Promises, Promises

During his 2020 presidential campaign, then-candidate Joe Biden promised to end the pandemic. He was “going to shut down the virus.” To many Americans, that claim was not particularly bold. The Trump administration was on track to have the vaccines available by mid-December, and our national pandemic experts had promised that those vaccines would end the pandemic.

As president, Mr. Biden’s vaccination program no doubt saved millions of Americans from some of the ravages of COVID-19. But it has done nothing to end the pandemic. The vaccines (aka mRNA vaccines) are designed to minimize the symptoms of COVID-19. They do not kill the underlying SARS-COV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19. Further, the effectiveness of the vaccines is short-lived. Given these two inherent flaws, there could not have been much science behind the decision to rely on mRNA vaccines to defeat the pandemic.

During 2020, when vaccines were not available, COVID-19 claimed the lives of 352,000 Americans. Let’s say that in late December 2020, when the mass vaccination program began, you were asked to predict the COVID-19 death toll for 2021. Most people would have expected a meaningful reduction, perhaps no more than 200,000 COVID-19 deaths. Many would have estimated a much smaller number, possibly a flu-like death toll of, say 100,000. After all, for 2021, our national health authorities would not only have unlimited quantities of vaccine, they would additionally possess abundant supplies of face masks, PPE, ventilators, PCR tests, and so forth, to say nothing of the lessons learned from 2020.

Biden’s vaccination program no doubt saved millions of Americans from some of the ravages of COVID-19. But it has done nothing to end the pandemic.

Yet the COVID-19 death toll thus far for 2021 – less than 11 months after the vaccines became available — has already exceeded 410,000 — over 60,000 more deaths than in all of 2020. Although vaccines may have saved millions of lives, especially those of the most vulnerable (the elderly, the obese, and people with multiple comorbidities), as a national pandemic response, the vaccination campaign has failed. Vaccination has not been the magic bullet.

Signs of the failure appeared as early as May 2021, when vaccine effectiveness began to wear off and the highly infectious delta variant began to circulate rapidly throughout the country. The vaccinated began to be infected. They experienced less severe COVID-19 symptoms than the unvaccinated, but they became infectious. That is, the fully vaccinated became transmitters of the virus. Predictably, as the vaccination rate increased, the fully vaccinated would become the dominant spreaders of the virus.

Equally predictably, the Biden administration would see the growing scientific evidence of vaccination failure not as a signal to reevaluate its vaccination campaign but as a signal to intensify it. Its solution to vaccination failure was more vaccination. But many tens of millions of unvaccinated Americans stood in the way. They believed that the vaccines were not particularly effective. Some believed that, as experimental drugs untested for their long-term effects, the vaccines could be dangerous. Almost all of them believed that, for children and the 150 million or so individuals with natural immunity (the previously infected), the vaccines are not necessary.

As a national pandemic response, the vaccination campaign has failed. Vaccination has not been the magic bullet.

The solution to the “unvaccinated problem” was the mandates. The unvaccinated would be vilified as public health pariahs. Without a vaccine passport, they would be isolated from society. Now, many of those who refused to be vaccinated have lost their job. Incredibly, and shamelessly, the Biden administration blamed the unvaccinated for the pandemic. As we entered a pandemic of the vaccinated, it insisted that we were in a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” As proof, pandemic gurus such as CDC director Rochelle Walensky, White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy repeatedly asserted that only the unvaccinated were dying of COVID-19. At a White House briefing on July 1, CDC director Rochelle Walensky was still telling us that 99.5% of the people who died of COVID-19 from January through June were unvaccinated.

But January was the only month in 2021 for which 99% of COVID-19 deaths were individuals who were unvaccinated. And that was simply because, in January 2021, 99% of the entire population was unvaccinated. As more and more Americans were vaccinated, the number of fully vaccinated who became infected began to increase. That number, and the number of deaths, had to be denied, because they shattered the mandate argument and contradicted the politically valuable blame-the-unvaccinated position of the Biden team. Accordingly, CDC director Walensky ignored a CDC Vaccine Effectiveness Team report, which showed that by May more than 15% of the people who died of COVID-19 were fully vaccinated.

They should have blamed the vaccines. A September 2021 study, entitled “Increases in COVID‑19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States,” found no positive correlation between the percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases. Across US counties, there “appears to be no significant signaling of COVID-19 cases decreasing with higher percentages of population fully vaccinated.” There is no significant difference in the viral loads found in infected vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, whether they are symptomatic or asymptomatic. A year-long UK study published last month in The Lancet found that the vaccinated are just as likely as the unvaccinated to spread the delta variant to contacts in their household, and, perhaps more startling, “that susceptibility to infection increases with time as soon as 2–3 months after vaccination.” The October COVID-19 Vaccine Surveillance Report published by the UK Health Security Agency showed that, for all age groups greater than 30 years of age, the infection rate was significantly higher for the vaccinated than it was for the unvaccinated. The only age group for which the vaccines showed the promised effectiveness (90%) was the under-18 cohort – the very cohort that doesn’t need vaccines. Finally, a recent Swedish study found that the degradation of vaccine effectiveness for the fully vaccinated is shockingly rapid, plummeting to less than 50% in four to six months. The Pfizer vaccine fell to “zero detectable effectiveness” by day 211 after the second shot. The AstraZeneca vaccine did so by day 121.

Shamelessly, the Biden administration blamed the unvaccinated for the pandemic.

As with the mandates, which became the solution to the “unvaccinated” problem, the booster shot became the solution to the “fading effectiveness” problem. Earlier this month, Dr. Fauci announced the booster as a requirement, saying that booster shots “are going to be an absolutely essential component of our response. Not a bonus, not a luxury, but an absolutely essential part of the program.”

Fauci’s statement is, in effect, an admission that the vaccines do not work as promised. Furthermore, because booster shots are made from the same ingredients as the first two shots, their effectiveness won’t last any longer. Thus, the Biden administration’s pandemic response boils down to: force everyone to be vaccinated, and, because the vaccines don’t work, force everyone to get multiple boosters, even though the boosters don’t work either.

The Biden pandemic response is not a scientific program to end the pandemic. It is a political ideology designed by arrogant public health bureaucrats to expand the power of the federal government. The scary “pandemic of the unvaccinated” storyline is void of science; it is merely a political tactic for usurping power from an artificially frightened citizenry. The Biden national health authorities willfully ignore and censor any scientific evidence that conflicts with the ideology. Our compliance with the lock-downs, the face masks, and now the vaccine-booster regimen is simply practice for their future projects (the Green New Deal comes to mind). If they were serious, and scientific, about ending the pandemic, they would consider other measures; they should have done so back in June, when scientific evidence began to show the limitations of the vaccines. One obvious measure is the development of a better vaccine – specifically, a sterilizing one. Another is therapeutic drugs. In his article “FDA should rethink COVID vaccine ‘one-size-fits-all’ booster shot message,” doctor Marty Makary identified two of them: “Merck’s and Pfizer’s new pills that cut COVID deaths to zero in each of their phase three clinical trials.” Makary also indicated that those who have been previously infected will derive little benefit from the vaccines, noting that “the largest study conducted worldwide on natural immunity found that vaccinated people were 27-times more likely to get COVID than those who had previously tested positive for COVID.”

Forcing people to take the vaccine, especially an experimental mRNA vaccine, should be regarded as unconstitutional. But even if it were constitutional, what is the point of forcing the unvaccinated to get vaccinated, when the vaccinated are spreading the virus? However fast it is spreading today, it will only spread faster as more people are vaccinated. As Andy Slavitt, a former advisor on President Biden’s coronavirus response team, recently tweeted: “Given Delta’s contagiousness & the fitness of future mutations in order to beat it [the virus], this means SARS-CoV-2 will be contagious enough that everyone will get the virus.”

The odds are that eventually you will be infected, even if you are fully vaccinated and boosted.

The promise to end the pandemic with mRNA vaccines is a deceitful fantasy. If you are fully vaccinated and encounter the virus, then you will be infected with SARS-CoV-2. What happens next is a function of the time elapsed since your last injection. Roughly speaking, if the encounter occurs within the first few months of that injection, you will be protected from serious illness and death. But you will be capable of spreading the virus. Indeed, if you are asymptomatic or experience only mild symptoms, then you could unwittingly become a super-spreader. You pose a major threat to the highly vulnerable.

If the encounter occurs during the following few months, then your level of protection falls below 50%. At this point, if you are among the highly vulnerable, serious illness or death looms large. It may be time to schedule your next booster shot. If the encounter occurs beyond that time, e.g., seven months or longer, in the case of the Pfizer vaccine, then you are no better off than the unvaccinated. The only good news is that if you survive, you will acquire natural immunity, which is 27 times better than the immunity conferred by the vaccines.

The mRNA vaccines can protect individuals from the effects of COVID-19 in the short term. Longer term protection requires an annual booster shot. This assumes that no long-term safety risks emerge to preclude its use, and that it works as promised (especially against severe illness, hospitalization, and death). Nevertheless, the virus remains in circulation, infecting both the unvaccinated and the vaccinated, who, in turn, transmit it to others. The odds are that eventually you will be infected, even if you are fully vaccinated and boosted. This includes being infected by a future strain that is likely to be more virulent, and conceivably more lethal, than the delta variant. And with well over half the country vaccinated, the odds are that you will be infected by someone who has been vaccinated. The principal achievement of the mandates will be the immense transfer of individual healthcare freedom to incompetent public health authorities – that, and the immense flow of multi-year profits to powerful pharmaceutical companies.

The promise of ending the pandemic, or even controlling it, with mRNA vaccines will never be kept. It doesn’t matter how many people are vaccinated; 100% vaccination won’t stop the virus. And it doesn’t matter how horribly the unvaccinated are treated or how many of their lives are ruined by feckless mandates.