When Jens Spahn, Germany's Minister of Health, said that, within months, all Germans will be "vaccinated, cured, or dead," his objective, presumably, was to so terrify the unvaxxed that they would get the jab.
However, the statement of this latter-day Goebbels embodies a lie, three lies in fact.
First:
Conveyed by implication, the Minister's first lie is that the "vaccinated" are a distinct category from the "cured" and the "dead". This however is not so. British data show that the vaccinated are more, not less, likely than the unvaccinated to catch Covid. That means that the vaccinated must, in greater numbers than the unvaccinated, be joining the community of the "cured" or the "dead".
In fact, among adults over the age of 29, the British data show that the Covid case rate, i.e., cases percent, for the vaccinated is more than twice that for the unvaccinated.
Second:
As for the division between the "cured" and the "dead," it is true, again according to British data (see Page 15), that mortality from Covid is higher among the unvaccinated that the vaccinated, but contrary to the implication of the minister's statement, the risk of death from Covid is not great, rather, it is barely higher than that from the flu.
Among under 18's, the recorded death rate per 100,000 was zero for both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.
In the 18- to 60-year-old category, the death rate for the four-week period to Week 42 was 2.8 in 100,000 (0.0028%) among the unvaccinated, versus 0.48 in 100,000 (0.00048%) among the vaccinated.
For the over 60's the recorded overall mortality was 63 per 100,000 (0.063%) among the vaccinated versus 176 per 100,000 (0.176%) among the unvaccinated.
For comparison, in 2019, deaths in the UK involving flu and pneumonia averaged 8.5 per 100,000 (0.0085%) per four-week period, which is four times the death rate from Covid among unvaccinated people between the ages of 18 and 60 recorded during the four weeks to October 24, 2021.
Third:
The third lie implied by the German "Health" Minister's statement is that the progress of Covid through the population is a bad thing that must be halted. In reality, Covid is beyond containment. All attempts, however draconian, to stop the spread of this highly infectious virus have failed. That is true even in China, where outbreaks are ongoing. Covid has become endemic, meaning that it is now widespread and ineradicable by means of any feasible public health measures.
Now, therefore, the objective of public policy should be to allow the acquisition of herd immunity through naturally acquired infection among the majority of the population, although those wishing to obtain whatever benefit there may be from vaccination should certainly be free to do so. The resultant more widespread immunity from infection, already acquired by a large fraction of the world's population, will prove to be both more robust and more durable than the short-lived, narrow-spectrum immunity provided by the so-called vaccines.
With the attainment of herd immunity, the virus will reach a stage of so-called endemic equilibrium, meaning that it will remain in circulation, but at a sub-epidemic rate, its spread limited by naturally acquired immunity throughout the population.
Immunity from the so-called vaccines will not be a factor in ending the Covid pandemic since we have seen from the UK data that the vaccines do not stop, but rather promote, viral spread.
The vaccines now available are of value, at best, in moderating the severity of disease. Moreover, there is a cost to the use of the vaccines, that being an increase in the number and virulence of newly created Covid variants.
Far from inducing a general immune system response, the vaccines induce merely the production of antibodies to just one of the virus's 18 protein components, namely the spike protein of the original Wuhan Covid strain. Thus, any mutation in the Covid spike protein that evades neutralization by vaccine-induced antibodies makes the vaccinated person a potential incubator for a novel Covid variant.
This phenomenon of vaccine-facilitated immune escape means that the ongoing and world-wide drive to achieve universal vaccination with the present generation of "leaky" Covid vaccines may be about to create a global catastrophe. Specifically, the vaccines may be giving rise to an array of Covid variants more deadly than the original virus. Thus, to quote an article from The Lancet:
If substantial immune evasion occurs, current vaccines are likely to still offer some benefit to individuals. At the population level, however, they could induce viral selection and escape, making the prospect of achieving herd immunity increasingly remote.That is a truly terrifying prospect: a world ravaged by multiple Covid variants, against which the achievement of population-wide natural immunity has been made virtually unattainable.
