Let the madness stop! In the last year and a half, we have gone from ‘let’s flatten the curve’ to mandatory vaccination; and now vaccine passports are a reality. We all chipped in initially, by locking down, masking, and isolating as needed. Then we were all told to wait for the magic vaccine and herd immunity so that we could move out of the pandemic. Has it worked? I would have to say a resounding ‘NO’ to that question! Why? Let’s look at what has happened.
The Numbers Game. We kept getting numbers every day from mainstream media and the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), but what did they mean? Some people sounded the alarm early on about the PCR test saying that it overestimated the cases. That is correct, because depending on the cycle threshold (Ct) the test can be positive in people whose viral loads are minimal and who are asymptomatic. I don’t think that ever before in medicine have we relied on a test without so much as a mention of symptoms! Symptoms are the sine qua none of diagnosis. It’s symptoms -> health care practitioner -> examination/testing -> diagnosis. Not testing -> diagnosis! Public Health will probably tell you it was done that way because it was a pandemic; but frankly that’s no excuse to pervert course of medicine. So, we got inflated ‘cases’. What is a case? It’s just a positive PCR. Even the inventor of the PCR has stated his test was not to be used this way. These inflated case numbers began the fear cycle. Never mind the fact that SARS Cov2 has infected over 190 million people and killed 4 million! That’s a 98% survival rate with essentially no treatment. And that is using the ‘inflated’ numbers. It’s likely there were less cases due to over-‘diagnosis’ and less deaths due to Covid due to simple fudging of causes of death, many patients dying with Covid rather than of Covid. In the USA some hospitals paid a premium for citing SARS COV2 as a primary cause of death.
No Treatment. Probably the worst mistake of all that we made is that we didn’t treat the illness until people were in the ER headed to the ICU. There is no other illness where we tell people to go home, take Tylenol, and come back when they cannot breathe – it’s even worse than the old aphorism: “take two ASA and call me in the morning”. But that’s essentially what we did. We have failed miserably to objectively and scientifically look at the evidence for potential treatments in an apolitical fashion. We dismissed hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment because it was tied to a President we did not like–despite he was a President in another country. We dismissed Ivermectin as an early treatment because there was ”insufficient evidence”, despite over 60 RCTs showing huge prevention effects, decreased death rates, and virtually no side effects. This is an utter scientific disgrace. Instead, we embraced a mediocre drug Remdesivir, with much less evidence to back it than Ivermectin, and serious side effects. Of course Ivermectin is off patent and costs a few dollars whereas patented Remdesivir costs $3000 per treatment. Now Merck, the manufacturer of brand-name Ivermectin Stromectol, actively discouraged the use of ivermectin and overinflated its danger. Now it has the audacity to be “looking for an effective antiviral” to help with early treatment–on patent of course.
The Vaccine. So we put all our eggs in one basket. The mainstream narrative was ‘get vaccinated and you can stop wearing masks and go back to congregating as normal’. But no – that didn’t happen! There were and are ‘breakthrough infections’, and the delta variant reared its ugly head. The vaccine, whatever kind you get, doesn’t stop the delta variant which is much better at transmission but less deadly. There are some who have posited that vaccinating during a pandemic, something never done before, might actually place selective evolutionary pressure on the virus to allow any mutations that are occurring to manifest more quickly. This possibility makes sense – if you are a virus, mutating 1000s of times a day and suddenly your host produces a spike protein that prevents you from replicating what would you do? Pick up on a mutation of course and start spreading that.
So now we are in a worse mess! Even if the above hypothesis is invalid the spread of the delta variant is wreaking havoc with the most vaccinated countries like Israel. As of 15 August, 514 Israelis were hospitalized with severe or critical COVID-19, a 31% increase from just 4 days earlier. Of the 514, 59% were fully vaccinated. Of the vaccinated, 87% were 60 or older. Now, in September infection rates are skyrocketing, even after a third booster shot. And vaccine efficacy is now waning. Is anyone questioning the validity of this approach?
What about vaccine side effects? This is another travesty. Not only is the vaccine experimental and was under emergency use authorization, but the side effects are simply not being reported. I was on a Canadian professional physician Facebook page since the pandemic started until about 6 months ago when I was ‘removed’. Physicians and Nurses on the site were reporting a significant number of adverse effects beyond the usual ‘sore arm and fever’ effects you might expect. There were reports of long lasting neurological adverse effects (paresis and paralysis), (and lately increased Guillain Barre); polyarthritic symptoms especially in those with auto-immune conditions, increases in Shingles and reactivation of other latent inflammatory conditions. Now I know the argument for ignoring these are that they are ‘not above the baseline rate’. But the point is that we do not know that unless we count them. I was shocked to hear that several physicians in Canada were ignored when they brought their concerns to Public Health authorities – yes ignored! They were told that these effects could not be due to the vaccine – even though it is new and experimental! The Facebook page I was on removed me partly because I kept bringing up these important facts and I was not being ‘kind to our Public Health colleagues’! What’s going on here? Are we no longer interested in facts; curious about the potential negative nuances of our treatments? Well, clearly physicians on the ground in the often rural practices are very much interested; but not so the PHAC who are not even counting adverse effects properly. I do not wish to be ‘unkind’ but that is an egregious mishandling of important data. The VAERS system in the USA has markedly increased AE’s and deaths way beyond baseline. When the ‘scare’ about myocarditis in young kids came out there was barely a murmur of concern. In fact, in Canada, there was a push on to vaccinate more kids and give them ice cream for getting the shot.
Now the adverse effects may be rare – although we do not actually know that – for reasons I made clear above; but if you are kid or the parent of the kid who gets myocarditis then that’s something to take seriously.
Censorship. As if this was not bad enough, the suppression of alternate views has been worldwide. Calling everything that is beyond the narrative of the PHAC a “conspiracy theory” just does not cut it. The advancement of science has always relied on disparate views being discussed, argued about, published, replicated, and finally accepted, or not. Instead we have individual physicians being shut down, fired, and ridiculed when they present ideas that are contrary to public health. YouTube, Google, and Facebook have become the arbiters of what is “scientific fact”. Since when did social media platforms and journalistic fact-checkers become the judges of what is truth?
Immunity in population. There have been some significant studies showing that there are likely high rates of immunity to COVID-19 in the population. And of course there are those who have had Covid who undoubtedly have a natural immunity which is robust. However, the mantra is that “everyone must be vaccinated”. Instead of seriously considering who is immune in the population and vaccinating everybody else, we have unwisely followed the dictates of public health mass vaccination.
Conclusions
To say that this is a mess is a bit of an understatement. At every turn it seems as though we have lost all scientific rationality. Could this be a part of some underlying postmodernism creep? Or is it just that we have been mass hypnotized into thinking that we could be saved by a vaccine? I do not know the answers to these questions, but I do know if we continue on the same path then we are headed into a disaster of extreme proportions. We cannot keep doing the same thing–vaccinating everybody and hoping for herd immunity – and expecting a different result. Our way out of this pandemic is to do what we should have done in the first place–emphasize early treatment protocols and prevention, vaccines should rightly have been secondary not mandatory.
Edward Leyton MD FCFP MDPAC(C)