Covid-19 vax wars refuse to go away
Disinformation/misinformation have a thousand faces to the detriment of all
If you are confused over the dilemma of “to vax or not to vax” you’re one of the tens of millions of people across the globe who literally do not know what, and who, to believe. And confusion fuels resistance to accepting the vaccine that offers a decisive shield against dying if you become sick and require hospitalization.
History registers similar conundrums ever since vaccinations became the most effective preventative weapon against fatal diseases. The Covid-19 pandemic is unique in its virulence and spread as to make it an extremely dangerous threat to global health, economy, and social stability. If an unvaccinated person contracts the disease he/she becomes candidate for severe complications which, almost always, translate into ICU death by asphyxiation.
Vaccination resistance isn’t new; it has pestered societies ever since effective, and death-preventing, vaccines became widely available. The polio vaccine, for example, developed in the 1950s, became unique in its acceptance by parents desperate to shield their offspring from death or permanent disability if contracting the disease. Polio has thus been reduced by 99 pc and “[it] survives only among the world's poorest and most marginalized communities, where it stalks the most vulnerable.” According to US data, smallpox, another mass killer, was eradicated in 1977 enabling “the discontinuation of prevention and treatment efforts, including routine vaccination.”
The Covid-19 antivax movement has burgeoned via traditional hesitancy based on religion, libertarian scepticism of government authority and state powers, and the wild spread of conspiracy theories via the curse of our times i.e. the online free-for-all that upends even the most well-intentioned proof that the vaccine is not the handiwork of a global dark conspiracy of the Jews, big pharma, and globalist corporate powers.
The latest earth-shattering “proof” antivaxxers are trumpeting across the Web is a recently issued paper by a Harvard professor “that proves covid vaccines are ineffective.”
That the author of the paper, a professor of population health and geography (that is, a social scientist and not a medical professional, immunologist, computational chemistry expert, or any other authority in combating diseases via medical/bio-chemical means) has rejected the antivaxxers claim that his paper “proves” we don’t need the vaccine has had no impact upon those who sped tο triumphantly announce the world does not/does not need this insidious jab undermining the survival of the global community.
This confusing hubbub has been further fueled by another Harvard professor, Martin Kulldorff, this one a medical expert, who has resorted to that other current plague of society, Twitter, to tell us it is better to catch the lethal bug and thus acquire strong natural immunity—a fact that makes vaccine mandates “scientific nonsense [and thus] discriminatory and unethical.”
Conveniently, however, the good professor sidelines the steep risk of dying of the disease, if having no defense against covid complications, something that places him firmly in the camp of those who, from the very outset of the pandemic, claimed the disease is a “mild copy” of the seasonal flu which, in turn, has led to “…vastly overestimating the death rate for COVID-19.”
Those already dead because of anti-vaxxism, I believe, are looking down from the clouds and wishing they could bash the good professor on the head with some of the heavier tomes in his library.
The more we are bamboozled by the “hesitant” the more we sink in a rather apocalyptic predicament.
Long readings below.
Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States
Vaccines currently are the primary mitigation strategy to combat COVID-19 around the world. For instance, the narrative related to the ongoing surge of new cases in the United States (US) is argued to be driven by areas with low vaccination rates [1]. A similar narrative also has been observed in countries, such as Germany and the United Kingdom [2]. At the same time, Israel that was hailed for its swift and high rates of vaccination has also seen a substantial resurgence in COVID-19 cases [3]. We investigate the relationship between the percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases across 68 countries and across 2947 counties in the US.
A Harvard Study Is Going Viral Among Anti-Vaxxers. The Author Says They Are All Wrong.
New research backing vaccines is being twisted to smear them.
Anti-vaxxers say they’ve found a smoking gun: a new blue-chip paper that proves COVID vaccines are ineffective.
The vaccine “doesn’t stop you from getting [COVID] at all,” claimed Daniel Horowitz, a senior editor at the Blaze, in a tweet promoting a column he wrote trumpeting the research. The headline: “Harvard researcher finds absolutely no correlation between vax rates and COVID cases globally.” Supporters of Horowitz’s perspective tweeted the piece and posted it on Facebook, where it received more than 4,000 interactions, including 2,600 shares, according to data from CrowdTangle, the Facebook-owned analytics company.
Alas, there’s just one problem for Horowitz and company: S.V. Subramanian, the Harvard professor of population health and geography behind the paper, says the vaccine doubters are completely wrong.
“That conclusion is misleading and inaccurate,” Subramanian told me of Horowitz’s Blaze column over email. “This paper supports vaccination as an important strategy for reducing infection and transmission, along with hand-washing, mask-wearing, and physical distancing.”
Natural immunity offers better COVID protection than vaccine, Israeli study finds
Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff said the conclusion undermines the case for vaccine passports.
A new study out of Israel on the efficiency of COVID vaccines compared to natural immunity has weakened the argument for vaccine passports, according to a Harvard University epidemiologist.
“Prior COVID disease (many working class) provides better immunity than vaccines (many professionals),” Harvard Medical School’s Professor Martin Kulldorff wrote on Twitter Friday, “so vaccine mandates are not only scientific nonsense, they are also discriminatory and unethical.”
He was commenting on a study published on August 24 by Israeli researchers who found that “natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2” when compared to people who had received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. It looked at over 670,000 individuals, both vaccinated and unvaccinated.
Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated: Europe’s Covid Culture War
In pockets of Europe, vaccine resistance has become the long tail of the populist nationalist movements that shook up European politics for a decade.
Sven Müller is proudly unvaccinated. He thinks Covid vaccines are neither effective nor safe but a way to make money for pharmaceutical companies and corrupt politicians who are taking away his freedom.
Under state rules to stem coronavirus infections, he is no longer allowed to go to restaurants, to the bowling alley, to the cinema or to the hairdresser. From next week, he will be barred from entering most shops, too. But that has only strengthened his resolve.
“They can’t break me,” said Mr. Müller, 40, a bar owner in the town of Annaberg-Buchholz, in the Ore Mountain region in the eastern state of Saxony where the vaccination rate is 44 percent — the lowest in Germany.
Mr. Müller personifies a problem that is as sharp in some parts of Europe as it is in the United States. If Germany had red and blue states, Saxony would be crimson. In places like this, pockets of unvaccinated people are driving the latest round of contagion, filling strained hospital wards, putting economic recoveries at risk and sending governments scrambling to head off a fourth wave of the pandemic.
Even as studies show that vaccination is the most effective way to prevent infection — and to avoid hospitalization or death if infected — persuading those who are deeply skeptical of vaccines has proved all but impossible. Instead, Western European governments are resorting increasingly to thinly veiled coercion with a mixture of mandates, inducements and punishments.