Did Lockdowns work?
When the virus hit Western countries in early 2020 many countries decided to impose lockdowns on their populations. Lockdowns of this type had never been tried before in history. Allegations regarding their effectiveness were based on abstract epidemiological models. This is another way of saying that the idea that the lockdowns would stop the spread of the virus was a theory. It was not proven science.
At the time when the lockdowns were first imposed. there was widespread disagreement in the scientific community about whether the lockdowns would work. But the media and politicians decided to focus attention on those scientists who believed the lockdowns would be effective and to ignore the scientists who disagreed.
We now have more data on lockdowns than we have on almost any other public policy intervention. Even though politicians and media figures are still acting as though the lockdowns had worked, the evidence is clear: lockdowns do not work. They do not prevent the virus from spreading. They do not lower the number of people who catch the virus. They do not lower the number of people who go to hospital. They do not lower the number of people who die from the virus.
Until recently, lockdown proponents pointed to countries like Australia as examples of effective lockdowns. These countries closed their borders and engaged in harsh lockdowns. Initially, it seemed as if these had actually prevented the spread of the virus. But this turned out to be an illusion. In fact, countries like Australia simply had different seasonal patterns by comparison with countries in the Northern Hemisphere. By October 2021, Australia was battling another outbreak.
Countries that did not engage in harsh lockdowns did not see worse outcomes than countries that did. Sweden is the most obvious example. Despite not imposing any lockdown, Sweden’s COVID-19 deaths remained below the European Union average.
The scientific evidence of the futility of lockdowns is clear. too. As early as December 2020, the American Institute for Economic Research had collected 35 scientific papers using advanced data analysis that showed lockdowns are ineffective. One particularly clear paper measured the trajectory of deaths per million in countries that had imposed ‘hard’ lockdowns versus those that imposed more ‘liberal’ measures. It found that countries with ‘hard’ lockdowns (represented by the bold black line) experienced more deaths than countries less restrictive lockdowns (bold grey line).
When politicians and media figures tell you that lockdowns work, they are not telling the truth. The science on lockdowns is as clear as statistical science can be: lockdowns do not work.
Vaccines: What Were We Promised?
When the vaccine was first introduced, we were promised that it would be highly effective against the virus. The original Pfizer/BioNTech study was released to the public on 9 November 2020. It stated that the vaccine would be 95% effective at preventing a person from catching COVID-19 28 days after the first dose.
In initial studies, other vaccines showed similar effectiveness. In December 2020, for example, Moderna published its Phase III trial showing 94% effectiveness against catching the disease.
Who Benefited From the Vaccine Promises?
The vaccines were created by private, for-profit companies that are traded on public stock exchanges. Immediately after Pfizer released their initial study, Pfizer’s stock price rose dramatically. Shortly after the announcement, the CEO of Pfizer sold $5.6m worth of his stock in the company – 62% of his total holdings.
This strange action was just the beginning. By April 2021, at least 40 people had become billionaires thanks to the vaccines and other measures related to the pandemic. In many cases, all businessmen and corporations needed to do was to provide a study showing the effectiveness of their product; this would be enough to cause their stock price to soar. All you need to get rich – or even ultra-rich – in 2021 is the promise that a medicine will work.
Did the Vaccines Work As Promised?
The vaccines did not work as promised. It became clear very quickly that the vaccines did not prevent 95% of those vaccinated from catching the disease. Countries that vaccinated their populations realised this quite quickly, some sooner than others.
Israel had some of the highest vaccination rates in the world in the first half of 2021. It soon became clear to the Israelis that the vaccines were not working as well in the real world as the pharmaceutical companies had claimed that they did in the trials. As early as July, Israel was reporting that the Pfizer vaccine, which had allegedly shown 95% efficacy in the trials. was only proving to be 39% effective in the real world.
The pharmaceutical companies were quick to blame this on the so-called ‘Delta variant’ of the disease. But even if the Delta variant was more virulent, this excuse was nonsense. After all, we had known for months that COVID-19 – like all seasonal respiratory illnesses – was a fast-evolving disease. If the pharmaceutical companies did not know enough to factor this into their studies, they were either incompetent or disingenuous. Since these companies hire some of the brightest scientists in the world, it is more likely that they were being disingenuous about effectiveness and they were doing so to maximise profits.
By the end of October, countries like the United Kingdom that were tracking efficacy closely started to see that those who were vaccinated (black line) were actually experiencing higher rates of infection per capita than those who had not received the vaccine (grey line).
Instead of looking closely at this shocking data, vaccine advocates started lobbying the British statistical agencies to remove the data so that people sceptical of the vaccine could not show it to other people. Vaccine failure is now leading to overt censorship of scientific evidence.
But the data remains overwhelming. Highly vaccinated countries continue to experience outbreaks of the disease. People who are vaccinated are still catching it. Everyone knows this because we all know vaccinated people who have caught the disease. We also see famous people and public figures who get vaccinated in public and then end up catching the disease anyway.
It is becoming obvious that the vaccines do not prevent people from catching or spreading the disease. This obviously means that the case for vaccine mandates is entirely without merit.
Are the Vaccines Preventing Hospitalisations and Deaths?
We will not know whether vaccines prevent hospitalisations and deaths until after the winter season has passed. But the initial evidence suggests that the vaccines are not nearly as effective at preventing serious disease as initially advertised.
Those promoting the vaccines have been proved wrong repeatedly. Yet they keep coming up with new excuses. The latest excuse is that vaccines prevent serious cases of the illness and deaths. Vaccine proponents point to the relatively low COVID-19 hospitalisations and deaths during the summer of 2021 as evidence that the vaccines prevent serious illness and death.
But we know that COVID-19, like other similar respiratory diseases, is seasonal. We do not expect to see high rates of hospitalisations and deaths from respiratory diseases during summer. This is why autumn/winter is known as ‘flu season’.
We need to wait until winter has passed to see if the vaccine is effective against serious illness and death. If we continue to see few people hospitalised with COVID-19 throughout the winter, then this may be evidence that the vaccine prevents serious illness and death. But initial evidence does not look promising.
In Central and Eastern Europe, the number of people suffering from COVID in intensive care units started rising again in September when the weather started to get colder. The countries listed are Romania (blue), Slovenia (pink), Serbia (dark brown), Austria (green), Germany (brown) and Czechia (light brown).
This is even though most of these countries have high rates of vaccination. By September 2021, when ICU wards started to fill up with COVID-19 patients once again, the vaccination rate in most of these countries was over 50%. Czechia, Germany, and Austria had higher vaccination rates than the European average.
Overall vaccination rates do not account for the fact that nearly all vulnerable people have been vaccinated in many of these countries. Germany, for example, has vaccinated over 85% of people over 60 years old.
We will not know until the end of the winter whether the vaccines are effective against serious illness and death. Right now, the data does not look promising and the decline in hospitalisations during the summer was more likely related to seasonality than it was to vaccination. But even if the vaccine proves effective against serious illness, this means that only vulnerable groups should be vaccinated. Since the vaccine does not prevent people from catching and spreading the disease, vaccine mandates make no sense and will only cause economic devastation and extreme social instability.
Are the Vaccines Safe?
The vaccines are not safe – at least in comparison to other medicines on the market. The initial trials were said to indicate that there would be no serious side effects. But since the vaccines have been injected into large numbers of members of the public, numerous side effects have been noted. Some of these have proved fatal.
The best data we have on this is the United Kingdom’s Yellow Card vaccine reporting system. Here are the latest numbers from the report of 4 November report. Note that in each cell, ‘F’ stands for fatalities. Total fatalities for each vaccine are listed in the last row.
As of 4 November, we have seen at least 1,739 fatalities reported from the vaccination program. The real numbers are likely to be much higher, as many deaths may have taken place at home and not have been attributed to the vaccine. But these are the closest numbers we have to being official numbers.
Some will say that these numbers are low relative to overall COVID-19 deaths. But this is misleading. Most of the people who died from or were seriously injured by the vaccine would not have been harmed by the virus, which only seriously affects the old and vulnerable. We can see this if we look at tables that list the patients’ ages. Here is a table that lists thrombo-embolic events together with deaths.
Here we see that people under the age of 60 made up around 73% of the thrombo-embolic events and 71% of the deaths attributed to these events. This is even though this group is not vulnerable to COVID-19. These are needless, wasteful, and tragic deaths.
It is not surprising that this is the case. Anecdotal evidence suggests that young active people are more vulnerable to the negative effects of the vaccine than older people. This is probably because they have stronger immune systems that react more aggressively to the vaccine.
In Belgium during the summer, three young cyclists from a single cycling club suffered from heart conditions related to the vaccine. This led to doctors advising against intense exercise after receiving the vaccine.
Cycling is not the only sport that has noticed huge number of complications from the vaccine. Journalists have begun compiling lists of the athletes who have reported that the vaccine has negatively impacted their health. Many athletes have started paying attention to to the reactions suffered by their teammates and rivals and are refusing to take the vaccine. We see these headlines emerge every day. But the media tell us that the athletes are crackpots instead of recognising that they are watching their friends and teammates experience these negative effects right before their own eyes.
The impact of the vaccine on pregnant women and babies is simply unknown but has been open to much speculation. We have no knowledge of how administration of the vaccine to a mother will affect her child’s development in the long term, as we simply do not have data. The best data we have – from the United Kingdom’s Yellow Card system – states that 906 pregnant women have suffered pregnancy complications that have been reported as being related to the vaccine. Since around 96,000 pregnant women have been vaccinated, this means that there is at least a 1% chance of a pregnant woman experiencing complications due to the vaccine.
Finally, we have seen a lot of excess deaths among groups not vulnerable to COVID-19 in 2021. The chart below shows excess mortality for all ages (top chart) and 15–44-year-olds (bottom chart) in 2019, 2020 and 2021, respectively. We see that fewer people overall died in 2021 than in 2020, which makes sense as the COVID-19 wave in 2020 was worse than in 2021. By contrast, far more people in the non-vulnerable 15–44-year-old age group died in 2021 than in 2020. This is not absolute proof that the vaccine is killing younger, non-vulnerable people in large numbers. But it is enough to raise huge concerns.
Furthermore, the following chart shows the death rate of vaccinated and unvaccinated people in non-vulnerable age groups (10-59) by week since the vaccine program began. The death rate in the fully vaccinated is far higher than in the unvaccinated. Some of this may be attributed to the fact that the fully vaccinated group is going to skew older than the unvaccinated group. But it seems unlikely that this explains all of the discrepancy – especially since the average of the unvaccinated group has been getting older through time as more young people are getting vaccinated and yet their death rate has not changed.
We conclude that this chart provides another worrying signal that the vaccine might be far from safe, especially for non-vulnerable groups. The data which makes up this chart is taken directly from the UK Office for National Statistics.
In 1976 the United States embarked on a mandatory vaccination program to inoculate the population against swine flu. After 25 people died, the government suspended the campaign. This anecdote shows just how important vaccine safety is and how seriously it used to be taken. By these standards, the COVID-19 vaccines cannot reasonably be considered safe.
