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Martin Kulldorff explains that hospitals should hire, not fire, unvaccinated nurses with natural immunity [3]. Two slices:
We have lived with endemic coronaviruses for at least a hundred years, for which we have long-lasting natural immunity. As expected, we also have natural immunity after Covid-19 disease, as there have been exceedingly few reinfections with serious illness or death, despite a widely circulating virus.
For most viruses, natural immunity is better than vaccine-induced immunity, and that is also true for Covid. In the best study to date [4], the vaccinated were around 27 times more likely to have symptomatic disease than those with natural immunity, with an estimated range between 13 and 57. With no Covid deaths in either group, both natural and vaccine immunity protect well against death.
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By pushing vaccine mandates, White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci is questioning the existence of natural immunity after Covid disease. In doing so, he is following the lead of CDC director Rochelle Walensky, who questioned natural immunity in a 2020 Memorandum [5] published by The Lancet. By instituting vaccine mandates, university hospitals are now also questioning the existence of natural immunity after Covid disease.This is astonishing.
Alberto Mingardi reports on the Madrid government’s response to Covid-19 [6].
Philip Pilkington documents some of the damage done to Britain’s economy by lockdowns [7]. A slice:
Market economies tend to be pretty good at getting food on the supermarket shelves and fuel in petrol stations, if left to themselves. That last part is key: if left to themselves. Heavy-handed interference in market economies tends to produce the same pathologies we see in socialist economies, including shortages and inflation. That has been the unintended consequence of lockdown.
When they started last year, what was most striking to me — cursed as I am with an economist’s brain — was that there was no discussion of the collateral damage they would have on the economy, not just immediately but down the line. As the weeks rolled on and it became clear that the lockdown was no one-off intervention, I looked to my Left and to my Right, expecting a phalanx of economists to come out warning of the dangers to the economy. But the cavalry never arrived.
Graham Young, writing from Australia, argues that government-mandated vaccination is a grotesque violation of human rights [8]. A slice:
While most of the media has been dishonourably absent from the field during the COVID pandemic, there are signs that as the audience-lure of COVID-porn wanes they are starting to pick up the stories of lives and livelihoods destroyed by the lockdowns.
They won’t be able to resist the stories of battlers living in their cars, or camped-out in the countryside because they can no longer afford a solid roof over their heads having lost their jobs to the jab.
For the last few months, CHOP’s occupancy rate has been at record-high levels, mostly because of non-COVID-19 respiratory illnesses, and mental health crises. On several occasions, the hospital ran out of beds and had to put inpatients in rooms normally used for treatment or postoperative recovery.
The surge is clearly traceable to the pandemic. Children who were hunkered down in relatively aseptic conditions — away from school and friends, donning masks to go out in public — didn’t get seasonal sicknesses last year, but they also didn’t build immunity to those viruses. Now that kids have resumed more normal lives, hospitals across the country are seeing an unusually big, early surge of sickness, particularly respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). [10]
“There’s this concept of an ‘immunity debt,’” Keren said. “Kids haven’t been exposed to these viruses for going on two years, so they are vulnerable. It makes it easier for the virus to spread quicker.”
As Margery Smelkinson says about this situation at CHOPs [11],
Myopic views and draconian restrictions did not come free. And yet, they persist.
Fascinating debate on masks on children. Pro-maskers @IrwinRedlenerMD [13], @PatriceHarrisMD [14]and @rweingarten [15]claim belief in science, but ignore scientific evidence, while anti-maskers @TracyBethHoeg [16]and @DrJBhattacharya [17]quote study after study.