We know what we don't know about vaccines and variants

GLOBAL NEWS reporting on Omicron

It is difficult to imagine more irresponsible reporting on the COVID file. Medical people interviewed are unanimous in stating that we don’t know anything about the allegedly new variant other than it exists.

The first rule of finding something you don’t know anything about is to stay silent. We do not need a booster shot of anxiety and fear.

Governments (including Canada) are not helping with half-vast travel bans from a handful of South African nations. If they were serious, they would ban entry by people carrying passports from those nations.

During COVID waves one, two and three, we learned that people carrying COVID or its variants often travel via an intermediate destination or travel across the country once they arrive, either of which spreads the disease.

We are cautioned to wait until more is known about Omicron, but all that happens while we wait is that we get older. As usual, the WHO is responsible for this misinformation mess, claiming it is alarmed by the emergence of the variant while admitting it has little information about it.

COVID first came to light in the fall of 2019. The WHO and Dr. Theresa Tam claimed a low risk to Canadians and advised waiting for further information. In mid-March 2020, alarm bells went off, and we discovered infected people from coast to coast. We lunged into lockdowns and isolation.

The lockdown plan did not work well as governments excepted a few million essential workers. No effort was made to protect them from one another or the public until later, during the ‘second wave.’

Frustrated governments fast-tracked vaccine development, assuring us that once we had about 75% of us vaccinated, we would achieve herd immunity and be reasonably safe from a COVID infection. Many areas met and surpassed the 75% target, but the spread of COVID continued.

We were next told that the spread of infections was in the unvaccinated population, and the unvaccinated were demonized as helping to spread COVID. Our society was split into factions, with those who produced proof of vaccination allowed freedoms denied to the unvaccinated.

Then we were told that the two-dose complete vaccination diminished in strength over time and that booster shots were likely required. Commons sense was drowned out by the ringing of pharma company cash registers. Most of us had thought that the vaccines prompted our bodies to develop COVID antibodies to give us COVID immunity. Apparently, that was not correct.

It now comes to light that COVID is still infecting immunized people. There is allegedly a diminished risk of hospitalization and severe outcomes. However, it put a lie to the phrase “an epidemic of the unvaccinated.” Vaccinated people are also spreading the disease.

The current unrest over the Omicron variant is more unjustified noise designed to keep the fear factor high. It is reasonably clear that COVID science is unreliable, and governments are winging it.

We are navigating uncharted seas with helmsmen drunk with power and lacking the common sense of ordinary people. Medical specialists are all singing from the same score that COVID ignores. We are drowning is a massive industry of COVID experts that has sprung up offering very different views of the disease and how it should deal with it.

Barrels of ink and thousands of feet of video have left us with competing theories that prove that the people advising our governments don’t understand coronavirus variants and how they affect humans. In his later years, Louis Pasteur (died 1895) warned us that his efforts to diminish the virulence of infectious diseases could be used to increase virulence. Pasteur did the first vaccinations to control anthrax and later, rabies, so he understood the topic.  

You have probably never heard of Ignaz Semmelweis. He was a Hungarian physician and scientist who promoted having doctors wash their hands before examining women giving childbirth to prevent the spread of disease. His theory, developed in 1850, was later enhanced by Pasteur, then Lister and became standard medical practice.

Physicians in Semmelweis’ day were strongly resistant to his ideas. They did not consider his theory with open minds. Not much has changed 170 years later.