Tips for Thought (March 2022 edition)

Research Focus

A Reasonable Map for Vaccination Decision-Making

Can reason prevail over fear-mongering and propaganda concerning vaccination decision-making? Here is a reasonable map to frame this decision according to vulnerability and informed consent:

Along with ‘Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes’ : (one of) the shortest poem in US literature isn't difficult to remember...

How Pandemic Management Maximises Spending

Time to learn how pandemic management maximises spending?by mass testing and universal vaccination?(and guess who gets paid):

And a nugget of wisdom by the Enlightenment:

Heard on the news

The Scare and Persuade (and Mandate) Strategy

Dr Gary Sidley argues that 'a civilised society should not strategically frighten, shame and scapegoat its citizens as a way to increase compliance. This deliberate creation of distress resembles the tactics used by regimes to eliminate beliefs and behaviours that the state thinks is deviant.'

He – together with 54 other health professionals – have written an open letter to the UK Public Administration & Constitutional Affairs Committee (a Commons select committee chaired by William Wragg MP) to formally request an independent inquiry into the government's use of covert psychological strategies.

Vaccination passports

Paddy Rawlinson?argues that "vaccines, a burgeoning sector of the industry, are mandated in direct violation of the principle of informed consent. Such policies have provoked suspicion and dissent as critics question the integrity of the state-pharma alliance and its impact on vaccine safety.

However, rather than encouraging open debate, draconian modes of governance have been implemented?to repress and silence any form of criticism, thereby protecting the activities of the state and pharmaceutical industry from independent scrutiny."

"Vaccine mandates can’t end the spread of the virus as effectiveness declines and new variants emerge. So how can they be a sensible policy? Is it sensible to consign tens of millions of people to an indeterminate number of boosters and the threat of job loss if it isn’t clear more doses will stop the spread, either?"

"The sensible approach, based on the available data, is to promote vaccines for the purpose of preventing serious illness. You don’t need a mandate for this — adults can make their own decisions. But mandates will prolong political conflicts over Covid-19, and they are an increasingly unsustainable strategy designed to achieve an unattainable goal," writes Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Florida Surgeon General and associate professor at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, on the WSJ.

Vaccination passports and forced vaccination can't either...

Here is a reasonable map to frame this decision according to vulnerability and informed consent:

Mortality Dynamics

According to official statistics for England and Wales,?covidー19?deaths without involving any pre-existing conditions amount to:

• 2020: 9400 (0-64: 1549 / 65 and over: 7851)
• 2021 Q1: 6483 (0-64: 1560/ 65 and over: 4923)
• 2021 Q2: 346 (0-64: 153/ 65 and over: 193)
• 2021 Q3: 1142 (0-64: 512/ 65 and over: 630)

Therefore, throughout 2020 and the first three quarters of 2021, total deaths from covid alone amount to 17,371, of which:

• 13,597 were 65 or over
• 3,774 were under 65

Total deaths in England and Wales with COVID-19 on the death certificate by September 30, 2021: 143,245 (Source: https://lnkd.in/eDEmTK-9).

This ONS report analyses deaths involving COVID-19 by vaccination status in England between 1 January and 31 October 2021.

Data analysis shows positive effects of vaccination on covid-19 deaths, while finding mixed or puzzling results for non-covid-19 deaths. The latter are attributed to changes in the composition of the age groups over time.

The control for health status on age group "18 to 39 years" confirms higher non-covid-19-mortality for vaccinated people in poorer health conditions, while these mortality rates remain the same for all people in good health, either vaccinated or not (figure 4). This is attributed to the fact that people in poorer health aged 18 to 39 years had been vaccinated first. Further controls for the other age groups were not disclosed.

We are supposedly at war against the virus... In the battlefield between pro- and anti-vax, death of the Hungary's 2000 Olympics gold medal winning gymnast Szilveszter Csollany aged 51 on January 24 took not exception.

The problem is that a third status exists in-between vaccinated and unvaccinated: under-vaccination.

At the time of his death, Mr Csollany was no longer an unvaccinated person. He started the vaccination process early January and then died few weeks later. Indeed he was in the process of reaching the vaccinated status, which is supposed to occur after several weeks from the last dose.

His unfortunate death is then what is labelled an 'adverse event'. The latter may occur when under-vaccination people experience any untoward medical occurrence which may (or not) be related to the vaccination process, including Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) of viral infection.

Adverse events are quite understudied and scarcely addressed by vaccination policies. Taywan makes exception by compensating people who experienced side effects from vaccination.

My last line is for expressing my condolences and sympathy for his family and friends.

Pandemic Management and Policy

Professor Ehud Qimron, head of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Tel Aviv University and one of the leading Israeli immunologists, has written an open letter sharply criticizing the Israeli – and indeed global – management of the coronavirus pandemic.

Dr. Harvey Risch, professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, argues that

"The time has come for [US] states and the federal government to end their Covid declarations of emergency and the accompanying closures, restrictions, propaganda, distancing requirements, forced masking and vaccine mandates. Covid may circulate at some level forever, but Americans can now protect those vulnerable to it with standard medical procedures. They can treat it as they would the flu." (Dr. Harvey Risch, professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health)

Together with late Dr Luc Montagnier, co-winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine, and Dr. Robert Malone, co-inventor of mRNA concepts and processes used in the existing COVID vaccines, Dr. Harvey Risch filed the following two briefs as amici curiae in support of the applicants’ application in view to highlight critical facts concerning Omicron so that the US Supreme Court is not led into error:

Awarded investigative journalists exposed the financial interests of medical experts advising US and UK governments during the covid-19 pandemic.

This BMJ article provides references to their awarded articles, including:

• On vaccine advisory committees: https://lnkd.in/e8-22aeD
• On testing: https://lnkd.in/eknANXdz

When they talk compulsory vaccination (forced vaccination for all is already in place around Europe), they argue about saturation of hospitals. But apparently no one mentions increasing resources for healthcare systems - the direct solution -, or the use of (early) treatments and non-pharmaceutical measures of protection for vulnerable people - the alternative one.

What about market shares, profit margins and financial returns?

• informed-consent-based vaccination of vulnerable people (the old-fashioned model for flu) would make - let's say - 80% of 7 millions (Italy's population share over 75 years old), and the revenues should be shared with doctors who inform and prescribe the vaccine
• compulsory vaccination for all people over 50 years old would make 100% of around 27.5 millions (for Italy, again), more than 4.9 times more, and the revenues remain almost entirely with the big pharma and their shareholders
• compulsory vaccination for all would make 100% of over 59 million (Italy's population in 2021), more than 10.5 times more than the traditional model

Continued boosters every some months for years to come will further assure these multiplied financial rents ...indefinitely.

Mass testing completes the waste of public resources that some are profiting from...

Here an alternative way to forecast both the pandemic evolution and public health policies in 2022.

According to the WSJ report, Pfizer estimated that sales of its antiviral pill Paxlovid will reach about $22 billion while the vaccine will add $32 billion in 2022. That is on top of 2021 sales of $36.8 billion for the vaccine, also known as Comirnaty, the highest annual sales total for any pharmaceutical product. Paxlovid sales totaled $76 million in 2021.

Pfizer said on Friday it had withdrawn an application for emergency-use authorisation of its COVID-19 vaccine in India, after failing to meet the drug regulator's demand for a local safety and immunogenicity study.

Therefore, Pfizer vaccine will not be available in India and China in the near future. Both countries are running their immunisation campaigns using other products.

According to Reuters, the India's drug regulator said on its website its experts did not recommend the Pfizer vaccine because of side effects reported abroad were still being investigated. It also said Pfizer had not proposed any plan to generate safety and immunogenicity data in India.

‘You can argue about everything but numbers’, advertised a French government spot on its vaccination campaign. Two numbers indeed:

• 72,58 million euro is the total cost of Presidential election in 2017 (Source: CNCCFP -?https://www.cnccfp.fr/)
• 3 million euro was the budgeted daily cost of vaccine doses paid to big pharma by France in 2021 (Source: CCSS 2020 Report -https://lnkd.in/g2ZSVZ_g), totaling 1.1 billion euro.

The entire 2017 Presidential election costed less than one month of big pharma revenues accrued through the forced vaccination for all in France.

"Billionaires have had a terrific pandemic. Central banks pumped trillions of dollars into financial markets to save the economy, yet much of that has ended up lining the pockets of billionaires riding a stock market boom," Gabriela Bucher, Oxfam's executive director, said in a press release.

According to Oxfam, billionaires’ wealth has risen more since COVID-19 began than it has in the last 14 years. At $5 trillion dollars, this is the biggest surge in billionaire wealth since records began.?

This WSJ analysis reports on the real estate bubble in US (and elsewhere) but misses the big elephant in the house: the golden rain of public spending by Treasuries and money issuance by Central Banks ...down into the pockets of financial investors

And yes, this is a kind of inflation, that is, a raise in real estate prices.

Time to learn how pandemic management maximises spending (and guess who gets paid):?

Energy crisis and climate realism

'Could this winter’s energy crisis be shocking Europe into climate realism?', asks the WSJ.

Are electric cars good for environment, public health and a good idea after all?

Bjorn Lomborg?doubts it. And he forgets to consider environmental impact of exhausted batteries loaded of heavy metals (hundreds of kilograms for each of them). He is the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

Pandemic Management by Numbers

An UK study inoculated 34 volunteers aged 18-29 years without evidence of previous infection or vaccination with covid-19 virus (SARSCoV-2/human/GBR/484861/2020) intranasally. Only eighteen (~53%) became infected.

Natural immunity defense appears to stand and work well even without prior infection...

"Children are perhaps the most-masked people in America ([and elsewhere], and clearly the people least needing to be masked"

Jeffrey H. Anderson,?president of the?American Main Street Initiative?and former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2017 to 2021, writes on 'the insanity of masking children — by the numbers'.

A insightful comparison between two numbers (and two ways to understand the pandemic diffusion):

• In France, through idiosyncratic mass testing, over the first week of 2022, weekly incidence of so-called 'cases' has been 2800 on 100 000 people (https://lnkd.in/eCUEDi8W),
• This same week, weekly incidence of patients diagnosed with acute respiratory infections including?#covidー19?in community life has been 89 / 100 000 people (https://lnkd.in/eC3s-Be6)

Quite a 31 times divide between mass testing and diagnostic assessment...

When you test positive, are you actually sick?

How much of the vaccine efficacy reported in COVID research is really a measure of survivorship bias coupled with naturally acquired immunity?

This is a critical question which is rarely asked and often hidden by comparative analyses which oppose 'vaccinated' (medicated people surviving some weeks after the second dose or a booster) to the unvaccinated ones ('all the others').

The European Commission is proposing to extend the EU Digital COVID Certificate (passport) by a year, until 30 June 2023. The EU legislation on the EU Digital COVID Certificate neither prescribes nor prohibits the domestic use of EU Digital COVID Certificate (such as for access to events or restaurants). The domestic use of EU Digital COVID Certificates remains a matter for Member States to decide.

A EU Council Recommendation Annex (https://lnkd.in/e96EArrH) points to the 'EU traffic light' indicator, a nudge for Member States which enacts the Europe's scare and persuade (and mandate) strategy.

The 'green' light is based on the number of so-called 'cases' (people who carry viral fragments in their nose), with a threshold by less than 0.4 weighted case rate for 1000 people over the last two weeks. Here the formula:

(C+C*(100-V)/100)/2 = weighted rate

with

• C = ‘14-day case notification rate', that is, the total number of newly notified COVID-19 cases per 100 000 population in the last 14 days at regional level, and
• V = the cumulative uptake of full vaccination with a primary course in the total population at regional level

This instrument pushes for wasteful and useless mass testing (fixed to at least 6 for 1000 people by week), while vaccination uptake is supposed to reduce transmission by one half (this is what 'weighted' implies), notwithstanding evidence that vaccination does not reduce transmission and infection (quite the contrary, apparently).

The obsession with tests, repeated vaccine doses (boosters), and mandates is now expected to go on by end June 2023 in Europe.

Misleading numbers drive unhealthy public policies:?