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COVID-19

CDC Quietly Admits to Covid Policy Failures

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7 minute read

From the Brownstone Institute

BY Harvey RischHARVEY RISCH 

Instead of admitting policy error that the Covid vaccines do not much control virus spread, our public health administration doubled down, attempting then to compel vaccination on as many more people as could be threatened by mandates.

In so many words—and data—CDC has quietly admitted that all of the indignities of the Covid-19 pandemic management have failed: the masks, the distancing, the lockdowns, the closures, and especially the vaccines; all of it failed to control the pandemic.

It’s not like we didn’t know that all this was going to fail, because we said so as events unfolded early on in 2020, that the public health management of this respiratory virus was almost completely opposite to principles that had been well established through the influenza period, in 2006. The spread of a new virus with replication factor R0 of about 3, with more than one million cases across the country by April 2020, with no potentially virus-sterilizing vaccine in sight for at least several months, almost certainly made this infection eventually endemic and universal.

Covid-19 starts as an annoying, intense, uncomfortable flu-like illness, and for most people, ends uneventfully 2-3 weeks later. Thus, management of the Covid-19 pandemic should not have relied upon counts of cases or infections, but on numbers of deaths, numbers of people hospitalized or with serious long-term outcomes of the infection, and of serious health, economic, and psychological damages caused by the actions and policies made in response to the pandemic, in that order of decreasing priorities.

Even though numbers of Covid cases correlate with these severe manifestations, that is not a justification for case numbers to be used as the actionable measure, because Covid-19 infection mortality is estimated to range below 0.1% in the mean across all ages, and post-infection immunity provides a public good in protecting people from severe reinfection outcomes for the great majority who do not get serious “long-Covid” on first infection.

Nevertheless, once the Covid-19 vaccines were rolled out, with a new large wave of the Delta strain spreading across the US in July-August 2021 even after eight months of the vaccines taken by half of Americans, instead of admitting policy error that the Covid vaccines do not much control virus spread, our public health administration doubled down, attempting then to compel vaccination on as many more people as could be threatened by mandates. That didn’t work out too well as seen when the large Omicron wave hit the country during December 2021-January 2022 in spite of some 10% more of the population getting vaccinated from September through December of 2021.

A typical mandate example: in September 2021, Washington Governor Jay Inslee issued Emergency Proclamation 21-14.2, requiring Covid-19 vaccination for various groups of state workers. In the proclamation, the stated goal was, “WHEREAS, COVID-19 vaccines are effective in reducing infection and serious disease, and widespread vaccination is the primary means we have as a state to protect everyone…from COVID-19 infections.” That is, the stated goal was to reduce the number of infections.

What the CDC recently reported (see chart below), however, is that by the end of 2023, cumulatively, at least 87% of Americans had anti-nucleocapsid antibodies to and thus had been infected with SARS-CoV-2, this in spite of the mammoth, protracted and booster-repeated vaccination campaign that led to about 90% of Americans taking the shots. My argument is that by making policies based on number of infections a higher priority than ones based on the more serious but less common consequences of both infections and policy damages, the proclaimed goal of the vaccine mandate to reduce spread failed in that 87% of Americans eventually became infected anyway.

In reality, neither vaccine immunity nor post-infection immunity were ever able fully to control the spread of the infection. On August 11, 2022, the CDC stated, “Receipt of a primary series alone, in the absence of being up to date with vaccination* through receipt of all recommended booster doses, provides minimal protection against infection and transmission (3,6). Being up to date with vaccination provides a transient period of increased protection against infection and transmission after the most recent dose, although protection can wane over time.” Public health pandemic measures that “wane over time” are very unlikely to be useful for control of infection spread, at least without very frequent and impractical revaccinations every few months.

Nevertheless, infection spread per se is not of consequence, because count of infections is not and should not have been the main priority of public health pandemic management. Rather, the consequences of the spread and the negative consequences of the policies invoked should have been the priorities. Our public health agencies chose to prioritize a failed policy of reducing the spread rather than reducing the mortality or the lockdown and school and business closure harms, which led to unnecessary and avoidable damage to millions of lives. We deserved better from our public health institutions.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

  • Harvey Risch

    Harvey Risch, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a physician and a Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine. His main research interests are in cancer etiology, prevention and early diagnosis, and in epidemiologic methods.

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COVID-19

Former Australian state premier accused of lying about justification for COVID lockdowns

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Daniel Andrews, Premier of Victoria

From LifeSiteNews

By David James

Monica Smit said she is launching a private criminal prosecution against Daniel Andrews based on ‘new evidence proving they enforced lockdowns without medical advice or evidence.’

The fiercest opponent of the former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews during the COVID crisis was activist Monica Smit. The government responded to her advocacy by arresting her for participating in anti-lockdown protests. When she refused to sign her bail conditions she was made, in effect, a political prisoner for 22 days.  

Smit subsequently won a case against the Victoria Police for illegal imprisonment, setting an important precedent. But in a vicious legal maneuver, the judge ensured that Smit would be punished again. She awarded Smit $4,000 in damages which was less than the amount offered in pre-trial mediation. It meant that, despite her victory, Smit was liable for Victoria Police’s legal costs of $250,000. It was not a good day for Australian justice. 

There is a chance that the tables will be reversed. Smit has announced she is launching a private criminal prosecution against Andrews and his cabinet based on “new evidence proving they enforced lockdowns without medical advice or evidence.”

The revelation that the savage lockdown policies made little sense from a health perspective is hardly a surprise. Very little of what happened made medical sense. For one thing, according to the Worldometer, about four-fifths of the people who tested positive for COVID-19 had no symptoms. Yet for the first time in medical history healthy people were treated as sick.  

The culpability of the Victorian government is nevertheless progressively becoming clearer. It has emerged that the Andrews government did not seek medical advice for its curfew policies, the longest in the Western world. Andrews repeatedly lied when he said at press conferences that he was following heath advice. 

David Davis, leader of the right wing opposition Liberal Party, has made public a document recording an exchange between two senior health officials. It shows that the ban on people leaving their homes after dark was implemented without any formal input from health authorities. 

Davis acquired the email exchange, between Victorian chief health officer Brett Sutton and his deputy Finn Romanes, under a Freedom of Information request. It occurred two-and-a-half hours after the curfew was announced. 

Romanes explained he had been off work for two days and was not aware of any “key conversations and considerations” about the curfew and had not “seen any specific written assessment of the requirement” for one. 

He added: “The idea of a curfew has not arisen from public health advice in the first instance. In this way, the action of issuing a curfew is a mirror to the State of Disaster and is not occurring on public health advice but is a decision taken by Cabinet.” Sutton responded with: “Your assessment is correct as I understand it.” 

The email exchange, compelling evidence of the malfeasance of the Andrews government, raises further questions. If Smit’s lawyers can get Andrews to respond under oath, one ought to be: “If you were lying about following medical advice, then why were you in such a hurry to impose such severe measures and attack dissenters?” 

It remains a puzzle. Why did otherwise inconsequential politicians suddenly turn into dictatorial monsters with no concern for what their constituents thought?  

The most likely explanation is that they were told it was a biowarfare attack and were terrified, ditching health advice and applying military protocols. The mechanism for this was documented in a speech by Queensland senator Malcolm Roberts.  

If so, was an egregious error of judgement. As the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed, 2020 and 2021 had the lowest level of respiratory diseases since records have been kept. There was never a pandemic. 

There needs to be an explanation to the Australian people of why they lost their liberty and basic rights. A private prosecution might achieve this. Smit writes: “Those responsible should face jail time, nothing less. The latest revelation of ‘document 34‘ is just the beginning. A public criminal trial will expose truths beyond our imagination.”

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2025 Federal Election

Conservatives promise to ban firing of Canadian federal workers based on COVID jab status

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The Conservative platform also vows that the party will oppose mandatory digital ID systems and a central bank digital currency if elected.

Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party’s 2025 election platform includes a promise to “ban” the firing of any federal worker based “solely” on whether or not they chose to get the COVID shots.

On page 23 of the “Canada First – For A Change” plan, which was released on Tuesday, the promise to protect un-jabbed federal workers is mentioned under “Protect Personal Autonomy, Privacy, and Data Security.”

It promises that a Conservative government will “Ban the dismissal of federal workers based solely on COVID vaccine status.”

The Conservative Party also promises to “Oppose any move toward mandatory digital ID systems” as well as “Prohibit the Bank of Canada from developing or implementing a central bank digital currency.”

In October 2021, the Liberal government of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced unprecedented COVID-19 jab mandates for all federal workers and those in the transportation sector. The government also announced that the unjabbed would no longer be able to travel by air, boat, or train, both domestically and internationally.

This policy resulted in thousands losing their jobs or being placed on leave for non-compliance. It also trapped “unvaccinated” Canadians in the country.

COVID jab mandates, which also came from provincial governments with the support of the federal government, split Canadian society. The shots have been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects, such as death, including in children.

Many recent rulings have gone in favor of those who chose not to get the shots and were fired as a result, such as an arbitrator ruling that one of the nation’s leading hospitals in Ontario must compensate 82 healthcare workers terminated after refusing to get the jabs.

Beyond health concerns, many Canadians, especially Catholics, opposed the injections on moral grounds because of their link to fetal cell lines derived from the tissue of aborted babies.

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