats.”
Here is what Sir Jeremy Farrar said about testing new drugs at the onset of the Covid pandemic.
“… Investing now, at scale, at risk and as a collective global effort is vital if we are to change the course of this epidemic. We welcome others to join us in this effort.” – Dr. Jeremy Farrar, Director of Wellcome
And so the Covid Therapeutics Accelerator was begun, with core funding from:
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundationm (BMGF), Wellcome Trust, and Mastercard.
All 3 play important roles in the shaping of Covid. Mastercard used it to push for digital money, since handling money exposes you to the virus. BMGF and Wellcome used their research funding to suppress useful drugs and prolong the pandemic, while using the opportunity to test new drugs and new drug platforms, like mRNA.
The website is hosted by the BMGF. While this organization did fund some hydroxychloroquine trials, if memory serves, at least 2 were shut down before completion, including one at the University of Washington, which is practically a subsidiary of the BMGF. The Henry Ford hospital trial, which showed great benefit from hydroxychloroquine, never got any traction, though the doctors involved tried hard to be heard. The MORU COPCOV trial was held up by the UK authorities soon after it began, on the basis of the danger of hydroxychloroquine, even though only tiny prophylactic doses were being used. By then, apparently, the plan was to shut down the cheap old drugs. Or perhaps the trials were set up under Wellcome and BMGF’s initiative so their management and/or findings could be controlled.
Scientist at center of lab leak controversy to lead the Lancet’s task force to investigate virus origin
By Steve Watson | Summit News | June 4, 2021
Revered scientific journal The Lancet has created a ‘task force’ to investigate the origins of the coronavirus that caused a global pandemic, yet it has decided to employ as its leader the very guy who funded the dangerous gain of function research at the Wuhan lab and subsequently allegedly ‘bullied’ other scientists into avoiding looking into the lab as a potential source of the outbreak.
In the wake of renewed scrutiny of the lab leak hypothesis, the Lancet’s task force will reportedly “focus on analyzing data on all of the theories put forward on the origins of COVID, on the reasons why SARS-CoV-2 was able to break out of Wuhan and spread globally, and on the most plausible strategies to prevent future pandemics.”
It also states that “The Task Force will review thoroughly and objectively all publicly available evidence, particularly the peer-reviewed literature, and conduct interviews with key leaders in science, medicine, policy and civil society.”
‘Objectively’. Right.
Dr Peter Daszak, who is heading up this task force, is perhaps the least suitable scientist on the planet to objectively analyse the data, given his track record.
Daszak, as President of the EcoHealth Alliance, shovelled at least $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the past few years to play around with coronaviruses inside the lab through the now infamous ‘gain of function’ research.
Daszak, who also works for the World Health Organisation, is on record admitting that he was involved with manipulating coronaviruses. Here is a video of him talking in DECEMBER 2019 about how ‘good’ the viruses are for altering in a lab:
Daszak notes that “coronaviruses are pretty good… you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily… the spiked proteins drive a lot about what happens. You can get the sequence you can build the protein, we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this, insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in a lab.”
No wonder then that Daszak as lead investigator for the WHO investigation determined within 3 hours of visiting the Wuhan lab in February 2021 that there was ‘nothing to see here’?
Recently released emails now document that Daszak thanked Dr Fauci for dismissing the lab leak theory before any scientific research had been done on the possibility.
Daszak was later employed as an ‘expert fact checker’ by Facebook when it was monitoring and removing ‘misinformation’ about the origins of COVID on its platform, much of which was credible scientific research. Facebook has since reversed the policy of banning any posts containing information suggesting COVID-19 was “man-made”.
Daszak’s Twitter profile is basically one long ‘it came from bats not a lab’ thread, much to the annoyance of some other scientists:
Why does this guy keep getting put in charge of investigations, task forces and ‘fact checking’, when it’s abundantly clear that he has the biggest motive to dismiss the lab leak notion?
As microbiologist Professor Richard Ebright has noted, “Daszak was the contractor who funded the laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that potentially was the source of the virus with subcontracts from $200million [£142million] from the US Department of State and $7million [£5million] from the US National Institutes of Health and he was a collaborator and co-author on research projects at the laboratory.”
Daszak has already lied about the type of research that was being conducted at the Wuhan lab, claiming, after the outbreak happened, that he didn’t know if it was gain of function or not. His own previous statements, and the Fauci emails prove he knew full well what was going on in the lab.
In addition, as reported by The Daily Mail and other outlets, Daszak “orchestrated a ‘bullying’ campaign and coerced top scientists into signing off on a letter to The Lancet aimed at removing blame for Covid-19 from the Wuhan lab he was funding with US money.”
Daszak used his influence to get the journal to publish the letter, which stated that to even suggest the lab leak theory had any credibility was equal to spreading “fear, rumours, and prejudice.”
It effetely shut down discussion among the scientific ‘consensus’ of the lab leak potential for a whole year until intelligence findings brought the matter back to the attention of the mainstream media.
WHO scientific advisor Jamie Metzl described Daszak’s letter as “scientific propaganda and a form of thuggery and intimidation.”
“By labelling anyone with different views a conspiracy theorist, the Lancet letter was the worst form of bullying in full contravention of the scientific method,” Metzl added.
The letter further stated that “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” and even had the audacity to state that “We declare no competing interests.”
Indeed, Daszak had made sure that the letter would be devoid of any link to EcoHealth, and even considered leaving his own name off it, emails released via the Freedom of Information Act have revealed.
To make matters worse, the other members of The Lancet’s task force are practically all minions of Daszak, some of whom helped him draft the letter that unequivocally stated the lab leak theory was dangerous, and others who either worked with him on ‘fact checking’ for Facebook, or were cited as sources during that activity.
Taking all this into account, it is obvious what the outcome of The Lancet’s inquiry will be, and it should not and cannot be used as credible evidence against the lab leak theory.
Why Is There Such Reluctance to Discuss Natural Immunity?
By Jon Sanders | AIER | June 4, 2021
If you’re among those of us who aren’t tribally invested in Covid politics but would like good information about when life will resume as normal, chances are you’re interested in herd immunity. You’re likely not interested in having to rely on the Internet Archive for good information on herd immunity. Alas, it’s become a go-to place for retrieving, as it were, previously published information on herd immunity that became inconvenient post-vaccine and then virtually Memory-Holed.
Over the past 15 months, the litany of Experts’ True Facts and Science regarding various aspects of SARS-CoV-2 has changed more often than the starting lineup of a bad minor league ball club. Covid-19 is spread by droplets, especially from asymptomatic people, until one day it was airborne all along and people who weren’t sick in all likelihood weren’t even sick. Stay at home, you’re safer indoors, even stay away from parks and beaches; well, actually, outdoors is the place to be. Masks don’t work against viruses and are actually unhealthy to wear if you’re not sick, then suddenly they did work and without one you might as well be shooting people. Everyone knows and PolitiFact verified that the virus couldn’t have been created in the prominent infectious disease lab doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in bats coincidentally at Covid Ground Zero until, one day, PolitiFact had to retract the entire “Pants on Fire!” article. And so forth.
Unfortunately, information about herd immunity has also not been immune to this kind of meddling. Until recent months, people readily understood that active immunity came about either by natural immunity or vaccine-induced immunity. Natural immunity comes from battling and defeating an actual infection, then having your immune system primed for the rest of your life to fight it off if it ever shows up again. This immunity is achieved at a sometimes very high personal price.
Vaccine-induced immunity is to prime your immune system with a weaker, non-threatening form of the invading infection, so that it’s ready to fight off the real thing should you ever encounter it, and without your having first to risk severe illness or death.
Those interested in herd immunity in itself likely don’t have a moral or political preference for one form of immunity to the exclusion of the other. Immunity is immunity, regardless of whether a particular person has it naturally or by a vaccine. All immunity contributes to herd immunity.
Others, however, are much less circumspect. They seem to have forgotten the ultimate goal of the public campaign for people to receive vaccination against Covid-19. It’s not to be vaccinated; it’s to have immunity. People with natural immunity — i.e., people whose immune systems have faced Covid-19 and won — don’t need a vaccine.
They do, however, need to be considered in any good-faith discussion of herd immunity. There are two prongs to herd immunity, as we used to all know, and those with natural immunity are the prong that’s being ignored. It’s not just mere oversight, however. Fostering such ignorance can lead to several bad outcomes:
- People with natural immunity could be kept from employment, education, travel, normal commerce, and who knows what other things if they don’t submit to a vaccine they don’t need in order to fulfill a head count that confuses a means with the end
- The nation could already be at herd immunity while governors and health bureaucrats continue to exert extreme emergency powers, harming people’s liberties and livelihoods
- People already terrified of Covid — including especially those who’ve already had it — would continue to live in fear, avoiding human interaction and worrying beyond all reason
- People could come to distrust even sound advice from experts about important matters, as they witness and grow to expect how what “the experts” counsel diverges from what they know to be wise counsel while it conforms to and amplifies the temporary needs of the political class
Those of us wanting good information certainly don’t want any of those outcomes. But others seem perfectly fine to risk them. They include not only elected officials, members of the media, political talking heads, self-important bureaucrats, and their wide-eyed acolytes harassing shoppers, but strangely also highly prominent health organizations.
For example, late last year Jeffrey Tucker showed that the World Health Organization (WHO) suddenly, and “for reasons unknown,” changed its definition of “herd immunity.” Using screenshots from a cached version on the Internet Archive, Tucker showed how the WHO altered its definition in such a way as to erase completely the role of natural immunity. Before, the WHO rightly said it “happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.” The WHO’s change stated that it happens “if a threshold of vaccination is reached.” Not long after Tucker’s piece appeared, the WHO restored natural immunity to its definition.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), seemingly apropos of nothing, on May 19 issued a “safety communication” to warn that FDA-authorized SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests “should not be used to evaluate immunity or protection from COVID-19 at any time.” The FDA’s concern appears to be that taking an antibody test too soon after receiving a vaccination may fail to show vaccine-induced antibodies, but why preclude its use for “identifying people with an adaptive immune response to SARS-CoV-2 from a recent or prior infection?” Especially after stating outright that “Antibody tests can play an important role in identifying individuals who may have been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and may have developed an adaptive immune response.”
Then there is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, that ubiquitous font of fatuous guidance. He had told people that herd immunity would be at 60 to 70 percent immunity, and then he started publicly cinching those numbers up: 75 percent, 80 percent, 85 percent, even 90 percent (as if Covid-19 were as infectious as measles). He is quoted in the New York Times admitting to doing so deliberately to affect people’s behavior:
“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.“
Now — or better put, as of this writing — Fauci has taken to arguing herd immunity is a “mystical elusive number,” a distracting “endgame,” and therefore not worth considering. Only vaccinations are worth counting. As he put it recently, “We don’t want to get too hung up on reaching this endgame of herd immunity because every day that you put 2 million to 3 million vaccinations into people [it] makes society be more and more protected.”
While composing an article about natural immunity and herd immunity for my home state of North Carolina, I happened to notice that the Mayo Clinic had removed a compelling factoid about natural immunity. It’s something I had quoted in an earlier discussion of the matter and wanted to revisit it.
Here’s what the Mayo Clinic once wanted people to know in its page on “Herd Immunity and COVID-19” with respect to natural immunity: “[T]hose who survived the 1918 flu (influenza) pandemic were later immune to infection with the H1N1 flu, a subtype of influenza A.” The Mayo Clinic pointed out that H1N1 was during the 2009-10 flu season, which would be 92 years later. That finding attested to just how powerful and long-lived natural immunity could be.
As can be seen from the Internet Archive, however, sometime after April 14 the Mayo Clinic removed that compelling historical aside:
The Mayo Clinic also reoriented its page to feature vaccination over “the natural infection method” (method? ) and added a section on “the outlook for achieving herd immunity in the U.S.” This new section stated that “it’s not clear if or when the U.S. will achieve herd immunity” but encouraged people nonetheless that “the FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective at protecting against severe illness requiring hospitalization and death … allowing people to better be able to live with the virus.”
Why, from people who know better, is there so much interest in downplaying or erasing natural immunity?
Is it because it’s hard to quantify how many people have natural immunity? Is it out of a mix of good intentions and worry, that discussing natural immunity would somehow discourage (“nudge,” in Fauci’s term) people from getting vaccines who otherwise would? Is it simple oversight, being so focused on vaccinations that they just plain forgot about natural immunity? Or is something else at work?
Whatever the reason, it’s keeping Americans in the dark about how many people have active immunity from Covid-19. It’s keeping people needlessly fearful and suspicious of each other. It’s empowering executive overreach. Worst of all, it’s tempting people to consider government and business restrictions on the unvaccinated, regardless of their actual immunity.
Jon Sanders is an economist and the senior fellow of regulatory studies and research editor at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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Clash of Civilization, Iran Part II
By Jamal Kanj – Intifada-Palestine.com – January 14, 2011
Israel’s survival kit is: perpetuate conflict, insecurity to rationalize collective hate and finally playing victim.
Devoid of conflict, Israel implodes internally; without hate, Zionism loses its justification; and playing eternal victim to continue blackmailing the West. Absence of this holy trinity, Israel ceases to exist.
From its inception, the house of Zion has mastered exploiting adversarial powers to advance Israel’s cause. For instance, their influence over the Democratic Party in the US began with President Truman’s bid for 2nd term election in 1948.
Responding to strong opposition from Secretary of State General George Marshall and Department experts urging against recognition of Israel, President Truman replied: “I’m sorry gentlemen but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands [Jewish voters] who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of [voting] Arabs among my constituents”
Zionists influence over liberal American politics was matched with the doctrinal school of Conservative theoreticians aligning the Republican Party’s platform with Israel’s objectives. The Neoconservative Zionists, coined Zioncons, invented the “Clash of Civilization” concept to fight Israel’s wars. … continue
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