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February 18, 2021 - 7:45am
A newly published study by King’s College London investigates the link between lockdown scepticism and vaccine hesitancy, suggesting that people who trust prominent lockdown sceptics are less likely to get the vaccine.
Listing a full gamut of influential Covid voices — ranging from Sir Patrick Vallance to David Icke — on who respondents trust, the survey asks a series of vaccine-related questions, such as whether respondents’ vaccine scepticism would put them off a Covid vaccine:
Half (52%) of those who trust David Icke say that opposition to vaccines in general is likely to persuade them not to get a Covid vaccine, as do significant minorities of people who trust other lockdown sceptics like Denise Welch (40%), Laurence Fox (33%) and Nigel Farage (31%).
Similarly, only 40% of respondents who trust David Icke say there are certain or likely to get a Covid vaccine:
Ostensibly, these charts paint a clear and predictable story: David Icke’s anti-vaxx views are well-known and Laurence Fox has trod close before so it’s little wonder either one sit towards the bottom of the table.
And yet you could equally look at this data as proof of the UK’s unusual vaccine enthusiasm. Of all the people in the UK, you would expect followers of David Icke to be about as vaccine hesitant as they come. After all, this is a man who has made a career out of claiming the world is run by lizards and paedophiles — why wouldn’t his followers take the comparatively smaller leap with him on vaccines? And yet, if 60% of them were not ‘certain or very likely’ to take a vaccine, that looks like they are roughly evenly divided across a four- or five- point scale (the full data has not yet been released).
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SubscribeMost lockdown sceptics I know or engage with are people who are logical, can do basic sums and whose concern about the devastating ravages of lockdowns imply high morality. I think it is a reach trying to link this automatically to anti-vaccination.
However if so many logical (using a neutral word) people are anti-lockdown, it does make sense that they would be curious to know more about the various Covid vaccines – especially a host of different vaccines whose development has been rushed through various countries using different technologies.
I would be careful about the ‘high morality’ argument. It might be that some of them have chosen to emphasize the ravages of lockdown – and de-emphasize the ravages of the virus – because they find lockdown intolerable for other reasons (ideological, personal, commercial …). ‘Policy-driven evidence’, you might call it. How would you distinguish the two?
I live in a country where there is no fat in the fiscus. It is very evident that pro-hard lockdown people fall into two camps – earning a salary or wealthy enough to weather the storm. There is no need to employ nous or imagination to the economics of lockdown – they are ignoring millions being tipped into poverty and witnessing people losing their livelihoods and futures on a massive scale. I therefore feel comfortable by generalizing that the opposite is true of people who are anti hard lockdown, especially so if they have food on the table and some money in the bank.
A taxi driver told me he was having to re-mortgage his house.
To this day he still talks about the time when he had you in his cab.
I am both sceptical about the long term benefit of lockdown (but recognise the limited capacity of our hospitals) and cannot wait for my turn for the jab. A foot in both camps, or more likely an argument against the pervasive laziness of “either A or B” characterisations!
Which jab, and why?
It actually comes down to whether or not you can assess risk and then balance it against benefit. Most of the people listed either can’t themselves or have refrained from publicly explaining the risk balance judgements we all really need to be making instead of blindly following / ignoring a complex and frankly quite ridiculous set of rules.
There are risks and benefits to locking down and not locking down and there are risks and benefits to vaccination. I am sure most ordinary people could work it out for themselves if there was open discussion that was honest about the uncertainties rather than the highly polarised views which use science and statistics like a drunk uses a lamppost (more for support than illumination) we get from those listed.
Being sceptical of the lockdown policy, being wary of the Covid vaccines, and being against vaccines generally are three different things.
There are lockdown sceptics who can’t wait to get the Covid jabs and people who don’t want it but are in favour of vaccines generally, and so on.
Lazy conflation.
When the whole thing is predicated on the lie of the PCR test, which has been deliberately used to create the false “pandemic”, why on earth would we believe a single thing Hancock, Witty, Valance, and Ferguson say? Again when you look into their individual financial ties to big pharma and the Gates foundation, alarm bells should be ringing immediately. They have an agenda to push, and the safety of people is very low on that agenda. I’ll stick with the scientists who are being censored, silenced, de-platformed, and threatened, thank you, because at least they have no vested interests in pushing a vaccine into your veins. I Can’t wait for the Nuremberg Charter trials to begin. Bring it on.
No way I am having it given the dangers of ADE. Previous versions of Covid vaccines have hit a major problem with ADE during animal test trials. The new vaccines have bypassed this part of the process. Many many medical papers refer to this as a real danger with the vaccine.
Many many links at the end of this article,
https://sciencewithdrdoug.com/2020/08/01/is-a-coronavirus-vaccine-a-ticking-time-bomb/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22536382/
Immunization with SARS coronavirus vaccines leads to pulmonary immunopathology on challenge with the SARS virus
“Conclusions: These SARS-CoV vaccines all induced antibody and protection against infection with SARS-CoV. However, challenge of mice given any of the vaccines led to occurrence of Th2-type immunopathology suggesting hypersensitivity to SARS-CoV components was induced. Caution in proceeding to application of a SARS-CoV vaccine in humans is indicated.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31607599/
Influenza vaccination and respiratory virus interference among Department of Defense personnel during the 2017-2018 influenza season
Conclusions: Receipt of influenza vaccination was not associated with virus interference among our population. Examining virus interference by specific respiratory viruses showed mixed results. Vaccine derived virus interference was significantly associated with coronavirus and human metapneumovirus; however, significant protection with vaccination was associated not only with most influenza viruses, but also parainfluenza, RSV, and non-influenza virus coinfections.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33113270/
Informed consent disclosure to vaccine trial subjects of risk of COVID-19 vaccines worsening clinical disease
Conclusions drawn from the study and clinical implications: The specific and significant COVID-19 risk of ADE should have been and should be prominently and independently disclosed to research subjects currently in vaccine trials, as well as those being recruited for the trials and future patients after vaccine approval, in order to meet the medical ethics standard of patient comprehension for informed consent.
Add to this the fact that clinical trials will not even finish for a couple of years, this is clearly a highly experimental vaccine. Thanks to Dr. Mengele and co, medical experiments without consent is illegal.
Full disclosure of the dangers of this vaccine has not been made. I do NOT consent to be part of a worldwide medical experiment.
NB. I am not an anti-vaxxer. Just anti-bad and experimental ones. Indeed, I had the PPV jab just a few months back – but that’s just a soup of Pneumonia bacteria and a few neutral adjutants. So fine.
So, if I believe that the virus escaped from a laboratory, but that the rest of what we are told is true, am I a gullible conspiracy theorist, or a rational sceptic?
It’s a possibility that even the WHO haven’t said is impossible. So to be sceptical and maintain that it’s possible is reasonable. But to believe it is true is to wander into conspiracy theorist territory. More important is to note that China withheld information from and obstructed the WHO investigation. Then you are dealing with facts, damning facts.
Based on China’s behaviour I assess the likelihood as being established on the balance of probabilities, but is not yet beyond reasonable doubt.
A little too strong, your conclusion. China is pushing the ‘frozen food from the US’ hypothesis. Which suggests to me that they might try to protect their image by convincing the world that COVID did not arise in China at all. They might well choose to twist the truth even if they had nothing particularly terrible to hide.
I agree that this might be the case. The most compelling evidence in my judgement is in respect of the wet meat markets. China closed these immediately after the outbreak as it was believeved that the virus jumped species there. Later, they reopened them. Had they been the source, I believe that China would have kept them closed; however, if they subsequently found the actual source, reopeneing them would make both financial and medical sense.
“Even the WHO”?
At this point it’s a fringe conspiracy theory to believe that the WHO isn’t just the Ministry of MediTruth for the Mandarin Empire.
Man, that David Icke must sure be popular in France.
If the public trust Starmer more than anyone else, the survey must be rigged and they just went round Islington asking people with colourful hair and beards.
I can’t believe that so many people trust anyone after all the bollox, lies and applied behavioural psychology.
There’s not one person on that list I trust in relation to the pandemic (some more trustworthythan others on other matters). So maybe the list is the problem? Heneghan? Gupta? Even Van Tam up to a point…
On the one hand, you have the Church of Vaccination where belief in the all-mighty power of vaccines to save the world from disease is their Dogma. Anyone expressing any doubt or hesitancy is committing a mortal sin, and full-blown vaccine denial is anathema, punishable by excommunication from social media and academia.
On the other hand, you have people who are sort-of Vaccine Agnostics. Well-established vaccines that have a good track record are acceptable to them, but newer, experimental vaccines trigger their scepticism. For them, the evidence for new vaccines is lacking. They note the poor track record for products like Gardasil. They view the growing evidence of adverse reactions to the novel mRNA products with dismay. These are the people who adopt a “wait and see” approach to new vaccines. They want clear evidence that the risk/benefit ratio is firmly on the benefit side before committing to an irreversible course of action.
Then there are disbelievers. This group includes those people who have had actual experience with adverse reactions. Those who have a child who had Guillain-Barré syndrome after vaccination. There are parents of autistic children who wonder if their child was damaged by a vaccine, but hold their peace because they fear the wrath of the Vaccine Inquisition. Also, in this group are those who note that improvements in hygiene, clean water, sanitation and food safety appear to have had more impact on the reduction of diseases than vaccines. The outright disbelievers in the Dogma of vaccination note that injecting a cocktail of toxic substances into a person and thus bypassing the normal route of infection (the mucous membranes, the skin or the gut) is entirely unnatural.
There’s a range of opinions. The evidence is not overwhelmingly positive or negative, so a person’s right to choose should never be removed. The Church of Vaccination needs to temper their religious fervour with the knowledge that their faith in the Power of the Holy Vaccine isn’t shared by everyone, and the human right to determine bodily integrity trumps their faith.
Thanks for such a clear description.
There can be fanatics on either side, but the actual evidence on vaccinations is overwhelmingly positive in general. It is just that some people hold by their convictions regardless and cherrypick the data that support their beliefs.
But you are right that vaccinations are highly unnatural – just like antibiotics and all the rest of modern medicine. The natural course of events is for infection to pass through the mucous membranes, make the person very sick, and kill him if his unaided immune defences are not enough to keep him alive.
“Make the person very sick and kill him”? The majority of illnesses children are vaccinated against are highly unlikely to make you very sick and kill you. Flu, measles, mumps, rubella, rotavirus, whooping cough. These were all illnesses that the vast majority of children in the 50s and 60s sailed through with no lasting ill effects at all.
I was thinking of antibiotics. They are just as unnatural.
For the other diseases, we know how much damage is done by the disease and how much is done by the vaccination. We just have to compare the numbers,. The lasting ill effects from these diseases may come in only a small fraction of cases, but it is still a lot more than the ill effects from vaccination – and a small fraction adds up to a lot of people for a very common disease. Flu is associated with on the order of 10000 deaths a year in a country the size of the UK or France.
You cannot be serious!! I was a child of the 50s and 60s and if I sailed through these diseases with no lasting effects it is because my parents had the good sense to have me vaccinated against them. The measles epidemic the ran through British and American schools a couple of years ago killed many children and left others blind. And dint even get me started on the damage Andrew Wakefield’s nonsense caused.
Pandemrix puts me on the sceptical side of agnosticism.
Sounds somewhat familiar, doesn’t it? To this day, Our NHS and successive government claimed that the testing was sufficient, and have denied culpability at every step, and made its victims fight for every penny of compensation.
I’m pro-vaccination, and I highly recommend everybody who isn’t me or mine to take a chance on one of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines out there. Get back to me in six months to a year and let me know how it turned out.
OK, I’ll grant you have a point, there. But it makes a big difference to the story that, as it happened, there *wasn’t* a swine flu epidemic, so any adverse effects could not be counterbalanced by lives saved. Regrettably there *is* a COVID epidemic, and even if one of the COVID vaccines is as bad as Pandemrix, the risks of the vaccine would be highly unlikely to be worse than the risks of the disease. Unless you are healthy and staying isolated, you might find that the risks of waiting are still bigger than the risks of getting vaccinated.
I’ll admit to feeling a bit queasy about it, at times, for some of the reasons you mention, but the logic seems to to be pretty clear.
Here it is- you can always find a comment that’s more insightful than the article.
“Half (52%) of those who trust David Icke . . .” To arrive at 52% they must have found at least 50 people (of whom 26 would be 52%) who “trust David Icke”. That seems improbable. It must have taken diligent searching (and considerable credulity) to find so many.
“Half (52%) of those who trust David Icke.” To arrive at 52% they must have found at least 50 people (of whom 26 would be 52%) who “trust David Icke”. That seems improbable. It must have taken diligent searching (and considerable credulity) to find so many.
Some 300 million people died of smallpox in the 20th century before vaccinations finally helped rid the world of this appalling disease. We are fortunate to live in an age with modern vaccination technology. Anti-vaccnation views are not logical or well informed.