Guest column by Dr. Joel S. Hirschhorn
Americans may not be mentally prepared to hear the really bad news. The COVID pandemic is not going to end. What the government is doing (and not doing) will ensure no end to the pandemic.
Just released is a new forecast of the coming COVID death toll on March 1, 2022. It comes from the group that has been doing the most thorough studies and modeling of the US pandemic. It is the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independent global health research center at the University of Washington. It forecasts a total of one million COVID deaths by that date.
That means in about 3.5 months there will be another roughly 250,000 COVID deaths. That is over 70,000 deaths a month. That compares to about 65,000 a month since the pandemic began. Does that sound like progress? Does that sound like the mass vaccination effort is the solution?
Their projection may underestimate what will be happening because “That forecast may be optimistic because we have not yet built into the modeling that we are releasing right now the explicit analysis around waning immunity for vaccine-derived immunity.” And there is now a strong consensus among medical experts that current vaccines lose their effectiveness in about six months. That is why booster shots are now being pushed so hard. An endless pandemic will mean billions of dollars going to big drug companies for vaccines and a new group of expensive pills announced by Merck and Pfizer.
Here is the crucial point to keep in mind. Current vaccines, including booster shots, do not kill the virus and do not prevent spread of the virus from fully vaccinated people. And the loss of effectiveness, especially for variants like delta, explains why countless more people will get breakthrough infections that are killing some people, like what happened to Colin Powell recently.
Breakthrough deaths fit into the category of COVID deaths.
This is the ultimate truth: We cannot vaccinate our way out of the pandemic. When more reliable data in other countries are considered, compared to awful data from the CDC, we see that very large fractions of people being hospitalized or dying from COVID are fully vaccinated. Booster shots just create the illusion of doing something really effective. Mostly, they just postpone bad health impacts.
The entire emphasis by our government on vaccines is the biggest mistake in the history of medicine and pandemic management. As many recent analyses have shown, the CDC data are undercounting both adverse health impacts of vaccines and deaths.
Steve Kirsch has done a good summary analysis of CDC data undercounting. Here are some excerpts:
“The COVID vaccines are the most dangerous vaccines in human history. They are 800 times more deadly than the smallpox vaccine which was the previous record holder. The vaccines have killed over 150,000 Americans and permanently disabled even more. They don’t make sense for anyone of any age. The younger you are, the worse it gets. For kids, it is estimated that we kill 117 kids for every COVID death we prevent.”
“So we are ‘saving’ fewer than 10,000 lives at the expense of over 150,000 (vaccine) deaths. In short, we kill 15 people to save 1. That’s incredibly stupid.”
Full details defining the vaccine dystopia we have entered are available.
The eminent Dr. Peter McCollough has emphasized: “You are about five times as likely to die of the vaccine than you are to take your risks with COVID-19. Therefore, those who ‘chose not to get the vaccine,’ in fact ‘made a smarter choice.’” Another point made is that those who have recovered from the disease and have natural immunity have a 56% greater chance of severe side-effects should they afterwards take the jab. When such a recognized medical expert says these things, the anti-mandate movement receives credibility.
A recent medical research article said: “A novel best-case scenario cost-benefit analysis showed very conservatively that there are five times the number of deaths attributable to each inoculation vs those attributable to COVID-19 in the most vulnerable 65+ demographic.” It was also noted that several studies: “have shown independently that the deaths following inoculation are not coincidental and are strongly related to inoculation through strong clustering around the time of injection.” ”Our independent analyses of the VAERS database confirmed these clustering findings.”
Sarah Zhang has recently made some incisive observations about the never-ending pandemic. Here is what she said:
“The coronavirus becomes endemic, and we live with it forever. But what we don’t know—and what the U.S. seems to have no coherent plan for—is how we are supposed to get there.” But talking about an endemic just means a constantly maintained level of COVID-19 infections and transmissions. It means living with the pandemic, but just calling it an endemic. It is a poor semantic solution.
Here are more words of wisdom:
“The Delta variant and waning immunity against transmission mean herd immunity may well be impossible even if every single American gets a shot. So when COVID-related restrictions came back with the Delta wave, we no longer had an obvious off-ramp to return to normal—are we still trying to get a certain percentage of people vaccinated? Or are we waiting until all kids are eligible? Or for hospitalizations to fall and stay steady? The path ahead is not just unclear; it’s nonexistent. We are meandering around the woods because we don’t know where to go.”
“But the level of COVID-19 risk we can live with is also not an entirely scientific question. It is a social and political one that involves balancing both the costs and benefits of restrictions and grappling with genuine pandemic fatigue among the public.”
“The Delta variant and waning immunity against transmission mean herd immunity may well be impossible even if every single American gets a shot.”
Accepting the ugly reality that the pandemic will not end is consistent with the findings of a recent medical research article titled “Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States.” The clear meaning is that mass vaccination does not work effectively to eliminate COVID impacts. Here is a main conclusion: “The sole reliance on vaccination as a primary strategy to mitigate COVID-19 and its adverse consequences needs to be re-examined, especially considering the Delta variant and the likelihood of future variants.”
Indeed, it is clear that a number of countries, including Gibraltar, with high vaccination rates are still fighting serious COVID outbreaks and impacts, including Israel now pushing booster shots. When Israel rolled out boosters in August, they also saw spikes in infections and deaths.
Should everyone get booster shots? Especially, those with natural immunity from prior infection and vaccine immunity from full vaccination? This is called hybrid immunity. Here is what MedPage Today said:
“With a COVID-19 booster shot available for a segment of the U.S. population, an emerging group may wonder if they really need it — those with “hybrid immunity.”
These are the people who are fully vaccinated but have also recovered from a case of COVID-19. Mounting evidence is clear: a bout with the virus does provide extra immunity, making a booster shot helpful but not necessary, experts say.
If you have hybrid immunity, “I would call yourself a victor,” said Paul Offit, MD, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. ‘Call it a victory and bow out.’”
Yet many groups seem on the verge of saying that without a booster shot people will not be considered fully vaccinated and booster mandates are being discussed.
What the government has failed to do is promote valid alternatives to COVID vaccines. It has not used a flexible policy using personalized medicine principles that would support use of generic medicines to treat and prevent COVID infection. For example, using fluvoxamine that a recent journal article said was effective, as well as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Nor has the government fully recognized and given mandate credit for natural immunity obtained from prior COVID infection, and that considerable data have shown is better than vaccine immunity.
This should be clear: Vaccine mandates will not end the pandemic. But there is no hint that government leaders are interested in taking a new fresh approach to addressing the pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of people will die unnecessarily in the US and even more globally. More deadly than the virus are feckless government officials.
Dr. Joel S. Hirschhorn, author of Pandemic Blunder and many articles, podcasts and radio shows on the pandemic, worked on health issues for decades. His work is available on Substack as the Pandemic Blunder Newsletter. As a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he directed a medical research program between the colleges of engineering and medicine. As a senior official at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the National Governors Association, he directed major studies on health-related subjects; he testified at over 50 US Senate and House hearings. He has served as an executive volunteer at a major hospital for more than 10 years. He is a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and America’s Frontline Doctors.