I’ve just been catching up on my Twitter feed and I came across this tweet from a doctor:
I just don’t understand how anyone who has looked after hospitalised Covid patients can look at the vaccines and be like “nah thanks I’m good”
I actually have some sympathy for this medic. I think one of the reasons some doctors have spoken out strongly in favour of all the restrictions and vaccines etc is precisely because they have seen, on a daily basis, some terrible tragic cases.
The problem is that the “evidence” they’re basing their judgements on is anecdotal. They’re not properly assessing the big picture with statements like this. I’m sure it’s heart-breaking to watch people die from covid every day. It must be. I’m sure they want to do everything they can to lessen the impact of this disease. I have no doubt their intentions are good.
It really does seem that the vaccines have reduced hospitalizations and deaths from covid. By how much is debatable, but the UKHSA data (raw, unadjusted) does seem to indicate that the rates of covid death and hospitalizations are higher in the unvaxxed than the vaxxed.
But even the UKHSA take great pains to state there might be a whole bunch of confounders. They provide examples of some, but do not provide any further data to back up their claims. So, for example, they say that vaccinated people may be more likely to socialize because they feel safer. Might be true. Might not be true. It’s just a “finger in the wind” statement with no further data to support it. In my experience it is the vaccinated who are more fearful. All my unvaccinated friends and family are just carrying on as normal as best they can (the proper, 2019, definition of normal). My vaccinated friends and family are a whole lot more cautious and worried. That’s my anecdotal evidence - but I suspect it’s representative.
The data is particularly clear for kids - they are at very, very, very low risk of serious impact from covid. Yet here we see one doctor and the Irish Times suggesting otherwise
The first tweet here is just a crass attempt to scare the living bejeezus out of you. Ridiculous fear porn. Notice also the element of blame being placed on the kids. Stuff like this is twisted and sick and not even remotely connected to reality (OK, we might be able to scour the world and find one instance of where something like this happened, but I’m not very optimistic even then).
The 2nd tweet from the Irish Times is more worrisome. We know the vaccines cause harm. The rise in myocarditis post-vaccination cannot be credibly denied now. That’s just one of a large array of potential harms that have been reported.
Sure, there are people who have died from covid. I have no doubt that their deaths were difficult, and difficult for the doctors to witness. I do not wish to dismiss or diminish these tragedies or experiences.
But to suggest the vaccine benefits for the young far outweigh the risks is preposterous. The NNTV (the number needed to vaccinate to save 1 life) for kids is around 600,000. That’s 599,999 young people taking on a risk (of things like myocarditis) so that 1 might be saved. The risk of myocarditis is far, far higher than 1 in 600,000. Some published work has put it at around 1 in every 3,000 shots.
If that’s true, this means that for every 1 young person saved from covid death you’re giving 200 young people myocarditis.
And again, I stress, that this is just ONE known and uncontroversial side effect. I’m going to re-write the initial tweet from the viewpoint of a doctor who has had to treat people with vaccine side effects:
I just don’t understand how anyone who has looked after hospitalised vaccine-injured patients can look at the vaccines and be like “yeah, give me that booster”
What the doctor in the initial tweet failed to mention are the associated risks. Presumably he thinks they are negligible in comparison to covid risks. I do not. What he is doing is focussing on the narrow slice of medical reality that is covid. Saving people from covid is all that seems to matter these days. Cardiac units could be stacking corpses on beds in their thousands and they would still be urging people to get the Goo to protect them from covid.
This has not been an emergency for young people at all. If you’re 80+ the UK official figures suggest you’re looking at 1 death in every 15 or so infections. That’s pretty serious. But if you’re under 50 you’re at a much lower risk. In England & Wales there have been around 3,800 deaths in the under 50’s (that’s deaths from or with covid). There are about 37 million people under the age of 50 in England & Wales. That’s not really an emergency for this demographic by any stretch of the imagination.
There might be some benefit in vaccinating older or more vulnerable people, but with the protection being so short-lived I’m not at all certain of even that. And even then there’s a more serious issue that has been caused by our ultra-narrow focus on covid.
The correct parameter to gauge effectiveness is not to merely look at one specific illness, but to see whether overall health outcomes are improved. After all, there’s not much point saving someone’s toes if the procedure means you have to amputate the whole leg.
It’s very clear in the initial trial data that the vaccinated arm of the trial had worse health outcomes overall than the placebo arm. The vaccinated fared better in terms of covid alone, but worse in terms of all-cause morbidity. It helped to stop you getting bad covid, but you ended up with other problems. That was a huge safety signal that was blithely ignored.
If you couple that with the worrying indications from the data that the vaccines give some initial temporary protection but then make you more likely to be infected, it doesn’t quite add up to the “no-brainer” the doctor writing the tweet thinks it is.
First, do no Pharm.
How about a doctor who tweets "It's incredibly frustrating to deal with all these hospitalized patients when we could have just treated them early instead?"
If you're 80 and there's a high risk of death from infection, what distinguishes that from a general high risk of death as you are at or above life expectancy?
Years of life lost due to covid, pre vaccination is pretty much zero.
Sadly, many fields of science have been corrupted not just by money but by this dogmatic obsession of supporting the status quo theories, by ignoring data that doesn't fit those theories err narratives.
The contradictions and holes in einstein's quantum theory proofs...
https://youtube.com/channel/UCcSIkt24P3WzN1n07l2C97Q
Virology is fraudulent.
https://drsambailey.com/2022/01/05/why-nobody-can-find-a-virus/
And the IQ of these professions is on average the same as the whole group... Surprised me!
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/dec/13/brain-surgeon-or-rocket-scientist-study-tries-to-find-out-who-is-smarter