The infection fatality rate for Covid19 has a strong age dependency. Young people have a negligible risk of death from Covid19. Those over 70 have a better than 10% risk of death from the disease. Such a steep age dependency means that rational assessment of the balance between the cost and benefit of vaccination is strongly age dependent.
For the young, with a negligible risk of death from Covid infection, the risk of accepting an untested vaccine with unknown adverse effects may seem unreasonably high, whereas for the old, if they wish to prolong what little remains of their lives, the possibility of negative effects beyond the immediate future will be of little concern.
One obvious potential adverse effect of Covid vaccines now being administered, is antibody dependent enhancement, or ADE, the enhancement in question being of viral infectivity and pathogenicity.
Based on experience with other vaccines, ADE arises on exposure not to the viral strain against which a vaccine has been developed, but exposure to different strains of the same virus. The emergence now reported of multiple new Covid19 strains thus creates precisely the conditions that might lead to ADE and hence severe illness or death among those vaccinated.
The recent imposition of stricter travel restrictions in Britain, Canada and elsewhere, with a view to restricting the spread of new viral strains surely reflects realization, rather late in the day, that pushing population-wide use of untested vaccines for a disease that, in young people, is less lethal than flu, and of unknown efficacy in old people, could be the recipe for a huge covid ADE disaster. Such risk may explain this newspaper headline:
Daily Mail February 2, 2021: SAGE experts 'tried to get No10 to close borders WEEKS ago over South African variant': Boris Johnson is accused of ignoring warnings as surge testing starts in eight postcodes in desperate battle to contain virus strain
which headline might suggest maneuvering by SAGE "experts" (none of whom is a well qualified immunologist) to put the blame on BoJo if their direction of the epidemic response turns out to be a disaster.
Johnson, of course, invited disaster by haqving a bunch of outsiders to serve in an advisory capacity, people, that is, who will immediately point the finger of blame at him when things go wrong. He should, obviously, have relied on the civil service, which surely not only have, collectively, at least as much intelligence as the weird crew of liars, adulterers, and Covid-lockdown rule breakers he has assembled under the wildly misleading acronym, SAGE, but also the knowledge that to bad-mouth the government will result in severe disciplinary action, up to and including ouster from the cosy and well-paid-for-life world of government service.
Related:
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| The Cost of the US Covid19 response relative to the cost of World Wars and other disasters. Source |
