We are fools for listening uncritically and can only blame ourselves
Business magazine Forbes has published a story with the arresting headline:
“Unvaccinated People Increase Risk Of Covid Infection Among Vaccinated, Study Finds”.
The work they are referring to is not in the normal sense a study but is actually a modelling exercise published by the journal of the Canadian Medical Association.
Did the Forbes staff writer read the paper very well? I am quite sure they didn’t. At the end of paragraph one of the Method section of the original paper, it describes their model saying:
“A vaccine that is 80% efficacious would result in 80% of vaccinated people becoming immune, with the remaining 20% being susceptible to infection. We did not model waning immunity.”
Now I am sure you know that the mRNA vaccines do not stop infection and also wane in effectiveness. In other words, mRNA vaccination does not confer immunity and its effectiveness does not remain constant as the paper assumes. So what use is this paper and to what do its conclusions apply? Apparently not to the mRNA Covid vaccines.
Conflicts of Interest are at Work
Lo and behold, one of the paper’s authors, David Fisman, declares competing interests:
“He has served on advisory boards related to SARS-CoV-2 vaccines for Seqirus, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Sanofi-Pasteur Vaccines.…”
Another author, Ashleigh Tuite, was employed by the Public Health Agency of Canada when the research was conducted (aka the domain of Justin Trudeau).
So why would Forbes publicise this story which prima facie has little relevance to the real world data of the current pandemic?
Forbes magazine is 51% owned by a Hong Kong based company Integrated Whale Investments about which little is known. The Washington Post has suggested that Forbes editorial policy has been influenced as a result, but by whom no one really knows.
At this point in the pandemic, it has become clear that boosted individuals are becoming more vulnerable to Omicron than the unvaccinated. So I can only suggest that it might be advantageous for some scientists and politicians to blame the unvaccinated for everything in order to cover up their own mistaken ideas. Or perhaps there are commercial interests anxious to sell more arguably useless vaccines for billions of dollars. You decide.
The Unwitting Public are the Victims Here
If the government and their compliant media friends are our one source of truth, as has happened in New Zealand (by decree), then you have no option except to blame the unvaccinated whatever happens.
For our government, it is quite useful to be able to quote a study (???) that affirms just that, even if it is irrelevant and unrelated to the real world we are living in.
The actual New Zealand situation is quite different, the unvaccinated were less likely to be hospitalised than the boosted. Thank you to Grant Dixon for compiling and graphing New Zealand Ministry of Health data, below.
Carefully Masked From Reality
This morning my mask exempt friend entered a haberdashery shop, whereupon two other potential customers turned and fled. Yesterday she was turned away from a fabric store. I am sure many of you have had similar experiences.
The fact of the matter is that almost the whole of the New Zealand population has become subject to fear-based government-sponsored group-think.
Are we all being conditioned to vote for Jacinda Ardern in next year’s election based on the carefully constructed myth that she is keeping us all safe?
We should be keeping our feet on the ground. We should recognise that public relations experts and propaganda promoters are at work full time, but they are working out of touch with reality.
Is it the Economy?
Meanwhile our whole economy is becoming more and more dysfunctional. As people are too afraid to associate with one another in public, the whole basis of commercial activity is being undermined.
The two large supermarket chains are laughing all the way to the bank. As small businesses are forced to close and their monopoly grows, supermarket prices and profits are entering the stratosphere.
Smart individuals are now ordering their vegetables and groceries direct from Australia (as far away from us as Moscow is from London) because they are so much cheaper.
This week in the UK the government was forced to intervene to control prices as the cost of tomatoes (mostly imported) rose from NZ$1.10 to $1.80 per kilo. The public were outraged and made their disapproval known in no uncertain terms, forcing the government to act.
Here in New Zealand (where tomatoes are easily grown), Countdown is charging at this minute, as I write, on its website from $6 to $16 per kilo for tomatoes.
The government is clueless to control this rampant price gouging, as it is clueless about most things including the pandemic. The public is equally hoodwinked, we are queueing up fully masked and fully vaccinated to pay through the nose for everyday items without so much as a squeak of dissent.
The ten year old son of a friend asked his mother the other day “Which do you think our society is more like—Brave New World or 1984?” I doubt either Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could ever have imagined anything so incomprehensibly doublethink as 2022 New Zealand.
This is the state we have reached through our government’s careful rationing of information and saturation conditioning.
Time we reopened the flood gates of free speech and social media—hold your horses, we might endanger our one source of truth.
Link to the Forbes article mentioned at the beginning of this post: Unvaccinated People Increase Risk Of Covid Infection Among Vaccinated, Study Finds
