The Hypocrisy of Lockdown Advocates on Herd Immunity
By Jeremy R. Hammond
Independent Journalist, Author, and Writing Coach
The cognitive dissonance of the lockdown advocates with their mass vaccination endgame never ceases to astonish.
When the Great Barrington Declaration was published expressing the view of many scientists that the authoritarian lockdown measures do far more harm than good, its authors were attacked by pro-lockdown scientists for believing the "pseudoscience" that the COVID-19 epidemic will end when the population achieves natural herd immunity.
Never mind that natural herd immunity is such basic epidemiology that it's built in as an assumption in the lockdowners' own models.
For example, Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London, in their influential and panic-inducing March estimate, projected that lockdown measures would prolong the epidemic by inhibiting the development of population immunity.
And remember how lockdown measures were initially sold to the public as strictly a short temporary measure to "flatten the curve"?
Yeah, well, the epidemic curve flattens, as all of these hypocrites know perfectly well, because of the known phenomenon of natural herd immunity. Viral transmission is reduced because enough people have gained immunity from infection that susceptible hosts are harder for the virus to come by.
So the question is: why do people who call themselves "scientists" say such silly things, denying such a well understood phenomenon?
The answer is simple: when they say things like that, they are not acting as scientists but as political advocates. They become propagandists masquerading as scientists, meaninglessly talking about "the science" to shroud their disingenuous political advocacy that consists of self-contradictory gibberish.
The concept of "focused protection" espoused in the Great Barrington Declaration is really simple: the way to minimize deaths from SARS-CoV-2 is to protect those who are at highest risk of dying from the disease; lockdown measures are unsustainable because they cause far more harm than good over the long term; and therefore the best long-term strategy is to allow those at low risk to go about their business in a socially responsible manner, a side-effect of which will be the attainment of natural herd immunity.
The lockdown advocates, which description is synonymous with mass vaccination advocates, counter-argue that this would unacceptably result in massive death, and therefore the only acceptable way to achieve herd immunity is by giving everyone pharmaceutical injections.
Let's look at a specific example.
Denial of Natural Herd Immunity in The BMJ
Last month, a letter titled "Natural herd immunity should not be used as a means of pandemic control" was published in The BMJ.
Let's start with that: the title nonsensically suggests that natural herd immunity is something to be "used" or not, as opposed to a naturally occurring phenomenon.
It doesn't get better from there in terms of sensibility.
Their purpose is to advocate continued lockdown measures, and their core argument supporting that position is that "herd immunity should only be relied on as part of a vaccination strategy".
The rest of their arguments illustrate how they are not acting as scientific thinkers but as propagandists serving the political and financial agenda of manufacturing consent for lockdowns and their mass vaccination endgame.
They argue that mass vaccination is the only feasible solution because that there is "a lack of evidence supporting [natural] herd immunity", which they describe as a "hypothetical possibility" only that is "not borne out by the evidence."
But that is an utterly stupid and hypocritical thing to say. For one, again, natural herd immunity is basic epidemiology, a known phenomenon with respiratory viral illnesses. Also, the solution they propose -- vaccine-conferred herd immunity -- is itself only a hypothetical possibility that is not borne out by the evidence.
Specifically, no COVID-19 vaccines have yet been evaluated for long-term safety and effectiveness, and we do not know whether they will be effective at preventing transmission.
Consequently, their argument that mass vaccination is the only feasible way to achieve herd immunity is not a scientific statement but an expression of faith.
This is why I often refer to advocates of authoritarian solutions like lockdowns and vaccine mandates as faithful adherents to the vaccine religion. They truly believe in these pharmaceutical products as the solution to infectious disease.
Continuing, they say that we lack information "about how the immune system behaves with SARS-CoV-2", such as whether antibodies will "generate wider herd immunity."
But if we don't understand yet how immunity works with SARS-CoV-2, then how can it be logically possible for scientists to have developed a vaccine to confer immunity, other than blindly guessing at how it ought to be done?
The answer, of course, is that it's not logically possible, but such is the cognitive dissonance of the lockdowners.
Next, they argue that, "If antibody responses are used as an indicator of immunity, there is a danger that individuals and the government will make decisions based on inaccurate information." In other words, just because someone has antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 does not necessarily mean that they are immune.
That's true. But it's also true that just because someone doesn't have antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 does not mean that they aren't immune!
And never mind the fact that the vaccines they so adamantly believe in were specifically designed to stimulate antibodies!
So how can it be that antibodies produced as a result of infection should not be equated with immunity, yet it's reasonable to assume that antibodies produced as a result of vaccination equate to immunity?!
Like I said, the cognitive dissonance of these scoundrels is staggering.
Naturally, these arrogant authoritarian-loving people also make a ridiculous attempt to claim moral authority for their position, arguing that "a herd immunity strategy" (meaning a focused protection strategy since herd immunity is not a "strategy" but a naturally occuring phenomenon) "creates a dichotomy between lives that matter and lives that do not".
Whatever their intended meaning, an inescapable interpretation of that argument is that the lives of people who are at low risk for severe COVID-19 "matter" just as much as those at high risk, and so non-pharmaceutical interventions must be imposed indiscriminately across the whole population without consideration for individual risk-benefit analyses.
They go on blabbering about how "Democratic societies have an obligation to uphold the equal value of all citizens."
All the while, they completely ignore the fact that the indiscriminate lockdown measures they advocate disproportionately harm the most disadvantaged members of society!
It is "unethical" not to impose authoritarian measures on the whole population, they argue, "because it exposes large groups of vulnerable citizens to life-threatening risks."
Never mind that the measures expose the whole population to life- and liberty-threatening authoritarianism!
Never mind that the lockdown measures have utterly failed to protect the most vulnerable members of society -- e.g., nursing home residents -- while inhibiting the development of the population immunity required to enable those at highest-risk, too, to get on with living their lives with some sense of normalcy.
And never mind the massive cost in health and lives exacted by the policy measures they advocate! They do not even acknowledge that there are costs, much less take the harms of lockdowns into consideration in their analysis! Never mind, again, that the lockdowns cause disproportionate harm to those who are most disadvantaged.
In fact, they go so far as to try to deny that there are economic costs to the lockdowns, asserting that "It is an illusion to believe that the economy will benefit if the pandemic is allowed to go unchecked. There is no trade-off between the economy and health."
They cite a source to support that, which you would think must show that countries that locked down hardest did not have worse economic outcomes than those with less authoritarian approaches.
But, then, you'd be making an erroneous assumption.
What their source really shows is that the European countries with the most severe decrease in GDP were Spain, the UK, France, and Italy -- whereas Sweden, famous for not locking down, is among the countries that have fared relatively well.
The same data show that Sweden did not have a worse result in terms of COVID-19 deaths per population than lockdown countries: Spain, the UK, and Italy all suffered more deaths per capita.
Are you seeing a pattern here? The pattern is of deception in furtherance of a political agenda that aligns with the pharmaceutical industry's financial agenda.
Like I said, we have to be wary of professional political propagandists masquerading as "scientists".
They also go so far as to blame "second waves" of COVID-19 on "resistance to lockdown measures".
Never mind that studies show that the epidemic waves are similar across government jurisdictions with no correlation between stricter lockdowns and better outcomes. (See here for example.)
They conclude by saying, "We need to focus on using successful virus suppression strategies until we reach herd immunity with the new vaccines" because "it is dangerous, and unfounded in science, to advocate natural herd immunity as a means to pandemic control."
This reflects the strawman fallacy underlying their argument against focused protection, advocates of which do not favor herd immunity as a "strategy".
Rather, again, they merely recognize it as a naturally occurring phenomenon that results in the most vulnerable members of society being protected by reduced transmission due to a sufficient proportion of the population -- ideally, those at lowest risk -- becoming immune.
Focused protection advocates do not advocate "unmitigated transmission", as the lockdowners suggest, but rather advocate that individuals socially distance in public and use masks appropriately in settings where prolonged close contact with others is unavoidable.
Focused protection advocates rather simply observe that authoritarian measures do not confer clear additional benefits beyond voluntary compliance with such sensible guidelines but do unquestionably cause massive additional harm, including the opportunity cost of preventing younger, low-risk members of society from developing herd immunity so that the least number of lives will be lost to COVID-19 in the long run.
It also once again illustrates the outrageous hypocrisy of the lockdowners: according to the very same measures by which they conclude that a strategy of focused protection is dangerous and unscientific, their own proposed strategy of achieving herd immunity through mass vaccination is dangerous scientifically baseless.
We must fight this insanity. These "public health experts" and "scientists" whine that people don't trust them, but they prove themselves over and over again to be totally unworthy of our trust.
www.jeremyrhammond.com---
See also:
Capitalism in Crisis: Covid-19 and The Great Reset
madaraka.online/covid-19-and-the-great-reset/
