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January 18, 2024 - 10:05am
What are we to make of research published in The Lancet this week looking at the impact of vaccination on severe Covid-related outcomes?
The paper is based on real data, so cannot be compared to discredited Neil Ferguson-style modelling of imaginary infection rates. The authors use a unique population level dataset and are careful to control for a number of confounding factors that might affect outcome, such as age, ethnicity and underlying health risks. As with any empirical paper, questions can be asked about the methods, underlying assumptions and robustness of the results. But the real story seems to be the policy implication the authors draw from their results, which have since been reported in the British national press.
The paper concludes that had the whole population of England and Scotland been fully vaccinated (defined as receiving the recommended dosage for each age), then severe Covid-related outcomes (hospitalisation or deaths) in the summer of 2022 would have been reduced by about 7,000. The authors then argue that this justifies public health interventions to increase coverage and to “tackle vaccine misinformation in a more direct fashion”.
To see if such a conclusion is justified, let’s look at the group with the highest rate of “undervaccinated” people: children aged 5-15. By June 2022, out of the 8.1 million children in the dataset, just 15% (1.2 million) had received the recommended number of doses (one for those aged 5-11, two for 12-15s). Given the very low mortality risk from Covid for children, virtually all the serious outcomes in this group will have been hospitalisations.
The paper estimates that having two fewer doses than recommended more than doubled the risk of Covid-related hospitalisation. Interestingly, having just one fewer dose than recommended had no significant effect in the main results. That means that for 5 to 11-year-olds (for whom only one dose was recommended), the study finds no significant impact of vaccination on hospitalisation.
If all children aged 5-15 in England and Scotland had been fully vaccinated, the authors estimate, there would have been 210 fewer Covid-19 hospitalisations in this group between June and September 2022. But to achieve that would have meant giving at least one more dose to 6.9 million children. In other words: for every hospitalisation avoided, an extra 33,000 children would have required vaccination. This estimate of the “number needed to vaccinate” (NNV) to avoid a single hospitalisation is consistent with the figures published by the ONS last October.
The Lancet study confirms that the risk of hospitalisation (and hence any potential benefit from being fully vaccinated) is dramatically lower for children who do not face a particular clinical risk. While the report doesn’t estimate the impact of vaccination specifically for those not at risk, the earlier ONS study estimates the NNV to avoid a single hospitalisation is over 10 times higher for adolescents in a clinical risk group, compared to those who are otherwise healthy.
All this suggests that fully vaccinating 1.2 million children may have resulted in about 36 fewer hospitalisations over a four-month period, but that most of this reduction is likely to have been limited to those in a clinical risk group.
On this basis, does vaccinating children pass any kind of cost-benefit test? This depends not only on the monetary cost of vaccination but also the risk of side effects, including hospitalisation.
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SubscribeAs anyone with children knows (or anyone who works with adults who do) the risk is not to the children themselves but rather the fact they are vectors and transmit every single microbe they pick up to more vulnerable adults. No doubt the title alone of this article will get lots of support from the “free thinkers” though.
I advocated a “lock up the vulnerable. and reduce their pensions and health and social care entitlements while you’re at it” policy from the start but this was never part of the debate. The idea that Johnson even contemplated such an approach was ridiculed for at least a few days in the press when revealed as part of the inquiry.
Also we really really really need to look at the fact that such a huge portion of the adult population are chronically unhealthy. Greggs is not breakfast and a high processed wrap/sandwich with a chocolate bar and carbonated caffeine sugar solution is not a meal. And no it’s not “nanny state” when you expect nanny state to step in and look after you when the inevitable health issues arrive.
But the vaccine was never tested for its ability to stop transmission and there is no data (as far as I know) to show that it stopped you ‘killing granny’ so what’s your point exactly?
As I have said before, there is no double-blind study that shows that putting on a parachute makes it safer to jump out of an aeroplane. In fact all the studies ever done on the question show that the parachute made no difference (or possibly increased the frequency of sprained ankles) – because all such studies had been done with the aeroplane standing still on the tarmac. If you want to argue about the effectiveness of COVID vaccines for various purposes, there are a lot of studies out there you could look at. Falling back on ‘was never tested for’ simply shows a disregard for facts.
Which ever way you look at it the jabs did not prevent transmission. It is also true that the authorities told us that the jabs would prevent both transmission and infection. This was the justification for mandates and it was false. Misinformation.All very quiet on that now.
This is fallacious Rasmus and you know it. We have lots of observations of ppl falling with and without parachutes from airplanes and we can see plainly what the survival rates are for both groups. That’s what’s known in the trade as a ‘self-evident finding’.
Similarly, it is self-evident that the vaccines did not stop transmission of the virus. The size and shape of the Omicron wave demonstrates this clearly. No serious virologist or immunologist would argue otherwise.
Good point – there was the conclusive study involving 8 mice that showed it was safe and effective. That after a few days they called it proved and euthanized the mice before they exhibited blood clotting does not discredit this ample study.
The mouse study was real – but almost as amazing as the parachute study you proposed.
@MS GS, SB
Vaccination does not reduce either infection or transmission to zero. They just reduce it. To stay with the parachute analogy: parachutes do not completely prevent people from dying when they step out of aeroplanes either – they reduce the risk, but some people die anyway. If you want to discuss how much effect vaccination has there is a lot of information out there about effect sizes that one could look at. If you choose to stick with ‘vaccination does not [completely] prevent either transmission or infection‘ you are – deliberately or not – trying to mislead.
My God man, will you stop at nothing to prevaricate and obfuscate? The vaccines were sold to us on the promise that if you were young and healthy and not at risk of Covid, you should get vaxxed anyway to save grandma.
This was not the case. Huge waves of Covid infection occurred in autumn 21 and winter 22, in place and among populations with very high vaxx rates.
Now, contact tracing was a colossally stupid hoax, as we all know, so it’s not really possible to pinpoint who infected whom and of course we never have counterfactuals in epidemiological data. So theoretically, it could be the case that the unvaxxed drove all that Oct – Jan 21/22 transmission (despite the fact that they were banned from bars, restaurants and many workplaces), and it could be the case that the Delta and Omicron spikes would have been much worse in the absence of the wonder-vaxxs, but all reasonable evidence suggests this is not the case.
I know you work in the industry, Rasmus, but at some point you’re going to have to let go of this bull-s**t narrative and admit you and your employers were wrong.
No, I do not work in the industry. I just think.
I do know that there is a lot of information out there about how much vaccination reduces the risk of transmission, the risk of getting sick, the risk of death or serious complications, Most recently there was a paper that estimated that low COVID vaccination rates in the UK *now* cost, I think, 7000 lives. Which is only a part of those who died, but is still enough to, you know, notice. One should not necessarily take that kind of paper as gospel, but if you wanted to argue the toss you would base your arguments on this kind of information. Instead you are giving us “They promised it would be perfect, that is the only reason I accepted the horror of vaccination, but it was not perfect, therefore they cheated us and it is all worthless.” The vaccinations did not work as well as we originally hoped, but AFAIK they were a sensible measure and they helped a lot. If you disagree, engage with the data. If you think vaccinations had zero effect, try finding the papers that say so – it is not the general consensus. It is not my fault (or Fauci’s) if you had unrealistic expectations or if you get the heebijeebies when you find out they were not met.
You appear to be suggesting that when it comes to interventionist medicines there’s no need to test them thoroughly for negative outcomes before administering them to the public. Or have I got that wrong?
Of course you should test for negative outcomes – how thoroughly depends a little on how many negative outcomes you would expect from not having a vaccine – but anyway the COVID vaccines were so tested. Mike Downing is not complaining about lack of testing for negative outcomes. He is complaining about a lack of specific tests for stopping transmission. Which I think is kind of silly. If tests show your vaccine is effective against the disease – and they did – then the obvious expectation is that it will both reduce deaths and ill effects, and reduce transmission. As indeed it did, just not nearly as well or for as long as one might have hoped.
Not testing something does not allow you to draw conclusions either way. My point was fully set out in my comment all you’ve done is give a couple of non sequiturs.
Well, gosh, we were in the midst of a WORLD-WIDE EPIDEMIC. Do you remember that?
Were we?
“well gosh, we panicked and did some stuff that contradicted all our planning guidelines and procedured. but we WORLD-WIDE PANICKED. Do you remember that?”
Yes, Paul. To paraphrase Taylor Swift, we remember it all to well.
Being vaccinated wouldn’t stop them being vectors.
”As anyone with children knows (or anyone who works with adults who do) the risk is not to the children themselves but rather the fact they are vectors and transmit every single microbe they pick up to more vulnerable adults.”
Strangely enough – the adult group with the lowest covid hospitalization rate was teachers – who did not suffer from it. The guess I heard why is because the children shed such low amounts of virus as it is not a problem to them that adults in their proximity for long basically get ‘vaccinated’ by this viral shedding in too low volumes to give a real illness.
No – the school lockdowns saved no grannies – it did destroy the futures of the low grade students who never caught up and are sentenced to a life of muchly lowered income – which as we know greatly reduces lifespan. Those children – you carved years of their lifespan – and that is about 25% of UK Children. So not quite the lifesaver you think.
The vaccine was sold to the population, including children, on precisely this premise. “Don’t kill granny”. In addition many people “just wanted their life back”, to quote many. They thought, through some tortuous logic, that the vaccine would deliver this. How wrong they were.
However, the above is wrong on several counts. As someone else says, the vaccine was never tested for prevention of transmission. Furthermore, it quickly became evident from observational studies, as well as anecdotal evidence (POTUS for one) that the vaccine didn’t prevent infection. It was then sold as “preventing severe illness” and that that was what they had always meant. Meanwhile, multiply boosted people continue to die, because they’re “not boosted enough”. Vaccines are supposed to be delivered for the benefit of the recipient, no one else. There might be a side benefit to society, but that’s irrelevant where medical ethics are concerned.
Frankly, the only people who should have been vaccinated were the vulnerable elderly. They were the only ones at risk from Covid, and the vaccine was not, and is still not fully tested. It is still being used under emergency authorisation.
The authorisation was clearly worded as authorising the vaccine to prevent infection.
It doesn’t.
So the authorisation is no longer valid.
Except the vaccine doesn’t stop you from spreading the disease.
It was said loudly and often that vaccination wouldn’t necessarily prevent either infection or transmission but that it would allegedly offset ‘serious illness’ for the vaccinated. So what was the point of vaccinating children under 15 (lowest risk of serious Covid outcomes) if it supposedly had no effect on the adults around them?
The last sentence in the article reads –
“By its own logic, the data in the Lancet paper suggests that rolling out the vaccine to all children over the age of 5 was a policy error. If anything it led to more, not less hospitalisation.”
Does this mean that the vaccine sent more children to hospital than Covid?
YES – it means injecting alien genetic material into people to avoid the sniffles is a crime against humanity. Then you have the lack of informed consent, a crime against humanity, and then school closures, a crime against humanity – and on and on – lockdown – crime against humanity – mandates crime against humanity, vaccine passports, crime against humanity.
Thousands of vax makers and pushers deserve life without parole in Prison for their crimes against humanity. Everything paid to doctors for giving the clot-shot, every penny to the Bio-Pharma complex needs clawing back – huge lawsuits – class action and individual need to bankrupt every person who had a finger in this crime against humanity.
That would be a start – then the MSM and Social Media all broken financially. Military Brass all sent to courts Martial, government Pushers – Traitors Gate and so to Tyburn Dock for the (after all legal process) to the treason punishment, that would be getting it going good…
Then Teaching Unions – that group which loathes children and Britain – then….
School lockdowns were terrible for pupils, that’s quite true, but when the epidemic was at its height, it was almost inevitable – not because the children were contracting Covid, but because the staff were. Children are the reason for schools, but staff are the sine qua non: you can run a school perfectly well with all the children absent (as with INSET days), but not with a large proportion of the staff missing.
The JCVI did not recommend the jabs for children but the politicians overruled them. This however did not count as being anti-science.
The story gets even worse if you look at excess deaths by vaxx status in the post-pandemic period. This is available for England and Wales.
Deaths by vaxx status here https://ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsbyvaccinationstatusengland
Vaxx rates here (read tab for figure 19): https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1168222/Weekly_Influenza_and_COVID19_report_data_summer_w27_report.ods
Use the raw numbers and calculate the ratios of mortality by vaxx status for any month post March 2022. Especially for 18-39 age group, vaxxed are overrepresented among all NHS registered deaths.
Are there confounders? Quite possibly. But the magnitude and scale of these results are so shocking that they really cannot be ignored.
Except they are being ignored.
Except they are being ignored.
Which is unbelievable since much of this attitude comes from the same people who lectured everyone else to “trust the science.” Except the science shows the very opposite of what the alleged experts claimed. And nothing will happen to any of them. Meanwhile, the date of that WHO pandemic treaty is drawing closer.
Trust the science – how I have grown to hate those three words.
It’s become just another of those facile three-word exhortations that any entity in authority patronises us with. The stupid security announcements on trains & platforms really set my teeth on edge (you know the one…)
I have literally come to despise the ‘expert class.’ Scientists, university professors, public health authorities, government experts – they are literally all liars who will say anything to support the narrative. It is both alarming and exhausting at the same time. They seem oblivious to the damage they are causing to society.
It is interesting how Florida Surgeon General Dr Josph Lapado’s damming critique of the vaccine and the need for it to be entirely withdrawn due to evidence of DNA contamination has received no publicity in this country.
The JCVI recommended against a policy of vaccinating under 16s, preferring a policy of vaccinating those with specific medical conditions. This was on the grounds of an extreme low risk from COVID vs the unknown longer terms risks of the vaccine.
This recommendation was overruled by Chris Whitty.
It would suggest that the study supports exactly what was considered prudent by the JCVI.
The shots were rolled out without any long-term testing (median duration from injection to end of trial: 2 months), and without testing in either children or the elderly, or for that matter in pregnant or lactating women.
The platform used was one that had never been used successfully before in any mammal, and for which there was no comparable, properly licensed analogue.
The testing that was done only tested for severe illness. All-cause mortality or prevention of transmission were not part of the testing.
The test data as provided by the manufacturers to the authorities showed that it took over one hundred persons injected to prevent one serious case.
The tests were stopped after the first round and never completed.
Under the circumstances, what could possibly go wrong.
The shots were rolled out without any long-term testing (median duration from injection to end of trial: 2 months), and without testing in either children or the elderly, or for that matter in pregnant or lactating women.
The platform used was one that had never been used successfully before in any mammal, and for which there was no comparable, properly licensed analogue.
The testing that was done only tested for severe illness. All-cause mortality, adverse reactions, or prevention of transmission were not part of the testing.
The test data as provided by the manufacturers to the authorities showed that it took over one hundred persons injected to prevent one serious case.
The tests were stopped after the first round and never completed.
Under the circumstances, what could possibly go wrong.
The justification for vaccinating children was that it would reduce the spread – ie save others, not those being vaccinated. It is very clear that the vaccine did NOTHING to stop the spread. Therefore there was no justification in vaccinating those who were less vulnerable and certainly no justification in discriminating against those who chose not to be vaccinated.
Ironically had the vaccine lived up to the claims made about it stopping the spread then those who took it voluntarily would have been more than sufficient to end the pandemic and there still would have been no justification for coercing anyone into taking it.
The author has done a great job at looking beneath the data in a paper that has drawn an erroneous conclusion. However why aren’t papers like this getting it right in the first place? The problem is most won’t question it and the vaccine misinformation it is founded upon will only deepen further in the public psyche.
My 17 (at the time) year old son was one of the first of his age group to be vaccinated, because at the time he was working part time in a vaccine clinic as an administrator – it meant he earned money and had face to face interaction during lockdowns rather than spending his whole time in his bedroom on social media – his first shot was the same day as the Queen.
When I had my second shot the concerns about vaccine harm were surfacing so I was given a leaflet which said in younger age groups the vaccine would reduce the spread by 95%.
Later when my son was sent home from school yet again because someone in his class had tested positive, I questioned why, given he was vaccinated. The school asked NHS England about this who said that vaccination made no difference and he had to be sent home. The school was just doing what some gnome in front of a computer screen in NHS England told them.
I raised an FOI request questioning both the scientific basis for the policy and the level of parliamentary scrutiny given to the policy. Eventually (initially I was fobbed off with we are too busy to answer questions, but I complained to the Information commissioner as it was an FOI request not a general enquiry) I was told by DHSS that they did not know and did not see it as their job to know!
Buck-passing 101
Why did you simply trust what you are being told? Total failure to protect your kids! If your told this is a genetic therapeutic drug, doesn’t that ring alarm bells. Absolute failure to look after your son.
That’s not a justification for vaccinating anyone. Vaccinations and indeed, any medical intervention should be done solely for the benefit of the recipient. I thought the Nazis taught us that. Oh well….
Unfortunately, it is a bit more complicated. The sanitary override exists for a good reason: There are situations where some of the non-pharmaceutical interventions are appropriate and work, and vaccinations are appropriate and work. In those situations, coercive measures can be appropriate.
The problem with the Covid madness was by all the canons of epidemiological science as it was known in 2019, we knew, unequivocally, based on peer-reviewed science and centuries of experience, that the NPIs could not and would not work.
The government’s coercive measures were illegal not because governments don’t have the power, but because science said they wouldn’t work.
So ultimately, I agree with you. The Covid measures, both NPIs and shots, violated nine out of the ten commandments of the Nuremberg Code.
Let me reword your statements:
After a large group of people were vaccinated, it was clear that the vaccine did X. So, we should not have vaccinated them, because we should have known ahead of time about X.
You should go into day-trading – you would make a fortune.
Is this a joke? There is limited proof on the benefits.
There are no long term studies, and this is not a vaccine! The dictionary definition changed to allow these genetic therapeutics! A vaccine of Polio offers sterilised immunity, most vaccines offer this. The fact you have all been totally fooled and cannot see it, then try and offer some supposed intellectual argument for an alternative perspective shows how lost you are to make the assertion that this has caused so much damage and the genetic impacts clearly will be shown through, Cancers, cardiovascular disease, immune based responses, this is impacting the genetic material of your cells. Your all in deep trouble.
Vaccinating children for a virus that presented almost no threat to them is nothing but wrong. There are very few people for whom the jabs were right. The one thing that has remained consistent in this sea of lies, govt misinformation, and fear porn is which groups are most at risk. That’s never changed.
It’s always been the elderly, especially old people who are already in poor health, the obese, and those with balky immunization systems. Kids were nowhere in that equation, yet they have been grievously harmed by the adults who, once more, failed them.
Thank you for this article – clear and well written. Thank you.
Of course it was, and they knew it. It was no “error”.
Was injecting young children with an experimental mRNA gene therapy given emergency use approval only because of manipulated data showing its efficacy and after an orchestrated media campaign against any other re-purposed drug that did show some effectiveness against the virus – a virus moreover that did not pose a threat to the vast majority of children. What do you think?
Truly a desperate low was hit during this pandemic as successive governments around the world – but particularly in the West – fell to significant pressure applied by so-called big pharma and their bought out media mouthpieces.
It’s not gene therapy. It’s the virus’s genes that are modified, not the recipient’s.
Gene therapy is proving highly effective. We don’t want it wrongly mired in the vaccine controversy.
It is gene therapy – the way the shot is supposed to work is that a blueprint for producing the spike protein is inserted into the recipient’s cells, and the recipient’s cells then produce the spike protein – in other words, gene therapy. The flood of spike proteins is supposed to trigger the recipient’s immune system.
Whether this is actually happening is disputed.
This mechanism is supposed to be temporary, and we are assured the spike protein blueprint will not be integrated permanently into the recipient’s genome. The supposed impossibility of such a reverse integration into the genome is also disputed.
Anyway, it’s not a vaccine by the old definition: With a vaccine, you inject a (hopefully) attenuated or inactivated version of the pathogen in order to trigger the recipient’s immune system.
Most comments here are from anti-vax waccka snacka idiots.
This is why it is so important to publish papers on COVID and hide the data from the public.
‘The data that were used in this study are highly sensitive and are not available publicly.’ The Lancet – January 15, 2024
The Lancet paper compares ‘fully’ vaccinated people with ‘under’ vaccinated people.
That is a total joke.
No, compare vaccinated people with unvaccinated people.
‘The paper is based on real data, so cannot be compared to discredited Neil Ferguson-style modelling of imaginary infection rates.’
The Lancet study says ;- ‘We estimated the reduction in severe COVID-19 outcomes by the end of follow-up that would have been associated with a counterfactual scenario in which everyone was fully vaccinated on June 1, 2022,’
What is it about ‘counterfactual scenarios’ that is based on ‘real data’ and not models of imaginary infection rates?
‘Counter-factual’ sounds very much like a fancier way of saying ‘alternative facts’.
The Lancet study gives away the game for people with sharp eyes, with their admission that unvaccinated is best :-
‘Our estimates for the 16–74 years and 75 years and older age groups show that being unvaccinated (strictly maximum dose deficit) was associated with similar or lower hazard ratio for severe COVID-19 outcomes compared with being vaccinated but having a vaccine deficit of at least one dose’
Astonishingly, the authors then turn medical science on its head by suggesting this is due to a novel effect which can be called ‘healthy unvaccinee effect’
When every study of vaccines ever knows that vaccinated people tend to be healthier in general than unvaccinated people for all vaccines, known as the ‘healthy vaccinee effect’
The Covid Inquiry has Vaccines and Therapeutics as Module 4 – still to come. Let’s hope this all dug into further there and those who gave advice/recommendations have to further explain.
Of course post facto hindsight wasn’t available at the time and decisions can only really be judged in their context of that time. Nonetheless still question to answer.
Frustratingly I think the Inquiry may end up in form of purdah for a while due to potential Gen Election.
Yes, Module 4 has been postponed…can you here the sound of that empty beer can rolling in the road?
Of course it was a mistake. Vaccinating anyone against a disease that is no real threat to them is all risk, no reward.
“no real threat to them” – what a moronic statement. 6.6M died.
I signed the Great Barrington Declaration, and believe that focused protection is better than lockdowns. But vaccines are a good overall solution, and this vaccine family has prevented deaths.
Retrospective wisdom is usually just gussied up “I told you so” comments.
Huh? Arthur G is (I think) saying is that while the vaccine reduced the severity of symptoms, young and healthy people were not terribly at risk from severe COVID symptoms. So for people for whom there was little threat from COVID (like children), there was little to be gained by getting the shot. The vaccine has probably reduced deaths in the population that was most at risk, but that hardly justifies the public health campaign (and in some cases legal mandates) trying to get everyone jabbed.
I don’t think there’s any way to look at the vaccine’s use and not conclude it is yet another example (like the lockdowns) of the way our most fundamental principles of self-governance, ordered liberty, free civil society, etc., were abandoned or degraded in favor of the kind of ideological tribalism and group-think that has destroyed so much of our political process. The global elite – the self-assured idiots who run our major institutions – couldn’t admit to themselves the possibility that they might be wrong… because any admission of error would give “the other side” ammunition.
Decades from now Trump, COVID, BLM and identity politics will be seen as a major turning point in the history of the West.
Lord almighty Thompson – you’re such an ignorant moron – a mouthy ignoramous.
Please keep your garbage thought processes to yourself old chap and let us all try to live in the real world!
Oh….. we are finally allowed to discuss this, are we?
If it required 33,000 injections to prevent one hospitalisation then at a conservative £30 cost for each dose the hospitalisation that was prevented cost roughly a £1million to achieve. A recent American study suggested the average length of Covid related stay in hospital for children was 2 days, making the preventative cost of the stay £500,000 per day.
Rolling up the numbers to include the older age group takes a bit more guess work but it looks like to have fully vaccinated all those eligible would have required top side of 50 million doses at a cost of £1.5billion. Saving 7,000 hospitalisations gives a cost of over £200,000 each. Given the period in the study cover the much less virulent Omicron, and the undervaccinated were mainly in younger age groups it seems unlikely that the average length of stay was more than 4 or 5 days, making the preventative cost around £40-50,000 per day.
I would suggest there are far cheaper ways of freeing up hospital resources.
I was never in favour of vaccinating children and the fact that only 15% of the cohort were vaccinated suggests parents weren’t either. My opposition was based, not only on the low risk posed by the disease to children, but also the belief that children shouldn’t be given forced medication they didn’t need in order to protect adults. (Remember, at the time it was thought the vaccine would limit the spread.) There might be an argument in households where Granny lived alongside the child but that decision is for parents to make.
Nevertheless, the author of this piece has made a flawed analysis by omitting consideration of the (indeed, any) vaccine’s dual purpose of protecting the population at large as well as the individual recipient.
It seems to me that the problem is not “the science”. Science is a method for accumulating knowledge. It assumes that no question is ever fully answered but that we come to know more through the gradual accumulation of data, public argument about what those data mean, the introduction of new data to further address the questions raised by that argument, and further argument about the best way to account for the data (i.e., theory). “Trust the science” makes no sense, as it assumes that there is such a thing as “the science” rather than recognizing that all knowledge is incomplete, all conclusions are provisional pending more data, and the methods of science are just one way of accumulating knowledge. Where the trust comes in is with the decision makers (i.e., the government). Since all knowledge is provisional decisions made on the basis of today’s knowledge often turn out to be less than optimal or frankly wrong at a later point. The earlier the decision is made the less information it will be based on, so the more likely it is to be suboptimal or frankly incorrect. During the COVID panic we empowered our governments to make binding, intrusive, potentially disastrous decisions at a point in time when very little was yet known and we were almost certainly going to find out that what we thought was true at the time was actually incorrect. But we all wanted our governments to ‘do something’ long before we could possibly know what we should do. We allowed them to use the notion of ‘the science’ because we no longer trust scripture or prayer or the authority of clerics, but we were doing the same thing that we did back when those were considered the best bases for decisions. We were scared to we turned to our ‘gods’, we asked our priests to tell us what they wanted, and we allowed our tribal leaders to impose their divine will on us. That’s what people have always done when they were scared. Human nature does not change. We just change the names we use for those who occupy different roles.
Yes, science is a method not a dogma and the ‘experts’ are the new clergy.
Vaccinating children was far more than a mistake. A society that conducts medical experiments on children to protect adults deserves much stronger condemnation.
I hope human society in the future will have extracted itself from the barbarism that is endemic today. If society is able to reset it is moral compass then future historians fill find the appropriate language to describe our actions, disgusting, depraved, perverted or degenerate all seem more appropriate than “mistake”.
Burning a around of toast or selecting the wrong paint colour during home remodeling are mistakes.
Seriously? Duh.
The education, health, mental health and future life prospects of British children were sacrificed in order to save the lives of the old, the fat and the already sick.
Surely the first time in history that a society had thrown its babies on the fire, in order to save the old and the feeble.
Future generations will look back with derision on the lock down and child vaccinating enablers.
Never, ever again.
Great take. Next time, we will just sit on our hands and wait for, say, 1 year’s worth of natural experiment.
People like you don’t understand that doing something to save lives is better than listening to anti-vax people.
Every discussion of COVID policy is retrospective re-consideration.
No one seems to remember that, before we knew stuff about COVID, we didn’t know anything. COVID seemed to be a pretty serious URI. Thousands died. The deaths were more likely in fat old people.
But we didn’t know that until a year had passed.
When the vaccine arrived, it was unclear what the side-effects would be. There certainly were some, but not many.
EVERY conclusion in the discussion here is retrospective. We did not know before the vaccinations began what the impact would be.
Dear God Thompson, would you just shut up.
Please – for the sake of sanity.
If you didnt realise this from the start, then you all don’t have the ability to critical think or possess critical reasoning abilities! If you gave this to your children you failed as a parent. If you believe the mainstream media and corporate WEF globalists, you have given up on life. Medical complex is so corrupt, you are all part of the problem. We must accept we need to change and stop being so selfish. Anyone at this stage that hasn’t done the research, and arrived at the conclusion this has done irreparable damage, should not be able to have any impact on anyone’s life. This reporter is completely half-a$$ed and this is so clear you would have to be hidden in a hole 600ft in the ground for the last 3 years not to see what has happened /happening. Humanity has fallen you should all just give up amd accept one world governance and slavery.
Where does this data account for vaccination preventing spread between people?
And this data from the ONS is meaningless, as it can’t tell you how many would have died or would have caused the death or hospitalisation if they were not vaccinated.
People also forget that viruses inbed themselves into your DNA and vaccination minimises this – they are so worried about the vaccine which doesn’t do this, that they forget that high viral loads can entrench the virus to a much greater extent and with unknown future consequences.
“Where does this data account for vaccination preventing spread between people?”
Vaccination doesn’t do this, and isn’t designed to. Covid vaccines don’t directly attack Covid viruses at all. What they do is prepare your immune system to spring into action on your behalf, to minimize the risk of harm that contracting a Covid virus presents to you. This process has no power to affect virus transmission one way or the other. Whenever you’re habouring a Covid virus, you can pass it along to someone else whether you’ve been vaccinated or not.