The World Health Organization (WHO), and the growing pandemic preparedness industry sponsoring it, have faced considerable challenges in maintaining support for its COVID-19 response.
It has addressed this difficult situation with simple and uniform messaging. The compliance thus achieved by WHO has been vital to the successful wealth concentration of the COVID-19 response, benefiting its major sponsors but also the army of global health staff who have remained obedient throughout.
Threatening this progress, a skeptical minority within the public sphere have been using evidence and rational argument to undermine the pandemic industry’s potential. As the pandemic preparedness and response narrative is poorly defensible on rational criteria, such criticism and opposition must be dealt with and dismissed by other means.
This is being achieved through the creation of a dogma around mass COVID-19 vaccination sufficiently separated from reality as to render the normal processes of debate irrelevant. If the gap between pandemic messaging and reality can be kept sufficiently wide, few passengers can step off, and this lucrative gravy train becomes unstoppable.
Most people want to be safe – and to achieve industry aims, the public must be convinced that others, not just themselves, are the key to their personal safety. They must support the blame or coercion being applied to these others. But the brilliance of ‘No one is safe, until everyone is safe’ is not just in its appeal to self-preservation and its divisiveness, but in its simple stupidity.
For the slogan to be true, the vaccine must be transmission-blocking only. It must not protect the vaccinated individual. Otherwise, their safety will not be dependent on the vaccination of others. However, the WHO and its partners also claim that “COVID-19 vaccines provide strong protection against serious illness, hospitalization and death.” Therefore, in promoting its ‘No one is safe’ slogan, WHO staff must collectively proclaim a lie. This builds loyalty and cohesion, as a lie is more easily maintained within a like-minded group.
To be ‘safe’ from a virus, one must either be intrinsically at very low risk (as most people are to most viruses) or gain immunity.
‘Intrinsic low risk’ created a huge problem for the mass-vaccination narrative early in the COVID-19 outbreak, as data from China showed the very strong skew of severe COVID-19 towards old age, and association with certain comorbidities. Most people are clearly at minimal risk. This had to be suppressed to enable mass-vaccination – all must consider themselves at risk. Public health agencies and their corporate backers even proclaimed impending catastrophe for the people of sub-Saharan Africa, more than half of whom are under 20 years of age. The use of age-based disease metrics, standard for disease-burden assessments up to 2019, were put aside and ‘COVID-19’ mortality reported as raw mortality numbers only.
Immunity presents a problem, as it is both the pathway through which vaccines work, and the way we naturally gain protection. Immunity makes us safe, but Pharma-independent immunity is useless to investors. While a safe vaccine would be preferable to a dangerous virus, once infection has occurred the gain from vaccination is minimal. This poses an immediate threat to profits and share price.
The response to this dilemma included one of history’s more ludicrous statements from a global institution, when the WHO modified its herd immunity definition to only recognize immunity resulting from pharmaceutical intervention. This is nonsense to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of immunology, and of course the WHO’s staff have at least rudimentary knowledge.
Inevitably, SARS-CoV-2 has continued spreading, including from the vaccinated. Based on serology from Africa, India and the USA, and the highly transmissible Omicron variant, we can now be confident that nearly all the world’s population have post-infection immunity.
It is no biological surprise that immunity gained from these whole-virus respiratory tract infections reduces disease severity more effectively than injection with spike-protein or its mRNA precursors. Claiming that mass vaccination still has public health relevance in these populations requires both abandonment of logic, and a willingness to dispense with decades of prior scientific learning. It requires acceptance of dogma.
A final component of the COVAX strategy, to lock in celebrity support and enable those promoting the vaccine to still feel virtuous, is ‘vaccine equity.’ People in rich countries are having boosters whilst many of the ‘global poor’ still await their first doses. The lack of plausible benefit to be obtained from these doses, and the requirement of coercion to attain high coverage, is irrelevant – inequity in vaccine distribution just must be ‘bad.’
Whilst pushing more boosters on high income markets, the same Pharma companies can look good by demanding vaccine equity, advocating for the ‘disadvantaged.’ In reality this diverts resources from areas of greater need, thereby killing more children, but such fine print will never make the front pages. Commodity equity expands markets and provides returns, while health equity does not. Fear of being vilified as anti-equity helps keep skeptics quiet.
