By Professor Ramesh Thakur: The Spectator Australia.
Israel was meant to have been the showpiece of vaccination success in escaping from the threat of coronavirus. Instead, it has turned into an embarrassing example of the limitations and ineffectualness of Covid vaccines.
On February 3, Arutz Sheva (Israel National News) reported Professor Yaakov Jerris, director of Ichilov Hospital’s coronavirus ward, as saying that between 70 to 80 per cent of serious Covid cases were triple vaccinated.
‘So, the vaccine has no significance regarding severe illness, which is why just 20 to 25 per cent of our patients are unvaccinated,’ he said.
On February 4, Israel’s seven-day average of daily new deaths per million people was 7.87, the highest ever since the start of the pandemic. The previous peak had been 6.98 a year ago on January 25, 2021. Israel is one of the world’s most heavily vaccinated and three-to-four jabs boosted countries. Yet, as shown in Figure 1, massive vaccine campaigns, boosters and mandates via the Green Pass system failed to avert a spectacular ascent in the three critical Covid infection, ICU admissions and mortality curves.
As someone who grew up in astrology-obsessed India, I am only too familiar with the psychology of self-negating explanations when good predictions fail to materialise and self-validating explanations when bad predictions fail to materialise.
In the first case, the prescribed course of action to bring about the good outcome wasn’t done properly or by enough people, or in time, or for long enough, and so on. Very much in a similar vein, self-evidently the reason why the predicted bad event did not happen was the person followed the advice of the astrologer. Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London have very much followed the same playbook. But they are not alone.
Paul Nuki, Global Health Security Editor at The Telegraph, whose position is part-funded by the Gates Foundation, is another such disciple. In an article on February 5, he is still not prepared to let go of his faith in the vaccine narrative. To his mind, the solution to Israel’s problem is more take-up of the fourth jab as soon as the efficacy of the third begins to wane. It’s a sign of how the public mood has changed that the article attracted over 1,000 comments online, the most popular being strongly hostile to his thesis and many recalling his links with the Gates Foundation.
On February 5, The Telegraph’s science editor Sarah Knapton reported: ‘Vaccine passports will do little to stop coronavirus transmission, but should still be considered anyway to increase uptake in young people, scientists advising the [UK] Government have said.’
In other words, the group least at risk from Covid but most likely to suffer heart damage from vaccines should be illegally coerced into being jabbed. Talk of the mad scientists who have completely lost their ethical moorings…
On July 24 last year, New South Wales Police Minister David Elliott was reported as calling anti-lockdown protestors in Sydney ‘selfish boofheads’. I assumed he had been misreported and had in fact uttered those words while looking into a mirror. On February 6, Health Minister Brad Hazzard expressed frustration that although 94 per cent of NSW residents over 16 are double vaccinated, only 43.5 per cent have taken a third jab. He called for the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) to change the definition of fully vaccinated to include got a booster shot. His boss Premier Dominic Perrottet advised people to ‘get that third shot as soon as you’re eligible and protect yourself, your family and your friends’.
Maybe they should enrol themselves in re-education camps and study real data, not models, from Israel, UK, and the US before making any further statements on vaccines? Leaky vaccines do not ‘protect yourself, your family and your friends’. Their efficacy is limited and they should be targeted at the elderly and those with underlying health conditions. The wild exaggerations from ministers and health bureaucrats deepen vaccine hesitancy by adding to the public sense that they know not whereof they talk.
Contrast Nuki’s report with Daniel Hannan in the same paper on the same day. With each passing week, Hannan wrote, the number of people who admit to having supported the lockdowns will shrink as memories are self-edited. This, he says, is what happened with respect to the Iraq War. In 2003, 66 per cent of Britons backed the invasion when it began. By 2015, after the serial disasters of civilian casualties, the Abu Ghraib abuses and the rise of Islamic State, ‘only 37 per cent admitted to having backed military action in 2003’.
Curiously enough, I wrote an article for India’s biggest circulation English-language newspaper The Times of India already on June 6, 2020 pointing to similarities between the Iraq War and lockdowns: threat inflation, thinness of evidence, denigration of critics questioning the evidence, dismissal of collateral harms, lack of exit strategy and mission creep (three weeks to flatten the curve, wait for the vaccine, 70 per cent vaccine coverage among adults, vaccine mandates, boosters etc).
Now, I would certainly add memory editing that erases public, parliamentary and media support for government policy as the sixth parallel between the madness of the Iraq War and lockdowns and vaccine policies to deal with Covid.
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