It is easy to say 'even one death is too many' (Hesther Ng/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Like a number of the weird little pressure groups that sprung up over the pandemic, the modus operandi of the Health Advisory & Recovery Team, or HART, is relatively straightforward: cobble together a bunch of people with vaguely academic credentials, put out scientific-sounding press releases that pander to one side or another’s prejudices, and get media attention.
Its latest such gambit is a claim that the Office for National Statistics’ data shows “a significant rise in the death rate for adolescent males over the last eight months”. HART have put together an “open letter to Sajid Javid, Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance and the relevant public health bodies”, saying that “the concern is that this time period coincides with the rollout of vaccinations to this age group”.
There’s a saying in journalism that you should play the ball, not the man. And I will play the ball, but I want to play the man a bit first. HART has form for suggesting that vaccines kill people: on p35 of its ‘Covid-19 Response’, still prominently linked on their website, they suggest that the second peak in deaths “coincided with the mass roll-out of novel mRNA/DNA vaccines” and that “whilst we cannot infer causation from correlation, the mRNA/DNA vaccines had not been tested on this cohort” and it would be “negligent” not to ask whether “the rise in deaths during this period is linked in some way to the vaccine roll-out”. (The second peak in deaths was, in fact, caused by the second peak in Covid cases which preceded it by a fortnight or so.)
HART is populated by odd people who believe strange things: one of its publicly listed members worried, in a since-leaked private chat, that the vaccines were literally making people magnetic. Other leaked messages show a member suggesting that the group “seed the thought that vaccines cause Covid”, and that the vaccine rollout is “a crime against humanity” and part of a plan for “massive scale depopulation”. It’s worth noting that while these people may seem to be cranks, they also seem to have some influence with senior Tory backbenchers.
But let’s look at the ideas, as well as the people. After all, stopped clocks are right twice a day, and there have been plenty of stopped clocks in the pandemic. So: what’s the evidence that vaccines have been killing young people?
Here’s HART’s case. They say that according to ONS data, there were 402 deaths among 15 to 19-year-old boys between May and December last year, and that that’s about 65 more than the average for that period over the years 2015 to 2019. I’ve looked into it, and these numbers are about right. In fact, they are a slight understatement of reality: you can see the figures for 2021 here, and the five-year average here. This is, the ONS acknowledges, a “statistically significant” increase.
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SubscribeHas Unherd slumped to Daily Mail click bait?? It looks like it to me. ‘It sounds cruel — but a small number of deaths would be worth it’, you’re damn right it sounds cruel! You do not vaccinate kids, with which is basically an unauthorized vaccine. If a consenting adult wants the vaccine, then that is their choice, but vaccinating 5 year olds is just not right. What is wrong with people?? The Great Barrington Declaration, which was nefariously shadow banned by Google, and not mentioned by any of the MSM, was spot on. Shield the elderly and vulnerable, and everyone else carry on, I can’t believe we have got to the point of discussing ‘Vaccinating Kids’. No doubt all the governments around the world and Big Pharma have got this legally wrapped up, but when the shit hits the fan, I really do hope a class action is bought against people, governments and Big Pharma promoting this insidious ‘advice’.
Ultimately governments have a choice. If their modelling shows that vaccinating a countries children will likely kill 10 of them, but not vaccinating the children will see 100 die of the disease most governments are going to choose the first option which is what the article is saying
Whos modelling are we talking about in the UK, the wildly and massively incorrect Sage modelling?
If Chivers can show in a relatively short essay that vaccination appears slightly less dangerous than the virus, I’d wager a government will have access to at least this level of information on which to make their decision
However, up to this point in time the UK government has acted with ‘worst case scenario’, which has been proven outrageously incorrect. What makes you think they will change tact now? I’m afraid I don’t trust this government to get anything right, nor the useless civil service. It speaks volumes that the most successful part of the vaccine rollout was the procurement, which was outsourced to the private sector.
The government has acted much more cautiously than I believe was necessary throughout the pandemic so why do you think they would suddenly go gung ho over children’s vaccinations?
As you say, they will act on the modelling, and as I have already said the modelling has been massively wrong, so using your logic, they will push for vaccinating kids using incorrect data.
France has
The point both Billy Bob and Tom have not covered is the long term risk to the young and healthy from a vaccine with no long term risk data. We have no reason to assume there will not be any long term risk given the track record of the drugs companies and this type of novel treatment. A risk assessment that does not build this in when applied to a very low risk group is at best incomplete and at worst negligent.
We have no reason to asume there will be no long term risk from getting COVID either. In fact we have ‘long COVID’. Uncertainty cuts both ways.
Rasmus, you need to get a grip on reality. We are no longer dealing with the original variant, or the alpha and delta variants. The current variant, Omicron, produces a bad cold. That’s a god send. As for long COVID, do some research and look up the literature. The latest on long COVID, debilitating though it is, is that it is largely psychosomatic.
Tell that to my 9 year old football, cycling, skateboarding, life loving well balanced grandson who, after contracting covid, has to stop playing his beloved game of football after 15 minutes, sit down on the sideline to get his breath back, before rejoining the game. He would never choose, consciously or subconsciously to miss even one minute of the game he absolutely adores. Don’t label all long covid case outcomes as psychosomatic.
Long Covid is a serious issue, please don’t gaslight those afflicted by dismissing their many symptoms as ‘all in the mind’. There is plenty of gaslighting going on with those who have adverse Covid vaccine reactions too.
Post viral syndrome is nothing new. Have had it myself after a coronavirus is 2017. Different is that it wasn’t splashed about in corporate media to scare and fool people
We also know that there are cases of ‘long Covid’ after vaccination, look up Shaun Barcavage on YT, a medical researcher who after second Pzifer jab has serious long term side effects. He has started a research website for vaccine damaged and has 3K of those people so far interested.
long covid is no greater a risk to anyone than viral fatigue from any number of viruses. It is not a new phenomena
Well.. there is that. And the fact the data shows the protections of the vaccines not only don’t last but if you don’t get a booster it goes negative. (meaning you are more likely to catch covid). This is actually why BoJo may have thrown in the towel. Plus his partygate scandal. LOL. We are on year two of this. We have administered billions of vaccines globally. It is admitted that they do not stop transmission or infection. It is claimed with unreliable data that it prevents severe disease. Why do I make that claim. Well step away from all the rhetoric and look at the big picture. Go to this webpage. Scroll down to deaths. Look at the chart. Click on the linear tab to give an even better picture. If this vaccine does what the Tom Chivers of the world says it does… Why isn’t it working? If you look at the chart the death rate actually goes up at the start of vaccinations. Since September the chart decreased back to the original rate before the vaccine was administered. (probably because people quit getting boosters because they are having second thoughts). After billions of vaccine injections shouldn’t this curve have flattened? I mean my God. This has to be the greatest fraud in history.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
Billy Bob, as ever you paint with very broad brushstrokes.
how can it be slightly less dangerous than a relatively insignificant virus to the vast majority of the population when they are at little risk from said virus and the risks from said ‘vaccination’ are unknown?
The first case is a sin of commission, the second is a sin of ommision. The first fits the definition of human sacrifice. That may be the right thing to do, but we should acknowledge what it is.
I’m not making any moral judgement on the matter, I don’t know if it’s morally worse to kill somebody by giving them a manufactured vaccine or to let them die from a virus. Governments however won’t be making their decisions on morality but on cold hard statistics. If they believe that by giving the vaccines less kids will die than if they don’t then they’re going to approve vaccination for children.
A line will be crossed if they mandate children must be vaccinated however, that should be a decision for parents to make after weighing up the pros and cons
How do you account for any potential consequences to these children in 5, 10, 20 years time?
I can’t, nobody can. As a society we had to weigh up the risk/reward and decide if the possibility of unforeseen consequences down the track was worth it to prevent however many deaths caused by the virus in the present
How can you account for the potential consequences in 5, 10, 20 years time from getting COVID?
One is nature the other is murder
You think a virus manufactured in a Chinese lab is ‘natural’?
And how do parents ‘weigh up the pros and cons’ when any criticism of the vaccines is censored?
And treating the illness is virtually outlawed.
And cold hard statistics back in February 2020 from the Diamond Princess said to do nothing was the right way to go.
People die under general anaesthetic from time to time. Is surgery also human sacrifice? People die on the roads. Is driving human sacrifice? People die in childbirth. Is that human sacrifice too?
Of course not. People under general anaesthetic are there because they have a medical condition. People drive on the road because they choose to. People die in childbirth because they choose to get pregnant. Not the same at all.
Wouldn’t it be worth knowing what the underlying conditions were for the kids who died of Covid (and those who’ve died from the vaccine). Maybe vaccinating children with diabetes, severe asthma, cancer and other conditions only would be more suitable? This should also be a consideration when looking at the figures
Indeed it would, however that’s much more in depth than the article goes into so I can’t really comment
That’s disingenuous. You already hold a position that vaccinating children is overall good, yet you don’t have information on the medical condition of those children who died from vaccine or Covid, so you’re admitting that you took your position without knowing, or wanting to know, more. Don’t fob it off on the depth of this article.
I’ve come to my conclusion based on the pure mathematics of the situation. All the numbers I’ve seen from various sources indicate that at a national level offering the vaccination will help more children than it harms. I don’t deny that some may be more at risk from the virus than others, which is why I wouldn’t want it to be mandatory but left to the parents to decide, however you’d presumably refuse to offer the vaccination to children based solely on your ideological opposition to the vaccines
This was the original proposal from vaccine taskforce (I forget their acronym) for the 12-15 age group. They drew up a list of 50(?) medical conditions, which would produce a risk factor significantly exacerbating a covid infection, and children with those conditions were recommended to be vaccinated.
SAGE recommended against this because vaccinating all children would mean opening up the schools earlier (I never understood this logic, but there you go).
Unfortunately, vaccines are the governments new magic hammer. And we, the populace, are nails.
Studies have shown the vaccine doesn’t last for the sick, elderly, or immunocompromised. The whole purpose behind a mass vaccination campaign is limit the spread of the virus. There was so much gaslighting around this fact a lot of the population believes it prevents infection. Even though viral loads were compared and there was no difference among vaccinated or not. It is a massive fraud to sell vaccine and force digital IDs. I know people don’t want to believe that but it is the truth. Take a look at this 2010 article about swine flue. It is probably past time we keep giving these evil people the benefit of the doubt. They don’t deserve it. This is fraud on an unimaginable scale. Most people don’t want to go there but if we don’t what kind of world are we going to leave to our kids. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/SwineFlu/swine-flu-pandemic-world-health-organization-scientists-linked/story?id=10829940
I don’t know anybody who thinks that the vaccination prevents infection. What it does do is reduce the likelihood of becoming extremely sick and requiring hospital treatment
you mean all 3 of them aged under 20? Over 2 years? Perhaps we should look at what underlying conditions there are for kids who die from any other the wide range of viruses which circulate both constantly and periodically., What about those who die walking to school, get struck by lightening?
Kids’ fatality rate from Omicron is 0.0%.
The vaccinations for children started before omicron though. Yes it has now become the dominant strain and thankfully appears to be less deadly than previous incarnations of the virus, but nobody was to know that until recently, which is why the statistics are taken across the pandemic as a whole
And unfortunately for the zealots, the previous strains were not that deadly either ………
Modelling? Yeah, because that’s been so accurate the last 2 years.
Call my cynical but I’d wager the information available to the government was vastly different to the vastly inflated numbers they delivered to the public to try and obtain some level of compliance
I would suggest you need to prove that.
If it is the case, then the populace is being unequivically corralled by propaganda.
except the average age of dying with covid is 82 – higher than the nation’s average life expectancy of 81. That 82 is even for those 17,371 (ONS figures) who died (from the beginning of March 20 to September 2)1 without co-morbidities – only 1600ish died who were under 64 .
And the average life expectancy of an 82-year-old in western Europe is about 10 more years.
That is not the correct to look at it.
Some 82 year-olds will die next month and some will reach 100. It depends on the individual.
In your terms, by killing off many the venerable individuals ages 82+ Covid has actually increased the life expectancy of those that survived. So a positive health benefit
No. I am not less likely to die because someone else who is in bad health dies early. It may be that the survivors will on average live longer, but they would have lived longer anyway, because they are healthier from the start. No benefit there.
Yes, but what sort of 10 years, hale & hearty or incontinent & incoherent?
As Lucan* said “The Gods conceal from men the happiness of death, that we may endure life”.
(* Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, 39-65 AD or correctly 792-818 AUC.)
I’m pretty sure that makes no sense
Look at it this way: Life expectancy is summed of all the risks you face through your life. If you make it till 82 you have already avoided a lot of those risks, so your life expectancy is longer than 82. Or like this: If life times were a nice bell curve, you would have half the population live longer than 82, and for everybody who died at 60, you would have another one who lived till 100. But it is worse than that. Quite a few people die before they are 40, but nobody live till they are over 120. To keep the average at 82, then for every person who dies at 22, you need, say, six people who live till 92.
The average life expectancy of a nursing home resident, where most of the elderly deaths occurred, is 13 months. I think we can agree, that across all age ranges, that those who died of covid were more likely to have a shortened life expectancy. You know, co morbidities, clues in the name.
That may well be, and if you had some decent numbers you could make a good argument for it. But meanwhile let us stop making the completely misleading comparison between the average age of COVID victims and the life expectancy of the population.
It may well be, indeed! Not quite sure why you’re peddling this stuff, though I’ve seen plenty of other people use the same argument. It’s not exactly controversial that Covid kills people with comorbities at a higher rate. Of course, an 80year will likely have comorbidities, but clearly they’re unevenly distributed, hence some are in nursing homes, most, thankfully, are not.
OK, badly put on my side. I would not deny that having co-morbidities (like being old), obviously makes your chances a lot worse. Less obvious is how many people we are talking about, how seroius the co-morbidities have to be, and how many otherwise healthy people get caught anyway. You made no explicit claims on those fronts, but a lot of people do.
I don’t know why this statistic is bandied about since its still not good if there is excess death at this age average?!!! 50% those are under 82 and if there were half a million of them would that be OK??!!
You seem to be missing one very important point.
At best protection form the vaccine lasts a matter of months and that is if it is effective against new variants at all.
As modelling proved so successful…. We still don’t know the long term effect of the vaccines. Over my dead body would I ever have a child of mine vaccinated. Thank God they are all grown up and can make their own decision.
If you allow governments to choose for you you are just a sheeple
Yet you’ll unequivocally believe everything peddled by those who agree with your predetermined position?
Not every death is the same. You have to ask yourself which cohort to kill, the ones who would die from Covid or the ones who would die from getting vaccinated. One is the act of god and one is the act of government.
Vaccines, even if their definition is now somewhat stretched, have only ever been given to protect the individual. If an individual is not going to benefit from a vaccine, it should not be offered. Period. Your argument is nonsense from that perspective. To take the new argument of protecting others through immunising everyone to create herd immunity, that argument, despite never having been a reason to vaccinate anyone in the past, was also never going to be valid since said ‘vaccine’ was not developed or tested to prevent disease or transmission
But the numbers suggest that at a national level giving children the vaccine will save some children
These vaccines provide the only immunity that matters, they give the companies that make them immunity from prosecutions.
We’ll, in fairness, it’s Tom Chivers, a crank not even worth an eye roll. I just came for the comments.
I agree about UnHerd. I read very little now and will not be renewing my subscription.
I know Ed West is on substacks, but has he left Unherd? Douglas Murray, and Ed were, are? The best 2 on here.
Douglas had an article last week. I was wondering if Ed left.
Yes, I saw Murrays article, Ed West as mentioned, is on substack, think he may have left unherd.
Murray had an article last week. However because he criticised the American right everybody on here complained that it was a poorly written article and they’d be cancelling their subscription. Turns out most on here just want an echo chamber, and are no better than the woke
Agreed Billy, an echo chamber should not be what unherd should be about. Not a good look.
Yes, Unherd is a tabloid with intellectual pretensions. 10% of the articles are written by true writers or intellectuals (that rare type who actually reads a lot before forming an opinion) while 90% are pundits of the millennial sort whose culture is a salad of cherry picked knowledge from wikipedia and various popularizer streams (YT, curiosity, nebula, etc) all of which have this common style to say very little but spread over 50 minutes of verbiage.
Shielding the elderly and vulnerable.
How practical do you think that would have been in the UK ?
This virus only transmits when people meet.
If you were going to really protect care home residents you would have had to ensure that all their carers and any visitors didn’t meet anyone else – that is that the care homes and their staff were kept in their own bubbles (not mixing with their families) until all the elderly inmates were vaccinated.
1.49 million people in the UK are in receipt of adult social care (private and NHS and Local authority and direct payment recipients). According to Satista about 490,000 of these are in care homes. There are 1.52 million social care workers (potential transmitters to this vulnerable population). This doesn’t include those that are being cared for by immediate family members – about 13.6 million informal carers according to this paper :
COVID-19 and UK family carers: policy implications
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2215036621002066#!
a number of whom are schoolchidren / in college eductaion / working.
In addition.
The population at risk of severe COVID-19 (aged ≥70 years, or with an underlying health condition with a fully adjusted hazard ratio of getting severe covid of 1.13 or greater) comprises 18.5 million individuals in the UK, including a considerable proportion of school-aged and working-aged individuals.
34% of households in the UK are multigenerational – 9 million homes.
According to the Actuaries Friday report # 51 : Priority Groups 1 to 9 i.e. over 50s, Health & Care Staff, Extremely Clinically Vulnerable and “At Risk” amounts to around 31m people.
Big numbers requiring lots of financial and logistical support in a GBD scenario + a massive sacrifice by direct care workers unless you chose to bribe them (to isolate with their charges) with what ? an average junior doctor’s salary perhaps for 1 year ? (Foundation year doctor year 2 £33,345) x 1.52 million care workers = aproximately £ 50 – 51 billion.
So that just leaves the ? millions who are still clinically vulnerable but still working and contributing to the economy but aren’t in a care home.
Good luck with organising all that.
I can never work out how people can argue that it is impossible to put a percentage of the population in shielded bubbles and social lockdown whereas doing it to the whole population on and off is somehow easier?
What percentage of the population, detailed in my original post are you suggesting should have been shielded in 2020 and in 2021 (when vaccine coverage of the younger, vulnerable members of society was incomplete) ?
Please state an actual figure including the percentage of those individuals who are economically active.
Which members of the population do you think were valuable enough to shield in 2020 ?
But it would/might have been finished within a month, as long as the rest of us lived life as normal.
How so ? The borders were open. There were plenty of immunocompromised people who would have caught and incubated and then transmitted mutated versions of the virus after 4 weeks.
Just lock everyone down for months on end then. Or you can be reasonable, and look who is at most at risk and do your best to shield them. Hospitals were the obvious place to catch covid, this should have been put into any plan after the first wave. Children are not at severe risk, and this risk should have been acknowledged. No response could have been perfect, but it could have been a damn sight better.
How many exactly do you think were “at risk” ?
What is your definition of “lockdown” ?
I was in Northern Italy March – September 2020. There were severe restrictions regarding freedom of movement March – May. After that things were pretty normal other than masks, only eating outdoors, limited access to museums etc., restricted numbers on public transport.
Re-imposition of some restrictions in the Autumn / Winter of 2020 – restaurants offering take out only and some restrictions on moving from one region to another but nothing like the Spring. Thereafter the restrictions have been piffling.
The only “lockdown” I have experienced and from talking to English pals, UK residents have experienced, was in the early Spring of 2020.
Totally impractical I agree. Nice idea. Quite impossible!
Where to begin with this article? Is Chivers just being paid by Pfizer? He starts by saying ad hominems are a bad idea, but then devotes 3 and a half paragraphs to just that. Bizarrely, he describes a group of highly qualified medical doctors and other PhD qualified academics as “a bunch of people with vaguely academic credentials”. Meanwhile Chivers’s own academic achievements (as he’s a science editor) are shrouded in mystery. If he is to play the “credentialism” game so beloved of his ilk, let’s hear his.
His sloppy use of OWID statistics to justify his position on child vaccination is very revealing. We are given the overall figures of vaccinated versus unvaccinated. This is not granulated for children, who we know are at virtually zero risk from Covid, as the disease is so age dependent. Something like 6 healthy children have died from Covid in the UK. The risk benefit ratio just doesn’t work, because statistically, there is no benefit for children, and we don’t even know the risks.
I can’t believe this is what passes for science writing. It is more like “Pharma Shilling”. I regret taking out a year’s subscription to pay for this tripe.
I tried to like this comment, but it wouldn’t let me
Thank you for this. My feelings precisely. There have been many cod scientific articles in the press over the last two years, either due to lazy journalism or funding from sources with a particular agenda, but this one really provoked me.
As a retired RN/RM, who battled her way through a nasty dose of Covid at home very early in the pandemic, I have looked on appalled at the way SAGE and government have twisted basic medical/health precepts, and deliberately manipulated half the population into a state of such abject terror that many would back into the hedge wearing a mask outdoors, for fear of coming closer than 6 feet to a passer by. It has been equally dystopic and tragic.
When Hart finally came along to regularly question the surrealism and voice considered medical sense, it felt a little like the cavalry coming over the hill. I’m not sure how Chivers reconciles his admission Hart have some influence with his claim they are a “weird little pressure group”. I would respond to him that any respect I might have had for his “scientific-sounding” writing is now non existent. It ranks about the same level as the dubiously funded “fact checker” websites one occasionally encounters.
He is by far the worst on unherd. I largely only come here for Freddie Sayers. Chivers just pisses me off. If you review his past articles he is clearly a World economic forum #buildbackbetter guy. Maybe that is the price of doing business in the UK. They force you to put at least one of these propagandists on the payroll and give them a platform.
welll said Sir
‘It sounds cruel — but a small number of deaths would be worth it’. Try saying that to a bereaved parent. Hey, your kid died, but it’s all for the greater good. And that is the problem with utilitarianism; its inhumanity.
But you could also say the same to a parent whose child died from Covid if you’ve withheld a vaccine that could have saved them. Thankfully both cases are vanishingly rare, but the numbers suggest the vaccine is slightly less dangerous than the virus
!
How about just doing Risk Benefit analyst – the ones immune compromised, the frail and sick – but not the healthy. WTF is it everyone gets it – surely only the high risk children should get it as it is the healthy young the vax hurts, yet does not help.
No child is being forced to take it. I don’t doubt that it would be of more use to some children than others, but the government can’t set national policy based on individual circumstances. Make it available to all and let the parents decide
But government policy was to invoke Gillick Competence, to try to side-step a parental decision. And, it wasn’t like here is the vaccine, your choice. Huge amounts of pressure like “you would not want to kill granny”.
“you would not want to kill granny”.
A silly emotive argument.
Average age of death in the UK is greater than 80 years!
Eyes rolling.
But we don’t know the 5, 10, 20 year results. We are just vaxing to fix a very short term problem. It is kind of weird.
Yes – several cardiologists have come forward to say that vaccinated people frequently have markers associated with higher risk of heart disease and may be suffering sub-clinical damage. One said he feared the current deaths as ‘the tip of the iceberg’. Why give extremely low risk people this vaccine – there is no need to shoulder this risk.
This is not what the numbers I am seeing are saying at all.
Sin of commission versus sin of omission.
You could say that if the evidence was there, but it isn’t. So why make this point. The risk for children from Covid (way before omicron emerged) is virtually zero. The risk from the vaccine is unknown. If you are a parent who makes a decision to vaccinate their child you are being led by propaganda not science
I’ll add to that. The cohorts who die are different also. That said, I dont think they can know whether its beneficial or not in the long term. So it should be an individual decision.
The whole world economic forum #buildbackbetter philosophy is built on this. The individual is evil and the collective is good. Or course the “collective” is given only once choice and they don’t get a say in it. As Billy Bob says we don’t get to see the real data. We would be too stupid to understand it… so we get the fake data to inspire us into the collective right think! You can’t make this stuff up. Billy Bob must work for SPI-B! Accept their decisions or be punished. This is what the vaccine passports and mandates are all about. It is to put you into your place. To force compliance. To let you know who your betters are to take your directions from. The Billy Bobs and Tom chivers know what is best for you. Comply or else.
According to ONS statistics,less than 20 people under 20 died from covid.That’s about 20times less than the number of deaths from drowning.
Total covid deaths FROM covid ,less than 20,000.
Statistically, more kids would die from the vaccines than Covid by an order of magnitude, even if the overall numbers were small. Add the fact that the vaccines don’t prevent spread and it’s a net negative.
The numbers in the article implies that this is not the case. What are you basing your opinion on?
Here you are Billy Bob – as you have such a strong position on the vax I would ask you to watch these https://odysee.com/@BannedYouTubeVideos:4/JOE-ROGAN-AND-DR-ROBERT-MALONE:c?r=ArkgA4P66Sz5zGgXYSVrbytBFoB8wGkg
The most watch video on the vax – banned on youtube
I believe Rogan recently had someone on his podcast who refuted a lot of this stuff. Rogan, to his credit, allowed that he might have been wrong about this.
I haven’t watched that video, yet, but I would remind you that Dr Malone was intimately involved in the early discovery and development of the mRNA technology. If the reputation of that discovery has not been damaged in the public eye by the greed of big Pharma over their cavalier approach to their “vaccines” it may yet have a valuable role to play in future treatment of many diseases. I think we should therefore allow Dr Malone some credit for what he might have to say.
I would be interested in a link to the podcast you mention, please, if you have it still?
And this this one with Dr McCullough and Joe Rogan (Rogan is the world’s most popular youtube interviewer.
He says giving children a vax is a crime against humanity – a TOP doctor, again this interview has had more views than 5 million on the many platforms it is on. https://odysee.com/@jackspirko:a/rogan-mccullough:6
I have a lot of time for Rogan, the way he talks to almost anybody about any subject is to be admired. However that doesn’t mean that just because I like him I have to agree with all his guests. The fact is that the number of doctors who are anti vaccine is vanishingly small compared to those that are pro, and having listened to a few that are against it none as of yet have put forward any arguments that I find convincing enough to change my opinion
You do not have to agree with his guests – but to listen to them as this covid response is about to destroy the world. It is a big deal.
I can listen to them and still believe they’re incorrect
Wait, are you saying you think health professionals who administer vaccines should switch off any sense of responsibiity for what they are doing because they are told that only one particular set of stats interpreted by one particular journalist at one moment in time is important, so if their patient dies they need feel no sense of guilt? They can wash their hands of it? The government and health services also? I’m sorry, but this is going down a very dangerous line of thinking indeed. You are saying it is okay to kill a healthy person, knowing this might be an outcome, in an attempt to prevent deaths you only know about as projected statistics? This removal of seeing each person as a human individual and instead as a possible mortality statistic that will look bad for the government is pure evil. You can choose to go down that track if you wish to, but you will be living in a very different world from the one I choose to inhabit.
That is part of all medicine, surely: You do things that might kill some patients, because not doing them would kill even more patients. Think of chemotherapy: Some people die from the chemotherapy, but if you do not give it, they all all die from the cancer. Would you prefer a doctor that refused to act, so that however many people died he could not be blamed for it?
At least try and use comparable analogies. If a patient has a malignant tumor and you do nothing, they WILL die. That’s a whole different ballpark where the survivability for COVID in children in 99.9995% and that was for the bad variants. For Omicron, the survivability is 100%. You don’t vaccine for the common cold, so you sure don’t vaccinate against Omicron with a vaccine targeted against a variant that’s two years old and whose spike contains well over 50 mutations relative to the original.
Healthy children are not “patients”. Unless you are starting to pathologise the healthy as well as the sick, just because they might at some point in the future become unhealthy and be then interpreted as being a biohazard. I think we need to be extremely aware of when we are going down the path of dehumanisation at the moment. Even if you believe you can make a net saving of human lives through jabbing the entire world (for which there is no evidence) you must still be aware you are being prepared to kill in order to do so. It’s a classic ethical question – the trolley car. And I am really concerned that the point is being made here that all the government has to worry about is numbers, not ethics. It that is what we now believe, heaven help us!
Are you also against vaccination for measles, polio, smallpox? The logic would seem to be the same in each case.
The Covid injection is not a vaccine. Check out the information on the unknown long term effects of this gene therapy.
vaccine noun“: a preparation that is administered (as by injection) to stimulate the body’s immune response against a specific infectious agent or disease:” Merriam-Webster dictionary.
We do not know the long-term effect of either COVID disease or COVID vaccines – though the former is likely to be worse than the latter. What about it?
I think it is pretty important to think very carefully before we use medical interventions on healthy people, and to weigh up the risks in the individual circumstances, rather than using them for everyone regardless. If the only goal is vaccine-induced herd immunity we also need to be aware of the many over-simplified assumptions we may be making with this strategy.
Well, I could not disagree with you on that.
Hurrah!!!!! It’s always nice to find common ground :-).
Not medicine, public health.
I don’t believe I said anything of the sort, so please stop implying I did. What I said was that the medical professionals opposed to vaccination are minuscule compared to the numbers that are pro vaccination. Those I’ve listened to who are anti vaccine haven’t as of yet been able to provide any hard evidence for me to believe them over the vast majority of their peers who think it’s a good thing
ROFL. “Vanishingly small”. Come on Billy. You can’t really be that naive. There are thousands and thousands of doctors and scientists who question the vax but they’re either censored (like the Joe Rogan interview) or threatened with losing their job.
Amazingly, many people then think they’re hearing all ‘the science’, but they’re getting only onr side, because for two years the biggest censorship campaign ever has been in place.
Ask yoursrlf why they are censoring all these voices Billy? That isn’t how science should work.
And do make sure to watch the Peter McCullough interview as he is one of the most reputable scientists in the world, and what he says is echoed by the thousands of good doctors and scientists throughout the world who have been silenced.
If they have reliable evidence they can present it, deal with critial comments, and start convincing those who are willing to listen. In the end they will win the argument *if they have the data*. That is how science works. The reason they are being suppressed is that they do not have the data but are spreading disinformation anyway.
Read this: Unboostered Brits Infected and Dying at Higher Rates than Unvaccinated (substack.com)
Which leaves me with a choice: Not having the time to redo the analysis myself, do I trust the UK Health Security Agency, or eugyppius. Not a hard choice. UKHSA ast least gives an explanation why their way is better than eugyppius way, which he does not reciprocate. Anyway, I find it unlikely that the entire UK civil service is deliberately and knowingly promoting a medical treatment that can be proved to increase people’s chance of dying.
You are a zealot, Rasmus.
I could tell you, as a long-time civil servant, how little it matters whether or not the ‘entire’ civil service believes in the party line or not, but you simply wouldn’t trust me.
Civil service or not, there is a limited group of people who are used to working with this kind of data, who do it for a living, and whose job, research or health service, is to promote better health. You are telling me that it is obvious from a quick look at the data what the real situation is – and that every single professional is happily colluding in a conspiracy to harm people unnecessarily. Not a single one of the people who understand the business thoroughly is willing to do the only thing that would make a difference – which is to publish a well-supported, professional-level analysis that would be impossible for journalists or colleagues over the world to ignore. It is much more likely that the professionals are actually right, but that there are a group of highly motivated amateurs eagerly looking to twist the data to conform to their beliefs, but unable to make a winning argument because the data simply are not there.
Eugyppius is one of those very people. He works in a government research unit in Bavaria, specialising in data analytics. He has a PhD and has worked in academia in the States.
The reason he publishes under a pseudonym is precisely because stepping out of line from the consensus has serious professional consequences, in the current climate.
And there are many such professionals who have stepped out, albeit mostly in academia: Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan, Byram Bridle, Jay Bhattacharya, Tess Lawrie…it’s a long list.
And no, I am not telling you that those who follow the consensus are part of a conspiracy. I am merely suggesting that they follow a narrative which has become so entrenched that – yes – its adherents ignore the blind truth in front of their eyes.
Exactly!
“It is much more likely that the professionals are actually right,”
Why? They got Thalidomide very wrong.
Why don’t you actually look at the UKHSA data a bit more carefully, as well as comparable data elsewhere. It’s not so pretty for the vaccines right now. They worked well to start with but not now.
Most of them are also insisting that men can be women. Go figure, if Big Pharma pays we get their tune. Phizer sticks 5 them most popular investment of congress members…
McCullough and others are doing their best to present. But surely you realize that there’s has been an awful lot of censorship, including on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, the MSM, etc… In fact all of your comments over the last several weeks/months reflect your intellectual lazziness with regard to finding out what’s actually going on.
I have yet to see anything that makes me doubt my current position seriously. I am arrogant enough to think I could probably produce a professional-grade analysis myself, if I tried, but I would have to work at it full time, probably for a couple of years. Anything less would be amateurish. And there is no need for one more amateur expert in this debate.
“I have yet to see anything that makes me doubt my current position seriously.”
Why am I not surprised?
You are indeed arrogant enough because your series of comments display an awful lot of ignorance, or more specifically, “a little knowledge is dangerous”. Further, you haven’t seen anything to reverse your position because you have repeatedly failed to look and do the relevant reading. If you trust the “narrative” from the “ExpertsTM” you will end up in a ditch.
Censors are never the good guys. “Suppression” is only necessary when truth is being told.
Malicious falsehoods can do a lot of damage, and people have found it useful to try to suppress them. Would you try to suppress the ‘Protocols of the elders of Zion’, the blood libel etc’? Or do you think they are true?
Hogwash. I know about blood libel because the self-evident utter mad weirdness of it isn’t suppressed but there for all to see. What we haven’t until recently been able to discuss is C-19, it’s origins, who’s responsible, its genuine lethality in real numbers, how to treat it, and who is profiting from the blatant lies of commission and omission for two years. There’s your malicious falsehood. Expose it all.
Another example is the idea of ‘love jihad’, that is causing rioting and murder in India. Whether that idea is promoted or suppressed makes a difference in people getting killed – or not.
Anyway, we *have* been able to discuss all the things you named. It has just been hard for people who had strong convictions but no reliable evidence.
Wrong!
Not true at all Rasmus. Once you go against the narrative your research stops getting published and you no longer get airtime. It isn’t about whether it is right or wrong. It is about who brnefits or doesn’t.
This is no longer a world in which things are openly debated. The media relies on big pharma for billions a year in revenues (look it up) and universities (including Imperial for example) rely on big pharma funding or grants from the likes of the Gates Foundation. Do you think they would be wiling to go against their paymasters and risk their funding.
I wish we still lived in the world you speak of Rasmus, but alas, those days are long gone.
Also do read this, if you have a mo: https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/doctors-demand-investigation-of-vaccine-related-child-deaths/
Science has been politicized and competent DRS forced into the shadows and silenced to protect their livelihoods and family. The most prominent who speak out are made by the press and institutional medicine to look crazy for questioning “the science”, or can’t be heard due to censoring by our current leftist media. Science is based on data and I would believe a real scientist over a government bureaucrat and his theory based algorithm. Unreported data, if ever collected, will be proof of the science behind the vaccine mandate, and it’s going to be ugly. This data is in every DR office in the world. How many increased cases in “x” occurred since vaccination began? How many neurological disorders, autoimmune cases, cardiac related illness, etc? I have friends who are DRS, they know this data for their practice and they can’t speak openly about it for fear of being cancelled or humiliated by their own profession. Medicine has always been political and now politicians control health care completely, because they control what a DR will say. “Follow the science is akin to “uncloth and step into the shower.” Sickening! We can’t stand for it. We must not only resist, we cannot comply! As one of my DR friends say recently, “medicine and science is over as we have known it.” I don’t want to believe that, but am seeing it everyday.
“The fact is that the number of doctors who are anti vaccine is vanishingly small”
What do you mean by ‘anti-vaccine’? Against vaccines altogether or against their application by force? These are two different arguments.
Had you thought that doctors who speak out risk ruining their careers. Medical research is hugely funded by Big Pharma. There are many similarities with the onslaught of transideology teachers and others afraid to speak out.
The numbers in the article are misinformed and distorted. Just check out the VAERS and Yellow book data pages versus the UKHSA statistics. The incidence, incidentally, of myocarditis in young males (including children and all the way up to 50) is incredibly high relative to expectation. And there is no such thing as mild myocarditis. Anything that requires hospitalization for a medical (as opposed to surgical) condition is by definition very far from mild. And the long term consequences of myocarditis include a very high incidence of heart failure.
I willo sum up the article above:
Giving the children these vaccines is a crime against humanity, but that is ok because some studies on this experimental medicine show it will save more than it kills.
And coincidentally the very pro vax man, Dr Campbell, did a part on this just today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25-iJKPA1CA He would vax anything which got within range of a needle – yet he says do not vax children without doing the risk analyst he then explains this recent CDC study showing that.
I prefer Dr Malone and Dr McCullough (you can see both of their 3 hour long interviews with joe Rogan on Odyssey if you google it. They both are the best experts available – both say it is a crime against humanity to vax children. JUST the fact TOP doctors say it is a crime to vax them should be enough for Chivers to not be so sure, as killing children, or damaging them, is not such a light choice as he makes it.
This Campbell is a retired nurse not a medical dr His PhD is in nurse education. Basically a semiliterate with a YT channel – a grifter
Has pretty solid statistics from NY and CA. Doesn‘t matter if his PHD is in nurse education.
All his statistics are copy-pasted from gov sites. He never seemed to be able to infer any conclusions of his own. Also when he cites studies from Lancet he selectively highlights one or two statements from the conclusions section to satisfy the bias du jour of his viewers. Upon closer inspection those studies (especially related to IVM) actually reached the opposite conclusions.
Maybe you look at his conversation with Professor Clancy, who is a world famous immunologist. Maybe you think Clancy also presents the “bias of the day”…https://youtu.be/FPPnyzvO7J4
Thanks for that video. The statistics seem pretty good news for people who acquired natural immunity through Covid illness. Seems also to confirm Dr.James‘ opinion about his acquired immunity and telling Javid off about the requirement for NHS doctors to be vaccinated.
What garbage writing.
This is the kind of hit piece that the big pharma PR departments have been encouraging puppet journalists to write for years.
It is a simple method.
Find someone, it could be a person or group, who is not following the script, and then start calling them a ‘quack’ (if it is a doctor). If it is scientist then terms such as ‘discredited’ come in useful. If it is a group then focus on the members and find a couple of them who said things that turned out not to be true. By association this implies the rest of the group is wrong too.
This is all standard corporate PR propaganda and it does make one wonder whether Tom Chivers has some association with big pharma. If he isn’t on their payroll he should be, as he is clearly working on their behalf whether paid or pro-bono.
I appreciate the fact that Unherd publishes writing from a diverse range of writers. I like to hear different views. But writing of this quality is just garbage. It isn’t quality journalism. It doesn’t provide interesting insights. It isn’t investigative (a form of journalism that seems to be very rare these days). It is nothing more than a poorly written hit piece on behalf of the pharmaceutical giants.
Please can we have full disclosure and accountability?
Is Chivers taking Pharma money? Because this article certainly reads like it.
Many of us have found the work of HART and similar groups to be humane, and reliable, so the ad hominem that makes up the first part of this piece seems very dubious.
Ditto focusing on the risks of Covid to children when the facts show that to be one smidgen over zero…
I know Chivers loves the contrarian clickbait articles but he appears to have been seriously gulled, or something has turned his head….
Couldn’t agree more Chivers needs to see this: https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-pfizer-vaccine-more-harm-than-good/
Even with all the appeals to numerous bits of data (done in a somewhat sloppy manner), this sounds like a lame, even dangerous shill piece on behalf of the Big Pharma narrative.
What do you believe was incorrect with the figures stated and the conclusions Chivers came to?
the only problem is they are lies – try VAERS, try many sources – the issue is there is no good collecting of issues on harm – nor on benefits so they are hugely exaggerated. These are the – lies, damn lies, and statistics, done to promote the agenda
Because the beautifully presented cesspool of data from the single Our World In Data page that this potty article hangs on is completely misleading.
The mortality data for England, for example, precedes Omicron by two months – it will likely be describing mostly older people who first became ill with Delta in the late summer.
The Swiss data, from early January, looks more compelling – until you realise Omicron only became dominant there between Xmas and the New Year, and that yet again the data is unrepresentative of what’s going on right now.
I hopefully needn’t remind you that what we have right now is the sniffles. If you want to Follow The Science and start vaccinating every minimum risk child with an unknown risk medication against a blocked nose and sore throat that they can still pass on, you’re on your own.
I’ll admit that omicron now does appear to be much less severe, however that’s only a single variant, and has only come about in the last month or two. If the next one appears to be more deadly like the previous ones then wouldn’t it make more sense to use statistics for the pandemic as a whole when making decisions, rather than cherry picking the ones that best suit our argument?
Billy, you need to understand how vaccines work. So let me clarify. The mRNA/DNA vaccines code for the spike protein from the original strain and hijack one’s cells, largely in the deltoid muscle at the site of injection, to produce said spike. Antibodies are then made SPECIFICALLY against this spike. There may be cross-reactivity to variant spikes to a greater or lesser extent but it all depends on where the mutations are located. If these are at the site where neutralizing antibodies bind (i.e. the binding site for the ACE receptor, or the site that undergoes large conformational changes to enter the cell), then your antibodies produced against the original spike will not be effective. In the case of Omicron, there are so many mutations in the spike that the antibodies generated by the current vaccines are ineffective. The same is also true of the monoclonal neutralizing antibodies that were produced against the original spike, and that’s why those monoclonal antibodies are no longer being used.
Cherry picking. Right. So for example, singling out some of the more leftfield views of individual HART members and portraying them as representative. Or maybe treating vaccination status as one homogenous lump of age-standardised mortality and not, say, breaking out its constituent age groups for the purposes of an article titled, “Is it worth vaccinating <specific age group>?”
I guess that was too much like hard work.
Furthermore, the mortality rate for the under 60s is so obviously low compared to the rate for the over 60s that it should lead you to question the need for vaccinating anyone aged 0-59 at all. Concentrate on high risk cohorts, particularly in other nations that are lagging us. Stop talking about children.
In summary then: this article is so sketchy and confused it’s basically worthless – the fact it’s from the ‘Science Editor’ makes me suspect he’s either daft or under orders to generate clickbait – so this is my last comment on the matter.
I do admire your tenacity though.
Well, other people have come to completely different conclusions as to what the data is and what it means. Somebody’s wrong.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355581860_COVID_vaccination_and_age-stratified_all-cause_mortality_risk
Titles like this make me want to cancel my subscription.
Indeed – I am cancelling my subscription today. This publication is no longer worthy of its name.
I think Tom Chivers should move to Italy. He’ll be very happy to live in a country where our anti-democratic government has made it practically mandatory for young people over 12 to get vaccinated: without their infamous ‘ Green Pass’ they can’t do sports (which should be encouraged as a way to be healthy), they can’t go to a cinema with their friends, and now they can’t even enter a shop which sells non-essential goods…basically they can’t live.
Not to mention mandatory vaccination for over 50…but that’s another story.
Since Chivers is so fond of numbers I’d like to talk about numbers and I’m going to share a link to a report published (English version) with official data from our ‘Istituto Superiore di Sanità’ (something similar to your National Healthcare Department); so, it is not a Flat Earthers website:
https://www.epicentro.iss.it/en/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-COVID-2019_5_october_2021.pdf
I am not denying that the report highlights the benefits of full vaccination (which now means 3 doses) against developing severe disease, but if you look at the statistics of people who have died of Covid infection it is quite clear that:
1) Mean age of patients dying for SARS-CoV-2 infection was 80 years
2) As of October the 5th 2021, 1.2% positive SARS-CoV-2 patients under the age of 50 died, percentage which decreases to almost 0% under 20 years old
3) 67.7 % of people who died had at least 3 comorbidities (worst being hypertension, ischemic heart disease and diabetes)
Unfortunately this report is not updated with the Omicron variant, as in Italy we seem to be quite slow on publishing data, but it does show something interesting. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that that it is unnecessary to vaccinate people who don’t risk anything from this virus, considering the obvious fact that vaccinated people do get the virus and do spread it! Believe me, I’m doing a swab test every two days to be able to go to work and there are plenty of vaccinated people (even with 3 doses) who receive a positive result!
Besides, these vaccines are still experimental and we do not know the extent of their possible side effects. They should be fully tested before they are given to young people, let alone children. I can tell a sad story about the difficulties encountered to prove that a severe illness was caused by a vaccination: a person close to me, who is now 40 years old, had to fight all her life to get a compensation from a vaccine given to her when she was just a baby. After so many years of tests, trials, humiliations, she finally got the Court to rule that it was that vaccine that gave her a disability for life. I’m not saying that vaccines are always bad, I’m just saying that if something goes wrong (as it is possible in medicine, remember Thalidomide) it is not so easy for Authority to take responsibility, imagine now with all the Propaganda surrounding these vaccines!
Teresa, a person who still believe in Freedom of Choice!
The vaccines have been fully tested, they have been applied multiple billions of times, and the data is in. They’re neither particularly safe, nor particularly effective.
And long term problems, though we can speculate, will be fully revealed in coming years.
I suspect that anybody who suffers serious side-effects from the covid vaccines will find it impossible to prove causation, or to get compensation. The propaganda trivializes or blames most side-effects on the nocebo effect and any longer term, more subtle injuries will be written off as coincidence. A decade ago, I had exactly this problem with a family member, who was given the Pandemrix (swine flu) vaccine, and whose subsequent reaction (eventually fatal) was brushed off by authority as mere coincidence. Perhaps it was, but it was certainly swept under the carpet very, very quickly, with some very odd things said by medical staff, and a suspicious spike in similar cases in our home town. Things are a thousand times worse now, with the covid vaccine hysteria, and Authority will fight tooth and nail to avoid any damaging admissions regarding long-term vaccine safety.
“An unvaccinated American is around 100 times as likely to die as a triple-vaccinated one; an unvaccinated Swiss is about 165 times as likely to die.”. What a ridiculous way to present statistics. You’re contributing to the very kind of misinformation and wilful distortions you seek to rebut. I won’t even waste my time with an explanation. Readers are easily sufficiently intelligent to see what’s wrong with that. It’s shameful.
I’d like an explanation as to why you believe those statistics are incorrect. Let’s not resort to the tactics of the woke by shouting “educate yourself” rather than putting your point across coherently
I sense you’re fighting a losing battle here, but I truly appreciate your doing it. I also appreciate your calm politeness in response to some of these replies: good on ya, mate.
Seconded
Thirded
Fourthed
Fifthed
I personally don’t care about people’s stance on vaccinations, I’ve had mine because I believe it lowers my risk of serious illness but if others don’t want to it doesn’t affect me.
I’m just interested to see whether those that disagree with Chivers are doing so because they have additional facts and data that disproves him, or whether they’re doing so out of ideology.
Quite right.
I’m not saying they’re incorrect per se. You can take almost any data and present it to support a particular view. But these data are useless as a means of determining the true likelihood of someone dying from covid. There are so many risk factors to take into consideration (e.g. age, general health condition, inter alia). To imply that there is a universal truth that every unvaccinated person is 165 times more likely to die from covid than anyone who is vaccinated is ignorant at best, disingenuous at worst. Almost no children have died from covid.
This is very true there are many different factors determining the risk from the virus. However when setting a policy at a national level, the government of the day will have to work on averages rather than individual cases.
Almost no children have died from Covid, but an even smaller percentage have died from complications arising from the vaccine. This is why I believe it should be available, and the decision left to the parents as to which they believe carries the greater risk
Surviving the vaccine isn’t the only measure of its success. We dont know what the long term consequences of the vaccine could be which is why it should be self evident to take a prudent approach and not administer the vaccine to a cohort that presents such a limited risk from the virus itself.
We do not know what the long term consequences of the virus are either. And it is likely to have a much heavier footprint that the vaccine.
Upon what ‘science’ do you make this claim? Please justify it. Journaled peer-reviewed references preferred.
I did say ‘likely’ – and since we would have to wait for twenty years or so before we were sure about the long term consequences of either this cannot be proved either way. So no proof and no references – but the argument is simple enough. The classical vaccines introduce a dose of protein or dead virus – once. mRNA or virus-based vaccines cause your cells to produce the protein – again once. The virus stays around for longer, because it replicates and infects new cells. It infects more cells. It produces more different proteins and interferes more with the in-cell machinery, it kills cells to release new virions. And it is capable of mutating and producing new variants. The vaccine will have other components, lipids, adjuvants, whatever, but unlike the parts of the corona virus these have been selected and validated by regulators (as best they could) to cause minimum possible damage and long term effects. It is not completely impossible that you could get a vaccine that caused more damage than the virus and that got through the initial trials without showing it, but sounds very unlikely indeed. The virus might not give long term damages either (though we do have long COVID already), but it is a good bet that it is likely to be more dangerous than the vaccine.
Prevalence of Clinical and Subclinical Myocarditis in Competitive Athletes With Recent SARS-CoV-2 Infection Results From the Big Ten COVID-19 Cardiac Registry JAMA 2021(with references to 4 other studies along the same lines)
For those that survived a spell in an ICU there is PICS https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ams2.415
Neuropathic sequelae described here :
Neuropathogenesis and Neurologic Manifestations of the Coronaviruses in the Age of Coronavirus Disease 2019A Review JAMA 2020
Pulmonary sequelae described here :
Follow-up study of the pulmonary function and related physiological characteristics of COVID-19 survivors three months after recovery EClinicalMedicine 2020
They don’t “have” to set any policy, let alone work on averages.
It is not a universal truth – certainly not to the extent that the number 165 holds across all age groups. But I believe it is true that across age groups and conditions the unvaccinated are many time more likely to die of COVID than the vaccinated. My guess is you would find the same across all groups you looked at, e.g. with various kinds of vulnaribilities, athletes, … with very few exceptions. Anyway, the numbers in Tom Chivers links, while incomplete, point to that. What do your numbers point to?
Because the people dying are old. What are the comparable ratios for unvaxed and vaxed 20 year old people?
Enlighten me, what are those statistics?
Absolute risk reduction for vaccines in UK – Graham Stull
Thanks for an informative post. I cannot critique your numbers, but nothing in there to suggest to me they are problematic. Anyway, more authoritative sources have also pointed out that the risk/benefit ratio for children is rather finely balanced. Just a couple of comments:
When you are looking at low risks to very large groups, absolute risk reduction is apt to make the problem look less than it is, just like relative risk reduction is apt to make it look worse. Your data have both, but many choose to quote only one.
It is also worth at least considering that the long-term risks of getting COVID are no better known than the risks of getting vaccinated, and that reducing transmission has benefits for third parties also.
Although I am very much in favour of covid vaccines, I have been wondering if we may have reached the point where we should concentrate on the vulnerable, and getting the rest of the world vaccinated.
A counter argument might be that we may not then have the vaccine induced herd immunity to cope with any more virulent new variant from abroad, especially as immunity wears off after a couple of months
That could well be. It is sure not an easy thing to figure out.
I can’t agree that ARR understates the problem. The question of risk put in words is this: If I do A, versus doing B, how much more likely am I to suffer a negative outcome? This is what ARR tells you and it is what the average person understands when they think of risk.
I challenge you to find an intuitive formulation in words that expresses the concept of RRR, that the non-mathsy person can relate to and which could compel their animal spirits to triple mask, deprive their children of education, starve the developing world… The fact is the authorities know that the RRR numbers are essentially meaningless and are misinterpreted by the average journalist who reads them. That is why they keep using them.
Actually they are worse than meaningless. They magnify the error from the (incorrect) implicit assumption that no confounders exist in the data. In other words, by calculating RRR for such a small absolute risk, the fact that the actual deaths are heavily influenced by confounders (what are the health characteristics of the unvaxxed who die/don’t die of/with covid, vis-a-vis the vaxxed who die/don’t die of/with covid?) is magnified exponentially by the RRR number. As the actual risk becomes vanishingly small (ie. omicron) the size of the exponent for the error term goes to infinity.
I should say this is not normally a problem in medical data, because the absolute risk is usually large enough for these effects to be within a range of comparability. There we’re talking about diseases that actually kill people.
As regards your final point: the long-term risks of covid are better known than for the vaccines by a whole year, because that is how much longer the time series goes. Theory also implies these risks will be lower, because we know something about the way spike protein is released in the case of infection – it is less concentrated than for the mRNA vaccines. This is likely why the cases of myocarditis from vacccination are much more severe than those resulting from natural infection. Any soccer fan knows this: In 2020, when infections were happening but vaccination wasn’t, no young men were dropping dead on the pitch. Fast-forward a year and soccer leagues are putting in place protocols to keep the bodies off camera during televised matches.
We also know that the immuno-suppression effect is particular to case of vaccine-induced immunity. Those who have recovered from covid and are not vaccinated have a measurable T- and B-cell response to repeated infection; the vaxxed who face subsequent infection have a stronger S-antibody response but are not responding with the full range of immuno-weaponry. And as the S-antibody response wanes, the vaxxed are left largely weaponless.
This is why the data now clearly shows negative efficacy for those who were double-vaxxed and face omicron. Too few S-antibodies, too badly targeted.
For now, it’s not a catastrophe, because omicron is so damn mild and the boosters are effective in providing short term protection, largely among the elderly.
But what happens next September?
You seem to live on a planet where omicron is harmless, and people are dropping like flies from being vaccinated. I am not convinced that is the same planet I live on, so while your rough estimates sound no less solid than my rough estimates, I cannot trust your data or conclusions. It would take the usual well-evidenced data from an authoritative source to convince me.
Meanwhile, on risk ratios. people (myself included) are notoriously ill equipped to understand probabilities. I think the best way is to give absolute numbers and include the popoulation, as in ‘5000 people in the UK’. We latch on to that better. If we are looking at an individual choice (like drinking a pint a day), yes, I agree that absolute risk reduction is a reasonable second best. ‘Reduces by a factor of ten’ is certainly too strong if the risk is too small to worry about in either case. So far I’ll ocncede your point. If we agree that the problem is big enough to worry about that consideration falls away, and then relative risk reduction does have the advantage that it can apply across subgroups with widely different risks – I believe that COVID vaccination reduces the risk of death by comparable factors across all age groups, even though the absolute risk varies across groups. Also we cannot vary the look of the number by merging groups with different risks. ‘5000 people in Burnley’ sounds a lot worse than ‘a 0.01% increase of deaths in the UK’, even though the numbers are the same. The problem comes in when we at looking at small risks for large groups. Say that vaccination could reduce COVID deaths in the UK from 5000 to one. You can relate to that. If you say ‘a five-thousand-fold decrease in risk’ you are exaggerating. But if you put it, again, as ‘a 0.01% reduction of deaths in the UK’ you are strongly implying that it is too small to worry about, and not worth giving up your weekly hour in the pub. And do you really think tha t5000 deaths are an irrelevance?
“You seem to live on a planet where omicron is harmless, and people are dropping like flies from being vaccinated.”
Oh come on, Rasmus. You and I are both smart enough to understand that the infection fatality rate of omicron, (when you take out the ‘with’ component) is vanishingly low – 73% lower than for the already mostly harmless Delta strain:
Omicron: South Africa says fourth wave peak has passed as it lifts curfew | The BMJ
That means it’s a cold.
Are colds harmless? Not completely. If everyone gets them then a number – in absolute terms a big number – will die, either ‘of’ and ‘with’ the cold.
If we deployed the same number of PCR tests on a particular rhinovirus back in say 2017, we would get the same scary number of ‘cases’ we see now for omicron. Again, alot of those ‘cases’, by design among those who are frail and getting admitted to hospital, would be among very sick people.
My grandmother died of a cold back in 1994.
On the risk reductions thing we are talking apples and oranges. I never said that relative numbers are never the right numbers to use. But in assessing an individual’s risk of death from infection by a virus (this is what risk reduction means) the absolute number is better, for the reasons I have already mentioned.
For looking at whether 5,000 deaths is a big number or not, relative numbers are more relevant. Why? Because we need to compare whether those 5k is a large percentage of the total number of deaths or not. 5k deaths in the world is nothing. 5k deaths in Iceland, well that’s another story.
AFAIAC 5000 deaths are five thousand deaths, whether they happen to live in Iceland or spread around the world. The measures I would find worth taking – or not – to prevent those deaths would be the same in either case (except, possibly, if I knew some of them personally).
Confounders. That’s the explanation. Confounders.
Hi Billy Bob, Mil isn’t saying the ‘statistics are incorrect’. His criticism is that numbers can be used to mislead. In support: The OWID website numbers Chivers uses to base claims that Mil believes contribute to ‘misinformation and willful distortions’ exclude ‘partially-vaccinated people’, therefore the cohort most at risk through having their innate immune system suppressed, and, secondly, speak to relative and not absolute risk of death.
Relative risk of death is exactly what we should be looking at. It tells us whethar vaccination helops or hinders, without confusing it with the question of how many people there are in each group. As for your ‘partially vaccinated people with suppressed innate immune systems’ I do not think the concept is valid, but it sounds like an analysis of the data should be able to show whether there is such a problem. Can you point to one?
I beg to differ. I have no interest whatsoever in my relative risk of dying. My only interest is my absolute risk. Then shouldn’t (referring to your second point) you be arguing for their inclusion?
It depends on what alternatives you are looking at. If getting vaccinated makes you ten times less likely to die of COVID that seems like agood argument in favour of vaccination, whatever the absolute risk. It certainly eliminates the confusion from comparing risks in different populations. It also prevents you from deciding that the risk from omicron is ‘effectively zero’, while still worrying about the much smaller risk from vaccination.
As for ‘partially vaccinated’ people, I have never heard that vaccination made you more vulnerable to infection, but I can clearly see why you would only include fully vaccinated people if you want to check how well vaccination works. But if you think people with one but not two doses of vaccination constitute a separate and uniquely vulnerable group, then a separate statistical analysis ought in principle to be able to confirm that.
It’s wrong on various levels. First, the numbers are based on incorrect records concerning COVID deaths, as co-morbidities or other diseases were and are vastly ignored. Second, the true numbers of infection are in fact unknown, as vaccinated people are tested much less frequently than unvaccinated people. Third, different countries use different ways of recording all aforementioned numbers, so even these incorrect averages are not comparable. Fourth, the data lacks any detail pertaining to age, BMI, diet, smoker status etc. and is thus completely worthless on the individual level that is suggested by the wording.
A ‘small number of deaths’ can never be worth it to vaccinate powerless people, with no personal or legal agency, against an illness that will barely affect them, for the sake of others who do have agency and have used it to become morbidly obese or a smoker.
Children are vaccinated against polio because it kills and disables children. I, along with other teenage girls in the 1970s, was vaccinated against German measles because, when contracted in pregnancy, it can kill and disable babies. There may have been some risks with the vaccine, but they were vastly outweighed by the risks of the illnesses.
Vaccination, particularly of a vaccine which does not prevent infection or transmission but merely alleviates symptoms, is only appropriate for those people for whom the risk to themselves of contracting the disease exceed the potential risk of the vaccine. For a healthy child, that will never be the case for Covid. Children must not be used as a human shield for adults. Vaccination of healthy children should, until the vaccines have been properly tested and licensed, be not only advised against, but forbidden in law.
Very well thought through and articulated argument, thank you.
Perfectly expressed. As an aside, Bob Moran’s cartoon of a geriatric wearing a baby carrier with the words “Pfizer STAB VEST” written across the front to illustrate the slogan “Protect the Vulnerable” will for ever sum up for me the peculiar horror of this aspect of the hysteria.
There is certainly an ethical limit here. As some other Unherd article pointed out, if the hospital has one young motor cyclist whom you could save, and three people dying for lack of organ transl[palnts,. a purely utilitarian calculation would require you to let the motorcyclist die and use his organs to save the others. Which is not only unacceptable but horrible.
Your problem is that you are making some quite questionable assumptions:
You are attempting to apply ethical insight obtained from choices between individuals who have suffered harm to the deliberate act of inflicting harm on healthy children. This is unwarranted.
Meanwhile, the risk of COVID to children is known and quantified: 0%, rounded to several significant figures.
The risk of the experimental gene transfer therapies to children is unquantified, plausibly accommodates a range with a very high upper value, and will not be known for years even on the basis of the safety trials currently in progress. Your claim that the risk of the gene therapy to children is extremely low is not even wrong.
Speculation about the effect of the therapy on transmission to others, and the effect of the virus on others, is therefore irrelevant. Treatment fails the determining risk/benefit test for the healthy child.
Another one like this from Tom Chivers, and I’ll unsubscribe. I can read anti-humane baiting like his anywhere in the herd mentality press.
I love that people sign up to a website that is about putting forward different viewpoints and not following the herd, then throw a hissy fit and threaten to cancel their subscription the minute an article is posted that differs from their worldview
It’s brilliant isn’t it?
Except that in this case the headline for the article explicitly says it is ok to kill healthy children with a medical procedure they don’t need to have, in order to acheive some kind of statistical success further down the line. I can quite understand why so many members here are horrified. If you can’t see that and continue to just calmly see statistics and accuse people of throwing hissy fits, I am wondering if you would be able to take a step back and try to understand where they are coming from.
I once read something along the lines of “Utilitarianism, taken to its logical conclusion, is indistinguishable from evil”. I wonder whether Chivers would be okay with, say, harvesting his organs if that could be shown to result in more years of life gained by the collective recipients than his own cut short.
since the article is about vaccinating children, I’d extend your question to be about Chivers children? Would he take a kidney from his kid to give himself a few more years, or to the extent you say.. would he allow the harvesting of all his children’s organs if the net benefit gain for others was more than the sum of his own child’s life? the “logic” of the premise in the article would say yes, in practice i doubt Chivers is so Malthusian to actual sincerely belief the position he espouses but its easy to be careless with other people and their children lives, not so much when your own are at stake.
A tabloid also brings all kinds of viewpoints
Except that Chivers’ is the prevailing, mainstream narrative pushed by the media, governments, and pharma. An “unheard” opinion would be more like one of, say, Malone or McCullough.
Happens all the time on this site, it’s just another bubble, which is the reason that I shan’t re-subscribe after my presemt sub runs out. Pity I was hopimg that it would be something more.
where will you go? genuine question, im always looking for new news sources. Unherd was excellent at the beginning of the pandemic, Freddie’s articles are still excellent and Mary Harrington is consistently interesting and insightful and Murray too. But in recent months the inclusion of those exiled from the Guardian has definitely dropped the overall quality. Chivers has always been poor, but else would be expected from the former science writer for BuzzFeed. Just dodge his articles.
Former science writer for BuzzFeed? Now that’s illuminating.
I think that would be a shame. Commenters here definitely tend right but there is some pretty good discussion.
In this thread, my impression is Billy Bob and Rasmus are doing a solid job of making a case, even if heavily outnumbered. Some of Elaine Gaedrys’s posts and links have been game changers in these debates (sorry Elaine, that isn’t how your name is spelt but can’t go to look for your posts without losing this.)
Seeing one’s “own” side going over the top can be as educative as listening to arguments from the other side.
I’ve learned quite a bit from some of the links posted, which have helped me form a view on those topics where I didn’t have one, and have, I think, a better understanding of some views with which I disagree.
The fact Unherd prints Guardianista views allows us to argue with them, something you can’t do on the Guardian site.
As George points out, where else on the internet could you have this level of debate?
Killing a small number of children would be worth it to further reduce the effects of a 99.98% survivable virus with a median age of death higher than the median age of death?
Did I understand this correctly?
You did, and it beggars belief doesn’t it?
Hart skilfully dribbles the ball and is surely on target..but wait, here comes Chopper Chivers, the 3rd division fullback (fully backing the narrative), who looks as if he is going to play the ball. Whoa! His clumsy tackle misses the ball completely as he cynically goes in studs up and attacks the man instead-surely a sending off offence!
We’ve seen this sort of tactic before:
1. Ad-Hominem attacks
2. Laughable logic and assumptions about the data that has no qualitative evidence to back it up (ironically, this guy promotes his book- How to Read the Numbers- I think I’ll give that one a miss!
3. Dismissing the uncomfortable truths that are emerging in the data as irrelevant.
Glad I haven’t renewed my subscription!
The author uses various sleights of hand to create the impression that the risk from covid to the young is greater than the risk of vaccination.
I could go on. There really isn’t much in there that isn’t objectionable, not least of which is starting off with “playing the man” and trying to convince us that it’s really justified in this case. As if he’s not like others that stoop down to playing the man. No, he had to do it because the other lot are so awful.
I guess Unherd need to throw this stuff in to prove their “unbiased” credentials.
Agree with your thesis Stewart. Well said. The only thing that I would add is people of power have abused their privileges and for too long, they can no longer be trusted. For instance, anti Fauci rhetoric did not start now, it started long ago, just look at what good people like Marcia Angell said. In short, yes vaccines do save lives but the jury is still out on these vaccines as it may finally be possible to tie abuse of power to science and that indeed may be a good thing
I don’t see any disclosure statement from Chivers, but surely he has to be a chill for big Pharma, and especially Pfizer and possibly AZ. This article is wrong at so many levels, ethically, medically and scientifically. In fact it’s a total disgrace, loaded with falsehoods and misinformation. You have outdone yourself Chivers and you should be ashamed of yourself and certainly you don’t deserve to be called a science journalist.
Here is the very simple deal. How many severe injuries and deaths due to myocarditis and other severe adverse reactions are you going to have to save a single child from death due to COVID. That ratio is probably well over 100:1 if not 500:1. So the risk/benefit ratio is negative.
During the last 2 years, barely any children have died OF COVID, and all of those have had severe co-morbidities including cancer, etc…. i.e. Children are just not at risk in any practical sense. Not only that Chivers is advocating for the administration of a vaccine that produces spike protein from the original virus. The spike protein of the current Omicron variant is so far removed that the current crop of COVID vaccines are completely ineffective against it. Further, even in the best of circumstances against the preceding Delta variant the double dose of vaccine was only good for 6 months with a booster providing only an additional 6 or so weeks of added protection, and the fourth shot, per the data in Israel, being completely useless.
So to risk severe adverse reactions post-vaccination which happen to be inversely correlated to age (the direct opposite of severe COVID sequelae which are directly correlated with age) is simply a crime against humanity. My conclusion: Chivers and many others, including the good Rasmus Fogh, have simply lost their minds, and have become monsters.
This isn’t an issue of being pro or anti-vaxx in general; it is an issue specifically related to the current crop of mRNA and DNA covid vaccines. At some point people really have to come down to earth and look at the reality. The mRNA/DNA vaccines appeared really promising at the beginning but they were poorly tested; reality has shown that they have failed to deliver and are nowhere near as effective as initially claimed. No wonder Moderna’s stock recently dropped by 50% in a single day!
Would it be possible for critics on UnHerd to start by disagreeing with the writer, rather than by making fairly savage personal allegations of deceit, corruption, bribery and so forth? It’s tedious to have to wade through this stuff before getting to the actual argument. I’m sure Tom Chivers would be happy, if asked politely, to outline his relationship with the shadowy world of Pharma finance.
By the way, I’m not the only one who raised this issue. What Chivers was proposing is unethical and criminal. There is no shade of grey here when it comes to children. It’s black and white, and he and his ilk are guilty of crimes against humanity.
You need to zero in a bit closer Tom. The children that died from COVID had severe comorbidities. Those children are the “vulnerable” that the vaccines were designed for.
Healthy children are not vulnerable. It is very unlikely that healthy children are more at risk from COVID than they are from the vaccines. The government had to use motivated reasoning to justify the vaccine roll out to them. How else can we interpret Whitty’s overriding of the JCVI’s decision on the basis of children’s mental health?
I have a 14 year old son. He had covid over the summer – a week of temperature and headaches. Nothing serious.
Why should I get the boy vaccinated now? The only argument seems to be ‘So he can go on holiday this summer’ – which is a rotten reason.
This person, with all due respect, proves on one hand that Unherd remains open wide to opinions. On the other hand he presents a total collapse of critical thinking. Give me an issue and I’ll tell you the right thinking. He’s just beyond reason.
It is insane how Chivers tries to double-down in the narrative as it crumbles around him. In a few weeks the big majority of children will have obtained natural immunity, and with studies like this coming out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25-iJKPA1CA the main narrative just seems ridiculous. The more Chivers holds on to it, the more silly it sounds.
Tom Chivers shows his bias immediately,referring to a ‘cobbled’collection of ‘vaguely’academic’ people giving ‘scientific sounding’press releases.
Look at the signatories.16 people from HART itself and around 70 others each giving their impressive qualifications.These are not vague,they are eminent medics and scientists all.
Has Tom Chivers any qualifications or is he just a ‘science journalist’ not at the sharp end of anything
“But let’s grant HART’s premise. Let’s imagine that some percentage of these excess deaths are not statistical artefacts, and are caused by myocarditis. What would that mean?”
It would mean that vaxing the young would only be acceptable if the risks to them from covid outweighed the risks from vaxing.
Chivers attempts to do a hatchet job on HART simply backfires on is own examples.
The OWID data on US and Switzerland would give a vaccine effectiveness against death of more than 99% which is clearly not the case.
The CDC figures for myocarditis have been shown to be well understated because of the way health insurance claims are processed in the USA https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268209v1
The JCVI said there was marginal benefit in vaccinating 12-17 year olds and that was before Omicron reduced the risk of infection.
The use of the Moderna vaccine has been banned in under 30/40 yo males in many countries because of the myocarditis risk
Then there is the question of what is counted as vaccinated. The Govt stats use 14-21 days from vaccination as being unvaccinated, but dont state what happens in those 14-21 days and the indication appears to be an increased risk of infection in that time. This and the non-covid mortality rates dismissed by Chivers as not coincidental to the vaccine rollout as discussed in this paper by one of the “vaguely academic” members of HART, Norman Fenton Professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University of London https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio/356756711_Latest_statistics_on_England_mortality_data_suggest_systematic_miscategorisation_of_vaccine_status_and_uncertain_effectiveness_of_Covid-19_vaccination
I subscribe to Unherd because it allows a range of views. Chivers has given his somewhat conviction blind one. Perhaps Professor Fenton could be asked ot give a rebuttal?
“FOOTNOTES
There it is! The single undefeatable argument against child vaccine mandates.
It’s not always just about death, imagine how many cases of the sniffles we could have prevented!
Indeed! Imagine the Vicks Vaporub and Olbus Oil shortages as a result of all those unvaccinated children wandering about the halls of schools up and down this land!
Until the vaccines have been through their long term risk trials and we have a picture of whether or not there are likely long term side effects then it is too early to make the call into how far vaccine and booster roll out should be spread. That applies to the young and healthy and especially to children. Any argument that does not take that into account when dealing with risk is seriously understating the benefit of vaccination.
I personally decided to reduce my definite risk of serious harm during the pandemic, rather than imagine harm some years down the line, which is extremely unlikely. I’m now 65
It is always interesting to read the comments after T Chiver’s articles. But there is no point in counterarguing: vaccinations are for the large majority of medics like a religion. That is it.
An interesting and very illustrative anecdote: we had a vaccinations discussion in the practice the other day and a young vet who is extremely data and research driven went home and spent a whole WE looking at all the available data for dog and cat vaccines. The next week he said: the data is completely different to what everybody (even in the university and experts) does and says. I don’t know what to think is happening in our profession. I have completely changed my view.
The same goes for human medicine: vaccines are a religion….
Chivers writes:
“when you look at 12 to 17-year-olds in the US (the only country where there’s a reasonable amount of data), about one in every 100,000 unvaccinated died each week.”
I clicked the hyperlink and the OWID page doesn’t seem to have any data for under 18s in the US. They DO for Switzerland, but it doesn’t show what he says (Switzerland has had 3 deaths in under 20s for the ENTIRE pandemic).
Am I missing something here, or has he made an error that needs to be fixed?
Possibly referring to the 18-49 column, which is .89 per 100,000. Good job he wrote a book on interpreting numbers.
OWID has changed its page overnight because new data splitting it up by booster status has come in. The original graph is here https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-covid-19-deaths-by-vaccination-status-by-vaccine?country=~12-17 – we’ve now changed the link to that
Closer to 0.1 per 100,000 per week with a variance of 0 to 0.2.
Not that I trust that table much when they can’t get the column name correct for the age groups.
Thank you for clarifying. But doesn’t that graph say 0.1 per 100,000, not 1 per 100,000?
I could be misinterpreting it, but that would be closer to 1 in a million..
The comments here are very interesting – most of them concur with my own views. If we are vaccinating children to protect people who are largely very close to the end of their lives anyway, when the children do not need to be vaccinated (other than vulnerable ones), then even one child’s death from the vaccine is indeed too many.
In my opinion this article marks a low point for UnHerd. Tom Chivers says that “a small number of deaths would be worth it” in the context of vaccinating children. Any society that prioritises adults (and very elderly ones at that) over children is a sick one. Healthy children are at no risk of Covid; the vaccines pose a risk, albeit apparently small, but it is clear the risk-reward is against vaccinating children. Professional athletes are being impacted, young adults are being impacted. I’m minded to remind him that these Covid vaccines are still offered for emergency use and remain under trials until the end of 2023; manufacturers still have indemnity from legal prosecution. Well, I suggest Mr Chivers auditions for a part in Treasure Island if all he wants to do parrot the same narrative as that from government.
Oh boy. You gonna put your kids up?? Type of guardian article that makes me question my subscription.
This is a repugnant article and the headline perfectly encapsulates the attitudes of people who can work from home, who are independently wealthy, who aren’t critical thinkers, who virtue signal and and and.
I thought the ONS disclosure at the end was significant. I’m sure a conspiracy theory could be developed from it but taking it at face value, the increase in deaths is statistically significant, so there does seem to be an onus to provide more data.
My guess is they’re more likely to be lockdown deaths – suicide and drug overdoses.
Disgusting article.
Excellent, an article that investigates the activities of the BBC’s mouthpiece “Independent Sage” and their relentless assault on the morale and mental well being of the country? And about time too. Oh hang on, it’s an article by Tom Chivers. As you were…
” weird little pressure groups” “: cobble together a bunch of people with vaguely academic credentials” , “scientific-sounding” “pander to one side or another’s prejudices”
Someone who has to start an article on a public health issue with these terms in the first paragraph is not a journalist, but someone with an axe to grind who is not interested in objectivity. It is a pathetic approach.
And no, it is not worth killing children too ‘help’ others (I am guessing that was referring to someone else’s children).
Unherd is a good forum for debate, but this sort of article drags the platform down.
HART deals in data, not denigration. It is a more trustworthy approach.
For Pfizer and Moderna business plans vaccinating children is not only worth it, it is essential. Who cares about potential long term effects?
And 6 years old can be forced to get at least 150 boosters based on current life expectancy, old farts like me cannot really help the Pfizer bottom line much. Pity.
Unheard editors – I’ve given Chivers’ pieces many chances but they’re never worth reading in my opinion. Why keep commissioning them? You’re better than this.
“UnHerd aims to do two things: to push back against the herd mentality with new and bold thinking, and to provide a platform for otherwise unheard ideas, people and places.” Sorry Unherd, but Tom Chivers is off mission.
Surely the question could be answered relatively easily by looking at the comparative all cause death rates for that age group by vaccination status? Why doesn’t the ONS just release that data?
Even if it could be established that on average the risks of vaccination outweigh the benefits for a particular age group, it does not follow that is the case for every individual with it.
We need a more nuanced approach. It may be the case that the vaccine is appropriate for a young person with a health condition that puts them at higher risk, but not necessarily for a healthy young person who has already had covid.
Evil has a face and a name.
So does stupidity
Didn’t the join committee on vaccination and immunisation (JCVI) actually advise against vaccinating 12-15 year olds? Are they also academically dubious oddballs?
That was also based on an earlier, more virulent strain(s).
How many otherwise healthy 12-17 year olds have died because of covid-19 in the U.K?
This article seems to confirm that Unherd has a Science editor who doesn’t give a s**t about science or the findings and theories of respected scientists in immunology, virology and epidemiology but is instead content to resort to interpretation of spurious statistics from arbitrary sources. If he’d taken the initiative and trouble to investigate the information from Dr. Malone, Dr. McCullough, Dr. Vanden Bossche and prof. Robert Clancy and make a balanced judgement on the situation and consequences with widespread vaccine deployment it would be worth reading, if he is indeed capable of such an initiative. He could also bring into question their assertions and present concrete evidence to disprove these. Since a number of Unherd commenters seem able to dive deeper into the information available, with the probable exception of a certain mr. Fogh, it should not be stretching his capability as science editor. And maybe an article on adverse effects and deaths would not be out of place, based on critique of the findings where certain batches of Pfizer, Moderna, J&J “good stuff” have resulted in a dramatic bump (spike) in the curves for mortalities. Another interesting focus area is the supposed statistical “filter” of deaths within 14 days of vaccination as being categorised as equating to being unvaccinated.
To summarise, I wonder if Unherd or the eminent Mr. Chivers are being financially incentivised by large corporations?
The only strange person around here is clearly Tom Chivers – advocating medical experiments for the vast majority of a population which do not need them. I assume that he is also going to diss other markers that suggest there could be a problem like the ONS data showing 30k+ deaths within 21 days of vaccination and MRSA vaccine death and side effects data, data from the ambulance service showing vast increase in 999 calls for cardiac incidents and data from other countries which show that vaccinated are getting sick and deaths are increasing when vaccinations are rolled out.
I would suggest that Mr Chivers is very guilty of selection bias. My personal opinion is that there are worrying signs regarding these alleged vaccines (which are most certainly not vaccines) and that given the historical difficulties experienced with this technology and the fact that for 99%+ of the population, covid is unpleasant but not a risk to them, it is too much of a gamble to mandate, coerce and force via the back door people to have these jabs. It also concerns me the lack of information given, the lack of testing and how keen they are to roll these out with illogical ‘passports’. There are far too many questions to support mass jabbing of a population on both safety and security grounds
Is Tom Chivers really trying to sell a book entitled “How to Read Numbers”? I think I’ll just stick with someone like Professor Norman Fenton, with his “vaguely academic credentials”, to show me how to read numbers.
Tom dude. you have lost the plot. For healthy people, the vaccine offers little benefit, but a lot of risk. Just look at the MHRA Yellow card figures or VAERS etc, which are already highly under reported. The vaccines don’t work.
I can’t believe this posting – Tom, just take a look at the ONS data for covid deaths without co-morbidity, 17th January this year, Feb20 to Dec 21, so that you can rationalize what you write – compare this data with other years and deaths from influenza.
The worst yet from UnHerd – recent articles have been poor in comparison with the early months, especially in relation to much available on the web.
Dr John Campbell is much more of an education to listen to and many others – UnHerd has got to the ‘mates’ write stage!
Why is it then that the JCVI, when considering this by applying normal paradigms of medical ethics, expressly refused to recommend vaccinating teenagers under 17? Why is it that the advice only changed when Sajid Javed specifically asked it to factor in wider societal benefits? (A request, btw, that this reader finds entirely reasonable)
Whyever that may have been, I can guarantee you it’s not not about money and power.
This argument is going to continue for a long, long time. No different, in essence, to the triple vaccine furore. As per usual, we don’t know what we don’t know. We can apply that argument to any pioneering treatment or medication, and find our knowledge lacking, as per the thalidomide tragedy. As a mother and a nurse, I struggled with my conscience over childhood vaccination.There were far too many “what ifs” going around. I had a very simple choice, did I go with vaccination and risk injury, or death, to my child, or did I not, and risk injury or death to my child. In the end, and I stress this is my personal view, not anyone else’s, nor am I seeking to force my opinion on anyone, but I thought better to risk injury because I am trying to protect my child , than do nothing and be neglectful. To allow others to risk injury by vaccinating their child and me reaping the benefit of mass vaccination without running the risks would have been hypocritical.
I appreciate your response here, Jean. I am also aware that we have been presented with an utterly false choice – to jab or not to jab – which is forcing people into this dilemma with unknown outcomes. But jabbing is of course only one strategy to mitigate against the effects of infectious disease. There is also the option of treatment, once someone is suffering from symptoms, and there are various treatments out there which for some reason, at the very least financial, our public health officials are reluctant to look at. They could be saving lives and focussing on those who are actually ill rather than rolling out an experimental medical intervention onto the whole population regardless of health status. Beyond that there is additionally the option of encouraging citizens to lead healthy lives through spending public money on improving air and water quality, regulating the food industry, rethinking how we work in order to reduce stress, enabling us to find more meaning in life rather than less… In the two years since all this started much could have been done, but in fact all the government has done is wreck people’s lives through lockdowns, prevent them from breathing properly, and spend god knows how much on jabbing till kingdom come – and the kingdom has no end in sight.
It makes little sense to vaccinate a healthy child, as Covid is generally very mild for this group. I’m not sure the science is even clear that they are big “spreaders”.
Further, there may be a real risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis in young men that is higher than the risk of getting myocarditis from Covid (see https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/uk-now-reports-myocarditis-stratified)
Finally, the oft-hyped stories of Long Covid in children are not that clear.
My four children are all grown, but if they were still school-age, I wouldn’t have bothered to vaccinate them. The people who need vaccination are those at risk.
We got oddly lucky with Covid: It’s light on children but very tough on adults, especially older adults.
So let the kids be kids and worry about the grown-ups for once.
I really need to add here that it is tough on SOME adults, but most also cope with it fine.
I checked the Unicef figures.
“The available evidence indicates the direct impact of COVID-19 on child, adolescent and youth mortality to be limited. However, there is concern that the indirect effects of the pandemic on mortality in these age groups stemming from strained health systems, household income loss, and disruptions to care-seeking and preventative interventions like vaccination may be more substantial.”
In other-words in context there is no evidence that policy of any description should be directed at this group and the consequences of policy is more of a concern.
Whenever one looks at deaths ONS NHS its obvious Covid protection need only be directed at the plus 60’s and commorbid it is not an 80/20 problem (95% of all deaths come from 5% of the population).
To focus on 0-9’s is the inverse of the intellectual logic of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Chiver’s is offering minor attention seeking psychopathy as always.
Cut off the lines of supply to hospitals and icu and make hospitals and care centres of excellence in terms of vigilance and prevention ( testing, temperature checks and mask wearing etc) but outside of those crucial areas let every one get on and if one is timid stay in doors. Indeed the NHS simply needs to write to every client who is vulnerable tell them they are and how they should be more vigilant and make adjustments.
Twenty years as an #autismdad, first 10 were in denial. Quick synopsis for parents:
1) My Dad brought the Polio vaccine to Philadelphia as a Doctor in the 60’s. Great man, but guess what, that version was not so great. The difference is, they learned and were honest back then. It was not driven by Wall Street profits. I worked on Wall Street, and that is a HUGE piece of this problem for a LONG TIME. Here is Polio vaxx history – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine
2) EUA – This is not an emergency. It probably was in April 2020 in NYC, but this NOT an emergency.
3) Five Year Studies – Obviously NOBODY knows what this will do in 5 years.
4) As Autism Parents we know the line “Many studies have been done…”. There have been NO STUDIES done on the CUMULATIVE effect of adding all these vaccines to the #VaccineSchedule since the 1986 Vaccine Act was passed here in USA. Kids, and now adults, can’t handle this amount of toxins. It is just too much!!
Everyday of my life, I try to fix this problem for my son and his friends. I make no money doing this. Here I am – https://www.carousel51.com
Mike Sweeney
New York City
Looking into the Andrew Wakefield story, it seems there has been a lot of misinformation on what he wrote. I think the irrational forces arranged against him suggest he touched a nerve in the business.
Your point 4 exactly states what I feel to be true about the babyhood triple vaccine. Far too much for an immature immune system to cope with in one go. I cannot understand what there is to gain by administering three vaccines in one shot, except to save money.
That’s the thing man, people think this is just about some corona vaccine. But the rot runs deep, and there’s a lot of vax stuff out there that is neither well-tested, nor proven effective, nor safe. I’m not saying all vaccines are bad, I’m saying it’s a problem that they’re somewhat mandatory AND firms turn a huge profit from them. They usually make up new vaxes as soon as the patents run dry, and sometimes they put in questionable ingredients. Then pay off some doctors or scientists to say “yes it’s more effective” with some terrible study that should never have made it through peer review. All just so they can get more money. Vaccines, unfortunately, are not about health first and foremost.
Fortunately, you’re not a journalist, but a clickbait activist. I assume that the only reason that Unherd still publishes your unoriginal, pro-establishment/industry claptrap, is that they like to have a variety of voices.
I’m not surprised to hear that you’re all for actively killing children (as long as it’s nurses that do the dirty work for you). You love to identify with machines. You long to be one.
You make no reference to life years lost if a child dies.
‘Strange people’…a cheap aspersion / phrase which marks you as not to be taken seriously
Unherd should get rid of you.
I think i saw many doctors’ names on tbe Hart signatory list. Strange indeed.
(I have had 3 jabs inc booster).
This is a page from the HART website, with the credentials and bios of some of their members.
https://www.hartgroup.org/bios/
Perhaps readers could decide for themselves whether they constitute a “weird little pressure group”, comprised of “a bunch of people with vaguely academic credentials”, who “put out scientific sounding press releases”? I see professors of medicine, including surgery, pathologists, experts in statistics, as well as academics in the fields of education, psychology and philosophy.
Or perhaps they could just listen to Tom Chivers?
Option not discussed: Give it to sick children only. Why do healthy children need it? What the hell is the urgency to vaccinate them with Omicron and deaths falling anyway? Blind dogma.
Also not discussed: Every claim made by vaccine makers and promoters has proved to be wholly or partly wrong, massaged or censored. If they didn’t know if causes myocarditis then, what else “don’t” they know now?
What does informed consent actually mean to Tom Chivers?
It is unfathomable how the author can just help the Pharma pick up the goal posts, move them elsewhere and then criticise those that actually become suspicious or cautious in the face of censorship and attempts to withold data for 75 years.
Can the author point to one country following his “by the WHO rule book” that is having a good outcome?
It’s the classic trolley car dilemma. “Should you pull the points lever to transfer the out-of-control car to a track where it will kill one man or allow it to continue its journey where it runs over a girl’s hockey team”. In simple mathematical terms it’s obviously right to pull the lever but on the moral side it makes you into a murderer. You’ve knowingly killed someone.
I wonder if anything similar has been tested in a court of law?
I’ve never heard of a case. Self defence is permitted either to protect yourself or other people but I’d be surprised if it worked where the victim is an innocent party.
Probably tried for murder but a good defence could see an innocent verdict on grounds of preventing a worse outcome. Not that I’m a lawyer.
Interestingly, I guess doing nothing would the best bet if you want to avoid jail time.
This article makes me sad: Our civilisation should not be so intellectually bankrupt that we need to make the argument, “Less deaths are better than more deaths”.
Society makes that judgement every day. We decide to allow cars to drive at 70mph knowing that at that speed some will crash and die, but we deem it worth the risk. We give women the pill knowing that some will have an adverse reaction, but deem the alternative of withholding contraception and dealing with unwanted pregnancies as worse
No.
“Mild Myocarditis”. What, pray tell, might be the the meaning of “mild” necrosis of heart muscle?
Meanwhile, the authorities have certainly made it difficult to evaluate the risks of the vax. Exhibit 1: This business of working in a two-week interval in this arbitrary definition of “vaccinated”. One thing we would like to know is how people fare during those two weeks after getting a jab. Such people may be officially counted as “unvaccinated,” but much (most?) of the physical risk may be experienced during these two-week windows. So, are the official numbers any good.
Here’s a simple analysis that uses the CDC’s own numbers to suggest that we may be killing eight young people and harm another nine to potentially save one young person: “The COVID Children’s Crusade” at https://dvwilliamson.substack.com/p/slaughterhouse-2022
Mild myocarditis does not necessarily mean that any part of the myocardium will become necrotic. Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle , not dead heart muscle.
Did I miss the bit where the JCVI recommended vaccinating otherwise healthy kids against covid? Can’t think that’s going to change with omicron?
I am starting to expect that new variants with exciting names will be introduced on a regular basis until finally one that does kill kids is found, as the jabbing of kids seems to be very much what most politicians are aiming at, regardless.
Many of Tom Chivers’ criticisms of the HART Group appear to be very similar to those tweeted by John Bye…
https://twitter.com/_johnbye/status/1428336950751158281
There is so much wrong with this article that I don’t even know where to start.
How about from the beginning. What do you think is incorrect?
Am I a masochist? If not, why would I continue to read Chivers’ Pharma-shill articles? He does get my adrenaline going. Much of what he writes has a basis in fact, but he always seems to fall short of a holistic, evidence-based ‘scientific’ perspective, says this practitioner scientist. I have to admit he does stir the pot for the anti-herd group. But I continue to be baffled with how he maintains his position here at UnHerd.
I look at my lovely grandson with his pristine natural immune system. I fear that this type of conversation about this gene therapy injection (it is not a vaccine) detracts from the conversation about natural immunity. The long term legacy of this experimental therapy is as yet unknown. Our kids should be left alone.
Chivers has gone full evil. What is wrong with you? Instead of reading this garbage I suggest people take in Steve Kirsh’s 100 questions. And start demanding they get answers. When you look underneath the hood and see their data is garbage you quickly realize things are a whole lot worse than what the Tom Chivers #buildbackbetter crowd believes.
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/100-questions-they-dont-want-to-answer
Ah, is this actually about preparing or at least testing the ground for how ready we are to accept the rolling of innocent heads in the name of the greater good in general? For example, if we are ready to accept the death of some innocent children in the name of someone’s idea of the common good (remember what Mr H from Germany said about that) then maybe we are ready to accept the exclusion of someone’s idea of the unclean from society, in the name of protecting us all? Tom, are you going down this path?
As soon as the word gender was used instead of the correct word sex I felt this article wasn’t going to be very good. Young males are dying of heart problems after the vaccination the figures are there. The mechanism by which spike protein attaches to endothelium is known. The vaccine was only intended for those vulnerable to severe illness children 3x more likely to have adverse effects from the vaccine than from Covid itself.
There have been in past Unherd comments comparisons between Covid mania and religion. This continues with what I regard as child sacrifice.
To potentially saddle children with a lifetime of so far unknown long term adverse affects to hypothetically protect the old and infirm is similar to sacrificing them to appease the gods.
The fact that the children are not ill and are at no risk worth considering smacks of original sin that has to be purged with an experimental drug.
I read that Mr Chivers was spouting the usual belief, opinion and speculation with an ad hominem or two thrown in so I came to see. I wish I hadn’t read this scientism and cruel, unethical extolling of taking a definite few dead children for a possible future benefit in older adults. In what insane world is this man a science editor. This shameful stuff so lets down Unherd.
This was interesting re: protection from natural immunity compared to vaccines. Latest data https://youtu.be/25-iJKPA1CA
I agree with both sides of this in that these vaccines for the young should never be mandated. I do notice constantly the arguing over stats or lack of and I despair. Stats are a modern disease massively exacerbated by the pandemic into the holy grail of evidence for either side. I’ve seen too much statistical smoke & mirrors in my life to know that stats are no basis for anything. The truth is not in statistics. The truth is in our own perception of experience. The arguing over Covid shows that there are infinite interpretations of the threat of this disease, which in turn shows that it’s not the Black Death generally speaking. Let those that wish to be vaccinated or have their kids vaccinated go ahead. Leave it at that.
I don’t anybody is suggesting mandatory vaccines for children as the risk from the disease is incredibly small, although the risk from the vaccine appears to be smaller still. It should be a choice for the parents about which risk they’d rather take with their children in regards to the virus.
However those that are anti vax appear to imply that vaccinating children is a crime against humanity or similar hyperbolic statements. They’ll happily label anybody in favour of vaccinations as sheeple, while unquestionably following anybody who happens to agree with their pre determined viewpoint
Is your pro-vax stance any different?
For a different take on what the numbers mean and age stratified covid risk see: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355581860_COVID_vaccination_and_age-stratified_all-cause_mortality_risk
With regard to minors, it’s a decision for parents.
End of discussion.
All kids get the HPV vaccine so that women don’t get cervical cancer later in life.
Why have I not heard similar arguments about the HPV vaccine?
The HPV vaccine based on conventional vaccine technology that was introduced in 2009 and has 13 years of safety data to calibrate side effect risk against? I can’t imagine why not.
In 2009 it hadn’t had 13 years of data to back it up though, and I don’t recall this amount of people being opposed to it. But then there was nothing to be gained ideologically from being an “other” in preventing cancers
It had full, regulation-compliant safety testing before initial licensing and five years of use before it was prescribed in children. Not three months of non-regulation compliant testing before authorisation without licensing under “emergency use” provisions, and one year of use. And it was licensed in the days when the FDA forced manufacturers to compIy with regulations and transparency, in contrast to today which sees the FDA fighting the courts on behalf of the experimental gene therapy manufacturers to support the manufacturer’s claims that the safety trial data is kept secret for 50 years.
This really isn’t a good comparison.
Try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mP3DXSvqdc&t=1383s for a balanced discussion about the benefits and risks of vaccines or the article by Dr Prasad on this website. There is a small risk [especially to young men] from the Pfizer vaccine. As a result, some people in this group will try to avoid this injection. People I know believe they should be allowed to make this choice without being ostracised.
JAMA study published in Daily Sceptic on horrible numbers on just one of the risks. More fringe nutters trying to discourage parents from vaccinating their kids! Mass formation and pride must be the explanation why they keep bullying… https://dailysceptic.org/2022/01/26/myocarditis-risk-increases-up-to-133-fold-following-covid-vaccination-study-finds/
Chivers, Unherd’s resident pharma enjoyer/state enthusiast.
Anybody interested in this issue should watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU5oNx4ZzoM&t=2s
“But even if it is, the likelihood is that it saved many more lives than it cost….There are still many thousands of children, and others, who have yet to have their vaccine: if some of them die unnecessarily because of this nonsense, that really would be a tragedy.”
A truly something to behold. A science journalist who manages to write an article that’s about 10% questionable science and 90% smear.
As Chivers well knows, the risk from Covid to children is all but zero, yet his ISIS level fanaticism for them to be jabbed with a so called ‘vaccine’ that neither prevents infection or transmission and has a demonstrable risk to their health is extraordinary.
His assertion that these vaccines have saved all these lives is dubious in the extreme. Can he directly prove this, given the astonishing distortions of Covid hospitalisation and mortality data across the world? Can he publish the death and hospitalisation figures FROM Covid as opposed to anyone who happened to catch Covid before they died of anything from a gunshot wound to cancer? Or happened to contract a mild case of Covid in hospital whilst waiting for a knee operation and became classed as a ‘Covid hospital admission’.
Of course children should be vaccinated against any disease that’s a potential threat to them. But with vaccines that have undergone proper clinical trials and have at lest ten to fifteen years of rigorous safety data. The polio vaccine for example is a sterilising vaccine that eliminates the possibility of catching and spreading polio and therefore eliminates polio. The Covid vaccines do nothing of the sort. According to Public Health Scotland there are twice as many double and triple vaccinated in hospital with Covid than non-vaccinated and the latest vaccine surveillance reports show that after three vaccines, the efficacy drops drop well into the minus 100’s range meaning that their immune systems are 100 times less effective than someone who hasn’t had the Covid vaccines at all.
Meanwhile last year the pharmaceutical industry made $340 billion and counting. Now their latest wheeze is to repurpose an off patent $4 drug called Ivermectin that they’ve spent two years trashing but has saved millions of lives in the developing world through early treatment, and flogging it to western governments for $750 a course and calling it Molnupiravir. Fauci and the rest of the cartel have spent the past 2 years orchestrating smear campaigns of world experts like Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone for championing highly successful early stage treatments of Covid using Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, steroids and numerous other cheap, effective and proven combinations of drugs and these smear campaigns have cost hundreds of scientists and doctors their jobs and reputations. Much the same as Chivers is trying to do here with this creepy little hit piece targeting the highly qualified and deeply concerned people at HART.
All to promote an experimental vaccine that A: most of us don’t need, B: doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, C: has a half-baked manipulated trail of safety and trial data, and D: according to vaccine safety systems has potentially caused more adverse reactions, injuries and deaths than every other vaccine combined in history. The very same safety systems that the vaccine companies were perfectly happy to use for decades but now dismiss as unreliable, conspiracy and ‘fake news’.
Something stinks like a student toilet on a Friday night and if anyone can’t smell it, they may have Covid. Particularly if they’re double or triple vaccinated. And if Chivers can’t smell it, he’s got skin in the game because the only way this nasty little attack piece masquerading as science makes sense is if he’s is a paid shill for the vaccine industry and/or he has major investments.
If this is the case Unherd, then you need to part ways with this nasty little moral vacuum now as you are doing your reputation for balance and integrity no favours by continuing to publish his egregious propaganda.
This is exactly the kind of calculation people, – and governments – should be doing. Let us hope that governments are.
Just for fun, when I saw the headline I thought he was going to argue that it was *not* worth vaccinating children, and that letting some children die of COVID would be worth it in terms of numbers. And I thought ‘Hmmm, could be – but I want to see the numbers!’ As it turned out, the numbers agreed with me after all.
Listen to the numbers, people.
I would disagree because there are too many unknowns. Statistically, healthy children are at zero risk of Covid. 2 years of UK data tell us that, and that’s before Omicron . Therefore there is no statistical benefit to risking an experimental vaccine on them.
Statistically, healthy children are also at zero risk of death from vaccine complications. And the long term damage of catching COVID are quite as unknown as long term effects of vaccination. If this was a purely individual question I’d be happy to leave it to the parents’ judgement. But COVID vaccination does reduce transmission (if less perfectly than other vaccines), so not vaccinating your child, or yourself, is increasing the risk for other people – just like it is for measles. That gives a clear benefit to counterbalance the hypothetical risk of vaccination.
So in that case, you first “do no harm”, by doing nothing, not experimenting on children. The effects of a novel coronavirus are likely more predictable than a novel vaccine.
On the contrary, the disease produces more proteins, invades more cells, does more things, and generally has a much heavier footprint. The consequences of the virus are *harder* to predict. Which is maybe why we have ‘long COVID’ but not ‘long vaccine syndrome’?
I guess the conspiracy theorists haven’t thought of long vaccine syndrome. Yet
That’s not a valid comparison, as not all kids will be infected with the virus. It will bounce off most of their immune systems, as it does with most adults.
The vaccination will also be symptom-free for most people, Slice it any way you like, the effects of the disease are likely to be heavier than the effects of the vaccination.
Considering side effects of the “vaccine” are hardly being looked at by medical professionals, and in fact mostly denied, we have literally no idea if there is “long vaccine syndrome” or not… Is anyone doing any research into this? Would there be any funding for such research, do you think?
Yes, and yes. People are looking at vaccine side effects as we speak, which is how they found the myocarditis, blood clots etc. Long vaccine syndrome is not harder to spot than long COVID. Granted if it only shows up in 15 years or so, it will be pretty impossible to figure out if it is due to COVID or a vaccine, or somethig else, but then there is no reason to think that it will.
People have also been ignoring many of the side effects, including in the Pfizer trials, where trial participants who suffered damaged were simply removed from the trials as though they had never taken part. I appreciate your sunny positive attitude about this new technology, but I truly believe you are missing a lot of vital information, whether accidentally and naively, or wilfully.
Your argument rests on a lot of assumptions, not just about jab effectivity and safety but also that the jab is the only way to prevent covid deaths. Which is to me clearly a very strange assumption to make, given the number of treatments available (mostly censored, for whatever bizarre reasons) and the fact we could be focussing on healthy lifestyles rather than sticking our arms out for some gene therapy every few months.
Vaccinations have been known to be effective for over a century, and have been proved to work specifically with COVID. Claims of alternative, effective treatments have been ‘censored’ mainly because there are no reliable data to back those claims. As soon as you can provide the data that prove to the satisfaction of a professional that zink, vitamin D, ivermectin, or a healthy lifestyle can prevent or cure COVID I am sure they will be considered as alternatives to vaccination.
These are not traditional vaccinations, are they? There is no long-term data, is there? If you have some please do share it with us. Tess Lawrie has plenty of data to show the safety and effectiveness of Ivermectin, I don’t think the benefits of Vitamin D, Vitamin C and zinc are in dispute. It is also clear that whatever effectivity can be claimed even for traditional vaccines, there are always also risks – see the many court cases for vaccine-damaged children in the USA over many years now. I am sure we would all be over the moon if it was clear we had a super duper technology that was entirely risk-free and brought only good health, and there would be no more sceptics, but we quite clearly haven’t and ignoring this is failing to face reality.
No one censors anything unless it is difficult to refute
Hmm, quite a number of doctors are begging to differ about your view of statistics here. How would you feel if after investigation it turns out that these experimental therapies have actually been causing much more harm than you are hoping/presuming? https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/doctors-demand-investigation-of-vaccine-related-child-deaths/
“How would you feel if after investigation it turns out that these experimental therapies have actually been causing much more harm”
‘Oh, well, win some, lose some..’