Tag: herd immunity

Emails Reveal Fauci’s Effort to ‘Smear’ Anti-Lockdown Scientists

Newly released emails show Anthony Fauci and his boss at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) wanted to conduct a “quick and devastating” take-down of health experts who proposed a lockdown-free Covid-19 control strategy.

The emails, released on Friday by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, show retiring NIH Director Francis Collins telling Fauci in October 2020 to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) – a statement that proposes working towards achieving herd immunity through “focused protection” of the most vulnerable.

Days after the GBD was released, Collins notified Fauci and other health officials about how the proposal from “three fringe epidemiologists” was getting a “lot of attention” and called for a “quick and devastating published take down of its premises.”

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Another fake fact check from Facebook’s “Science Feedback”: this one about Amish Covid-19 immunity

If you’ve paid attention, you already know that Facebook’s “Science Feedback” and other health-related fact checkers are prolific distributors of misinformation and false information that typically benefits the vaccine or pharmaceutical industry.

They tend to “fact check” articles about medical studies and topics that are having an impact on the public, in hopes of tamping down the buzz and circulation of the data or details.

This week, these players are working hard to keep the public from learning that the Amish have claimed to reach “herd immunity” with Covid-19 and fared better than places that imposed drastic measures. The Amish say they did so without masking, closing, social distancing, or vaccination.

The Amish claim of herd immunity was previously reported by Associated Press and other news organizations, but didn’t get wide circulation. The propagandists and fake fact checkers didn’t challenge the topic at the time.

But my report on the same, which aired last Sunday on Full Measure, must be having an impact.

In response, Facebook’s Health Feedback propagandists have made several false and unsupported claims in an attempt to discredit The Amish approach and the reporting about it.

The fake fact-checkers, edited by a woman named Fernanda Ferreira, falsely claim that “natural immunity post-infection is variable, while vaccination provides safer and more reliable immunity.” The bulk of the scientific studies show the opposite. (You can find them here and decide for yourself.)

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So much for vaccine-generated herd immunity

A reader tipped me to this fascinating paper in a peer-reviewed journal about a Covid outbreak in Israel that began in mid-July, just as vaccine failure was accelerating there.

A vaccinated dialysis patient was admitted to Meir Medical Center – a large Israeli hospital near Tel Aviv – with fever and cough. He remained on the dialysis unit for days, as his condition worsened. (One of many problems with overselling the vaccines is that it led to mistakes like this.)

By the time he was diagnosed with Covid-19, he had infected three fellow patients. He also had a PCR threshold of 13.6 – almost impossibly low, showing viral loads roughly 1 million times those in a lightly infected person. He was moved to a Covid-19 ward, where he eventually died (I say he, though the patient’s gender is not revealed; the paper refers to “they).

The paper, published in Eurosurveillance, a journal published by the European Centers for Disease Control, explains that the outbreak rapidly spread among both patients and staff of the hospital’s dialysis unit, the Covid-19 ward, and other wards. At the time, 238 out of 248 of exposed patients and staff had been fully vaccinated with Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine.

Again, the fact that 96 percent of the people in this population had been vaccinated – a level far above early estimates of the percentages required for herd immunity – apparently made no difference.

Further, all patients and staff were required to wear surgical masks when they were in the same room, and staff on the Covid-19 unit wore N95 masks and face shields.

Ultimately, 39 out of the 238 exposed vaccinated people (16 percent) were infected, along with 3 out of 10 unvaccinated people – a difference that doesn’t reach statistical significance because the unvaccinated group is too small.

Of the infected, 23 were patients and 19 staff. The staff all recovered quickly. But five patients died and another nine had severe or critical cases. All were vaccinated. The two unvaccinated infected patients both had mild cases.

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CDC-funded study: In May, U.S. reached level that some experts say is ‘herd immunity’ against Covid-19

Research shows the U.S. had reached what some scientists believed to be “herd immunity” status against Covid-19 last May, with more than 80% of the population immune to Covid either through natural infection or vaccination.

And the actual number of immune Americans may be higher.

That’s because the new study, funded by the Centers or Disease Control (CDC), factored in only 20% of the population as being protected through natural infection after recovering from Covid-19. But over three months ago, CDC estimated the naturally-infected population to be substantially higher: more than 120 million or 36%. And after the spread of Delta variant, and the passage of three more months, experts say the percentage of naturally immune is much higher than the 36% estimate, though CDC has not publicly updated its number in months.

Still, even assuming the study’s lower estimate of naturally immune, and adding in the vaccinated, researchers concluded 83% of the population was immune from Covid-19 as of last May.

One confounding factor is that the vaccines are less effective at preventing Covid infection and spread than hoped.

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New Normal Newspeak #1: “Herd Immunity”

Ever since the beginning of the “pandemic”, and its transition into the clear “New Normal” (or “Great Reset) agenda, the English language itself has become a battleground. Words and phrases are being stretched and twisted into new, bizarre or contradictory meanings, or weighted with implications that never existed before.

“New Normal Newspeak” is our attempt to catalogue these changes, and stop the real meaning of words being memory-holed forever.

Our first example is a very, very literal one.

The phrase “Herd Immunity” has existed for decades, and most of us had probably come across it at some point prior to March 2020. It had a clear meaning, which was available from (among other places) the World Health Organization website:

Herd immunity is the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.”

However, after the “pandemic” hit, this erstwhile totally uncontroversial theory became the subject of fierce debate, and proponents of it suddenly found themselves described as “genocidal”.

It was at this point that the WHO changed their website, updating their definition of “herd immunity” to totally remove the concept of “natural immunity”:

‘Herd immunity’, also known as ‘population immunity’, is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached. Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it.

You can check their old site through the wayback machine, or with this screencap (in case the archive gets wiped)

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FDA: ‘Vaccine hesitant’ can’t use antibody test to prove immunity!

Many Americans who have chosen not to get one of the experimental COVID-19 vaccines because of the risks have hoped that testing positive for antibodies could substitute for being vaccinated, providing a virtual “vaccine passport.”

But the Food and Drug Administration issued guidance this week stating a vaccine is still needed to confirm immunity from the COVID-19 virus.

The FDA acknowledged that antibody tests “can play an important role in identifying individuals who may have been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and may have developed an adaptive immune response.”

“However, antibody tests should not be used at this time to determine immunity or protection against COVID-19 at any time, and especially after a person has received a COVID-19 vaccination.”

The FDA said that antibodies provided by the vaccines are superior to the antibodies developed from being infected by the virus, providing needed protection that the regular antibodies do not.

But that’s contradicted by empirical study data, Yale University epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch told WND.

He pointed to a massive study in Israel finding that people who had tested positive for the novel coronavirus in the previous three or more months had at least as much protection against new infection, hospitalization and death as vaccinated people.

“People become immune by surviving infection,” argued Risch, professor of epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine.

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Amish community may have reached COVID ‘herd immunity,’ health official says

An Amish community in Pennsylvania may have become the first group in the US to achieve herd immunity, a local health official claims.

The administrator of a medical center in the heart of Lancaster County’s New Holland Borough, which is known for its Amish and Mennonite communities, estimates that as many as 90 percent of the religious families have had at least one family member infected with the virus.

“So, you would think if COVID was as contagious as they say, it would go through like a tsunami; and it did,” said Allen Hoover, an administrator of the Parochial Medical Center, which caters to the religious community and has 33,000 patients.

The Amish and Mennonite groups initially complied with stay-at-home orders at the beginning of the pandemic — shuttering schoolhouses and canceling church services.

But by late April, they had resumed worship services, where they shared communion cups and holy kisses, a church greeting among believers.

Soon after, the virus tore throughout the religious enclave.

“It was bad here in the spring; one patient right after another,” said Pam Cooper, a physician’s assistant at the Parochial Medical Center.

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After a Year of Crushing COVID Restrictions, Sharp 77% Drop in Cases Proves Herd Immunity Is What We Needed All Along

COVID-19 could be gone as early as April, as plunging infection rates suggest the United States is on the verge of achieving herd immunity.

That’s the prediction of Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon and professor at Johns Hopkins University.

The left-wing media continues to stoke hysteria and panic as Democratic lawmakers push for more shutdowns. But Makary underscored that coronavirus cases have tumbled 77 percent over the past six weeks.

“At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life,” Makary wrote Thursday in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed.

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