You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘vaccine’ tag.
On Monday, October 4, a reader of mine, The Underdoug, commented on my last coronavirus vaccine post, including a link to an essay by Julius Ruechel, ‘The Snake-Oil Salesmen and the COVID-Zero Con: A Classic Bait-And-Switch for a Lifetime of Booster Shots (Immunity as a Service)’.
Julius Ruechel appears to be a dairy farmer living in Canada.
Excerpts from his lengthy essay follow, emphases in purple mine.
Ruechel posits that coronavirus vaccines could become yet another subscription model, because there will always be a perceived need for boosters:
Exposing this story does not require incriminating emails or whistleblower testimony. The story tells itself by diving into the long-established science that every single virologist, immunologist, evolutionary biologist, vaccine developer, and public health official had access to long before COVID began. As is so often the case, the devil is hidden in the details. As this story unfolds it will become clear that the one-two punch of lockdowns and the promise of vaccines as an exit strategy began as a cynical marketing ploy to coerce us into a never-ending regimen of annual booster shots intentionally designed to replace the natural “antivirus security updates” against respiratory viruses that come from hugs and handshakes and from children laughing together at school. We are being played for fools.
This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of other opportunists taking advantage of this crisis to pursue other agendas and to tip society into a full-blown police state. One thing quickly morphs into another. But this essay demonstrates that never-ending boosters were the initial motive for this global social-engineering shell game ― the subscription-based business model, adapted for the pharmaceutical industry. “Immunity as a service”.
Vaccines cannot eradicate everything
Ruechel explains that vaccines cannot eradicate everything, because specific criteria must be met in order to do so.
A disease such as smallpox, which is specific to humans, can be eradicated, but a respiratory virus that jumps across species — animals and humans — cannot:
Eradication of a killer virus sounds like a noble goal. In some cases it is, such as in the case of the smallpox virus. By 1980 we stopped vaccinating against smallpox because, thanks to widespread immunization, we starved the virus of available hosts for so long that it died out. No-one will need to risk their life on the side effects of a smallpox vaccination ever again because the virus is gone. It is a public health success story. Polio will hopefully be next ― we’re getting close.
But smallpox is one of only two viruses (along with rinderpest) that have been eradicated thanks to vaccination. Very few diseases meet the necessary criteria. Eradication is hard and only appropriate for very specific families of viruses.
Smallpox made sense for eradication because it was a uniquely human virus ― there was no animal reservoir. By contrast, most respiratory viruses including SARS-CoV-2 (a.k.a. COVID) come from animal reservoirs: swine, birds, bats, etc. As long as there are bats in caves, birds in ponds, pigs in mud baths, and deer living in forests, respiratory viruses are only controllable through individual immunity, but it is not possible to eradicate them. There will always be a near-identical cousin brewing in the wings.
Even the current strain of COVID is already cheerfully jumping onwards across species boundaries …
SARS was an exception, he says, because it was poorly adapted to humans:
When it made the species jump to humans, it was so poorly adapted to its new human hosts that it had terrible difficulty spreading. This very poor level of adaptation gave SARS a rather unique combination of properties:
-
- SARS was extremely difficult to catch (it was never very contagious)
- SARS made people extremely sick.
- SARS did not have pre-symptomatic spread.
These three conditions made the SARS outbreak easy to control through contact tracing and through the quarantine of symptomatic individuals. SARS therefore never reached the point where it circulated widely among asymptomatic community members.
COVID-19 was different:
COVID was quite contagious (its rapid spread showed that COVID was already well adapted to spreading easily among its new human hosts), most people would have mild or no symptoms from COVID (making containment impossible), and that it was spreading by aerosols produced by both symptomatic and pre-symptomatic people (making contact tracing a joke).
In other words, it was clear by January/February 2020 that this pandemic would follow the normal rules of a readily transmissible respiratory epidemic, which cannot be reined in the way SARS was. Thus, by January/February of 2020, giving the public the impression that the SARS experience could be replicated for COVID was a deliberate lie – this genie was never going back inside the bottle.
Viruses such as these mutate quickly, unlike polio or smallpox:
Once a reasonably contagious respiratory virus begins circulating widely in a community, herd immunity can never be maintained for very long. RNA respiratory viruses (such as influenza viruses, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), rhinoviruses, and coronaviruses) all mutate extremely fast compared to viruses like smallpox, measles, or polio. Understanding the difference between something like measles and a virus like COVID is key to understanding the con that is being perpetrated by our health institutions. Bear with me here, I promise not to get too technical.
All viruses survive by creating copies of themselves. And there are always a lot of “imperfect copies” — mutations — produced by the copying process itself. Among RNA respiratory viruses these mutations stack up so quickly that there is rapid genetic drift, which continually produces new strains. Variants are normal. Variants are expected. Variants make it virtually impossible to build the impenetrable wall of long-lasting herd immunity required to starve these respiratory viruses out of existence. That’s one of several reasons why flu vaccines don’t provide long-lasting immunity and have to be repeated annually ― our immune system constantly needs to be updated to keep pace with the inevitable evolution of countless unnamed “variants.”
Hence the need for constant booster shots, as with influenza:
This never-ending conveyor belt of mutations means that everyone’s immunity to COVID was always only going to be temporary and only offer partial cross-reactive protection against future re-infections. Thus, from day one, COVID vaccination was always doomed to the same fate as the flu vaccine ― a lifelong regimen of annual booster shots to try to keep pace with “variants” for those unwilling to expose themselves to the risk of a natural infection. And the hope that by the time the vaccines (and their booster shots) roll off the production line, they won’t already be out of date when confronted by the current generation of virus mutations.
He criticises public health officials and Big Pharma for causing alarm over variants:
The alarm raised by our public health authorities about “variants” and the feigned compassion of pharmaceutical companies as they rush to develop fresh boosters capable of fighting variants is a charade, much like expressing surprise about the sun rising in the East.
Vaccines for these types of viruses will only ever offer temporary, short-lived protection. The same goes for our own antibodies:
… for fast-mutating respiratory viruses, including coronaviruses, within a few months they are sufficiently different that your previously acquired immunity will only ever offer partial protection against your next exposure. The fast rate of mutation ensures that you never catch the exact same cold or flu twice, just their closely related constantly evolving cousins. What keeps you from feeling the full brunt of each new infection is cross-reactive immunity, which is another part of the story of how you are being conned, which I will come back to shortly.
But let’s pretend for a moment that a miraculous vaccine could be developed that could give us all 100% sterilizing immunity today. The length of time it takes to manufacture and ship 8 billion doses (and then make vaccination appointments for 8 billion people) ensures that by the time the last person gets their last dose, the never-ending conveyor belt of mutations will have already rendered the vaccine partially ineffective. True sterilizing immunity simply won’t ever happen with coronaviruses. The logistics of rolling out vaccines to 8 billion people meant that none of our vaccine makers or public health authorities ever could have genuinely believed that vaccines would create lasting herd immunity against COVID.
So, for a multitude of reasons, it was a deliberate lie to give the public the impression that if enough people take the vaccine, it would create lasting herd immunity. It was 100% certain, from day one, that by the time the last dose is administered, the rapid evolution of the virus would ensure that it would already be time to start thinking about booster shots. Exactly like the flu shot. Exactly the opposite of a measles vaccine. Vaccines against respiratory viruses can never provide anything more than a temporary cross-reactive immunity “update” ― they are merely a synthetic replacement for your annual natural exposure to the smorgasbord of cold and flu viruses. Immunity as a service, imposed on society by trickery. The only question was always, how long between booster shots? Weeks, months, years?
Feeling conned yet?
Mass vaccination and vaccine passports are a ‘con’
Ruechel posits that mass vaccination should not have been done. Only the vulnerable should have had the vaccine:
… these vaccines can neither stop you from catching an infection nor stop you from transmitting the infection to someone else. They were never capable of creating herd immunity. They were designed to protect individuals against severe outcomes if they choose to take them – a tool to provide temporary focused protection for the vulnerable, just like the flu vaccine. Pushing for mass vaccination was a con from day one. And the idea of using vaccine passports to separate the vaccinated from the unvaccinated was also a con from day one. The only impact these vaccine passports have on the pandemic is as a coercive tool to get you to roll up your sleeve. Nothing more.
I am going to interject here to offer support for the argument that vaccine passports drive up vaccination rates. In Scotland, vaccine passports will be mandatory from October 18, 2021, provided the bugs with the app, which rolled out on October 1, can be ironed out.
A July 21 article in The National on this subject has a quote from Dr Nicola Steedman, Scotland’s deputy chief medical officer:
According to the Times, less than half of men under 30 in Scotland’s cities have received their first dose of a vaccine. Asked if a passport scheme could increase vaccine uptake, Steedman said: “In theory it might, and clearly that’s something other nations have used to increase the uptake in their vaccination programmes, but we have to balance that very carefully against people feeling as though they’ve been forced into something or coerced …”
The need for a vaccine passport, the use of which in Scotland will be limited, increases Big Pharma’s profits, especially if people have to update it every few months to prove they have had the latest booster shot.
Ruechel says:
vaccines will, at best, only last as long as immunity acquired through natural infection and will often fade much faster because the vaccine is often only able to trigger a partial immune response compared to the actual infection. So, if the disease itself doesn’t produce a broad-based immune response leading to long-lasting immunity, neither will the vaccine. And in most cases, immunity acquired through vaccination will begin to fade much sooner than immunity acquired through a natural infection. Every vaccine maker and public health official knows this despite bizarrely claiming that the COVID vaccines (based on re-creating the S-protein spike instead of using a whole virus) would somehow become the exception to the rule. That was a lie, and they knew it from day one. That should set your alarm bells ringing at full throttle …
Thus, to pretend that there was any chance that herd immunity to COVID would be anything but short-lived was dishonest at best. For most people, immunity was always going to fade quickly. Just like what happens after most other respiratory virus infections. By February 2020, the epidemiological data showed clearly that for most people COVID was a mild coronavirus (nowhere near as severe than SARS or MERS), so it was virtually a certainty that even the immunity from a natural infection would fade within months, not years. It was also a certainty that vaccination was therefore, at best, only ever going to provide partial protection and that this protection would be temporary, lasting on the order of months. This is a case of false and misleading advertising if there ever was one.
He explains that coronavirus vaccines for animals work in the same way:
If I can allow my farming roots to shine through for a moment, I’d like to explain the implications of what was known about animal coronaviruses vaccines. Baby calves are often vaccinated against bovine coronaviral diarrhea shortly after birth if they are born in the spring mud and slush season, but not if they are born in midsummer on lush pastures where the risk of infection is lower. Likewise, bovine coronavirus vaccines are used to protect cattle before they face stressful conditions during shipping, in a feedlot, or in winter feed pens. Animal coronavirus vaccines are thus used as tools to provide a temporary boost in immunity, in very specific conditions, and only for very specific vulnerable categories of animals. After everything I’ve laid out so far in this text, the targeted use of bovine coronavirus vaccines should surprise no-one. Pretending that our human coronavirus vaccines would be different was nonsense.
The only rational reason why the WHO and public health officials would withhold all that contextual information from the public as they rolled out lockdowns and held forth vaccines as an exit strategy was to whip the public into irrational fear in order to be able to make a dishonest case for mass vaccination when they should have, at most, been focused on providing focused vaccination of the most vulnerable only. That deception was the Trojan Horse to introduce endless mass booster shots as immunity inevitably fades and as new variants replace old ones.
How natural immunity works
Ruechel explains how the body fights off infection.
Not all forms of our natural defences are needed whenever we get sick. It depends on the illness:
… a mild infection doesn’t trigger as many layers whereas a severe infection enlists the help of deeper layers, which are slower to respond but are much more specialized in their attack capabilities. And if those deeper adaptive layers get involved, they are capable of retaining a memory of the threat in order to be able to mount a quicker attack if a repeat attack is recognized in the future. That’s why someone who was infected by the dangerous Spanish Flu in 1918 might still have measurable T-cell immunity a century later but the mild bout of winter flu you had a couple of years ago might not have triggered T-cell immunity, even though both may have been caused by versions of the same H1N1 influenza virus.
As a rule of thumb, the broader the immune response, the longer immunological memory will last. Antibodies fade in a matter of months, whereas B-cell and T-cell immunity can last a lifetime.
Another rule of thumb is that a higher viral load puts more strain on your immune defenses, thus overwhelming the rapid response layers and forcing the immune system to enlist the deeper adaptive layers. That’s why nursing homes and hospitals are more dangerous places for vulnerable people than backyard barbeques. That’s why feedlot cattle are more vulnerable to viral diseases than cattle on pasture. Viral load matters a lot to how easily the generalist layers are overwhelmed and how much effort your immune system has to make to neutralize a threat.
Where the infection happens in the body also matters. For example, an infection in the upper respiratory tract triggers much less involvement from your adaptive immune system than when it reaches your lungs. Part of this is because your upper respiratory tract is already heavily preloaded with large numbers of generalist immunological cells that are designed to attack germs as they enter, which is why most colds and flus never make it deeper into the lungs. The guys with the clubs are capable of handling most of the threats that try to make through the gate. Most of the specialized troops hold back unless they are needed.
Catching a dangerous disease like measles produces lifetime immunity because an infection triggers all the deep layers that will retain a memory of how to fight off future encounters with the virus. So does the measles vaccine. Catching a cold or mild flu generally does not.
Constant booster shots could harm natural immune systems
Ruechel says that a continual regimen of booster shots could harm our natural immune systems:
At this point you may be wondering, if there is no lasting immunity from infection or vaccination, then are public health officials right to roll out booster shots to protect us from severe outcomes even if their dishonest methods to get us to accept them were unethical? Do we need a lifetime regimen of booster shots to keep us safe from a beast to which we cannot develop durable long-term immunity?
The short answer is no.
Contrary to what you might think, the rapid evolution of RNA respiratory viruses actually has several important benefits for us as their involuntary hosts, which protects us without the benefit of broad lifelong immunity. One of those benefits has to do with the natural evolution of the virus towards less dangerous variants. The other is the cross-reactive immunity that comes from frequent re-exposure to closely related “cousins”. I’m going to peel apart both of these topics in order to show you the remarkable system that nature designed to keep us safe… and to show you how the policies being forced on us by our public health authorities are knowingly interfering with this system. They are creating a dangerous situation that increases our risk to other respiratory viruses (not just to COVID) and may even push the COVID virus to evolve to become more dangerous to both the unvaccinated and the vaccinated. There are growing signs that this nightmare scenario has already begun.
The panic generated by our notional experts over the Delta variant is unwarranted and unethical. That variant is a logical progression of coronavirus.
Ruechel says:
fear mongering about the Delta variant being even more contagious leaves out the fact that this is exactly what you would expect as a respiratory virus adapts to its new host species. We would expect new variants to be more contagious but less deadly as the virus fades to become just like the other 200+ respiratory viruses that cause common colds and flus.
How lockdown damages healthy immune systems
Lockdowns and restricted circulation among humans also adversely affect healthy immune systems:
… the decision to lock down the healthy population is so sinister. Lockdowns, border closures, and social distancing rules reduced spread among the healthy population, thus creating a situation where mutations produced among the healthy would become sufficiently rare that they might be outnumbered by mutations circulating among the bedridden. Mutations circulating among the healthy are, by definition, going to be the least dangerous mutations since they did not make their hosts sick enough to confine them to bedrest. That’s precisely the variants you want to spread in order to drown out competition from more dangerous mutations.
A host stuck in bed with a fever and not out dining with friends is limited in his ability to infect others compared to a host infected with a variety that only gives its host a sniffle. Not all bedridden hosts have caught a more dangerous mutation, but all dangerous mutations will be found among the bedridden. Thus as time goes by, dangerous mutations can only compete with less dangerous mutations if the entire population is limited in its ability to mix and mingle.
As long as the majority of infections are among the healthy, the more dangerous variants circulating among some of the bedridden will be outnumbered and will become evolutionary dead ends. But when public health officials intentionally restricted spread among the young, strong, and healthy members of society by imposing lockdowns, they created a set of evolutionary conditions that risked shifting the competitive evolutionary advantage from the least dangerous variants to more dangerous variants. By locking us all up, they risked making the virus more dangerous over time. Evolution doesn’t sit around to wait for you while you develop a vaccine.
Spanish Flu 1918
Ruechel explores the Spanish Flu pandemic, which took place in the last year of the Great War. A lot of soldiers were in trenches:
Let me give you a historical example to demonstrate that this rapid evolution of a virus towards either more or less dangerous variants isn’t mere theory. Small changes to the environment can lead to very rapid changes in the virus’ evolution. The first wave of the 1918 Spanish Flu was not particularly deadly, with mortality rates similar to regular seasonal flu. However, the second wave was not only much deadlier but, rather unusually, was particularly deadly to young people rather than just the old and the weak. Why would the second wave be the deadly one? And what would cause the virus to evolve so quickly to become both more deadly and better adapted to preying on young people? At first glance it would seem to defy all evolutionary logic.
The answer demonstrates just how sensitive a virus is to small changes in evolutionary pressure. The Spanish Flu spread in the midst of the lockdown-mimicking conditions of World War One. During the first wave, the virus found a huge population of soldiers trapped in the cold damp conditions of the trenches and a near endless supply of captive bedridden hosts in overflowing field hospitals. By the Spring of 1918, up to three-quarters of the entire French military and half of British troops had been infected. These conditions created two unique evolutionary pressures. On the one hand, it allowed variants that were well adapted to young people to emerge. But on the other hand, unlike normal times, the cramped conditions of trench warfare and field hospitals allowed dangerous variants that immobilize their hosts to spread freely with little competition from less dangerous variants that spread through lively hosts. The trenches and field hospitals became the virus incubators driving the evolution of variants.
Normally young people are predominantly exposed to less dangerous mutations because the healthiest do all the mingling while the bedridden stay home. But the lockdown conditions of war created conditions that erased the competitive advantage of less dangerous mutations that don’t immobilize their hosts, leading to the rise of more dangerous mutations.
Thanks to the end of the war, the lockdown-mimicking conditions also ended, thereby shifting the competitive advantage back to less dangerous mutations that could spread freely among the mobile healthy members of the population. The deadliness of the second wave of the 1918 Spanish Flu is inextricably linked to the First World War, and the end of the war is linked to the virus fading into the background of regular cold and flu season.
This brings him back to our 2020 lockdowns around the world:
It is therefore highly likely that the 1918 Spanish Flu would never have been more than a really bad flu season had it not been for the amplifying effect of lockdown conditions created by a world at war.
It also raises the question, for which I don’t have an answer, whether the lockdown strategy during COVID was intentionally used to reduce spread among the healthy in order to keep the virus from fading into harmless irrelevancy. I use the word “intentionally” ― and it’s a strong word ― because the deadly second wave of the 1918 Spanish Flu and its causes are hardly secrets in the medical community. You’d have to be a completely reckless and utterly incompetent idiot, or a cynical bastard with an agenda, to impose any strategy that mimics those virus-amplifying conditions. Yet that’s what our health authorities did. And what they continue to do, while shamelessly hyperventilating about the risk of “variants” to force us to submit to medical tyranny based on mandatory vaccines, never-ending booster shots, and vaccine passports that can turn off access to our normal lives. This is cynicism at its finest.
‘Leaky’ vaccines: how vaccinated people can pose a danger
As we know, coronavirus vaccines do not provide what is known as sterilising immunity because they cannot.
The vaccinated can still spread the virus, making the vaccines ‘leaky’, something which happened in chickens vaccinated against a herpes virus in the 1950s. This is what is known as the Marek effect, as he was the one who discovered it in 1968.
Ruechel says:
Vaccinated chickens were protected from severe outcomes but nevertheless continued to catch and spread the virus, so evolutionary pressure led to the emergence of a dual-track variant that become the dominant strain of this herpes virus. It continues to spread among the vaccinated chickens without killing them but kills up to 80% or more of unvaccinated birds if they get infected. Thus, a never-ending stream of vaccinations is now required just to maintain the status quo. I bet the pharmaceutical industry is smiling at all those drug-dependent chickens though — talk about having a captive audience!
Ruechel explains that this same effect is happening with COVID-19 vaccinations:
A vaccine that provides sterilizing immunity prevents the vaccinated from being able to catch or transmit the virus. They become a dead end for the virus. However, as I’ve already mentioned, the current crop of COVID vaccines, which are meant to train the immune system to recognize the S-spike proteins, were not designed to create sterilizing immunity. By their design, they merely help reduce the risk of severe outcomes by priming the immune system. The vaccinated can still catch and spread the virus ― the definition of a leaky vaccine ― and epidemiological data makes it very clear that this is now happening all around the world. Thus, both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated are equally capable of producing new variants. The idea that the unvaccinated are producing variants while the vaccinated are not is a boldfaced lie.
This is dangerous:
From an evolutionary perspective, this is a potentially dangerous scenario. What has been done by temporarily blunting the risk of hospitalization or death, but without stopping infection among the vaccinated, is to create a set of evolutionary conditions where a variant that is dangerous to the unvaccinated can spread easily among the vaccinated without making the vaccinated very sick. For lack of a better term, let’s call this a dual-track variant. Thus, because the vaccinated are not getting bedridden from this dual-track variant, they can continue to spread it easily, giving it a competitive advantage, even if it is highly dangerous to the unvaccinated.
Furthermore, since COVID vaccination only offers temporary short-term protection, as soon as immunity fades, the vaccinated themselves are also equally at risk of more severe outcomes. Thus, this creates the evolutionary pressure for the virus to behave as an increasingly contagious but relatively mild virus as long as everyone is vaccinated but as a dangerous but also very contagious virus as soon as temporary immunity wears off. The call for boosters every 6 months is already here. (Update: now it’s being revised down to 5 months.)
Here’s where Big Pharma steps in, aided and abetted by our respective leaders:
So, the pandemic really does have the potential to become the Pandemic of the Unvaccinated (the shameless term coined by public health officials to terrify the vaccinated into bullying their unvaccinated peers), but reality comes with a twist because if a dual-track variant does evolve it would be the unvaccinated (and those whose boosters have expired) who would have reason to fear the vaccinated, not the other way around as so many frightened citizens seem to believe. And the end result would be that we all become permanently dependent on boosters every 6 months, forever.
He says that the reason this hasn’t happened with the flu vaccine is because not enough people are advised to take it, thereby avoiding a dangerous dual-track variant scenario:
It is mostly the vulnerable and those who work around them that get it while children, young adults and other healthy members of society don’t get it. So, even if more deadly variants were to arise in nursing homes or hospital settings, the high number of healthy unvaccinated visitors to those facilities would constantly bring less deadly more contagious variants with them, thereby preventing more dangerous variants from gaining a competitive edge in nursing home or hospital settings. But if the leaky flu vaccinations were to be extended to everyone, or if nursing home populations continue to be kept isolated from the rest of society during COVID lockdowns, things might begin to look a little different.
We do not need constant booster shots
Ruechel gives various scientific reasons why we do not need constant booster shots for coronavirus if we are healthy:
This year’s runny nose is your protection against COVID-23. Your cross-reactive immunity to last years annoying flu might just save your life if something truly dangerous arrives, as long as it is at least somewhat related to what your immune system has seen before. COVID could easily have turned out to be as dangerous to us as the Spanish Flu if it hadn’t been for the saving grace of cross-reactive immunity. As this study shows, up to 90-99% of us already had some level of protection to COVID thanks to partial cross-reactive immunity gained from exposure to other coronaviruses. The high percentage of infections that turn out to be asymptomatic bears that out.
Someone needs to remind Bill Gates, his fawning public health bootlickers, and the pharmaceutical companies that whisper sweet-nothings in his ear that in the natural world of respiratory viruses, most of us don’t need a regimen of never-ending booster shots to keep us safe from COVID variants ― we already have a perfectly functioning system to keep bringing us new updates. Respiratory viruses are a completely different beast than smallpox, polio, or measles; and pretending otherwise is not just silly, it’s criminal because anyone with a background in immunology knows better. But it’s a fantastic and very profitably way to scare a wide-eyed population into accepting never-ending booster shots as a replacement for the natural antivirus updates that we normally get from hugs and handshakes. Protect the vulnerable. Stop preying on the rest of us.
He also delves into the Diamond Princess cruise case, which was made public in February 2020, early on in the pandemic. Not many people displayed symptoms, and only a few died.
Yet, world leaders were getting the jitters:
The important thing to remember is that the Diamond Princess data was already publicly available since the end of February of 2020. Operation Warp Speed, the vaccine development initiative approved by President Trump, was nevertheless announced on April 29th, 2020. Thus, our health authorities knowingly and opportunistically recommended lockdowns and promoted vaccines as an exit strategy after it was already clear that the majority of us had some kind of protection through cross-reactive immunity. The Diamond Princess example provided the unequivocal proof that the only people who might benefit from a vaccine, even if it worked as advertised, were the small number of extremely vulnerable members of society with weak immune systems. Likewise, lockdowns should have been recommended only for nursing home residents (on a strictly voluntary basis to protect their human rights) while the pandemic surged through the rest of us.
Conclusion — vaccine by subscription
There is much more that Ruechel discusses, so it is worth reading his essay in full.
I’m going to skip to the conclusion, which is about making us permanently dependent on Big Pharma’s vaccines:
What if, by depriving us of normal life, those who stand to gain from vaccines can forever cement themselves at the center of society by providing an artificial replacement for what our immune systems used to do to protect us against common respiratory viruses back when we were still allowed to live normal lives? …
What if the fast mutation of RNA viruses ensures that no vaccine will ever be fully effective at providing lasting immunity, thus creating the illusion that we are permanently in need of vaccine boosters?
What if politicians could be convinced to make vaccination mandatory in order to prevent potential customers from opting out?
What if, by relying on lockdowns during the winter season, our vulnerability to other viruses increased, which could then be used to rationalize expanding the jab, via mission creep, to simultaneously vaccinate us against RSV, influenza, other coronaviruses, the common cold, and so on, despite knowing full well that the protection that these vaccines offer against respiratory viruses is only temporary?
And what other social engineering goals can be rolled into your annual booster shot in the future once you are permanently bound to these annual jabs and vaccine passports? In an atmosphere of hysteria, it’s a system ripe for abuse by opportunists, ideologues, power hungry totalitarians, and Malthusian social engineers. The snowball doesn’t have to grow by design. Mission creep happens all on its own once Pandora’s Box is opened to coerced vaccinations and conditional rights. The road to Hell is frequently paved by good intentions… and hysteria.
So, what if COVID-Zero and the vaccine exit strategy is merely the global state-sanctioned equivalent of a drug dealer creating dependency among its customers to keep pushing more drugs?
What if it was all just a way of convincing society of the need for subscription-based “immunity as a service”? The subscription-based business model (or some version of it) is all the rage these days in the corporate world to create loyal captive audiences that generate reliable money streams, forever. Subscriptions are not just for your cable TV and gym membership anymore. Everything has been redesignated as a “consumable”.
Netflix did it with movies.
Spotify did it with music.
Microsoft did it with its Office suite.
Adobe did it with Photoshop editing suite.
The smartphone industry did it with phones that need to be replaced every 3 to 5 years.
The gaming industry did it with video games.
Amazon is doing it with books (i.e. Kindle Unlimited).
The food industry is doing it with meal delivery services (i.e. Hello Fresh).
Uber is doing it with subscription-based ride sharing …
Monsanto and its peers did it to farmers with patented seed technology, which cannot legally be replanted, and is lobbying to try to legalize the use of terminator seed technology (GMO seeds that are sterile in the second generation to prevent replanting).
The healthcare industry is doing it with concierge medical services, fitness tracking apps (Fitbit), sleep-tracking apps, and meditation apps.
The investment industry is doing it with farmland, with investors owning the land and leasing it back to farmers in a kind of modern revival of the sharecropping system. (Bill Gates is the largest farmland owner in the USA – are you surprised?)
Blackrock and other investment firms are currently trying to do it with homes to create a permanent class of renters.
And public health authorities and vaccine makers have been trying to do it with flu vaccines for years, but we’ve been stubbornly uncooperative. Not anymore.
Remember when the World Economic Forum predicted in 2016 that by 2030 all products would become services? And remember their infamous video in which they predicted that “You will own nothing. And you will be happy.”? Well, the future is here. This is what it looks like. The subscription-based economy. And apparently it now also includes your immune system in a trade-off for access to your life.
Ultimately:
The con is clear. It’s time to focus all our might on stopping this runaway train before it takes us over the cliff into a police state of no return. Stand up. Speak out. Refuse to play along. Stopping this requires millions of voices with the courage to say NO — at work, at home, at school, at church, and out on the street …
It’s time to be bold. It’s time to call out the fraudsters. And it’s time to reclaim the habits, values, and principles that are required to fix our democratic and scientific institutions to prevent this from ever happening again.
Feudalism was one giant stinking cesspool of self-serving corruption. Individual rights, free markets, the democratic process, and limited government were the antidotes that freed humanity from that hierarchical servitude. It seems we have come full circle. The COVID con is a symptom, not the cause, of a broken system …
Freedom of speech, individual rights, private property, individual ownership, competition, good faith debate, small government, minimal taxes, limited regulation, and free markets (the opposite of the crony capitalism we now suffer under), these are the checks and balances that bullet-proof a society against the soulless charlatans that fail upwards into positions of power in bloated government institutions and against the parasitic fraudsters that seek to attach themselves to the government’s teat.
Yes, we need a Great Reset. Just not the subscription-based version that the World Economic Forum imagined.
I learned a lot about vaccines and immunity from Ruechel’s essay, even though reading it and writing this post has taken me well over five hours.
Thanks again to The Underdoug for sharing it.
Most of the British population has now had their two injections, myself included.
However, in terms of efficacy, the jury is out.
Since the summer, we have been told that boosters will be required as soon as this autumn.
This is what a Guido Fawkes reader had to say, referring to the implementation of vaccine passports in Scotland:
… the vaccine does not prevent infection, re-infection or onward transmission of those vaccinated, so is utterly futile as a warranty of safety for entering any type of premises. Indeed it gives a false warranty about those things. The lurgy may still be lurking.
Indeed.
Remember back in 2020 when Drs Fauci and Walensky told us that the vaccines are 100% effective and that vaccinated people do not carry the virus?
Not so, as we have discovered.
To make matters worse in this parlous state of affairs, the British public are now expected to help market vaccinations on social media. This campaign is called #ValuingVaccines:
This is a photo of a letter to young Britons urging them to get vaccinated. What is missing from it? Any mention of health benefits:
Note the mention of ‘freedoms’ in the last bullet point.
Here’s a thought. Since when did our basic freedoms ever rely on getting a vaccine?
Also, minors eligible for the vaccine in the UK do not require their parents’ consent. This is a mock-up of Chris Whitty, our chief medical officer. It’s not far from the truth:
There are other issues with these notional vaccines.
One of them is the redefinition of the word ‘vaccination’, which has gone from disease prevention (I will always hold by the original and best) to producing immunity against a disease to the current protection from a disease. We’ve been had, folks, but most of my readers know that by now:
Now let’s look at how long producing a vaccine has taken throughout history. With regard to coronavirus, we were told that vaccines take a lot less time these days. Perhaps. However, six months to market seems rather brief:
Now let’s look at what six months to market has produced — a product that doesn’t even work and could be injurious to one’s health, if not fatal, depending on the individual. Some American youngsters have experienced heart problems after taking Pfizer or Moderna. The cure can be worse than the disease:
I am glad to see that ‘vaccine’ has quotation marks around it in this risk/benefit analysis:
Our notional betters, including journalists, say that the unvaccinated are causing the vaccine to fail. Hmm. That’s a new one:
Now we have to worry about vaccine passports. France already requires them just to go to the supermarket. In other words, you cannot eat if you have not been vaxxed:
Speaking of supermarkets, here’s Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, a former Labour MP, moaning about the lack of social distancing at Tesco. Yes, he named the chain. Yet, here’s Burnham partying at Labour’s conference this week as if it were the old days. The sheer hypocrisy of our leaders is mind-boggling:
But I digress.
Those are my thoughts on the coronavirus vaccines, a necessary evil if one wishes to go out again.
I would have liked to give credit to the people who created these images, which I found in various places online. My compliments to everyone involved.
Two stories of interest today feature coronavirus.
The Lancet’s U-turn on lab leak
With all the news from independent media outlets revealing more information about the possible origins of the coronavirus lab leak, The Lancet agreed to publish what it calls an ‘alternative view’.
On September 19, the Mail on Sunday reported (emphases mine):
The Lancet medical journal has bowed to pressure over its heavily-criticised coverage of the disputed origins of the Covid pandemic by publishing an ‘alternative view’ from 16 scientists – calling for an ‘objective, open and transparent debate’ about whether the virus leaked from a Chinese laboratory …
The Lancet has agreed to publish an alternative commentary which discusses the possibility that laboratory research might have played a role in the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
It also directly confronts the efforts of science journals to stifle debate by labelling such theories as ‘misinformation’.
In the article, the authors argue that ‘there is no direct support for the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2, and a laboratory-related accident is plausible’.
They add that the February 2020 statement ‘imparted a silencing effect on the wider scientific debate’.
And they say scientists, ‘need to evaluate all hypotheses on a rational basis, and to weigh their likelihood based on facts and evidence, devoid of speculation concerning possible political impacts’.
Science itself, they go on, should ’embrace alternative hypotheses, contradictory arguments, verification, refutability, and controversy’ and rather than congratulating China on its supposed ‘transparency’, they call on the secretive superpower to open up …
The new commentary, published in The Lancet on Friday, said: ‘The world will remain mired in dispute without the full engagement of China, including open access to primary data, documents, and relevant stored material to enable a thorough, transparent and objective search for all relevant evidence.’
One of the signatories, Professor Nikolai Petrovsky of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘It might seem small, but after 18 months of complete denial, the very act of [The] Lancet agreeing to publish this letter acknowledging the origins of Covid-19 remains an open verdict, is a very big deal.
‘For a leading medical journal like Lancet to agree to finally open its doors to a letter from scientists highlighting the ongoing uncertain origins of Covid-19, indicates how far we have come in 18 months in requesting an open scientific debate on the topic, but also indicates just how far we still have to go‘.
Good news, at last.
Matt Hancock on anti-vaxxers
Matt Hancock hasn’t been Health Secretary since June, but that hasn’t stopped him banging on about the virus.
On September 19, he wrote an opinion piece for the Mail on Sunday: ‘MATT HANCOCK: In all my time, I have never come across a group so dangerous as anti-vaxxers’.
With a title like that, who needs the editorial?
He writes the way he talks:
While of course we need to be vigilant, we can start restoring what makes life worth living. Families are once again able to reunite with their loved ones. Weddings, christenings and family celebrations are back on. Businesses can open up again with more confidence. In fact, by some measures, Britain has the fastest economic recovery of all the major Western nations.
Then he goes off on a tangent:
However, almost unbelievably, there is still a persistent yet thankfully small and shrinking group of people determined to try to stop this progress. In all my time in public life, I have never come across a group so blinkered and dangerous as the anti-vaxxers …
Getting the jab isn’t just about protecting yourself, but about protecting others. It’s not just about you, it is a social and moral obligation.
Good grief. I am so glad that Sajid Javid is Health Secretary.
This is probably the nicest thing he says about people hesitant to get the vaccine:
I understand that some people are hesitant. It’s ok to be unsure and ask questions.
He then trots out all the pro-vaccine statistics, including this old chestnut, which is highly dubious:
The vaccines protect you, with about 112,000 deaths prevented because of the vaccines.
Then he returns to excoriating people who don’t want to get the vaccine:
The people I reserve my vitriol for are those who promote anti-vax lies. I find it hard to believe, but it’s a shocking fact that there is a small number of aggressive, noisy, threatening people who think it is right and fair to try to stop others from getting vaccinated.
The lengths to which these people will go are extraordinary. They pump out scaremongering material and videos, with discredited arguments. They try to play on people’s fear of the unknown. They create conspiracies and spread misinformation. They’ve even sent me death threats just because I played a prominent part in the vaccines rollout.
First of all, if anyone pushed fear and scaremongering, it was Matt Hancock in his coronavirus briefings.
Secondly, if any people went to extraordinary lengths over this ‘pandemic’, it was Matt Hancock and the British government with lockdowns, ‘because they work’, so we needed not one but four. I’ve lost count.
Thirdly, millions must be more than furious with the man who laid down the law about physical restrictions — no visits to the elderly, severely restricted funerals, damp squib weddings, no church — for months on end then shows his blatant hypocrisy by canoodling with his assistant. Thank goodness for security cameras and for The Sun publishing the photo on the front page a month later.
Finally, he never gave MPs the granular data that he was looking at. MPs asked him for the data on which he based his decisions, but he never produced the information. Yet, he expected them to vote based solely on what he told them. I do wish there had been more of a revolt, but Labour were quite happy to approve any and all restrictions. What a parlous state of affairs.
In other Hancock news, in late August, he and his girlfriend took a summer holiday together at a modest resort in the Swiss Alps. It’s a pity she hasn’t gone back to her husband, who seems like a nice guy.
On September 7, Hancock returned to the backbenches for the first time since 2012:
He’s no doubt smarting from that and last week’s reshuffle.
To think he was so confident that he would get another Cabinet post.
I do not think he will win re-election should he run again. His constituents are still irked with him for leaving his wife, whom they adored.
It used to be that vaccines prevented infection.
Coronavirus has changed all that. The double-vaxxed are ending up infected:
Andrew Doyle, who hosts Free Speech Nation for GB News, has it, and he’s taken his shots.
ITV’s Robert Peston, also double-vaxxed, has it, too:
Peston was supposed to be in Aberdeenshire in Scotland but had to cancel:
I hope he recovers soon.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the debate rages on as to whether children over the age of 12 should receive the vaccine and whether older adults should have a booster shot this autumn.
British supporters of vaccines for children say that such programmes in the United States and France have been highly successful. Hmm.
Dr Robert W Malone is an American physician as well as an inventor of mRNA vaccines and RNA as a drug. He directs his readers to an article in LifeSiteNews about possible coercion being used in high schools:
Meanwhile, the WHO is urging countries wishing to vaccinate their children to donate those doses to Covax instead for wider use around the world. The reply to this tweet includes a statement from Britain’s JCVI (Joint Committee on Vaccines and Immunisation) which recommended against children’s vaccinations on Friday, September 3:
The WHO also disagrees with booster shots in Western countries, again recommending donating those doses to poorer countries:
The UK also wants to roll out vaccine passports by the end of the month. If we can catch the virus despite two jabs, what is the point? It seems as if we are all back at Square One, only that we are susceptible to milder cases rather than death.
Speaking of deaths, the UK figures for 2021 are on a par with other years since the vaccine rollout began. I saw this graphic on another site with no attribution. Note the bright green line up to Week 33:
Moving to poorer countries now, not every nation has shown signs of infection or deaths:
Dr Malone says that Peru had a preventive programme of giving its citizens doses of ivermectin until a new president scrapped it. At that point, fatal infections began rising dramatically:
Since the pandemic began, ivermectin for humans has been taken off the market in several Western countries or is restricted on a prescription-only basis for certain conditions, excluding the virus. In many first-world countries, ivermectin is now used solely on animals for various diseases. The current formulation is made for their consumption.
Yet, in Peru and Africa, the formulation for humans is still available. It is inexpensive and is used to cure a variety of diseases as the following Twitter thread about Africa tells us.
The countries in blue are where ivermectin is used on humans. Note the differences in coronavirus cases and deaths:
Ivermectin, sold under the trade name Mectizan, is used to treat river blindness, a common and highly painful disease. It is not unusual to see people with a pair of eyebrow tweezers on a chain around their necks. Among other things, river blindness inflames the eyelash follicles. The only way to relieve the intense pain is to carefully pluck the offending eyelash. It is an ongoing pain until the disease is cured:
The Japanese have looked at sub-Saharan data and have recommended ivermectin to the government as a treatment for coronavirus:
It seems that the Japanese government rejected the use of ivermectin in combatting coronavirus. The updated statistics for Africa are in the second tweet:
Another big supporter of ivermectin is Karl Denninger of The Market Ticker.
On December 18, 2020, he wrote that by giving Americans two tablets of ivermectin, coronavirus could be stopped in one week in the United States. Two tablets in total is all it would take (emphases in the original):
… Why the hell are you not only letting them get away with it but willing to stand in line and take a not-fully-tested shot when a $2 alternative that does the same thing and has been proved safe over more than 30 years of time is available, and it also has a remarkable record of preventing serious disease and death. This has been known for months.
We can stop Covid-19 in ONE WEEK.
One. Not five, six, eight or ten as promised by Dr. Redfield with his “masks” who, I remind you, lied. Covid-19 did not stop even though he got what he wanted.
The science and the CDC’s own data says this will work in ONE WEEK.
And the risk if it doesn’t work as the science and math says it will?
STATISTICALLY NONE; the drug in question has had over 3.5 billion doses dispensed worldwide and, on the data, is safer than Tylenol and the number of pills you must take is two.
Not two per day.
Two.
Ivermectin will receive broad media coverage only when it’s too late. What a pity.
A developing situation in the coronavirus saga revolves around a possible link between vaccination uptake and new variants, not to mention deaths from the virus.
Dr Luc Montagnier
On May 19, 2021, LifeSiteNews reported that the Nobel Prize winning virologist Dr Luc Montagnier has alleged that mass vaccinations are creating variants which could be fatal. Emphases mine below:
French virologist and Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier called mass vaccination against the coronavirus during the pandemic “unthinkable” and a historical blunder that is “creating the variants” and leading to deaths from the disease.
“It’s an enormous mistake, isn’t it? A scientific error as well as a medical error. It is an unacceptable mistake,” Montagnier said in an interview translated and published by the RAIR Foundation USA yesterday. “The history books will show that, because it is the vaccination that is creating the variants.”
In another interview, he discussed antibody-dependent enhancement, or ADE:
Many epidemiologists know it and are “silent” about the problem known as “antibody-dependent enhancement,” Montagnier said.
“It is the antibodies produced by the virus that enable an infection to become stronger,” he said in an interview with Pierre Barnérias of Hold-Up Media earlier this month.
He alleges that vaccinations are driving ADE:
While variants of viruses can occur naturally, Montagnier said that vaccination is driving the process. “What does the virus do? Does it die or find another solution?”
“It is clear that the new variants are created by antibody-mediated selection due to the vaccination.”
He also said that:
Vaccinating during a pandemic is “unthinkable” and is causing deaths, the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovery.
LifeSiteNews posted this video in the article:
Here is a simple definition of ADE:
A physician, Dr Robert W Malone, inventor of mRNA vaccines and RNA as a drug, agrees with Montagnier’s assessment:
A farmer also agrees. He says that unvaccinated people could not be creating new variants. Someone replying references Marek’s disease, which comes about when chickens are vaccinated:
Dr Malone explains ADE, which most likely occurs during the waning phase of vaccine immune responses. This might explain the need for a booster shot:
He says that the coronavirus vaccine trials did not take ADE into account:
No one is talking about ADE, yet it could be highly significant, for the worse:
Public Health England report
At the weekend, the media reported that a booster programme for people living in England is planned for this autumn, possibly as early as September, for those who are aged 50 and over.
Malone tweeted about a paper from Public Health England (PHE) linking vaccinations and coronavirus deaths:
The Simpson Post has a summary of PHE’s paper:
The UK government agency Public Health England published a report on Friday that officials who are trying to push the Covid-19 vaccine upon the rest of the world do not want people to see. Data contained within their report revealed people who have received the Covid-19 vaccine are more vulnerable to the Delta variant than those who have not been vaccinated. Their briefing titled “SARS-Cov-2 variants of concern and variants under investigation in England,” investigated every variant of covid-19 that is currently known. The information contained in the report showed that people who received the covid-19 shot are more than three times likely to die than those who have not received the vaccine.
Out of 117 people who died over a time period of four weeks, 73 of them had received the covid-19 vaccine. That means 63 percent of those who died from the Delta variant had been vaccinated. Information within the chart that can be found on pages 13 and 14 of the report revealed that one of the people who died received their first dose of the covid-19 vaccine within three weeks of when they died. 19 of them had been vaccinated more than three weeks before they died. 50 of the people who died during the four week time span had received both doses of the covid-19 vaccine.
The Conversation has more about vaccines, variants and the possibility of ADE occurring. As a reminder, the Delta variant originated in India and the Lambda in Peru:
A risk assessment released by Public Health England in July concedes there’s not yet enough information on Lambda to know whether infection increases the risk of severe disease.
The risk assessment also recommends ongoing surveillance in countries where both Lambda and Delta are present be implemented as a priority. The aim would be to find out whether Lambda is capable of out-competing Delta.
With ongoing high levels of transmission of the coronavirus, there’s a continued risk of new variants emerging. The Lambda variant again highlights the risk of these mutations increasing the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to infect cells or disrupt existing vaccines and antibody drugs.
The WHO will continue to study Lambda to determine whether it has the potential to become an emerging risk to global public health and a variant of concern.
It would be nice if England’s health experts and politicians would come clean on the need for booster shots. I’ve watched every single coronavirus briefing and none of the above has been mentioned, ever.
There is speculation that a third shot — i.e. booster — might cause ADE to kick in. Again, this is a developing situation, but our betters must have an idea of what could happen to us, none of it good.
Freedom Day — Monday, July 19 — in England is turning out to be a damp squib with the exception of nightclubs — for now.
Everyone’s preoccupation now is vaccine passports, which France is already rolling out with a grace period of six weeks.
Here in England, vaccine passports are likely to be rolled out in September not only for nightclubs and music venues but anywhere else that can be deemed as a ‘crowded space’.
Julia Hartley-Brewer interviewed the owner of a group of entertainment venues, who said that this is a ‘very dangerous step’ for the Government to take:
She also interviewed a spokesman for the Night Time Industries Association who says that random security guards will be checking people’s health status, something that should be private information:
It is the thin end of a very nasty wedge, indeed.
Oxford’s Prof Carl Heneghan rightly wonders if he will need a vaccine passport if he takes the Tube in London:
Here’s Julia Hartley-Brewer’s opening editorial on the danger such a policy presents:
She interviewed the Conservative MP, Sir Iain Duncan Smith. He is not one of my favourite politicians by a long shot, but he gave a considered 10-minute interview and said that we need a balance of risk, otherwise we could end up like China, where you cannot leave the house without the government knowing about it:
Lord Sumption wrote an editorial for The Telegraph on Monday. He says that Prime Minister Boris Johnson has no coronavirus plan:
We are squandering our vaccination success, which is the best in Europe. Lord Sumption concludes:
Vaccination is an impressive achievement. It represents the best that humanity can do about Covid. If it is not enough, then there are only two options. One is to impose total and permanent restrictions on human interaction, something which even governments realise is impossible. The other is to recognise defeat and allow their populations to live with Covid-19 – just as humanity had learned to live with worse pathogens for centuries before governments embarked on their current unprecedented and ill-advised experiment.
Bob Moran, a cartoonist for The Telegraph, has been concerned about coronavirus restrictions for a long time.
On Monday, July 12, he tweeted:
He had quite the Twitter thread on Tuesday. Politicians, he says, do not like solving difficult problems:
Yes, but Labour MPs, except for a handful, have actually voted with the Government on continuing coronavirus restrictions.
Moran has no love for Labour leader Sir Keir ‘Keith’ Starmer, either:
Bob Moran is genuinely concerned about what is happening:
Also:
If only we could remove the boot on our collective necks.
The next discussion point in England will be vaccinations for children. Even other conservatives, such as James Delingpole, are sounding the alarm:
I have no words for how awful this is.
Although I’m writing about England, Scotland and Wales are no better with their restrictions. I despair.
Freedom Day did go ahead on Monday, July 19, in England.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson, along with Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Health Secretary Sajid Javid, was told at the weekend to self-isolate. Boris went to Chequers and broadcast from there.
At 5 p.m., Boris gave a remote coronavirus briefing while Prof Jonathan Van-Tam and Sir Patrick Vallance were in the Downing Street press conference room.
Nightclubs
It looks as if Covid passports are coming in September for nightclubs and music venues.
As Dan Wootton said on GB News, Freedom Day will be remembered as the day when the Government took more of our freedoms away:
Note that tweet about the Formula One Grand Prix at Silverstone: no vaccine cards accepted, only the NHS app. No smart phone, no entry. That, to me, is also wrong. The Government should not force people to have smart phones.
GB News took a poll on vaccine passports. They had omitted their earlier question on dictatorship:
Reporter Ellie Costello returned to her favourite nightclub, Faces in Essex. She had a ball. She pulled an all-nighter as she gave this update to the GB News breakfast show. She interviewed the owner of Faces who said he was concerned about his obligation to check vaccine passports in future and the possibility they could be faked:
I hope there are enough Conservative MPs to put pressure on Boris not to go down this route:
Travel
Journalist Isabel Oakeshott spoke to Wootton about the draconian self-isolation one has to go when returning from a nearby country such as France, which is on the Amber list. During that 10-day period, one is not allowed to leave one’s house — at all. Police or a third party representative of the Government can go to a person’s home to make sure he is there:
Supermarkets
Yesterday, on Freedom Day, I did a recce of my high street. Mask wearing was 50/50.
I did not wear a face covering.
I won’t be going to the supermarket until later in the week, so cannot speak to that for now.
However, Guido Fawkes’s readers compared notes on what their Freedom Day experience was like.
One wrote:
… let me report the depressing experience of shopping in Morrisons this morning. Less than 1% unmasked amongst the customers (2 apart from me). Plenty of staff unmasked, though, behind the checkouts. And I could see they were happy, as their smiling faces were visible.
Another Morrisons shopper said (emphasis mine):
I was also in a Morrisons this morning, ignoring the pleas over the tannoy to ‘Be kind and show [you] care’. I decided to be kind to myself and abandon the mask. At first I couldn’t see anyone else unmasked, but finally in the milk aisle there was a guy coming the other way, also unmasked. We smiled at each other and nodded like we had just completed a Freemasonry ritual, and went on our way. I wasn’t challenged and no-one seemed to care, not that I care what they think anyway.
A Tesco shopper wrote in:
I’ve just done my start-of-the-week shop at Tesco: normal crowd levels. Most people are still doing their cleaning routines at the entrance. About 75%, including all at the check-outs, remain masked-up. The other 25% were mainly the twenty-somethings with no fear of Covid, either short or long …
And, finally, there was a report about Sainsbury’s:
Moving goalposts
Presenter Neil Oliver (the bearded gentleman in the video below) appeared on Wootton’s show to say that the Government is controlling the people, when, in fact, this is our country, not theirs.
Wootton pointed out that the Government is continually moving the goalposts in this coronavirus fiasco. Last year, they told us that when we got the vaccines, we would be able to, in Matt Hancock’s words, ‘Cry Freedom!’ Now that we have the vaccines and a majority of the adult population has had the ‘jabs’, we’re still not out of the woods:
In fact, we have less freedom now than we did a year ago.
On the evening of Saturday, June 26, many Britons were relieved that Prime Minister Boris Johnson appointed a new Secretary of State for Health and Social Care so soon after Matt Hancock’s resignation.
Although lockdown supporters say that Sajid Javid has no experience in health, that is why many of us think he is a good choice. He will give the department a fresh pair of eyes and a new perspective, one that isn’t tied to SAGE or ‘our NHS’, which has become a cult religion over the past 16 months (March 2020 – June 2021).
Since the pandemic began, it has become very difficult being able to see a general practitioner (GP) in person.
The Telegraph‘s Ross Clark wrote (emphases mine):
… many patients struggle to get a doctor to see them even at the surgery. Hancock’s vision of us all consulting medical staff via smartphone app doesn’t allow for the fact that, according to Ofcom, only 55 percent of the over-65s – ie those who need the NHS the most – use a smartphone. Even if it did, it ignores the views of cancer specialists who have warned that cancer is often diagnosed via subtle changes in a patient’s appearance – something you can’t capture by uploading a photograph of a spot.
Hopefully, the new health secretary will bring a keen eye to Hancock’s failures and won’t shy away from tackling vested interests so that we can a real doctor, in real life, when we need to.
GB News covered the appointment on their Sunday morning programme:
TalkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer also thought Javid’s appointment was good news:
Mark Harper MP of the Covid Recovery Group (CRG) in Parliament tweeted his congratulations:
The Sunday Times said that Carrie Johnson, who once worked for Javid in government, was influential in getting him the job:
The Mayor of London appeared on Andrew Marr’s show on Sunday to congratulate a fellow son of a bus driver (video here):
This confused Deputy Labour Leader Angela Rayner, who also said ‘fragrant’ instead of ‘flagrant’ in an interview this week:
Later that day, Times journalist Steven Swinford was told that the security camera in Hancock’s former office — now Javid’s — had been turned off:
Monday’s front page of the Telegraph reported a positive outlook from the new Health Secretary:
That morning, Javid gave an interview to Sky News expressing his desire for a quick lifting of coronavirus restrictions:
However, as Guido Fawkes pointed out, Javid has voted with the Government on continuing restrictions (emphasis in the original):
Co-conspirators will be relieved to hear that given hitherto he has voted in favour of every lockdown. Javid also confirmed the notorious camera lurking in his new office has now been disabled, though not by him personally…
Late Monday afternoon, Javid delivered his first statement in Parliament as Health Secretary. Excerpts from Hansard follow, emphases mine.
He stated the positives about the vaccine rollout, beginning with a brief tribute to Hancock:
I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock), who has worked hard throughout all these testing times. He achieved a great amount in the work that he did, and I know that he will have more to offer in public life. I wish him the very best.
There remains a big task ahead of us to restore our freedoms—freedoms that, save in the gravest of circumstances, no Government should ever wish to curtail. My task is to help to return the economic and cultural life that makes this country so great, while, of course, protecting life and our NHS. That task has been made all the more difficult by the delta variant, which we now know makes up some 95% of new cases in the UK. Not only does it spread more easily, but the evidence points to a higher risk of those who have not been vaccinated needing hospital treatment, compared with the previously dominant alpha variant.
This narrowing of the race between the virus and the vaccine led to this Government’s difficult decision to pause step 4 on our road map until 19 July. We are using this extra time to protect as many people as we can. When the Government took that decision on 14 June, more than 4.3 million over-40s had had a first dose but not a second. The figure is now down to 3.2 million people over 40. We can all be reassured by how many more people are getting the life-saving opportunity that a vaccine offers.
At this two-week review point, I want to update the House on our progress on our road map to freedom. Our aim is that around two thirds of all adults in this country will have had both doses by 19 July. We are bringing forward second doses, and bringing forward our target for first doses too, so we can meet that 19 July goal. Vaccine uptake remains sky-high. We have seen that age is no barrier to enthusiasm for getting the jab: as of this weekend, more than half of adults under 30 have taken up the chance to be vaccinated—including, in the past couple of weeks, all three of my own adult children.
Our vaccines are working, including against the delta variant. The latest modelling from Public Health England shows that they have saved more than 27,000 lives and have prevented more than 7 million people from getting covid-19. We know that, after a single dose of vaccine, the effectiveness is lower against the new delta variant, at around a 33% reduction in symptomatic disease, but two doses of the vaccine are just as effective against hospital admission with the delta variant as with the alpha variant.
The jabs are making a difference in our hospitals, too. In January, people over 65 who were vaccinated earlier in our programme made up the vast majority of hospital admissions; the latest data shows that that group now makes up less than a third. While cases now are ticking up, the number of deaths remains mercifully low, and we will continue to investigate how our vaccines are breaking that link between cases, hospitalisations and deaths. I am also encouraged by new data just today from Oxford University’s mix and match trial, which shows that a mixed schedule of jabs, such as getting the AstraZeneca jab first and the Pfizer second, could give our booster vaccination programme more flexibility and possibly even some better immune responses …
I spent my first day as Health Secretary—just yesterday—looking at the data and testing it to the limit. While we decided not to bring forward step 4, we see no reason to go beyond 19 July because, in truth, no date we choose comes with zero risk for covid. We know we cannot simply eliminate it; we have to learn to live with it. We also know that people and businesses need certainty, so we want every step to be irreversible. Make no mistake: the restrictions on our freedoms must come to an end. We owe it to the British people, who have sacrificed so much, to restore their freedoms as quickly as we possibly can, and not to wait a moment longer than we need to.
With the numbers heading in the right direction, all while we protect more and more people each day, 19 July remains our target date. The Prime Minister has called it our terminus date. For me, 19 July is not only the end of the line, but the start of an exciting new journey for our country. At this crucial moment in our fight back against this pandemic, we must keep our resolve and keep on our road map to freedom so that together we can beat this pandemic and build back better. It is a task that I am deeply honoured to lead and one I know will succeed. I commend this statement to the House.
Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth (Lab) responded for the Opposition, pointing out that Javid’s optimism might be misguided:
Can I just say at the outset that, despite our fierce political differences, my dealings with the previous Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock), were always courteous, respectful and professional, and I wish him well in resolving his personal difficulties.
I welcome the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid) to his place and thank him for advance sight of his statement. He will find working with the NHS and social care staff both inspirational and rewarding, and I hope he will agree to make arrangements for them to receive a fair pay rise and not the real-terms pay cut that is currently pencilled in.
Today, the Secretary of State has let it be known that the 19 July reopening will effectively go ahead. He told the news this morning that there is “no going back” and that lifting restrictions will be “irreversible”. A word to the wise: I have responded to a lot of these statements these past 15 months, and I remember Ministers telling us there was “nothing in the data” to suggest that 21 June would not go ahead. I remember children returning to school for one day before the January lockdown. I remember, “It will all be over by Christmas”. I remember, “We will send it packing in 12 weeks”.
Well, we have seen around 84,000 cases in the past week—an increase of around 61%. Today, we have seen the highest case rate since January. If these trends continue, we could hit 35,000 to 45,000 cases a day by 19 July. That will mean more long covid—the Secretary of State did not mention more long covid—and it will mean more disruption to schooling. For some, it will mean hospitalisation, and we know that even after two doses, someone can catch and transmit the virus, so what is he going to do to push infections down? Vaccination will do it eventually, but not in the next four weeks.
I want to see an end to restrictions and our constituents want to see an end to restrictions, but I hope the Secretary of State’s confidence today about 19 July does not prove somewhat premature or even, dare I say it, hubristic. Can he confirm that by “irreversible” he is ruling out restrictions this winter? Has he abandoned the plan that the previous Secretary of State and officials were drawing up for restrictions this winter? …
Javid responded, without addressing possible winter restrictions:
… With all the data I saw yesterday—I sat down and discussed it with the experts and my colleagues—it is very clear that we are heading in the right direction, and I am very confident about that date of 19 July …
Lucy Allan (Con), who has voiced her scepticism about coronavirus restrictions before, asked about the terminus date:
Can my right hon. Friend confirm that 19 July will mark the end of the road map out of lockdown, that “terminus” means the end of the line, not an interchange, and that it is his intention that all restrictions will be lifted on that date?
Javid replied:
… As she will have heard in my statement, it is absolutely our intention to have step 4 commence on 19 July and to remove restrictions and start returning to normal. She asked me specifically about all restrictions, or which restrictions. It is certainly our intention to remove restrictions, but as we follow the data in the coming days, we will set out more in due course.
Jim Shannon (DUP), a staunch Anglican, asked about loosening restrictions on church worship:
… If we are aiming for progression and moving away from restrictions such as the wearing of masks, may I ask when people will be able to attend worship and sit in churches self-distanced, without wearing a mask, just as diners can sit in a restaurant self-distanced without a mask? If we are going to have parity, then I believe that churches should have parity with restaurants.
Javid gave a reassuring reply:
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his remarks. I agree with him that as we move towards removing restrictions and step 4, we should take seriously into account what he said about people attending churches and the restrictions that they currently face. That is certainly my intention.
John Redwood (Con) asked whether Javid would look into improvements in ventilation and cleaning for various types of establishments to improve the air flow. Javid said that he would do so.
Theresa Villiers (Con) also asked about church, specifically singing hymns:
… Now that thousands of people are allowed to gather together at a football match to shout and cheer as much as they want, is it not time that we allowed congregations in church to sing hymns together?
Javid responded positively, which is more than Hancock ever did when asked similar questions:
I can tell my right hon. Friend that that is certainly what I would like to see and it is certainly my intention to allow that to happen as soon as possible. When it does, I hope we can sing a hymn together.
Richard Drax (Con) asked how long it would take before people could see their GPs in person again.
It looks as if Javid will address that issue, which Hancock did not much care about, insisting that phone and video conferences were highly successful:
My hon. Friend has raised an important issue. Even before I had this job, that issue came up again and again when I was a constituency MP just like him, and I absolutely understand it. It has especially been raised by older members of my constituency; people have brought this issue up where they are perhaps not as familiar with technology and they want that face-to-face meeting. I have already asked for advice on that and I will write to him on it, if I may.
Liam Fox (Con) asked for more data to be made public:
… As for the data we get, it is not just about the number of infections—it is about who is infected, what age they are, whether they have pre-existing conditions, and whether they have been offered a vaccine, but have refused. It is not just about hospitalisations and how many people are in hospital. How long have they been hospitalised compared with the figures for previous parts of the pandemic? How many of them require extra care and how many are in intensive care units? We need to understand much better how the Government are reaching their decisions. The British people are not stupid, and Parliament needs to be taken into the Government’s confidence much more. I trust, given the previous examples of how he has conducted himself, that my right hon. Friend can do that.
Javid replied:
… On his important point about data, I saw the data in the Department for the first time yesterday. I saw the detail that it provides and how granular it is. I was impressed with that data, so I can give my right hon. Friend reassurance that the Government are looking at the data, and are absolutely taking it into account. I would also like to find a way to make sure that we can share as much of that data as possible so that others can benefit from it, and I will certainly look at ways in which we can do just that.
Dr Ben Spencer (Con) asked about winter measures:
… Does he share my concerns regarding this winter, when we predict that an increase in covid hospitalisations may be superimposed on normal NHS winter pressures? Can he confirm that plans and preparations are being put in place now to support our NHS in what may be a very difficult winter indeed?
Javid responded in the affirmative:
My hon. Friend is right to raise this issue. I can absolutely confirm that plans are being put in place. A huge amount of work was done by my predecessor and, of course, I will continue that work—just yesterday, I had meetings on winter plans. I can give my hon. Friend the absolute assurance, not just on vaccinations but on dealing with the backlog, that there are plans in place, and in due course I will come to the House and set them out.
Huw Merriman (Con) asked about a return to international travel, especially for those who have had two vaccinations.
Javid said:
First, my hon. Friend will know that, in terms of 19 July and the restrictions that will be removed, we are focusing on domestic restrictions. He knows that, separately, we also take very seriously the border controls, the border restrictions and the so-called traffic light system. In terms of making any further decision on that, he will know that it is kept under constant review on a very regular basis, and it is something that I intend to sit down and discuss with my right hon. Friend the Transport Secretary as soon as I can.
Mark Harper (Con) pressed Javid with a question on winter restrictions:
… I welcome my right hon. Friend’s tone and his intent to get us back to normal, but let me pick up on his earlier answer to our hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer). There are those in government, from documents that I have seen, who are preparing the ground for the return of restrictions in the autumn and the winter. Will he rule out the use of lockdowns and restrictions in the winter as a mechanism for managing covid, and look at alternatives to ensure that the NHS is able to deal with us getting back to normal?
Javid answered:
… I am very happy to meet with him to discuss the issues in more detail and listen to his views. He should know that it is my intention, and the Government’s intention, as I have said from day one on this job, to remove all restrictions as quickly as possible.
Steve Brine (Con) asked about the disruptive self-isolation rules following positive test results, especially for schoolchildren:
… I am looking for a change in policy as much as a change in tone. I return him to the subject of education. Estimates suggest that a quarter of a million children are missing school today due to precautionary isolations, the vast majority of them sequential due to the bubbles that they are caught in. Under the current rules, 10 days of isolation is then unavoidable, even with a negative PCR test. Have our young people not suffered enough? Are we really going to continue to do this to ourselves? Is this not an area, given the availability and reliability of testing now, where I might find the change of policy that I am looking for?
Javid replied:
Other hon. Members have rightly raised this very important issue, and my hon. Friend is right to draw attention to it once again. It is something that I have focused on from day one on the job. That is why I have asked for fresh advice on it. As he knows, that decision was made with the data that was available at the time. Clearly, data is changing all the time, and we must ensure that we keep that under review for exactly the reasons that he has just set out. As I say, I have asked for advice on that and will hopefully be able to say more on it as soon as possible.
This is what journalists and the public picked up from that debate.
The Sun‘s Deputy Political Editor Kate Ferguson tweeted about the terminus date …
… and singing in church:
GB News was a bit more cautious:
The Telegraph‘s Alison Pearson gave Javid five suggestions for improvement, including sacking SAGE and publishing COVID-19 recovery data with the public:
… It was pure speculation by Sage that led to the cancellation of Freedom Day on June 21. Subsequent figures have shown that we are not seeing any sign of hospitalisations for Covid “rocketing” or “surging” as we were warned two weeks ago. On the contrary, NHS England currently has just 1,445 Covid patients (one per cent of all beds). The rolling seven-day average of deaths after a positive test with Covid is 17. Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford, says the vaccines are holding up really well against variants. Asked about the large number of “cases”, he said, “This is trivial, actually. Most who test positive are under 30 and they don’t get very sick.” Sir John is clearly far too sane to qualify as a government adviser. Maybe have a word with him?
As for publishing the recovery data:
Matt Hancock promised he would last summer; the slippery eel never did. We are among the only countries in the world not to trust its people with positive information from which they can calculate their own risk. Please stop infantilising us.
The Telegraph‘s Jeremy Warner has hope that, by working together, Javid and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak can turn this parlous situation around:
Like the new Health Secretary, Sunak has always been at the libertarian end of the debate on lockdown, as he must given his interest in a functioning, tax generating economy. So unusually, we for now have a Chancellor and a Health Secretary who are actually on the same page. The Prime Minister should enjoy the harmony while it lasts. The Treasury and Health department are not natural bedfellows.
On the other hand, Bob Moran, the Telegraph‘s cartoonist and a coronavirus sceptic, was unimpressed:
Someone picked up on ‘Build Back Better’:
However, author Carl Vernon, also a coronavirus sceptic, was positive:
I tend to agree with him.
As Sajid Javid has worked for some of the world’s greatest investment banks, I hope that he will cast a gimlet eye over all of the data and ask probing questions of SAGE when they make recommendations on continuing restrictions.
I wish our new Health Secretary all the best.
Dr Michael Yeadon is a former Vice President of Research for Pfizer. He researched respiratory diseases and allergies for many years.
After he left Pfizer, he co-founded a biotech firm that Novartis later purchased for approximately $325 million.
He is now semi-retired and has been a coronavirus sceptic from the early days of the pandemic in 2020.
For anyone who missed it, this is a video of his speech to those who participated in the Canterbury Freedom Rally on May 15, 2021. It is around 25 minutes long.
Highlights follow.
Contrary to what our governments are telling us via scientific advice, Yeadon said that there is no asymptomatic transmission of the virus, therefore, no masks or lockdowns are needed.
In short, he said, you know you have coronavirus because you are ill.
With regard to PCR tests, he says that those analysing them work in conditions that could possibly contaminate the tests. He said that there is no measure of contamination when analysing PCR tests.
As for the variants, they are with 0.3% of the original COVID-19, making it ‘a lazy virus’.
Contrary to what the UK government says, Yeadon stated that if you are immune or have been vaccinated you will not get the virus and you will not need a top-up vaccine. In his words:
You do not need a third jab.
He has concerns about the vaccines: more people have died from this vaccine in four months than from any other vaccine in that time frame.
Concerning the blood clots that some younger adults have experienced after vaccination, Yeadon said that spike proteins cause coagulation. He added that has been known since 2006 with SARS vaccines. As such, he believes the coronavirus vaccines causing clotting should have been taken off the market.
He then went on to discuss ‘vaccine passports rubbish’. He said that a vaccine passport database is ‘tyrannical’ and fears that it will be misused for a universal identity monitoring system.
He does not know why coronavirus restrictions and authoritarian measures took root so deeply in Western countries. He acknowledges the notion that these measures could be about control or depopulation, but he has no idea:
I don’t know.
He thinks Western nations are in this for the long haul:
This isn’t going to be over soon. They’ll still be going at it months from now.
He encouraged those at the rally to say to their friends and family swept up by coronavirus fear:
It’s simply not true.
He said that people are unknowingly peddling lies about the virus, because T-cells recognise all variants in immune persons.
At that point, he asked members of the audience to chat briefly to each other by choosing someone they didn’t know on one side of them, exchanging contact details. Then he asked them to do the same thing by choosing someone from the other side, again exchanging details. By doing that, they could start to build up a network of acquaintances to oppose continuing restrictions.
Afterwards, he said that this is the first time a vaccine has been given to pregnant women or healthy 25-29 year olds:
I’m pleading with you not to get vaccinated for non-medical reasons.
He added that minors should not be given the vaccine:
That’s just appalling.
He said that the restrictions and lockdown have nothing to do with viruses. He encouraged the audience to persuade people they know. With enough opposition, he thinks the UK government will back down on restrictions.
He then warned:
We’re standing in front of the gates of Hell.
He ended by saying that he has adopted rationality of thought throughout his life, however:
My rational thoughts that I’ve had all my life are no longer working, so whatever your faith is: use it.
That was an incredible admission.
The past 16+ months in the UK have been a huge ‘come to Jesus’ call.
It would be interesting to know how many unknown converts to Christianity there have been during that time.
Unfortunately, we’ll never know.
On Wednesday, June 23, 2021 — the five year anniversary of the Brexit referendum — The Spectator had a good article about how wrong Project Fear’s predictions were.
Excerpts from ‘Five of the worst Remain predictions five years on’ follow (emphases mine).
The sources for these are then-Chancellor George Osborne, the banks, an international accounting firm, then-Prime Minister David Cameron and the EU’s Donald Tusk.
George Osborne
George Osborne and the Treasury peddled three Project Fear disasters: impoverished households, huge job losses and what The Spectator calls a ‘punishment budget’.
On households, using Treasury figures, he predicted that each household in Britain would be poorer by £4,300 in 2030. Even the Remainer BBC had a problem with that. Their fact check said that the figure was:
questionable and probably not particularly helpful.
In reality, the opposite has happened:
records from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show in the five years since that real disposable income per head has risen from £5,177 in the second quarter of 2016 to £5,354 at the end of 2020.
On the jobs front, Treasury figures predicted 500,000 job losses across Britain.
In reality, early in 2020, before coronavirus hit, the employment rate was at a record high:
a million jobs were added by the time Covid hit, with the employment rate for those aged between 16 to 64 rising from 74.5 per cent in June 2016 to 76.6 per cent in January 2020 – the highest level since 1971.
Before the 2016 referendum, Osborne told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the UK would leave the EU with no economic plan, therefore, a punishment budget of higher taxes and public spending cuts would have to be implemented.
In reality, after Cameron resigned at 9:30 a.m. on June 24, 2016, Osborne left his post as Chancellor. Philip Hammond, his successor, said that no such budget would be implemented.
As a result:
Hammond’s first budget was described as a ‘low-key package’ that increased national insurance contributions for the self-employed and enjoyed stronger-than-expected tax receipts since the EU referendum. Britain even finished the year as one of the fastest growing economies in the G7.
The banks
Goldman Sachs predicted a British recession by early 2017.
Nomura and Credit Suisse predicted falls in GDP: 1.3% and 1%, respectively.
JP Morgan predicted that Scotland would leave the Union and create their own currency.
In reality, Scotland is still yearning to break free with no plan on how to do it:
with the British economy growing up until the first quarter of 2020 when Covid struck with 1.7 per cent annual GDP growth in both 2016 and 2017 followed by 1.3 per cent in 2018 and 1.4 per cent in 2019.
Big accounting firm
PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted a loss of up to 100,000 financial services jobs.
EY (Ernst & Young) came closer to the true figure:
Rivals EY estimated last month that PWC’s figure had overestimated such losses by a factor of nine, with just 7,600 going overseas as of March 2021.
Donald Tusk and David Cameron
The EU’s Donald Tusk predicted the loss of:
Western political civilization in its entirety.
David Cameron predicted a Third World War.
In reality:
it appears that the greater threat to the EU is in fact its own leaders, given the ongoing debacle of the vaccine rollout in the face of public dismay. Western political civilisation meanwhile has somehow remained intact.
Ordinary citizens — the 52% who voted to Leave — can discern the situation on the ground better than the experts — our notional betters — can.
Thanks again to all Britons who voted Leave on that rainy, miserable day five years ago.
We’re out and, together as a Union, we are putting the ‘Great’ back into Britain. Our coronavirus vaccine rollout has been spectacular, surpassing the EU’s by a country mile. More great accomplishments for us lie ahead.
When it comes to the EU, better out than in.
Sainsbury’s Chesterfield 9am -ish today.
All screens gone staff scraping up the floor markings and unmasked. 😍
Was worried when I read they “REQUIRED” customers to mask up and had decided that if it was the case to boycott.
They keep my business.