Land of soft soap and glory

The vaccine response to Covid is hailed a great success

The UK is enduring a Jarndyce v. Jarndyce moment (if that can describe an interminable experience). As fans of Charles Dickens are likely to know, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce was a civil suit that had stretched back through the generations without any hope of resolution and was at the heart of his masterpiece Bleak House.

The UK’s contemporary equivalent is the Covid-19 Inquiry, which has already taken years to complete and is set to last at least another 18 months. In the process, it’s likely to burn through around £200 million ($271 million) of UK taxpayers’ money. It’s all pointless and is producing hundreds of thousands of pages of reports that nobody will read.

Every other country completed its Covid inquiry years ago and tossed its findings into a filing cabinet unread and, more essentially, ignored. But the Brits take their bureaucratic duties far more seriously and have turned the circus of white papers, select committees, select sub-committees, working parties and expert groups into street theater.

The Covid Inquiry’s utterances—more like mumbles emitting from a comatose patient—occasionally wake the media from its slumber, and there was an example recently when it reported on the government’s vaccine response to the epidemic. Having listened to thousands of witnesses, the inquiry confirmed that the UK’s Covid vaccine program was indeed an unmitigated triumph that had saved the lives of 450,000 people.

The figure is based on one study, and a shining one it is, too. Studies across all of Europe have reckoned the vaccine saved 470,000 lives among its 745 million citizens, and so the UK effort having saved almost as many lives in a population that is 11 times smaller is an achievement indeed.

It’s nonsense, of course. The researchers worked from two premises that are false: The first is that the Chinese authorities which reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization on the very last day of 2019 set everyone’s Covid clock ticking.

But it’s a false start. The earliest cases that WDDTY heard about were happening in August of that year—and they were in the UK, a long way from China. Set the timeline back at least four months, and everything changes. On that basis, the virulence of the virus would have peaked in February 2020, one month before the world went into lockdown and 11 months before the “lifesaving” vaccine was launched.

Which brings us to the second false premise: The researchers who claimed the vaccines saved at least 450,000 lives in the UK alone assumed the virus didn’t weaken but remained constant in its virulence in the months and years following its introduction into the world. But nothing does; the virus we disparagingly describe as “the common cold” was once a killer, and the same can be said of the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the Covid pandemic.

By the time the first vaccines were launched, the lethality of the virus was in decline, and yet researchers based their estimates on a flat-lining graph set at its most deadly phase and never deviating.

The vaccine likely saved lives, but far fewer than researchers proclaim. Nature and the ebb and flow of the virus accounted for far fewer people dying than anything the vaccine has been heralded as doing.

Strangely, the inquiry chose to ignore any harm the Covid vaccines might have caused. It’s impossible to get the true figures, but occasionally the truth slips past the guards.

That happened recently when the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) gave a glimpse during an exercise to test the effectiveness of the Yellow Card system, to which doctors can report side effects of drugs but rarely do so. Inadvertently, the agency mentioned in passing that nearly 14 percent of people given a Covid vaccination suffered serious adverse reactions, up to and including death.¹

Essentially, the Covid exercise was for governments to be seen as doing something, even if they did more for Big Pharma than their citizens and, along the way, allowed the drug companies to launch their experimental mRNA technology. A triumph indeed.

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