The Spectator, August 14, 2021: Despite having mocked app-happy Albion in my last column, I finally downloaded the NHS app. (Lest I seem a raging hypocrite, the institutional app is quite distinct from the Track-and-Trace Covid one, possession of which marks you as insane.) I found the app’s elaborate security features for registration bitterly comical. I had to photograph my passport, then record a video of myself speaking four prescribed numbers to affirm that my face matches my ID. These uploads provide the dirt-birds who’ve hacked the NHS before still more means of stealing my identity and medical records.
But never mind, because I’d no choice. I’ve an author’s tour of France in September. To get my mitts on even a lowly Croque Monsieur in Macron’s bastille, I’ll need to prove my Covid bona fides. Even here in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s wormy Big Apple, by next week I’ll also have to furnish proof of vaccination to grab an even lowlier grilled cheese sandwich — though it remains to be seen whether AstraZeneca’s elixir, still not approved in the US, will suffice to make me customer-worthy in New York diners. I guess it’s fortunate I’m a dab hand at grilling my own cheese sandwich.
Now that vaccine passports are already coming to a theatre near you, it’s ironic that Public Health England (PHE) has just released figures that cast this whole wheat-from-chaff project as scientifically daft. Extrapolating from data, vaccines appear to protect the over-fifties from Delta infection by a paltry 17 per cent. As for transmissibility? Once infected, both the vaccinated and unvaccinated carry almost identical viral loads. PHE notes that ‘this suggests limited difference in infectiousness’. If both classes of citizen can still get and spread the virus, vaccination is not an act of noble altruism
Our political high priests don’t seem to have taken this bad news on board. I’ve observed before that vaccine passports are pointless if the vaccines work; unvaccinated people pose no threat to the medically impervious. But vaccine passports are also pointless if vaccines don’t work. Should the vaccinated and unvaccinated both be roughly as vulnerable to infection and as capable of transmitting the virus, they pose a nearly equal danger to others. If on average the vaccinated are only 17 per cent safer company, that’s a pretty dismal stat on which to base a vast new social apartheid.
But never mind, because I’d no choice. I’ve an author’s tour of France in September. To get my mitts on even a lowly Croque Monsieur in Macron’s bastille, I’ll need to prove my Covid bona fides. Even here in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s wormy Big Apple, by next week I’ll also have to furnish proof of vaccination to grab an even lowlier grilled cheese sandwich — though it remains to be seen whether AstraZeneca’s elixir, still not approved in the US, will suffice to make me customer-worthy in New York diners. I guess it’s fortunate I’m a dab hand at grilling my own cheese sandwich.
Now that vaccine passports are already coming to a theatre near you, it’s ironic that Public Health England (PHE) has just released figures that cast this whole wheat-from-chaff project as scientifically daft. Extrapolating from data, vaccines appear to protect the over-fifties from Delta infection by a paltry 17 per cent. As for transmissibility? Once infected, both the vaccinated and unvaccinated carry almost identical viral loads. PHE notes that ‘this suggests limited difference in infectiousness’. If both classes of citizen can still get and spread the virus, vaccination is not an act of noble altruism
Our political high priests don’t seem to have taken this bad news on board. I’ve observed before that vaccine passports are pointless if the vaccines work; unvaccinated people pose no threat to the medically impervious. But vaccine passports are also pointless if vaccines don’t work. Should the vaccinated and unvaccinated both be roughly as vulnerable to infection and as capable of transmitting the virus, they pose a nearly equal danger to others. If on average the vaccinated are only 17 per cent safer company, that’s a pretty dismal stat on which to base a vast new social apartheid.
Related:
In Southeast Asia, robust immunity found up to 9 months after SARS-CoV-2 infection“The forced vaccination of all military personnel with the present COVID-19 vaccines may compromise U.S. national security due to the unknown extent of serious vaccine complications,”writes Furman. “Further study is needed before committing the Total Force to one irreversible experimental group. Initial reports leave more concern for the COVID-19 vaccinations than the virus itself for the (at present) exceptionally healthy military population.”
The main points in the paper by CDR Furman:
The average member of the U.S. military is young and in excellent physical fitness, two categories that are nearly immune to the dangers of COVID. So far, only 24 people out of 2.2 million military personnel have died of COVID-19, a rate of less than one per 91,000.
There is reason to believe severe or even fatal side-effects from existing COVID-19 vaccines are more common than reported, and could even prove deadlier to otherwise-healthy servicemen than COVID-19.
There is also the outlier possibility that mRNA vaccines (the kind used by the Moderna and Pfizer shots) may have unanticipated negative effects on the immune systems of recipients.
Currently, the U.S. military has proven completely capable of weathering COVID-19 without any loss of effectiveness, so forcibly making the entire service a test case for a novel type of vaccine is a pointless risk.
The same points apply to the majority of the civilian population.
But who cares?
Certainly not geniuses like Biden, Bojo or Justin Trudeau, who are clearly intent on gaining favor with the very rich corporations that are massively profiting from everyone being injected with an experimental, and all to often lethal, vaccine of slight to zero efficacy.
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