TrialSite recently shared with the community an unfolding lawsuit in Maine addressing vaccine mandates and the 661 deaths associated (but not proven) with the COVID-19 vaccines. At a Senate hearing last titled “Next Steps: The Road Ahead for the COVID-19 Response” U.S. Senator Susan Collins https://www.collins.senate.gov/ asked the nation’s top health leads such as Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health as well as Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) some pressing questions on many people’s minds. One key question for Fauci: Given that the State of Maine is one of the heaviest vaccinated places in America why have there been such a high growth in overall infections, as well as breakthrough infections? The topic of purported vaccine associated deaths were not candidly addressed.
Representative Collins, a moderate Republican, recently shared the hearing in the form of a press release. While Maine has the fourth highest vaccinated population proportionately the New England state now experiences the worst surge yet when factoring in total number of cases. Even the number of deaths now approach the previous worst surge back before any vaccination was occurring. This obviously has raised considerable concern.
Collins shared with Fauci that 95% of Mainers over age 65 have been fully vaccinated. Nevertheless, over the past seven days, Maine has the 15th highest current Covid-19 case rate on a per capita basis and the 22nd highest death rate on a per capita basis among U.S. states. In addition, Maine has recently experienced a six percent increase in hospitalizations, an 18 percent increase in people in the ICU, and a 37 percent increase in people on ventilators.
The Senator declared:
“First, let me make clear that I believe in the efficacy of vaccines and have encouraged my constituents to become vaccinated,” said Senator Collins. “But I’m hoping you can explain what appears to be a contradiction when I look at the data for the State of Maine. Maine ranks in the top five states in the [percentage] of people…who have been vaccinated. Can you explain to me why a state that has done a terrific job in getting people vaccinated is seeing this surge in cases that is overwhelming our hospitals and causing great fear, and pain, and loss?”
Fauci came back with what as really a non-answer:
Dr. Fauci responded that Maine’s high caseload is due to COVID-19 infecting unvaccinated populations as well as breakthrough cases among the vaccinated.
POTUS’ chief medical advisor continued to downplay the mounting problem attempting to position the issue as simply not achieving 100% vaccination:
“[A] vaccinated compared to an unvaccinated person has a multifold less likelihood of being infected, a multifold less likelihood of being hospitalized or dying. I think there were probably confounding multiple factors going into the difficult situation that your citizens in your state are going through, but there’s no doubt that the vaccines are clearly much better in the sense of protecting you from infection, hospitalizations, or death compared to the unvaccinated.”
However, TrialSite has accumulated dozens of national and regional studies now that indicate vaccine durability represents a growing problem. Meaning that the vaccines will wane in effectiveness leading to growing breakthrough infections, hospitalizations and even deaths.
CDC Director’s POV
Turning to Dr. Walensky, Senator Collins raised the promising “test-to-stay” approach that allows asymptomatic students who test negative for COVID-19 to remain in school rather than quarantining after another student or a staff member has tested positive for the virus. A study in the peer-reviewed British medical journal The Lancet found that case rates were not significantly higher at schools that allowed close contacts of infected students or staff members to remain in class with daily testing than schools that required students to quarantine at home. Senator Collins previously pressed the Secretary of Education to consider this method in September.
“Dr. Walensky, parents, teachers, and pediatricians have all talked to me about the learning loss, the emotional and behavioral health problems, that have occurred among children due to their not being in school,” said Senator Collins. “Brown University professor Emily Oster has expressed great frustration with the CDC being slow to take a stronger position in favor of test-to-stay… Another public health expert said simply ‘It’s madness to quarantine school children. The CDC policies hinder learning and provide no meaningful reduction in COVID transmissions.’ My question for you is, why doesn’t the CDC issue guidance or recommendations to encourage school districts to adopt test-to-stay in order to avoid these highly disruptive quarantines of students who are asymptomatic and could be tested?”
In response, Dr. Walensky said the CDC is “working with local jurisdictions now to demonstrate the domestic data here in the United States that this practice works, it’s safe, it’s effective, [and] it gets our children back to school. And importantly, we recognize that jurisdictions are actually doing this and other jurisdictions may want to. And in that context, we’re doing peer-to-peer matching of schools that are interested in doing the test-to-stay practice and having them talk to schools that are also doing it so they can use the implementation strategies that a school has already used. So we’re actively studying this so that we can provide the data on it working, and we’re actively encouraging it as a promising practice.”
Conclusion
Public health authorities and the current political leadership continue to take the rigid stance that universal vaccination represents the only key next step to overcome the pandemic. However mounting data indicates that vaccination just cannot stop such a malleable pathogen by itself. This is not a disease that can be eradicated via vaccination. Moreover growing reports of vaccine-related safety-related issues must be taken seriously and not continually censored in an attempt to systematically discount the data.
TrialSite suggests that unfortunately the pandemic has become too politicized and forces form multiple points of view will attempt to exploit that fact to advance political, economic and social agendas.
The growing evidence of vaccine-related adverse events must be accounted for—simply ignoring them will lead to possibly extreme political reactions.
What is needed is a step back, objective review of the true situation and collaborative, bipartisan efforts (in America) to adjust and extend approaches that further protection from the disease while ensuring civil liberties and mission critical economic considerations are factored into any agenda moving forward.
Call to Action: You can review the Senate hearing here.