To reiterate. The mRNA shots don’t stop infection or transmission, we don’t know whether they interfere with the development of durable immunity post-infection, and whether the next variant is deadlier than Omicron is “mostly a matter of luck.”
Politically, none of this matters at the moment. The people who pushed the shots – in other words every Western government and the entire public health establishment and media – have zero incentive to admit that the roulette wheel is still spinning.
And not unrelated…
The events of the past two years have been a wake-up call to those of us who naïvely believed our liberties were more or less secure under Western democracy. We discovered that a viral epidemic with an estimated Infection Fatality Rate somewhere in the range of 0.15-0.3% was sufficient for governments to claim the power to lock citizens up in their homes, prohibit citizens from taking walks in the park, tell citizens how many visitors they could have in their homes, shut down religious worship indefinitely, and order mass closures of businesses, all “for our own good.”
If all of this can happen once, it can surely happen again, especially if we are hit by another global crisis, be it global warming, terrorism, a global recession, an energy crisis, or a food shortage.
And if the crisis is not quite severe enough to convince citizens to renounce their liberties, governments can apparently count on the support of an uncritical media to stoke up people’s anxieties and fears, priming them for more “emergency” interventions and ever more illiberal restrictions on their property, life, and mobility.
Governments have restricted a wide range of civil liberties during the pandemic on the basis of unsubstantiated doomsday predictions, highly unorthodox methods of disease control, and hardly any serious consideration of the likely harms such restrictions would inflict on citizens and on our way of life. Future governments could exploit this dangerous precedent in a future crisis, whether real or manufactured, especially if the media jump on board to drum up some public hysteria.
be it global warming, terrorism, a global recession, an energy crisis, or a food shortage.
What is really worrying is the Four Horsemen are (and always have been) a dressage team. Almost all of those can be linked in various ways. Energy crisis and recession are the most obvious but then there is energy crisis causes a fertilizer crisis which causes food shortages which may lead to terrorism which leads to greater crack-downs on free movement which…
I live in the leafy suburbs of South Manchester (sort of). My local Tesco (a very big one) didn’t have lettuce the last time I was there. It has a gas staion which for a fortnight has a placard up saying, “No diesel”.
Part of me feels an existential dread that I never felt through the Cold War (I was born in ’73 for reference). Most of me thinks, “Fuck it!” and lights a cheroot.
The potential energy crisis and all the other problems that it could cause is entirely the fault of western governments. They have created it deliberately while supposedly trying to solve the non existent problem of climate change. It is interesting to note that the only solutions being applied are the ones that don’t actually work.
If it doesn’t protect the person receiving it from being affected by the virus or transmitting the virus it ain’t a vaccine*. If it limits the severity of the disease then at best it is a “treatment”.
It is not a vaccine.
* – or leastways a piss poor one
At best, it’s a prophylactic treatment. Yet the hysterical demonising of those who chose not to have it to the point of accusing us of not caring about other people when it doesn’t protect other people was mass psychosis in action.
Oddly enough, I haven’t caught it (yet) and no one that I am aware of has caught it from me despite being one of the unclean.
@Longrider:
Agreed. At best what is being injected into people is a prophylactic.
That makes you a “COVIRGIN” 🙂
As any fule no,
The media didn’t “jump on board” to drum up public hysteria.
The media were a very well remunerated, screeching & finger pointing, part & parcel of the project.
Those reptiles that acceded to involvement should be named, shamed & completely disregarded in future
As I recall, the UK Government (in the form of Public Health England) leapfrogged over big industry to become the single largest purchaser of advertising, shortly after Covid appeared.
With regard to the role of the media in the Covid hysteria (and their backing of everything the State did, indeed demanding they did even more) am I right in thinking in the UK that Ofcom had threatened all the MSM outlets with sanctions if they didn’t toe the State line? I seem to remember reading such allegations early on in the crisis, but no one ever seemed to mention it again. Did I imagine it, or is it one of those ‘even mentioning the existence of the D notice is a crime’ things?
Today it was announced that the biggest advocate for vaccination, the most implacable opponent of anti-vaxers, and the most vaccinated person in the history of medicine, Nancy Pelosi, has been diagnosed with Covid. I wish her a speedy recovery. However, I find it impressive that those on her side of the issue brushed over it as if there was nothing to see here. One has to be impressed by the almost boundless resources of chutzpah these people have.
In terms of the broader question, I am reminded of Rahm Emmanuel’s statement “Never let a good crisis go to waste”*, I think it actually misses the point. Because why wait till the caprice of fortune brings you such opportunity when you can create your own crisis out of thin air?
And why? Well I think at its root it comes down to this: society probably needs a little government, but for the most part we can all get along just fine without them. Politicians are perfectly fine with being reviled, criticized or judged, but the one thing that they can’t stomach is to be ignored. So this whole “we can get along perfectly well without them” is something they loathe, and so they will do anything to stick their nose into our business, or gin up something that ruins the peaceful enjoyment of our lives just so that we notice them. Just so that we consider them important.
* Though there are some who suggest that Churchill was the first to say this.
Re lockdown, we shouldn’t forget the deleterious effects of the young, whether uncaring or deliberate ( Enough child development types warned of the dangers)
“Babies “Struggling with Facial Expressions” After Months of Lockdowns and Masks, Says Ofsted”
See here.
For once I am fairly optimistic.
I do not think the people will tolerate another lockdown or other such. I do not believe that such measures will be imposed. Although Mr Johnson has refused to admit that the lockdown was a terrible mistake (it did NOT save lives) – and has “refused to rule out” another lockdown.
As for the endless injections “vaccination” (as people above have pointed out – by the old definition these are not vaccines) – well they may indeed reduce the severity of the disease, but the injections (especially of the American products) have their own dangers – especially to young men.
People can not continue to be injected with such powerful things again-and-again – some people are now on their 4th injection. The short and long term effects of all this are very worrying.
We need to go over to the old definition of Herd Immunity (by the old medical dictionaries) – T Cell resistance from most people who have had this disease.
With proper EARLY TREATMENT for people in vulnerable groups who are hit by the disease.
I know I always “bang on” about Early Treatment – but the systematic smearing of Early Treatment (the PRETENCE that it did not work – in order to get Emergency Authorisation for the injection products) was the worst medical scandal of my life time.
Vast numbers of people died – people who could have saved by Early Treatment.
“… society probably needs a little government, but for the most part we can all get along just fine without them.”
Absolutely agree. Politicians poking their noses into things that they know nothing about causes endless harm and we get charged a fortune for the privilege. More and more government is driven by a ratchet effect though, who among them is going to vote himself out of work so that he has to go out and get a real job, doing something productive.
“I do not think the people will tolerate another lockdown or other such.”
I don’t know, I’m still seeing a lot of masks about. I see these as an indicator of ignorance and sheep like conformity. I suppose that it depends whether there are enough of them.
“
“What comes next?”
Thats easy. Significantly vaccinated populations (ie the West mainly) will suffer repeated waves of covid (and other) infections. Not just an annual winter wave as with other respiratory illnesses, but at any time of year. New variants will emerge constantly in the West, and sweep through the vaccinated population. With a bit of luck the variants will not be more severe than current ones, but there is no guarantee a significantly more fatal one will not emerge. Its all chance. However even if the variants are mild, they will become massively more infectious, particularly to the vaccinated, due to natural selection favouring strains that can evade the Wuhan spike protein antibody response, such that the vaccinated will get multiple infections per year. This will deplete their immune systems, and mean they easily catch other infections as well. Its entirely possible we will see a significant number of deaths in people who have succumbed to a nominally mild variant, or even other mild respiratory diseases, because they just don’t have the immune response to throw it off.
None of this will affect largely unvaccinated populations as these Western variants will be selected to evade the vaccine response, not natural immunity. Thus poor countries will escape this – their natural immunity and layered natural immune response to different variants will protect them.
There is nothing that can be done to stop this process, its set in stone. The only thing we can do is stop vaccinating people, as that undoubtedly weakens overall immune response even more with each shot. The big question is whether the immune system of the vaccinated will improve over time if they stop taking boosters, or its a permanent impairment. In the meantime we will just have to slog our way though whatever is coming our way. We made our bed with the shots, now we must take whats coming as a result. We thought they were a magic bullet that would allow us to sidestep covid in a Matrix style, it turns out we’d have been better letting nature take its course from the beginning.
Time to replace the vax-certificates with NoVax-certificates.
@ bobby b. – I have a T-shirt with a picture of two glasses of bourbon (Colonel E. H. Taylor Single Barrel) and two beers (Old Nation M-43) and the slogan “I’ve had my shots – and my boosters!”. Suggest you search for something similar.
On a serious note – and bearing mind always that I got my epidemiology degree off a cornflakes box – I am starting to think that Jim has the right way of it. It’s not looking too good for the vaccinated.
And – I saw where Nancy Pelosi tested positive for the virus, and – well, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh yourself silly. After a year and a half of having to listen to that schoolmarmy, hectoring bitch, wagging her finger and lecturing the rest of us on her ideas of what’s good for us, all the while ignoring the restrictions she demanded for us whenever it suited her – the comeuppance is sweet indeed. I don’t hope for her death – that would be vicious and cruel indeed, and like that not I are – but I sincerely hope she gets good and sick, so that she gets to suffer a bit. To paraphrase Bonasera – let her suffer, as we have suffered.
llater,
llamas