Wow it quickly gets complicated.
My wife and I were in Italy celebrating Christmas 2019 with my mother in law when we first became aware of Covid-19. The news reports from China were alarming. I also recall British Expats were pressuring the Govt to fly them home. I often wonder where those same expats have chosen to ride out the Covid-19 pandemic.
We were both ill in late February with a rough cold and flu symptoms, which evolved into a hacking cough that just lingered. We have no way of knowing what that was but often consider whether it was a mild bout of Covid. We acknowledge if this was a mild case of Covid we were very lucky.
Some background that influences my thinking. Professionally, I have worked with small businesses and Corporate organisations including IBM. I understand a bit about modelling and how decisions are made in a Corporate context. I am particularly familiar with getting solutions accepted into a delivery organisation, the use of circular arguments and providing just enough information to get an approval. I am of the opinion that Corporate organisations have a collective IQ which is considerably lower than average. This collective dumbness leads to a systemic predilection for “one size fits all” or what I might describe as Big Levers.
Around 2006 a relative was hit by HLH, an autoimmune disease that effectively attacks the central nervous system. At that time the medics were working on limited knowledge. Unfortunately the condition came back 2 years ago. Over a period of 12 years the amount of research around HLH has been significant. There are some really brilliant people working at the best hospitals in the world, and at no time have they said they fully understand what is going on. Happily, having undertaken a bone marrow transplant the person in question is doing well rebuilding an immune system. I mention this to highlight that the immune system is complex, and a lot is not understood. That is not because the medics are lacking but to recognise that the immune system is a complex work of evolutionary wonder.
Lockdowns
My primary way of keeping fit is cycling, riding around 6,000km annually. My response to the initial call for a “3 week Lockdown to flatten the curve”, was to stop going out on my bike in favour of a stationary bike in my Garage. In my own mind in the unlikely event that I fell off my bike, I couldn’t justify calling an Ambulance.
I joined the local Whatsapp Group and witnessed a supportive forum, particularly delivering meals to someone with Covid. There was some unease with the seeming enjoyment being in self imposed prison, which I didn’t share.
I have never been comfortable or derived any pleasure in any aspect of the lockdown despite that fact that I have been relatively comfortable working from home.
I am sympathetic to the small business, and the people who simply couldn’t stay at home. I was uneasy about the Doorstep bashing pans on a Thursday night to support the NHS. I generally resist the infantilization of the language and casual use of superlatives such as “awesome” to describe average performance. Calling someone a hero doesn’t come easy to me.
The designation of “Essential Workers” was a toxic, naive and misguided idea that could only emanate from a Government with little appreciation of the delicate fabric of a society.
We quickly discovered that the Imperial college modellers do not have a great track record in building models. Irrespective of their level of competence it was clear that lockdown decisions were either being made based on models or models were being used as a proxy for “the science” to justify political decisions.
What has become subsequently clear is that the models were not validated against real data, and subsequent to a twitter dialogue between Fraser Nelson and Graham Medley the models were driven by policy.
We can infer from this dialogue that the policy is not only leading the modelling, but there is a bias for action where it would be probably more healthy to have a bias for no action.
Were there any alternatives to Lockdowns? The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) presented by Suneptra Gupta, Martin Kuldorf and Jay Batattcharia set out in some detail an alternative broadly based on focused protection. However, the GBD was attacked mercilessly by the MSM, some would say “smeared”. Given the recent emergence of emails by Francis Collins and Dr Fauci it would be silly to argue that there was not a coordinated effort to demean this initiative with ad hominem attacks e.g. “fringe” to describe eminent scientists in their fields. These attacks were clearly at the political level.
My conclusion is that the only Government mandated Lockdown that was justified was the initial three weeks to flatten the curve and to an extent that was not entered in good faith.
Vaccines
The arrival of the vaccines was welcome, but there was also the realisation that our Government viewed this as an opportunity to pursue a one size fits all policy, to vaccinate our way out of the pandemic. In this respect “if the only tool you have is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail” holds true. I think that there is also some truth in the observation that the Government is aligned to look for “Big Levers” that can be applied to the population to fix the problem.
Primary care appears to have been overridden by Government policy. Certainly “Big Levers” appear to be at odds with the work of Doctors working with Patients through a process of inferential thinking.
There also remains the question about the step change in the amount of time that was required to release vaccines. Some have suggested that this is as a result of running several processes concurrently. My only reflection is that Concurrent Engineering (or Simultaneous Engineering) has been around for over 50 years, and to find that the Pharma industry has just discovered this is a little far fetched.
What appears to be the clear is that vaccines are effective in stopping people developing a life threatening disease. However, currently in the UK if I catch Covid, and my condition deteriorates such that self medication is not enough my primary care provider advises that I should under no circumstances visit the surgery but call 111, the Hospital triage system.
We are over 24 months into this pandemic and we do not have any official protocols for the early outpatient treatment of Covid. Have the rapid development of vaccines based on Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) resulted in the suppression of alternatives. It would appear that this is a systemic weakness of the system, that should have been addressed. Perhaps a case of legal expediency getting in the way of what is desirable from a public health perspective. Maybe we should consider “following the money” and see where that leads us?
Similarly there doesn’t appear to have been a reliable scientific study on the efficacy of masks. I am aware of studies from Bangladesh, Denmark and studies that required “adjusting” of control groups.
The politicisation of the whole narrative is hard to refute given that the same MRNA vaccines that Biden considered mandating were not to be supported under Trump. The popular US podcaster, Joe Rogan noted “Masks have become the Democrats equivalent of MAGA Hats”.
We have rolled out the booster (3rd vaccine shot) and we are currently discussing administering the 4th shot to front-line healthcare staff. We can say with certainty is that we do not have any long term data on the efficacy of the vaccines. We do have short term data which would suggest limited effect in preventing transmission of Covid-19 in general and Omicron variant in particular.
For the record I have had all the childhood vaccines and then some including Cholera & Yellow Fever. I have actually had more tetanus vaccines than you could imagine having been brought up in the countryside.
I am unclear as to what the “Booster” is protecting me or my fellow human beings from – Omicron, Delta or Original. I have had 2 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine, the first of which resulted in frequent mild headaches for a period of 3 weeks – noteworthy because I rarely get headaches.
There are people, particularity in the Developed World who really buy into the medicalisation of everything, and vaccines in particular. My view is we should be humble about interventions with something as spectacular as the human immune system.
Hubris is the only way to describe the folly of people who believe they can vaccinate there way out of this to reach the illusive “Zero Covid”.
Summary
My current position is that I will not be taking the vaccine booster shot until something materially changes. My rational is based on the overall efficacy of the current vaccines, the unknown risks of the vaccines and the realisation that we cannot go on with the medicalisation of our lives at the expense of everything else.
We simply have got to move on and learn to live with Covid. For the avoidance of doubt we need to drop all Government guidelines, lockdowns, mandates and focus on vaccination status. We need to replace the “Ministry of Truth” in favour of publishing good quality data in order to enable people to make their own choices.