Not so black and white: Covid’s 50 shades of gray

Health agencies are not releasing the truth about the dangers of vaccines, the real death rate from the Covid virus or alternative therapies that can help. The black-and-white world of Covid they present is tearing communities and families apart.

Has anybody in your family refused the Covid vaccine? Have you socially shunned them and not invited them to family gatherings? Or perhaps you’re an ‘anti-vaxxer,’ and you’ve fallen out with friends and family who blame you for Covid’s continued spread.

Families are being torn apart—and it’s because they are being told a very clear message that Covid is a killer and that vaccines are the only way out of this.

As the saying has it, truth may be the first casualty of war, but it’s also taken quite a knock in another type of conflict: our battle against Covid-19. Forgetting conspiracy theories, reliable and trusted sources reveal that the number of deaths directly caused by the virus is much lower than official figures suggest, and adverse reactions and deaths from the vaccines are far higher than we’re being told, while proven alternative therapies are being suppressed.

These inconvenient truths are not mentioned in the official narrative, which is more akin to propaganda than reasoned debate. The result is a schism in society—even in families—where anyone questioning it is branded an ‘anti-vaxxer’ and faces hostility from the vaccinated, and in some countries is treated as a social pariah, barred from shops and restaurants.

The basis for the narrative is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 can be lethal, and that vaccinations are safe and prevent serious infection and transmission. Getting vaccinated is, therefore, a social duty that protects the most vulnerable.

While there is merit in each of those statements, the truth is more nuanced, and it’s being excised from the public debate. And getting the truth isn’t always easy, as the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency group has been discovering. 

The group, made up of doctors and other healthcare providers, filed a Freedom of Information request last September with the US drug regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for the documents that were used to approve Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine, Comirnaty, a month earlier.1

As the FDA ignored the request, the group sued. In its initial response, the FDA has released just 91 pages of a file it says includes 329,000 pages and has asked the court to allow it 55 years to release all the rest, as it has to read them first and redact any sensitive information.

Even the few pages that have been released reveal a worrying picture. Within a few months of the vaccine’s initial rollout at the beginning of 2021, Pfizer had received 42,086 reports of adverse reactions, which included 1,223 fatalities.

Do your own math

According to the US Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), which logs reports of adverse reactions to all vaccinations, the Covid vaccines’ fatality rate (VFR) is around 0.002 percent, which is calculated by dividing the number of reported deaths by the total number of doses given out.  

As a passive reporting system, VAERS has its limitations and relies on doctors and individuals to report on cases they suspect may have been caused by a vaccination. Instead of relying solely on the VAERS data, research scientist Spiro Pantazatos at Columbia University Medical Center widened his search to include data from 21 European countries that was collated by the EuroMOMO (European Mortality Monitoring) database.2

He concluded that the VFR is 20 times greater than the VAERS estimate, putting it at around 0.04 percent as an average. If this is a more accurate fatality rate, the vaccine has claimed the lives of up to 187,400 Americans between last February and August alone. Extrapolated across a year, the calculations suggest around 321,257 Americans died as a direct result of the vaccine in 2021.

His regression analysis reveals a more granular picture in which the current “vaccines-for-all” campaign is unethical, with only the elderly seeing benefits greater than the risks that come with vaccination. Covid’s fatality rate among those over 75 is around 1 percent—orders of magnitude greater than the vaccine’s risk of death for that age group (0.06 percent).

But the risks from the vaccine start outweighing the benefits in younger age groups, and there is the added danger that people are three times more likely to get a Covid infection in the first week after vaccination. Pantazatos also confirms that the vaccine’s effectiveness wanes after five months—and it doesn’t stop infection or transmission, negating the argument of vaccinating for the public good.

Not so many

Nonetheless, Covid-19 can be lethal, and WDDTY has calculated that in the same period Pantazatos tracked up to 187,000 vaccine deaths in the US, around 250,000 Americans died from the virus.

Despite all the statistics available, it’s hard to ascertain Covid’s true lethality rate. According to John Ioannides, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, the upper level is around 0.3 percent among those over 70, making it three times more deadly than seasonal flu.3

But that’s assuming Covid deaths are being properly recorded. Most health authorities are using the definition of a Covid death as being one within 28 days of a positive Covid diagnosis, but that does not necessarily mean the person died from Covid.

When Italy’s Higher Institute of Health took another look at the country’s 130,468 deaths, it discovered that just 3,783 of them were a direct result of the virus. Nearly 66 percent of the infected Italians were suffering from arterial hypertension, which can be a killer, while 23 percent had dementia and 24 percent had atrial fibrillation (irregular heartbeat). In addition, 17 percent had lung problems, 16 percent had suffered from cancer in the previous five years and 15 percent had heart failure. As those figures add up to more than a hundred, some victims were very sick and were suffering from at least two of the conditions.4

Nothing else works

Doctors treat severe Covid cases with antivirals and anti-inflammatories—and ventilators for the very sick—and several Covid pills are on the horizon, including Merck’s antiviral molnupiravir  and Pfizer’s nirmatrelvir (Paxlovid).

But don’t expect to be given vitamins, minerals or herbs in the intensive care unit—there’s not enough evidence that suggests they help, says the US National Institutes of Health.   

That’s not what researchers at the University of Nottingham in the UK have found. They’ve discovered that a plant-based antiviral—thapsigargin (TG), from the Thapsia sarganica plant, commonly known as ‘deadly carrot’—blocks the SARS-CoV-2 virus, including the more virulent Delta variant.5

In laboratory tests, TG was around 95 percent more effective than other therapies in stopping infection and inhibiting the virus’s spread. TG was effective against all Covid variants, and especially Delta, which replicates at four times the rate of earlier variants.

The discovery builds on earlier work at the university showing that TG therapy blocks three human respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2.

Lead researcher Kin Chow Chang said TG therapy could be used both as a preventative and as a therapy after infection.

High-dose vitamin C could also be a lifesaver; patients in critical care are more likely to survive if they are given high-dose intravenous (IV) therapy. Researchers at the Institute of Optimum Nutrition analyzed 12 studies that had explored the relationship between vitamin C levels and the severity of a Covid infection. Covid patients tend to have levels of the vitamin so low they are comparable to someone with sepsis.6

But the doses need to be high, say the researchers, ranging from 2 to 3 grams every day, and they should be given for far longer than the two to four days the therapy is used in hospitals.   

Intensive care doctors have also been having success with high-dose vitamin D, and researchers at Purdue University have discovered why it works: they’ve found that the vitamin reduces inflammation caused by the immune system’s killer T cells.7

Analyzing lung samples taken from eight Covid patients, the researchers noticed their immune system had gone into overdrive—the cytokine storm often seen in severe Covid—which causes severe inflammation that creates breathing problems.

Th1 cells, a subset of T cells, go through an inflammatory phase, when infections are killed off, before becoming anti-inflammatory. But sometimes the inflammatory phase can last for days, and in cases where a person’s vitamin D stores are low, never switch off.

Giving the patient high doses of the vitamin speeds the T cells’ transition to the anti-inflammatory phase or kick-starts it if it isn’t happening.

The researchers emphasize that the type of vitamin D in health stores won’t be adequate, and that very high doses are needed to help support the T cells.

The truth is out there

These concerns—and especially that the vaccine is more dangerous than we’re being told, and doctors are not being allowed to use alternative treatments that are effective—were raised by the British family doctor Samuel White last summer in two videos he uploaded to Instagram.

The UK’s medical regulator, the General Medical Council, ordered him to take down the videos and barred him from practicing medicine. The GMC rescinded the bar on practicing a month later, but Dr White was banned from posting any new material on social media or commenting on others’ posts.

Dr White challenged the ruling on the basis that his freedom of speech had been unreasonably curtailed and asked the UK High Court of Justice to overturn the ban. Last November, they did just that, although it was because the GMC had not followed proper process.

However, the judge, Mr Justice Dove, did not believe the GMC had proven Dr White’s claims were false and would cause ‘national panic,’ two of the measures that determine our right to freedom of speech.

The GMC had not proven that mask-wearing was necessary—another of Dr White’s claims, that Covid vaccines were entirely safe, or that proven alternatives had not been suppressed, and doctors discouraged from using them.

The judge’s ruling suggests that the truth is found in the granular, the many shades of gray. But while we continue to live in a polemical, black-and-white Covid world, people, families and communities will continue to be divided.

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