Israel's Grim COVID Data Suggests Vaccines Alone Won't Stop Pandemic

[Hoodat]

Israel's Grim COVID Data Suggests Vaccines Alone Won't Stop Pandemic

Ed Browne  12 hrs ago

Scientists around the world have closely watched Israel to see how vaccinations could affect the pandemic, since the country launched a rapid vaccination campaign in December 2020. This saw more than half of its population fully vaccinated as early as March this year.

Yet Israel currently has one of the worst rates of biweekly COVID cases per million people in the world as the country battles the delta variant, according to figures collected by OurWorldInData as of August 24.

Breakthrough cases are also a matter of concern. Earlier this month, Science magazine reported that 514 Israelis were hospitalized with COVID as of August 15, that 59 percent of these had been fully vaccinated, and that the vast majority of these fully vaccinated people were aged 60 or older.  .  .  .

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/israels-grim-covid-data-suggests-vaccines-alone-wont-stop-pandemic/ar-AANJIxp


So the only possible solution is for everyone to be more fully vaccinated.

[Right_in_Virginia]

Vaccines without effective thearpeutics are never enough.

[PeteS in CA]

"Grim"? Not if one looks at the daily deaths chart here, https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/ , specifically comparing the current surge to the fall and winter 2020 surges. Nor have I seen anyone claim that vaccines alone were the answer to Covid. Exaggeration does not help the credibility of the claims.

[mountaineer]

Alex Berenson
@AlexBerenson
1/ To the vaccine fanatics who are saying, Israel, who cares, Israel’s tiny, muah…
The UK - population 65 million, ~80% of adults fully vaccinated - is very much heading the wrong way.
Deaths are up 10x - yes, tenfold - compared to this time last year. Cases are rising again.

https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1431288257564794884

[mountaineer]

Berenson was banned again by Twitter, but still posts at Substack. I received this via email (also posted at his blog) and want to republish it in its entirety because it addresses both vaccines and shutdowns - not in Israel, but in Vietnam.

Insanity in Vietnam
Army-enforced lockdowns, spiraling case counts... and a new mass vaccination campaign. Coincidence, no doubt.
   
Alex Berenson
19 hr ago   

Until this summer, Vietnam was a Covid success story. Many Americans still think of Vietnam as a poor country of rice farmers. In fact, Vietnam’s economy has surged since 2000 as it picks up manufacturing priced out of China, its historic foe to the north. Fewer than 10 percent of Vietnam’s 100 million people now fall below the global poverty line.

Like China, Vietnam has a nominally Communist government better described as pro-growth and authoritarian. And like China, Vietnam moved aggressively to contain the coronavirus last year with apparent success.

In 2020, Vietnam reported fewer than 1,500 Covid cases and 35 deaths. In a March 2021 article, a group of academics - inevitably supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - bragged that Vietnam’s early lockdowns and aggressive contact tracing program deserved the credit.

Just how aggressive? Vietnam detained 4.3 million people in centralized quarantine centers in 2020, and quarantined another 6 million at home.

It also closed its borders to nearly all international travel and created an phone app that includes “allows users to declare their own health status, report suspected cases, and watch real-time movement of people placed under quarantine.”

In other words, an automated snitching program that would have made Orwell proud.

You also may not be surprised to hear that Vietnam cracked down on “misinformation” about Covid, too. “The government was on the lookout for misinformation from the very beginning… [and has] a specific decree outlining fines for people who use social media to ‘share false, untruthful, distorted, or slanderous information.’”

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-exemplar-vietnam

But Vietnam’s success at containing Covid abruptly ended this spring.

Its coronavirus epidemic began in May and exploded in late June. Since then, cases have risen 25-fold. On Friday, Vietnam reported more than 17,000 cases, its most ever - more than 10 times as many as it had in all of 2020.

Deaths are soaring too. Over the last week, Vietnam has averaged more deaths per-capita than the United States.

With this number of cases, individual contact tracing is effectively impossible, even for a centralized and authoritarian state. So Vietnam has implemented far more aggressive lockdowns than it did last year, including bringing in soldiers to enforce quarantines in the southern metropolis of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon).

As Reuters reported on August 26: “Vietnam has deployed soldiers to the streets of Ho Chi Minh City to help enforce the country's strictest movement curbs yet which prevent people from leaving home, even for food.”

Apparently this plan… has a few flaws.

As a reader wrote in this morning:

“On August 23 they have implemented this so-called Directive 16 for two weeks which is like martial law at this point...

“Areas in the red zones are not allowed to shop at supermarkets for two weeks. Supposedly their plan was to have the military do the shopping for you and they can deliver it at your doorstep…

“As you can surmise, it’s a nightmare. [There is now] a mobile app for food and essential stuff but the supermarkets are inundated with orders it can’t cater to everyone. So much for the military doing the shopping…”

Where all this goes remains to be seen. Presumably the Vietnamese government will not starve its citizens to death to reduce case counts for a virus that roughly 997 out of every 1,000 people survive. (Though, at this point, who can be sure?) But the Vietnamese economy and global clothing and shoe supply chains are already starting to feel the pinch.

But maybe the biggest question of all remains unanswered: why now?

Inevitably, the media and government are blaming the Delta variant. But the variant was widespread worldwide well before the explosion in cases Vietnam saw two months ago.

But Vietnam did see one big change this summer: the beginning of a mass vaccination program. Vietnam didn’t depend on Chinese vaccines, either (not surprising, given the long history of conflict between the two countries). It has mostly used the AstraZeneca DNA/AAV vaccine, along with the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines - the same trio that have dominated Europe.

As of early June, almost no one in Vietnam was vaccinated. Today, almost 20 percent of the country has received at least one dose.

The pattern is exactly the same as we saw in Israel and Britain in January, and many other countries over the spring. The first dose of mass vaccination campaigns is associated with a huge spike in cases.

Too many countries have seen this trend for it to be called coincidental. The question is what’s causing it. Possibilities include post-vaccine behavioral changes (hot vaxxed summer!), vulnerable people clustering together at vaccination sites, or (most likely) some short-term vaccine-driven suppression of the immune system.

Given that we know now peak mRNA vaccine protection lasts a matter of months at most, the post-first-dose spike is even more important in judging the costs and benefits of vaccines. But vaccine advocates will not even acknowledge the existence of the post-first-dose spike, much less admit that it leaves the case for mass vaccinations even murkier than before.

No matter.  Whether they choose to admit the truth or not, Vietnam’s experience proves again that virus gonna virus. Extreme measures may temporarily delay the spread of Sars-Cov-2 (at enormous cost to civil liberties). But without a permanent and effective vaccine, every country - and every person - will eventually be exposed. And right now, we are nowhere near a permanent and effective vaccine.

—

I’d say all of this on Twitter, but I can’t. You can, though.

I encourage anyone interested in his well-researched reporting on the pandemic to sign up for his Substack blog.

[Hoodat]

"Grim"? Not if one looks at the daily deaths chart here, https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/ , specifically comparing the current surge to the fall and winter 2020 surges.

The primary reason the death rate is down is because the Delta strain has a much lower mortality rate than does the winter 2020 strain.  The pseudo-vaccine has nothing to do with it.

Nor have I seen anyone claim that vaccines alone were the answer to Covid.

No, one must also include wearing 2 masks, staying at home, and shutting down the economy.

[PeteS in CA]

The primary reason the death rate is down is because the Delta strain has a much lower mortality rate than does the winter 2020 strain 1.  The pseudo-vaccine has nothing to do with it 2.
...

1 Comparing US and Indian daily deaths, here https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/india/ and here https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ , and allowing for India's greater population, the data does not support that claim. Then there are the facts that US "Covid deaths" are exaggerated by a fairly loose definition, while India's healthcare system under-counts Covid deaths because it is too rudimentary to have accurate statistics.

2 What is this, "The pseudo-vaccine," to which you refer? There are three Covid vaccines approved or authorized for use in the US. Like all vaccines, they teach recipients' immune systems to produce antibodies that attack the vaccines' targets. The target often is a whole virus, but at least one other long-used common vaccine's target is neither a virus nor part of a virus. Do I need to say what that vaccine is for? The two currently approved Ebola vaccines target part of the Ebola virus (rather than the entire virus), much as the Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J vaccines do the SARS-Cov-2 virus, and use the same viral vector technology as does the J&J vaccine.

[DB]

Strange how they had to change the legal and technical definition of a vaccine to include these "vaccines".

[Bigun]

Strange how they had to change the legal and technical definition of a vaccine to include these "vaccines".

There is something very sinister going on if you ask me.

[PeteS in CA]

Strange how they had to change the legal and technical definition of a vaccine to include these "vaccines".

@DB

1. Who are "they"?

2. What do you claim was the "legal and technical definition of a vaccine"?

3. Where is the evidence this "legal and technical definition of a vaccine" was changed?

[DB]

@DB

1. Who are "they"?

2. What do you claim was the "legal and technical definition of a vaccine"?

3. Where is the evidence this "legal and technical definition of a vaccine" was changed?

The first hit on Bing:

https://theredelephants.com/merriam-webster-dictionary-quietly-changes-definition-of-vaccine-to-include-covid-19-mrna-injection/

There was much discussion about back when it happened. There were legal issues with calling it a vaccine because it wasn't technically a vaccine.

So the definition was changed.

[Hoodat]

1 Comparing US and Indian daily deaths, here https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/india/ and here https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ , and allowing for India's greater population, the data does not support that claim.

Not sure what India's numbers have to do with this.  But looking at the current Delta spike over the last two months, here is a comparison of death rates:


Up until June 29, 2021

Cases:  34,413,467
Deaths:  620,453

Mortality:  1.80%

After June 29, 2021

Cases:  5,370,592
Deaths:    34,751

Mortality:  0.65%

[art.prout]

There is something very sinister going on if you ask me.

 

Very sinister, and very evil.

[mountaineer]

Scientists continue to push false info about benefits of Covid-19 vaccine in people who had Covid
Dated: August 30, 2021 by Sharyl Attkisson


The following is a news analysis.
Saturday Aug. 28, 2021

The same false information that top immunization advisers and officials at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) promulgated months ago somehow worked its way into an article in the medical journal Science published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The information incorrectly claimed, once again, that a new study showed people with natural immunity to Covid-19 after infection benefit further if they still get vaccinated, anyway.

The writer of the article appeared to use the misinformation to try to undercut the findings of the large study in Israel that found natural immunity is far superior to vaccination in preventing Covid-19. The study amplifies the results of many other studies that concluded the same thing. ...

[mountaineer]

URGENT: Five months = plunging COVID vaccine effectiveness
A new paper just out in the NEJM confirms human biology is the same everywhere.   
Alex Berenson
Sep 1   
   
The New England Journal of Medicine has just published a letter reporting that Covid vaccine protection among 19,000 healthcare workers in San Diego went from 94%+ March through June to 65% in July.

It also reported vaccinated and unvaccinated people were just about as likely to be symptomatic (which means they probably had similar viral loads and risks of spreading the illness - and so much for vaccines protecting people from symptomatic disease).

Worse, the 65% figure probably OVERSTATES real vaccine effectiveness, for three reasons:

1) It includes some people who were vaccinated in March and April and were still at or close to peak protection.

2) Healthcare workers are relatively young and healthy and thus more likely to have a strong immune response.

3) This included many people vaccinated with Moderna, which has a higher dose and thus may last slightly longer than Pfizer.

Boosters today, boosters tomorrow, boosters forever!

SOURCE: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2112981

[DB]

Has there ever been a fully approved vaccine that resulted in people in large numbers catching the very virus that they were vaccinated against?

What real vaccine has only lasted 6 months in the history of vaccines?

This is just a big science experiment with "experts" adlibbing their way through it all.

[mountaineer]

What "stopped" the flu outbreak of 1918?

[catfish1957]

What "stopped" the flu outbreak of 1918?

It's been almost 35 years since I had an epidemiological job with the state and had discussions with CDC, but from my Public Health Micro days , it was pretty well understood  that all highly contagious air born viruses pretty much have to be starved out of the population via herd immunity,  Meaning after enough people get, acquire immunity through infection, or are propely vacinnated, the virus has difficulty in transmitting because of the lack of hosts to infect.

That's pretty much what happened back in 1918.

[mountaineer]

That's pretty much what happened back in 1918.

That's what I figured. For some reason, the powers-that-be don't want that to happen in 2021.

[DB]

It's been almost 35 years since I had an epidemiological job with the state and had discussions with CDC, but from my Public Health Micro days , it was pretty well understood  that all highly contagious air born viruses pretty much have to be starved out of the population via herd immunity,  Meaning after enough people get, acquire immunity through infection, or are propely vacinnated, the virus has difficulty in transmitting because of the lack of hosts to infect.

That's pretty much what happened back in 1918.

And to do that, the young and healthy getting the virus creates that herd immunity with the fewest casualties. And the government is hell bent on preventing that.

[mountaineer]

[Polly Ticks]

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1433482410558164993

[mountaineer]

As I've said many times, I would gladly take the Covid-19 vaccine if there were any evidence it's both 1) safe, and 2) effective.
Still waiting.

[rustynail]

There is something very sinister going on if you ask me.

Well, it is from the left.

[roamer_1]

That's because they are not vaccines.