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July 19, 2021 - 5:37pm
Today is freedom day, and that means many people are now free to catch Covid-19 — a disease which has killed millions and made many others seriously ill for multiple months. Unlike the previous waves, this will primarily fall on the younger, un-vaccinated population which might not result in as many deaths, but should still be taken seriously.
Nobody wants to go through another lockdown. But there are certain actions our government could take to help ease the transition between tight restrictions and total freedom — actions which could prevent more unpopular u-turns, and cushion the impact of another surge.
Stock up on vaccines
Primarily, deaths from Covid are being prevented because of vaccination, but the government currently has not ordered any more vaccines for next year. Considering the unpredictability of the virus, the government should do some serious forecasting and make sure we have a stock of mRNA vaccines prepared.
Jab children
The government has wobbled on the issue of whether or not to vaccinate children. Following on from the approval of regulator MHRA in allowing for Pfizer’s use in 12-to-15 year olds, they should commit to rolling out the vaccine for under-18s in order to better achieve herd immunity.
Provide proper guidance on disease transmission
Catching this disease may be completely fine for some, but it is unfair and a dereliction of duty to allow your citizens to catch such a disease when the infection is so variable. The Government has made progress on communicating how someone can catch the disease, but it hasn’t been enough. Covid is spread through breathing it in, and hand sanitiser makes next to no difference in preventing the spread. The Government, NHS, PHE and the Health and Safety executive should drop this security theatre, and grow a spine. Tell people how this disease is spread and they can make their own decisions.
Embrace the festival spirit — outside
The last few months have been an excellent example of how the Government can do things which it thinks it can’t. The billions spent on furlough to prevent deaths from this miserable disease are perhaps the best example. So for the most “dangerous” activities, such as clubbing, which will likely be attended by those who haven’t been vaccinated, should be held outside. Everyone loves a music festival, so let’s do them outdoors until we have herd immunity through vaccination.
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Subscribe‘Jab’ children? Introduce vaccine passports? – how about; how could the government avoid another lockdown – sack SAGE! Job done.
You have to have some lines in the sand that you wont cross – pandemic or not. I would say not upending the usual order of things so we have children used to protect adults and not putting in place the infrastructure of a bio security state have to be two things we are unmovable on.
Articles like this remind me why we will never get our freedoms back.
Neil Oliver has a rather powerful piece, where he portrays this as older people sheltering behind a wall of children.
Just a couple of days ago I read that when the Titanic was about to sink they shouted “old and infirm first!”.
Unless the virus starts making children ill in large numbers, then trying to vaccinate kids with a relatively new vaccines will be a non-starter with parents, and raises a few ethical questions. It’s one thing to wave through a vaccine under emergency measures for adults, to combat a virus that is killing adults in large numbers and for adults to make the choice to be vaccinated. Very different proposition to start immunising kids with that same vaccine, against a disease that doesn’t pose much of a threat to them.
Subjecting any patient to a medical procedure where the benefit to the patient is less than the potential risk is unethical. In some exceptional cases such as live donor transplants counselling is given to the donor to ensure they know the risks involved. Children cannot surely have the capacity to give consent to being vaccinated to benefit total strangers. It’s a can of worms.
This is without doubt one of the most poorly-considered pieces that I ever seen on UnHerd and certainly not worthy of a place on this web-site.
Quite agree. now I regret even reading this tripe.
FIRST Is the Government should give honest information!!!! Instead they have an agenda and so make all things justify the agenda.
1) Show excess deaths in similar populations who locked down and who did not. California/Florida. North Dakota/South Dakota. Show Lockdown/non-Lockdown quantified, then show costs per life year. Costs per life year are actuarial numbers used to justify every manner of risk/death. How do these compare with those normal cost/risk which are tolerated? Only use excess deaths in non-lockdown minus lockdown, as these show lives lost by failing to lockdown. How much did each life/year cost?
2) Show how Excess Deaths are VERY weird last year. Almost all kinds of deaths rose, not just Covid. Many more deaths in some USA states by overdosing than covid – All kinds of disease deaths rose, even auto accidents. The excess Death statistics are inexplicable, and need a proper study.
3) Mask studies Needed! Then some psychiatric study on the costs of making the citizens think of strangers as dirty, and proximity to others as dangerous. Masking was pure Psy-Ops, and costs of messing with the people’s heads needs analyzing.
4) Ivermectin? The most favorite doctor on the Internet who is pro distancing and masks says Ivermectin is the answer, and will show a huge amount of statistics – watch his youtubes (John Campbell), Why was every thing but vaccines forbidden? Even taking of these things got people banned from Twitter and youtube! Do studies on it. The Medical Industrial Complex has utterly corrupted the government –
5) COSTS- the lockdown and paying not to work, and every thing else may destroy the economy of the West and make China supreme – studies on this needed, but none are done by Government!
6) Studies on deaths directly due to lockdown – untreated medical issues killing, deaths of self destruction through despair, and a great many others.
7) Education disruption. How much have the young been harmed scholastically? How do they compare with their traditional age groups? How many have been made under-employable for life because of lockdown? How much anti-social behavior has resulted in them, how much self destructive issues?
AND ON AND ON AND ON…….
Lockdown promoters like this one need to show both sides, a reckoning is Needed – a time of punishing those who usurped freedoms and did harm as a result, which will turn out to almost always be the case, I think.
The writer is proposing what he sees as reasonable measures to reduce the number of COVID cases. You are proposing to ignore the number of cases and just open up regardless. Would it be fair to call it the Bolsanaro approach?
When can we get the article on “six ways to pee standing up”?
I might actually read that one.
Some of this stuff is sensible, like ending the hygiene theatre and telling people to focus on ventilation, but I draw the line at vaccine passports. It’s flat out wrong to coerce people to have a medical procedure – and yes, requiring proof of that procedure to go about a normal life is very coercive.
Then there’s the fact that requiring vaccine passports means creating a massive bureaucracy to enforce it – from the civil servants managing the data base to the bouncers checking documents. And all these people will now have a vested interest in keeping and expanding the use of vaccine passports forever. Think how we’re still stuck with expensive, annoying security theatre twenty years after 9/11.
Then think about what vaccine passports might turn into. If we already have infrastructure to demand documentation every time someone enters a theatre or a shop, then how else will we use that system? Put everyone’s citizenship status on the app so we can make the hostile environment even more hostile? Track people everywhere they go and shame them for too many unhealthy activities? Will the next obesity strategy involve the government bullying anyone who sets foot in a McDonalds – information that it will have? And then there’s the dystopian Chinese scenario, where undesirable people, as defined by the government, lose the ability to do things like book a train ticket.
No. Oppose vaccine passports now. To any readers who agree with me, please consider donating to Liberty or Big Brother Watch campaigns against this menace.
One more such an article that has no idea about the medical reality of covid and I will stop my subscription to unheard:
The mechanism of spread of covid is not fully understood
There is no bl**dy reason to vaccinate people below 60
We have to live with covid: we have to treat people when they are ill, not wait till they are in hospital
for God’s sake: WAKE UP!!!!!!!
Proper clubbing can’t be done outdoors. Everyone knows the situation. There can be no such thing as ‘safe’ clubbing with the virus spreading and vaccination faltering.
Is it a pandemic when less that 99.9% of the UK population have died with Covid complications, the majority of whom were already terminally ill?
The wolrdwide statistic of 4 million gives a similar low death rate when the world population is over 850 million.
Yikes.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.
no,no,no,no,no and no.
Ha ha ha ha ha and ha.
If that were true one could go along with it. Instead ,how many times have we been told that freedom is just round the corner, we need just another push? It is a bit like the independence for Scotland, always JUST out of reach.