CORONAVIRUS | BEHIND THE STORY How to argue with a Covid antivaxer Your guide to some of the most common and persuasive assertions — and why they are wrong please log in to view this image Tom Whipple , Science Editor Friday December 31 2021, 5.00pm, The Times Share Save It’s not always nefarious plots by Bill Gates, brain control by 5G masts or elaborate conspiracies about a “plandemic” involving Pfizer-installed bioweapons. Some of the most compelling arguments by antivaxers use real data and cite official sources — but make faulty conclusions. Here is science editor Tom Whipple’s guide to some of the most common and persuasive arguments — and why they are wrong. Claim Thousands of people have died after getting the vaccine please log in to view this image IN YOUR INBOX Best of Times We’ll send you our top stories, across all sections, straight to your inbox. Simple as that. Sign up now Assessment We all die, eventually. And, trite as that sounds, that’s crucial in understanding one of the most common antivax claims: that official websites, such as that of the UK medical regulator, show the vaccines have caused mass deaths and disability. Those websites do indeed record a bewildering array of post-vaccine disease. And this is exactly what you’d expect. In the UK, EU and USA, doctors report illnesses, oddities and deaths that occur post-vaccine to a central database, irrespective of what caused them. If you vaccinate an entire population, there are going to be a lot of these. ADVERTISEMENT All that matters is, are there more than you would expect in a population that hadn’t been vaccinated? Answering this is phenomenally hard. So far, statisticians have identified a very slight extra risk of clotting with the AstraZeneca vaccine, with 75 reported fatal cases in the UK, and a slight risk of non-fatal heart problems with Pfizer. Anyone citing UK vaccine reporting statistics to claim mass side effects is ignoring a lot of disclaimers. This will be bad news for some: officially reported side effects include a man who claimed that after vaccination his penis grew larger. Claim Footballers who are vaccinated keep dying Assessment There is an emotional force to seeing young, fit men die — especially during sport. When they do so in large numbers after a mass global vaccination programme it begins to look fishy — and last month a statistic was shared widely that claimed 108 footballers and coaches have died in 2021. The source appears to be an Israeli news site, which trawled the internet to collate deaths in sports around the world at all levels of the game. Is it unusually high? Without comparing to other years using the same methodology we can’t know. In 2020, though, Fifa backed research looking systematically at 16 countries’ “sudden death registries”. In a normal year, across the world, it found 150 entries for players dying during football games alone. Claim Big Pharma are suppressing drugs to beat covid because it won’t earn them huge profits Assessment Ivermectin is a Nobel Prize winning drug that is cheap, mass produced and highly effective. The problem is, what it is highly effective at is treating parasites. This has not stopped it becoming a cause célèbre among those on social media who claim pharmaceutical companies are suppressing treatments, especially ivermectin, that would stop the pandemic. The claim — of efficacy, if not conspiracy — is not absurd. Early in the pandemic, some laboratory studies suggested that, along with many other compounds, it might have an effect on Covid. Later, this hypothesis was backed up by clinical trials. The most impressive of those trials, including a randomised study in Egypt, turned out to be fraudulent. It is currently being assessed in Oxford’s Recovery Trial, but as yet there is not strong enough evidence to recommend its use. ADVERTISEMENT As to the claim that Big Pharma is suppressing a cheap medicine, it’s very hard to square that with the knowledge that the first drug proven to treat Covid was a 60-year old steroid called dexamethasone that costs pennies. Claim People under 60 who are vaccinated are twice as likely to die Assessment This compelling statistic, shared and promoted by antivax groups, has an unimpeachable source: the Office for National Statistics. And it is absolutely true. This isn’t, though, a lesson in the danger of vaccines, but in the danger of counterintuitive statistics. As Stuart McDonald, chairman of the Covid 19 Actuaries Response Group put it, it’s a near-textbook example of a phenomenon known as Simpson’s Paradox. In each age group — 30 to 40, 40 to 50, 50 to 60 — vaccines reduce your risk of death. Yet when these ages are grouped together, the reverse appears to happen. Why? The answer is simple: it’s because the average age of the vaccinated group is a lot higher than that of the unvaccinated one. Almost all children under ten are in the unvaccinated group. Almost all adults over 40 are in the vaccinated group. What the statistic really shows is that older people are more likely to die. Claim We count too many deaths ADVERTISEMENT Assessment According to official data, over 148,000 people have died within 28 days of a Covid diagnosis. Each day, this figure is incremented by the latest daily toll, which is also the figure reported in much of the media. But can we trust it? If someone caught Covid 27 days ago then got run over by a bus, they would still be a Covid death. We are including people who died “with Covid”, instead of just those who died “from Covid”. The criticism has merit. This “28-day” figure is a rough and ready statistic used to provide an early estimate of deaths, but is no substitute for medical diagnosis. That is why, separately, we also wait and record those deaths in which Covid is mentioned on the death certificate. This number takes longer to arrive but is considered a truer reflection of reality. Currently, it stands at 173,000, which is 25,000 higher than the 28-day figure. It turns out the number of Covid cases who lived 28 days before dying more than offsets the number run over by buses. Claim Covid is no worse than flu Assessment Influenza deaths vary between years, depending on the strain in circulation and the effectiveness of the vaccine programme. According to Public Health England, though, in a normal year — a year with no public health mitigations — it would not be unusual to have fewer than 10,000 deaths. In the past two years we have had the most stringent public health mitigations in history — enough that flu disappeared. And we have seen more than 150,000 Covid deaths. Covid isn’t flu. Claim The vaccines don’t work any more ADVERTISEMENT Assessment There is no doubt that Omicron has severely hit the effectiveness of vaccines. Knowing how much is very hard this early on. Laboratory work suggested a huge drop in the ability of vaccines to stop infection, but also that a booster dose bumps it up. Preliminary real world data corroborates this. Two doses of AstraZeneca seems to have almost no effect against infection, but a booster brought it back to almost 50 per cent. Crucially, scientists always thought the vaccines would hold out better at their primary job — stopping severe disease. According to the best estimates of the UK Health Security Agency, two doses still make you more than 50 per cent less likely to end up in hospital. Three brings that up to almost 90 per cent. There is a simpler way of understanding the effectiveness of vaccines. Last winter, 50,000 cases of Covid led to about 1,000 deaths. This autumn they led to 100.
What if we had done nothing about Covid? No lockdowns, no border closures, no homeschooling, no furlough. What state would Britain’s health, hospitals and economy be in today if we had just let the virus rip and waited for immunity? Tom Calver explores an alternative reality please log in to view this image How would Britain have fared with a different approach to tackling Covid? Tom Calver Saturday January 01 2022, 6.00pm, The Sunday Times Share Save For an eternity (or was it a week?) it looked like Britain might be going it alone, avoiding the tough measures imposed by some of our European neighbours and shielding only the vulnerable: in other words, treating Covid like flu. Then research by Imperial College London presented a startling reality: if we did nothing, it said, half a million people would die of Covid. Thus Britain was consigned to lockdown. Nearly two years later we have a good idea of how the pandemic will end: thanks to ever-growing levels of immunity from vaccines and infections, Covid is becoming less threatening. It will continue to circulate every year; indeed it is predicted to become no more deadly than flu. Lockdowns, once our only way of preventing large numbers of deaths, are unlikely to be needed again ... at least until the next pandemic. We are still not sure what measures worked best, while many of the secondary effects of lockdowns — particularly on children — may not be seen for years, perhaps decades. Yet what would have happened if we had not taken any action? What if Covid had been allowed to spread rapidly, with no enforced social distancing? What if pubs, schools and non-essential shops had stayed open, if borders had not closed and there was no furlough scheme or masks? How many more deaths would we have suffered? What would have happened to the economy or our children’s educations? Would Britain look much different now? ADVERTISEMENT Would the bodies have ‘piled high’? As a data journalist trying to make sense of the early pandemic, I recall being horrified by the numbers in Professor Neil Ferguson’s Imperial paper, published on March 16, 2020. So does Tim Harford, the economist and author of How to Make the World Add Up. “Ferguson got a lot of criticism, but actually, when you look at all the data that’s come out since then, if you assume nobody did anything to stop the spread, it’s probably about right,” Harford said. Ferguson’s estimate of 510,000 deaths was based on most people catching the virus, and an infection fatality rate of about 1 per cent. Don’t forget, Boris Johnson allegedly said he would “let the bodies pile high in their thousands” in a quest for herd immunity. “It would mean one person dying on every street,” Harford said. “We’d also have had an enormous wave of long Covid.” Deaths in spring 2020 never topped 1,100 a day, but Ferguson’s model predicted a daily toll of 14,000. Here, the numbers can only take us so far. Harford has been researching the effects of the Chicago heatwave in 1995, which killed hundreds of people in a few days. “The mortuary became overrun. There was not enough freezer space to put the bodies in, so they had to call a meat-packing truck. They stored the bodies inside it. “Then they realised they still didn’t have enough room, so they called in another one, and another. In the end, there were nine of these trucks, all full of bodies. I think we’d be looking at that all over the country for weeks. It is horrific for several months — and then it is over.” Would the NHS have collapsed? Ferguson’s model suggested that at the peak about 180,000 critical care beds would be needed. This is more than the total number of beds in all NHS hospitals, let alone the much smaller number of intensive care beds (about 6,000 during the first and second Covid waves). Most hospitals would have been devoted entirely to treating Covid patients. Tens of thousands who should have gone to hospital would have died at home. Other patients would not have got a look in. “The NHS doesn’t ‘collapse’ — there’s not one moment when it hits the buffers,” said Siva Anandaciva, chief analyst at the King’s Fund think tank. “Rather, you’d see an extreme version of the existing prioritisation that goes on in hospitals. Doctors would only be seeing people who needed emergency lifesaving operations.” The non-Covid excess death toll would have been substantial. And the Nightingale field hospitals would have seen their 10,000 or so beds quickly fill — if there were enough staff to run them. In London, NHS absence rates reached 7 per cent in April 2020, but these would have been far higher if Covid had been allowed to spread unimpeded. ADVERTISEMENT This four-month horror show would have left lasting scars on NHS workers, said Dr Sara Machado, a health economist at the London School of Economics. “We need our healthcare workforce to provide for the next 15, 20 years — but a Covid wave of that size would have left it unsustainable. The consequences would have been catastrophic — not only are they at higher risk from the virus, but their mental and physical health would have suffered for years afterwards.” There would probably not be enough workers left to run the NHS, let alone deal with the backlog of cancelled operations or the tidal wave of long Covid. Politically, it is hard to see how Johnson and Matt Hancock — or any prime minister and health secretary — could have survived such a death toll. Most countries experienced a “rally round the flag” effect, as voters backed their leaders making tough decisions during the pandemic. Johnson was at his most popular in early April as he lay in a hospital bed, when 66 per cent of people thought he was doing well as prime minister, according to YouGov. However, this rallying effect was much less strong in countries that were hit harder by the coronavirus, such as Italy and Spain, than it was in countries that took decisive early action such as Germany and Ireland. Had the bodies piled high — particularly while our neighbours had managed to halt the march of Covid — the government’s position would have been untenable. Would the economy be in ruder health? Britain’s GDP is 1.5 per cent smaller than it was at the end of 2019, while the National Audit Office puts the total cost estimate for Covid measures at £370 billion. That price tag is unlikely to cause us too much immediate grief thanks to low interest rates. If we had done literally nothing, the economic impact from loss of life alone would have been catastrophic. Many industries — not just healthcare — would have lost a substantial chunk of their workforce to death or long-term illness. To understand the knock-on effect of labour shortages, we have only to look at September’s fuel crisis, where a shortage of delivery drivers sparked a nationwide panic. A national sick note could have seen shops shut, shelves empty, and — with no drivers — public transport grinding to a halt. Even without a formal lockdown, footfall on shopping streets, pubs and restaurants would still have been down. “Sweden’s experience wasn’t that different from the UK,” Harford said. “Public transport was empty, public squares and restaurants were empty — their economy took a big hit anyway as people voluntarily protected themselves.” ADVERTISEMENT Without business and worker support measures, such as the furlough scheme and tweaks to the universal credit system, unemployment would have soared. Research by the Bank for International Settlements in December 2020 found that recessions were systematically associated with extra deaths. The big trade-off: what price a life? The lockdown debate is often “healthcare versus the economy”, but Julian Jessop, an economist, thinks this is the wrong way to look at it. “There is undoubtedly some sort of trade-off between the health and economy — if there wasn’t, we’d shut down tomorrow, stay at home and save lives. But there’s a bigger trade-off between short and long term. Shutting down for three weeks might lead to a big economic hit, but in the long term you get better health outcomes, which in turn leads to a better outcome for the economy.” Lockdowns and vaccinations may have cut a potential death toll of 500,000 in about four months to 150,000 over two years. Questioning whether the economic impact was worth it is a taboo to many, but not economists such as Jessop. “Suppose it would cost one billion pounds to prevent just one premature death. Would this be worth it? Most would say no. By answering that question, you accept that there is indeed a value for a human life.” Experts often use the concept of the QALY (quality-adjusted life year), equal to a year of life in perfect health, when calculating whether medical treatments are worth the cost. Some have tried to apply a similar approach to Covid. The typical Covid victim has their life cut short by ten years on average. If £370 billion has been spent on saving an extra 350,000 lives over the past two years, that comes to about £1 million per person, or £100,000 per year of life lost. That is a little more than the Treasury’s estimate of a QALY’s cost, at £60,000. Yet such simplistic calculations do not work with Covid. They ignore, on one hand, the health costs of lockdowns — hard to put a number on — and the fact that many Covid victims are not in good health. On the other hand, they ignore the secondary economic impact, emotional scarring and catastrophic political negligence of allowing 1 per cent of all adults to die in just four months — plus the wrecking of the healthcare system for years to come. Would we have reached immunity by now? In the alternative, lockdown-free reality, the silver lining, if we can call it that, is that Britain would have substantial immunity. There would probably not have been the big Covid waves during the winter of 2020, or the summer of 2021. But Omicron, which is reinfecting people much more than previous variants, is proof that the various variants would have struck us one form or another, if not to such a devastating effect. ADVERTISEMENT “We would have reached endemicity sooner but with many more deaths,” said Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia. “But we would still see further waves due to the appearance of new variants. The other human coronaviruses tend to infect us every three to six years.” Infections, though, would be milder. A wave of the Delta variant tore through South Africa in July, infecting most of its population — and that helped to keep Omicron deaths low when that variant arrived. Could schools have been spared? In the first waves of Covid, children were not significant drivers of infection. During the second lockdown in November, schools were kept open, yet cases still fell. They closed in January but even when they reopened in March 2021, cases did not soar. Yet since the Delta variant arrived in the summer, cases among children have been higher than ever and pushed up infections among their parents. Under a “do nothing” scenario, classroom sickness rates would have soared during spring 2020. But because children are at very low risk from the virus, some think it would have been worth the cost. Paul Dolan, professor of behavioural sciences at the London School of Economics, is one of them. “If anything’s wrong at home, it gets picked up at school,” he said. “And all of a sudden, in lockdown, that wasn’t the case anymore. Given the social harms and the mental and psychological costs borne by young people, I think we will look back and feel that was a disproportionate thing to do.” Daisy Christodoulou runs No More Marking, which provides teaching materials for schools. “We found that in autumn 2020, students performed substantially worse than we would expect,” she said. “Other data on reading and maths showed less severe but still significant falls. However, our results, and those from other assessments, have shown that students have been able to bounce back and have made back quite a lot of these losses. We think it is more accurate to talk about learning decay than learning loss.” Ability-wise, pupils in the long run probably will not be too much worse off than they would have been. Would we have taken things into our own hands? Ferguson’s Imperial study shows what could have happened if we had all behaved as we normally do. Yet data suggests that even if the government did nothing, we would have adjusted our behaviour. According to smartphone data from Google, the amount of time people spent in their homes rose steadily throughout March 2020, and was already 10 per cent higher than normal by the time Johnson announced lockdown on March 23. Trips to shops and hospitality venues were down by a third. Fear of the virus was keeping us apart before lockdown made it law. The real-world examples back this up. Sweden defied calls for a full lockdown — yet a German study published in April last year found a “profound change of actual mobility patterns”, with people travelling less and spending more time at home. Deaths may have been reduced with a nine-week lockdown, they found, but only by 38 per cent. “This finding suggests that voluntary social restraint limits infection growth to a considerable extent,” it concluded. However, some are sceptical that the virus could have been entirely controlled without restrictions. “People are often not very good at incorporating the benefit to society into their decision-making,” Machado said. “Look at smoking: rates were falling slowly, and it was only when we introduced a ban on smoking indoors that we saw a substantial drop overnight.” Such patterns were repeated last month. In the run-up to Christmas, as news of the Omicron variant washed up on our shores, Britons started behaving differently. Shopping centres — normally enjoying their busiest periods of the year — saw a third less footfall compared with pre-pandemic levels. Yet the only rules that were introduced concerned masks and Covid passports: nobody ordered shoppers to stay away. The latest data shows the growth in cases has started to slow. In the same way, a huge Covid wave in spring 2020 that caused a very visible strain on the NHS — where many people we know ended up in hospital — would have propelled people to act regardless of government intervention. Many of us would have stopped going to bars, kept our distance from each other and avoided seeing elderly relatives. Coughs would have been viewed with suspicion. It might have taken longer, but eventually these drastic lifestyle changes would have been enough to flatten the curve. Sometimes governments have less power than they think. What if we had never discovered vaccines? Covid jabs have prevented more than 127,000 deaths in Britain, according to the UK Health Security Agency. We would not have lived in relative freedom for most of last year without nearly doubling the death toll. Europe’s least vaccinated country, Bulgaria — where only 35 per cent of over-60s have been double jabbed — has suffered one of the worst excess death tolls in the world. About 54,000 excess deaths have been recorded since the start of the pandemic, mostly in 2021: adjusted for population, that would be the equivalent of 520,000 in Britain. Was our approach the right one? For the first months of the pandemic, with no vaccines to protect people, governments resorted to a variety of measures to stop the spread. A common criticism of Britain’s response was that we were too relaxed about border controls. Would our fate have been different if we had done an Australia? The island nation closed borders to all international travellers between March 2020 and December 2021. The country has suffered only 2,200 deaths, helped largely by stringent lockdown policies. However, cases have surged with the arrival of Omicron. Around the world, we have seen how border controls merely delay the inevitable. Britain tends to get infected with new variants early on because it is one of the world’s most connected countries — but as Delta, and latterly Omicron have shown, variants spread elsewhere eventually. There is an inevitability about Covid that suggests the world cannot escape widespread infection: the question becomes when those infections happen. “The only value of reducing the spread of Covid is if the peak would overwhelm health or other services,” Hunter said, “or if you expect better treatments, or a vaccine to come along in the future.” In the first six months of the pandemic, Britain had the second-highest excess death toll in Europe, with more than 60,000 extra lives lost. More than a year later, it is decidedly mid-table. Countries that initially escaped the brunt of Covid, such as the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, were hit doubly hard later on. It is, in truth, too early to assess Britain’s pandemic response. Many may look back and wish we had done an Australia, locking down for most of the first year until vaccines were readily available, keeping excess deaths to a minimum — but there would have been a huge cost to the economy, mental health and civil obedience. Others will wish we had done a Sweden, mainly relying on voluntary measures in place of legal restrictions, but accepting a higher death toll than our neighbours. Either way, as we begin the third year of the pandemic and the virus begins to become endemic, it looks, happily, as though hard lockdowns are no longer a choice that governments will be forced to make.
2022 preview: What will the coronavirus do next? HEALTH 29 December 2021 By Michael Le Page please log in to view this image The delta variant, viewed using an electron microscope Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library WE HAVE been watching evolution in action as one coronavirus variant after another emerges and triggers further waves of infections around the world. There is every reason to think this will continue during 2022 – and there is no guarantee that future variants will be any less dangerous. For the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, survival is all about infecting as many people as possible. Variants that are better at spreading will outcompete other variants. A key part of this is transmissibility. When the original virus began spreading, every infected person infected two or three others on average. Delta infects six or seven. Omicron seems to be even more contagious. It isn’t yet fully understood how the virus is becoming more infectious. But with delta, it might be because it is better at replicating itself, meaning infected people shed more of the virus. Infecting people is no longer as easy as it used to be, however. Most people in the world now have some degree of immunity because of past infection or vaccination. So variants such as omicron are evolving to evade this immunity, typically through changes in the outer spike protein, the main target of our antibodies. There is a limit to how much more infectious the virus can become, but there may be no limit to its ability to evade our immune response. As happens with human flu viruses, we may see the continual emergence of new variants that evade immunity enough to cause wave after wave of infections. “Most people around the world now have some immunity from past infection or vaccination” It is possible that, over time, different viral lineages will persist and diverge, rather than successive variants wiping out all others and sweeping to dominance. This could require different vaccines to be combined into a single dose, as is done with the flu vaccine. It is often claimed that new viruses will evolve to cause milder symptoms. But because SARS-CoV-2 is most infectious just before symptoms appear, there is little selective pressure for it to do this. Smallpox was highly lethal and might have become worse over time. Flu still exacts a high annual death toll. Another concern is that the virus might be circulating in several other animals, generating new variants that could jump back into people. While it is possible that future variants may cause more severe illness in people with no immunity, most people in the world do now have some immunity. This is likely to continue to provide some protection against severe illness even if it fails to prevent infections. But we can expect this immunity to fade over time. Even if you have already had a booster shot, you could well find yourself standing in line to get yet another jab or two in 2022 to protect you from rho, sigma, upsilon or maybe even omega. More on these topics: COVID-19
HISTORY MATTERS The Original Anti-Vaxxers When widespread vaccination was introduced there were objections – some justified, some not. Patricia Fara | Published in History Today Volume 71 Issue 1 January 2021 please log in to view this image ‘TRIUMPH OF DE-JENNER-ATION (The Bill for the encouragement of Small Pox awaits Third Reading in the Commons)’, by Edward Linley Sambourne, Punch, 30 July 1898 © Wellcome Images. Anti-vaccination protests are nothing new, although in the past they did have some justification. When Edward Jenner introduced smallpox inoculation at the end of the 18th century he was widely derided as yet another quack trying to make a quick fortune. Envious rivals were swift to point out his lack of professional qualifications, while one satirist imagined his children turning into cows after being vaccinated: There, nibbling at thistle, stand Jem, Joe and Mary On their foreheads, Oh, horrible! Crumpled horns bud … Jenner’s technique sounded bizarre and the testing programme was perfunctory. After learning that dairymaids apparently became immune to smallpox after catching cowpox, he embarked on an unorthodox experiment. First, he inoculated his gardener’s son with lymph taken from a woman’s cowpox blister and, two months later, deliberately exposed him to smallpox. The boy remained healthy, as did a handful of further conscripts: Jenner was ready to launch his new procedure. Doctors were already practising variolation (variola is Latin for smallpox), the Turkish antidote imported by Mary Wortley Montagu, which involved inducing a (hopefully) mild form of the disease to stimulate resistance. Risky and unpleasant – but it usually worked. In contrast, Jenner’s counter-intuitive recommendation was to contaminate human bodies with matter from a creature lower down God’s hierarchy. These suspicions were confirmed when patients reacted badly, probably because of poor medical hygiene. In his anti-vaccination propaganda, Dr Rowley of Oxford showed a boy with heavily swollen glands, remarking that he seemed to be ‘assuming the visage of a cow’. In a savage caricature, James Gillray played on contemporary fears by mocking a packed hospital clinic. Prominent in the centre is Jenner, wielding the spiked metal instrument used for scraping patients’ skin. To his right stands a scruffy charity boy holding a tub of ‘Vaccine Pock hot from ye Cow’ for Jenner to smear into the wound on the terrified woman’s arm. Above them looms a picture referring to the biblical story of Aaron blasphemously encouraging the Israelites to worship a golden calf. On the right, a pregnant woman is vomiting up a small cow, surrounded by people with cow-like tumours sprouting from their faces. Opposition to Jenner slowly faded, but in 1853 the debates shifted gear when the government made it compulsory to vaccinate all newborn babies. What sounds like a sensible health measure proved enormously controversial, provoking riots and demonstrations. Antagonists from opposing camps were at loggerheads about two main issues: the clinical risks and benefits, and the right of the state to dictate an individual’s actions. The anti-vaccinators voiced some powerful arguments. The procedure was long, painful and sometimes life-threatening. Practitioners scored cuts into a baby’s arm, rubbed in pre-prepared lymph and, eight days later, harvested new lymph from the blisters, which was then recycled for treating the next tiny patient in line. Parents might have been happier about subjecting infants to this ordeal if they could be confident it provided immunity. But, although data collection improved through the century, there was no incontrovertible evidence that vaccination guaranteed protection. Inserting alien material threatened an innocent baby’s God-given purity. Parents not only objected to polluting their babies with animal matter, but also insisted that passing bodily fluids between children enabled infections to be transmitted. Perhaps insanity and progressive diseases were present in the serum – and suppose a privileged infant received cells from one that was Irish or Black? Anger was exacerbated by conflicts over the cause of smallpox. Was a specific germ responsible, or did illness stem from a miasma of foetid air? Reformers agreed that the filthy, overcrowded slums needed to be cleaned up, but some health experts – Florence Nightingale, for instance – insisted that cleanliness offered a sufficient solution. Such arguments led only too easily to declarations that poor people were guilty of living fecklessly, of spreading disease through their failure to keep themselves clean and well-nourished. The virus was too tiny for even powerful microscopes to detect and sceptics denounced doctors as scaremongers. Anti-vaccinators devised various strands of persuasive soapbox rhetoric. Should freeborn Britons be subject to the whims of the medical profession? Was vaccination just another tactic for the upper classes to lord it over decent hard-working people? In any case, was there any point in spending good public money on the impoverished dregs of society? In 1898 a new clause was introduced permitting parents to declare themselves Conscientious Objectors and withdraw their child from the national programme. A Punch cartoon articulated middle-class complaints that this governmental capitulation would encourage smallpox to ravage the country. Trampling on a copy of the Lancet, Death brandishes an anti-vaccination banner as civilisation crumbles about him. The title De-Jenner-ation puns on the flipside of evolution and progress – the possibility of degeneration. As populations expanded and societies became more democratic, fears about personal and national deterioration pervaded Europe. Anti-vaccinators whipped up chauvinist sympathies by coining bellicose slogans that emphasised pollution, depletion and contamination: the ‘Anglo-Saxon race – once the finest race of people – will sink into effeminacy, disease, and premature death’ proclaimed one prominent campaigner. In a vain bid to satisfy everyone, soon after this caricature appeared the government pushed through compromise legislation that made the situation worse. To qualify for exemption, parents had to convince a magistrate that they ‘conscientiously’ believed vaccination would damage their child’s health. Opponents immediately pointed out that the strength of a belief is intangible and impossible to measure. Applications were often flatly rejected, thus exacerbating existing resentment among lower-class people, who regarded vaccination as yet another form of oppression. And then there was the gender question: suffragists were angered by legal debates about whether mothers had the right to obtain certificates. By 1908 the government agreed that women could make responsible decisions on their own, but opting out became easier and many babies remained unvaccinated: not a positive move for the nation’s physical health, but a small step towards gender and class equality. And when war broke out in 1914, the term ‘Conscientious Objector’ acquired a different resonance. Patricia Fara is an Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. Her next book will be Life after Gravity: The London Career of Isaac Newton (Oxford, 2021). 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Regarding above article on what would have happened if we did nothing. Article does not take into account that the more people the disease infects, the more chane the virus has to mutate and create new variants. Any country that doesn't protect itself is putting the rest of the world at danger. If the whole world had done nothing (not just Britain) we probably would have had twice as many variants and don't forget you can get COVID multiple times, that short harsh first wave would be followed by another short harsh wave and another and another.
Can still test positive 3 months after symptoms have gone. https://medical.mit.edu/covid-19-updates/2021/03/still-contagious
If we did "nothing" argument 8s done by deniers and morons. The death rates in march 2020 and in New York hint at the levels of deaths that could have occurred. We would have seen hospitals turn away new patients, we would have seen masses of deaths. Frankly at times I am astounded by some folk who continue to whine. The difference between jan 2021 and jan 2022 is massive. Theres fat **** bags playing darts in front of a heaving crowd of drunken yobs ffs. Theres stadiums open and people going about doing whatever the feel like. Sadly the people working in hospitals s sre not seeing the difference cos while we have fun they are headed into year 3 of war conditions as we ignore the numbers actually in hospital
My nephew tested positive for 2 months after he came home from hospital. As with every other aspect of this virus, nobody knows for sure why some people stay positive for longer than others.
According to that trendy scientist they have on the Beeb the NHS don't carry on with their normal staff testing for iirc 6 months after they have had the virus as they reckon what you are getting are false positives from residual covid .
Depends on what it is thats getting detected. Pcr will find any rna within the sample By contrast antigen test is actually using a binding agent that attaches to proteins on the virus spike. So it's actually detecting the protein not active virus in theory. So in that case it makes sense that you have these positives for months with the antigen tests as you could be detecting whatever cells
2022 preview: What will the coronavirus do next? HEALTH 29 December 2021 By Michael Le Page please log in to view this image The delta variant, viewed using an electron microscope Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library WE HAVE been watching evolution in action as one coronavirus variant after another emerges and triggers further waves of infections around the world. There is every reason to think this will continue during 2022 – and there is no guarantee that future variants will be any less dangerous. For the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, survival is all about infecting as many people as possible. Variants that are better at spreading will outcompete other variants. A key part of this is transmissibility. When the original virus began spreading, every infected person infected two or three others on average. Delta infects six or seven. Omicron seems to be even more contagious. It isn’t yet fully understood how the virus is becoming more infectious. But with delta, it might be because it is better at replicating itself, meaning infected people shed more of the virus. Infecting people is no longer as easy as it used to be, however. Most people in the world now have some degree of immunity because of past infection or vaccination. So variants such as omicron are evolving to evade this immunity, typically through changes in the outer spike protein, the main target of our antibodies. There is a limit to how much more infectious the virus can become, but there may be no limit to its ability to evade our immune response. As happens with human flu viruses, we may see the continual emergence of new variants that evade immunity enough to cause wave after wave of infections. “Most people around the world now have some immunity from past infection or vaccination” It is possible that, over time, different viral lineages will persist and diverge, rather than successive variants wiping out all others and sweeping to dominance. This could require different vaccines to be combined into a single dose, as is done with the flu vaccine. It is often claimed that new viruses will evolve to cause milder symptoms. But because SARS-CoV-2 is most infectious just before symptoms appear, there is little selective pressure for it to do this. Smallpox was highly lethal and might have become worse over time. Flu still exacts a high annual death toll. Another concern is that the virus might be circulating in several other animals, generating new variants that could jump back into people. While it is possible that future variants may cause more severe illness in people with no immunity, most people in the world do now have some immunity. This is likely to continue to provide some protection against severe illness even if it fails to prevent infections. But we can expect this immunity to fade over time. Even if you have already had a booster shot, you could well find yourself standing in line to get yet another jab or two in 2022 to protect you from rho, sigma, upsilon or maybe even omega.
New variant detected in France in a man from Cameroon. (Cameroon has 2% vaccination rate so a nice safe place for Covid to spread and mutate... Perhaps western nations should be helping less prosperous nations get vaccinated... For our own good). Don't think new variant is named yet or much known about it, but it appears to be even more mutated from the original covid than Omicron was... ... So is probably going to reinfect everyone again. Our vaccines and previous infections probably won't be enough. With any luck this one won't spread, we don't know how transmissible it is yet. But you could be looking at a sneezy valentine's day in the UK and a coughy late Feb in the US if it follows the pattern of Omicron.
By the time they are detected it's already spread and guess where the African cup of nations is being held
