This warped Tory Government is using the vaccine roll-out to provide cover for the incessant steam of catastrophic blunders that have cost so many lives in the UK as we pass the grim milestone of over 100,000 Covid deaths, an underestimate manufactured to hide an even greater death toll nearer 120,000! In the Skwawkbox Article entitled, “Michael Rosen’s letter on the Tories’ murderous ‘herd immunity’ that the Guardian wouldn’t publish,” Rosen says what the ‘mainstream’ media won’t. Author Michael Rosen, who came close to death last year when he suffered COVID-19 complications, wrote to the Guardian about the Tories’ original (and frankly murderous) plan to create ‘herd immunity‘ to the coronavirus without a vaccine, which would have caused up to a million UK deaths and perhaps more. The paper did not publish his letter.” It is reproduced by Skwawkbox with his permission.
Rosen wrote, “Dear sir/madam, Jonathan Freedland’s comment ‘Lies about Covid, insisting that it was a hoax cooked up by the deep state, led millions of people to drop their guard and get infected’ (‘Trump may be gone but his big lie will linger’ Guardian, Jan 15) misses the point. If we look closely at what was being said in official circles in March 2020, we can see quite clearly there was a plan to create ‘herd immunity’ without vaccination. Robert Peston had his usual inside story on March 12 in ‘The Spectator’ with a headline ‘Herd immunity’ will be vital to stopping Coronavirus’ and wrote of this desirable outcome without mentioning the inevitable huge loss of life involved nor the high chance of it being unachievable. A day later, 3 government scientists sang the same tune: Graham Medley told BBC Newsnight, ‘We’re going to have to generate herd immunity…the only way of developing that in the absence of a vaccine is for the majority of the population to become infected…’”
Rosen noted, “Sir Patrick Vallance said that morning on the Today programme, ‘Our aim is to try and reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely; also because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity.’ Same day, John Edmunds said, ‘The only way to stop this epidemic is indeed to achieve herd immunity’. These people were talking of engineering mass death. It’s not as if science is unaware of the Black Death, Myxomatosis, or Dutch Elm Disease. At the time, Boris Johnson was appearing on TV telling us that he was shaking hands with Covid patients. The extraordinary fact is that this idea of ‘herd immunity’ without vaccination is lousy biology. No one knew then how long or short nor how strong or weak the body’s immune response would be to this virus. No one knew how often it would mutate nor how different the mutations would be from the original virus. These scientists were gambling with ‘known unknowns’ some of which would result in no ‘herd immunity’.”
Rosen shares his reality check re ‘herd immunity’ saying, “What’s more, the limited ‘herd immunity’ without vaccination that occurs naturally usually involves the evolutionary process of ‘breeding out’ (through death, before they reproduce) of those individuals who are susceptible to the virus and the ‘breeding in’ of those who are resistant, assuming the resistance is inheritable. This takes generations to effect, if ever. The problem for this scenario is that the section of the population most affected by the virus is above ‘breeding’ age! This negates the process by which evolution favours resistant individuals. It seems to me horrific that top scientists were able to put forward their proposals to enact mass killing without being challenged, either on ethical or biological grounds.”
Rosen concludes by saying, “If you want to find out why or how this government has been lax, chaotic, incompetent and cruel in its approach to Covid-19, it starts here. The consequence is that there have been tens of thousands of deaths, and there are tens of thousands of us with long term or lifetime debilitating consequences. They must never be let off the hook.” He signs off, “Yours faithfully, Michael Rosen.” Once this warped Tory Government realized that the general public had been alerted to their eugenics ‘Slaughter of the Sheeple’ targeting the ‘economically inactive’ pensioners, the disabled and the most vulnerable for extermination, on a superficial level they disowned the plan. Sadly they never changed objectives and many of the poor judgement decisions that cost lives may well have been an intentional continuation of their deadly cull.
Skwawkbox say that, “Michael Rosen is absolutely correct. The Tories’ original plan for ‘dealing’ with the pandemic was to throw hundreds of thousands of people on the pyre and hope for the best. That plan, despite a change of language when the public started to catch on, never really went away. 100,000 (in reality a lot more) people have lost their lives in the UK because the country is ruled by Johnson and his ideological ilk instead of making use of our natural advantage as an island, as New Zealand and others have done. Michael Rosen was very nearly one of them, and wouldn’t even have counted as a virus death, because of the time that had expired after he was diagnosed. That Tory dodge had already hidden 18,000 or more COVID deaths by last October. They must never be let off the hook. They should be in the dock and the failure of the so-called ‘mainstream’ media to say so is a national scandal and disgrace.”
Now that a number of vaccines are becoming available the prospect of eventually creating ‘herd immunity’ in our population is a science based reality, because it’s a well recognized legitimate phenomenon associated with mass vaccination programs. What we cannot allow is for the Tories to manipulate the reporting of this long hoped for return to safe normality with the shear insanity of their misappropriation of the term to morph the dangerous psudo-science of zero intervention ‘let it rip’ as if it was ever a valid plan. This will confuse the public and it will be exploited to deliberatly confuse the public, excusing those who planned to use the Covid crisis to comit culpable homicide on an industrial scale in the UK; a form of Genocide I call: ‘Covicide.’ The PM is stalling, trying to postpone an urgent inquiry until they have completed their deadly mission and solidified the absolute power of their Tory Sovereign Dictatorship. But, the agenda of Covicide is ongoing, so an immediate robust inquiry into this criminal plan cannot be postponed.
After so many dangerous decisions made by this Tory Government have proven deadly the decision to extend the time between doses of the vaccine should be scrutinized with great caution as the PM, his Scientific advisors and Ministers cannot be trusted. A reliable report on the UK’s vaccine roll-out strategy is analyzed in the British Medical Journal Article: BMJ 2021;372:n18 entitled, “Covid-19 vaccination: What’s the evidence for extending the dosing interval?” BMJ report that, “On 30 December the four UK chief medical officers announced that the second doses of the covid vaccines should be given towards the end of 12 weeks rather than in the previously recommended 3-4 weeks. Gareth Iacobucci and Elisabeth Mahase look at the questions this has raised.”
The BMJ pose the question that many people are curious about right now, “Why has the government taken the step to delay the second dose?” The BMJ explain that, “In a letter sent to healthcare staff on 30 December NHS England said the decision had been taken to prioritise giving the first doses of vaccine (whether the Pfizer and BioNTech one or that of Oxford University and AstraZeneca) to as many people as possible on the priority list to ‘protect the greatest number of at-risk people overall in the shortest possible time.’ 1 Delaying the second dose meant that the prioritisation process ‘will have the greatest impact on reducing mortality, severe disease and hospitalisations and in protecting the NHS and equivalent health services,’ it said.” While this might sound like a wise decision, we should consider the potential pitfalls in the logistics of roll-out in the hands of unreliable outsourced companies obsessed with profiteering. Can we trust the Tories to deliver a booster dose guaranteed within the new time frame?
The BMJ ask, “Why was this decision taken?” They report that, “In a letter to the profession sent on 31 December laying out the ‘scientific and public health rationale’ for the change to the dosing schedule, 2 the chief medical officers said that vaccine shortages were a major reason for the shift in approach. ‘We have to ensure that we maximise the number of eligible people who receive the vaccine. Currently the main barrier to this is vaccine availability, a global issue, and this will remain the case for several months and, importantly, through the critical winter period. The availability of the AZ [AstraZeneca] vaccine reduces, but does not remove, this major problem. Vaccine shortage is a reality that cannot be wished away’.” This is less relevant here in the UK than almost any other country as the UK appears to be hoarding all vaccines manufactured here. It might be politically motivated to boast the numbers vaccinated rather than tout a lower number fully vaccinated; a bit like the counting of each glove as a separate item of PPE!
The BMJ ask, “What’s the evidence for changing the schedule?” They admit the supporting evidence is scant, “There isn’t much for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, as trials did not compare different dose spacing or compare one with two doses. The trials of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine did include different spacing between doses, finding that a longer gap (two to three months) led to a greater immune response, but the overall participant numbers were small. In the UK study 59% (1407 of 2377) of the participants who had two standard doses received the second dose between nine and 12 weeks after the first. In the Brazil study only 18.6% (384 of 2063) received a second dose between nine and 12 weeks after the first. 3 The combined trial results, published in the Lancet, 4 found that vaccine efficacy 14 days after a second dose was higher in the group that had more than six weeks between the two doses (65.4%) than in the group that had less than six weeks between doses (53.4%).”
The BMJ report that, “In their joint statement the chief medical officers said that data provided to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) showed that, although optimal efficacy was achieved through two doses, both vaccines ‘offer considerable protection after a single dose, at least in the short term.’ Stephen Evans, professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said, “In an ideal world, decisions about treatments would only be made within the exact parameters of the trials which have been conducted. In the real world, this is never so… We know that vaccinating only half of a vulnerable population will lead to a notable increase in cases of covid-19, with all that this entails, including deaths. When resources of doses and people to vaccinate are limited, then vaccinating more people with potentially less efficacy is demonstrably better than a fuller efficacy in only half.”
The BMJ ask, “How effective is just one dose?” The BMJ point to, “A paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine stated that the efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was 52.4% between the first and second dose (spaced 21 days apart).5 However, in its ‘green book’ Public Health England said that during the phase III trial most of the vaccine failures were in the days immediately after the first dose, indicating that the short term protection starts around day 10.6 Looking at the data from day 15 to 21 it calculated that the efficacy against symptomatic covid-19 was around 89% (95% confidence interval 52% to 97%). Meanwhile, Pfizer has said that it has no evidence that the protection lasts beyond the 21 days.”
To be fair, the unprecedented race to production, driven by the urgency of the Covid 19 crisis, didn’t allow much time to complete lengthy or more varied trials. Because of this, other efficacy questions still remain unanswered, like can a vaccinated individual transmit the virus as an asymptomatic carrier? The BMJ report that, “In the case of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, PHE said, ‘High protection against hospitalisation was seen from 21 days after dose one until two weeks after the second dose, suggesting that a single dose will provide high short term protection against severe disease. An exploratory analysis of participants who had received one standard dose of the vaccine suggested that efficacy against symptomatic covid-19 was 73% (95% CI 48.79-85.76%)’.”
The BMJ ask, “What do the manufacturers say?” The BMJ note that, “In a joint statement Pfizer and BioNTech said, ‘The safety and efficacy of the vaccine has not been evaluated on different dosing schedules as the majority of trial participants received the second dose within the window specified in the study design… There is no data to demonstrate that protection after the first dose is sustained after 21 days.’ The European Medicines Agency has said that the gap between the first and second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine should not exceed 42 days. ‘Any change to this would require a variation to the marketing authorisation as well as more clinical data to support such a change, otherwise it would be considered as ‘off-label use,’ the agency said.7” If a problem were to emerge UK patients wouldn’t have a good legal case. “AstraZeneca did not reply to a request for comment from The BMJ.”
The BMJ ask, “How have doctors responded?” This is where a logistics issue could create problems down the line; the BMJ note that, “The BMA has called the government’s decision ‘unreasonable and totally unfair’ and said it could cause ‘huge logistical problems’ for general practices and vaccination centres.8 GPs and clinical leaders have told the BMA that delaying already promised second doses ‘will have a terrible impact on the emotional wellbeing of their most vulnerable, at-risk patients.’ Richard Vautrey, chair of the BMA’s General Practitioners Committee, said, ‘The decision to ask GPs, at such short notice, to rebook patients for three months hence will also cause huge logistical problems for almost all vaccination sites and practices. For example, to make contact with even just 2000 elderly or vulnerable patients will take a team of five staff at a practice about a week, and that’s simply untenable.’ He said that bookings for the oldest and most vulnerable members should be honoured.”
The BMJ ask, “Will the consent forms still be valid? GPs told The BMJ that patients consent to the two doses of the vaccine during their appointment for the first dose but could not specify what these changes would mean for that consent. They said that patients were understandably worried about the change and called on the government to provide them with a clear explanation as to why this has happened.” The BMJ ask, “What are patients told about their behaviour after one dose?” The BMJ were told that, “Patients are given a leaflet when attending vaccine appointments,9 and this has been updated to reflect the latest changes to dosing. It tells patients that it takes one to two weeks for protection to build after the first dose. It advises, ‘Like all medicines, no vaccine is completely effective, so you should continue to take recommended precautions to avoid infection. Some people may still get covid-19 despite having a vaccination, but this should be less severe’.”
The BMJ ask, “How do other countries view the policy change?” The most disturbing point highlighted within this article was when the BMJ reported that, “The US news site STAT referred to the move as ‘effectively turning [the UK] into a living laboratory.’ 10 It accused the UK of basing its new vaccination schedule ‘on small slices of evidence mined from ‘subsets of subsets’ of participants in clinical trials, and on general principles of vaccinology rather than on actual research into the specific vaccines being used.’ It added, ‘If the efforts succeed, the world will have learnt a great deal. If they fail, the world will also have gained important information, though some fear it could come at a high cost’.” Another severe blow to the British public that will meet warped Tory Covicide objectives while being passed off as “we did our best” after we have been exploited as global Guinea Pigs!
From the opposite perspective the BMJ note that, “Andrew Pollard, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group and chief investigator into the trial of this vaccine, said that extending the gap between vaccines made biological sense. ‘Generally, a longer gap between vaccine doses leads to a better immune response, with the second dose causing a better boost. (With HPV vaccine for girls, for example, the gap is a year and gives better responses than a one month gap.) From the Oxford vaccine trials, there is 70% protection after the first dose up to the second dose, and the immune response was about three times greater after the second dose when the second dose was delayed, comparing second dose after four weeks versus second dose after 2-3 months,’ he told The BMJ, referring to the MHRA’s summary of product characteristics.11”
Pollard told the BMJ that, “With the Pfizer vaccine, there are no published data comparing shorter and longer gaps between doses because all participants had the second dose at 3-4 weeks. However, the biology is straightforward and will be the same as with all vaccines… The immune system remembers the first dose and will respond whether the later dose is at three weeks or three months.’ In a statement the British Society for Immunology said, ‘Most immunologists would agree that delaying a second ‘booster’ dose of a protein antigen vaccine (such as the two approved covid-19 vaccines) by eight weeks would be unlikely to have a negative effect on the overall immune response post-boost. We also would not expect any specific safety issues to arise for the individual due to delaying the second dose, other than an increased potential risk of disease during the extended period due to lowered protection.” While this is good news we should remember that this is a completely new type of vaccine.
“However in a BMJ Opinion article John Robertson, professor of surgery at the University of Nottingham, and colleagues, warned that less was known about the behaviour of the Pfizer vaccine because of the novel mRNA technology it uses.12 ‘Maximising coverage with the first dose as intended by the CMOs could come at increased risk to already high risk/priority groups,’ they said. They called for the second dose of this vaccine to be provided at day 21 ‘until the MHRA and/or JCVI [Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation] make the data on which the JCVI recommendation is based publicly available for independent scientific review’ and for randomised controlled trials to compare the dosing schedules’.”
The BMJ report that, “A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care for England said, ‘As agreed by all four UK chief medical officers and the medical experts at the independent Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, the data provided by the manufacturers demonstrated that both vaccines offer considerable protection for patients after the first dose. ‘This measure will have the greatest impact on reducing mortality, severe disease, and hospitalisations, helping to protect the NHS and save lives’.” The BMJ ask, “Are any other countries going to do the same? According to the BMJ, “German health minister Jens Spahn has reportedly asked the Robert Koch Institute, the country’s disease control agency, to look into extending the period between the first and second vaccine dose, according to the Guardian.13 Meanwhile, in Denmark the infectious disease institute has said it was closely monitoring the UK situation and was considering a three to six week interval between doses.”
The BMJ ask another troubling question, “Could the gap lead to vaccine resistant strains of SARS-CoV-2?” One response the BMJ received was particularly disturbing as, “Paul Bieniasz, a retrovirologist from Rockefeller University who is studying how the virus can acquire mutations, has warned that the UK was taking a gamble that risked fostering vaccine resistant forms of the virus. He told the news site STAT, ‘My concern, as a virologist, is that if you wanted to make a vaccine-resistant strain, what you would do is to build a cohort of partially immunized individuals in the teeth of a highly prevalent viral infection’.14” The BMJ note, “When asked about this concern, a Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson did not directly answer the question, saying rather that it was “vital we do everything we can to quickly and safely protect as many vulnerable people as possible from this virus” and that data from manufacturers showed considerable protection for patients after the first dose.”
The BMJ ask, “What are the implications of this move for vaccine uptake?” The BMJ report that, “Some experts are concerned that having large numbers of people only partially protected for several months could lead to some individuals contracting covid while they wait for the second dose, which could dent people’s confidence in the effectiveness of vaccines. The British Society for Immunology has called on the government’s advisory committee on vaccines to make the ‘full evidence for decisions around covid-19 vaccines available immediately’ to build public trust. ‘Having access to the evidence and rationale behind the public health decisions taken is important,’ it said in a statement.15 ‘The government have confirmed that openness and transparency are vital. The British Society for Immunology will continue to monitor and advocate for this’.”
This Tory Government has never been open or transparent about anything. I am concerned that the current row over the delivery of the Oxford AstraZeneca to the EU might involve political meddling at a time when the Brexiteers are desperate to prove that the UK is ‘world beating’ while the EU lags behind. The number of Brits vaccinated looks more impressive due to the extended wait for the booster dose. The PM frantically tries to gain credibility to move beyond the shame of achieving the highest death toll in Europe. To an extremely power hungry narcissist like Boris Johnson, the general public, especially the weak, vulnerable, disabled and the elderly, are all expendable, but we cannot allow him to continue his deadly agenda by remaining in office. Ever since the Covert 2019 Rigged Election where he seized control he has left a trail of significant corruption, risking lives as he squanders public funds. We must Challenge and Robustly Investigate his vote fraud, shady dealings, cronyism and danger to life: Get The Tories Out now! DO NOT MOVE ON!