How Covid “Herd Immunity” won and changed humanity’s health forever

First published at Anna Chen's website

Anna Chen – 2 September 2024, herd immunity

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Public Health vs Big Business Interests in Classic Class Conflict

They don’t call it “herd immunity” any more. It’s invisible. The new normal. No name but effectively the same. 

If you want to know what the ruling classes have in store for us, here’s a clue.  Why did the US and UK do so badly in the Covid pandemic? 

And why did Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer elevate GSK’s Sir Patrick Vallance to the House of Lords and to government as the Minister of State for Science, Research and Innovation for the United Kingdom as soon as he entered Downing Street in July this year? 

“Sir Patrick Vallance diary testimony exposes government chaos at the UK Covid Inquiry, November 2023:” However, attempts to rehabilitate Big Pharma’s man in the government during the crucial pandemic period are undermined by his March 2020 promotion of “herd immunity” against serious scientific evidence, his deferred bonus of 43,111 shares in GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) worth £600,000 from his time as president (GSK is making MRNA vaccines with CureVac), and his attempts to redact certain pages. Despite this, Keir Starmer installs him as his science minister on 6 July 2024. 
SEE SIR PATRICK VALLANCE “HERD IMMUNITY” INTERVIEW FROM 2020

The right undermines the science

Public Health and Big Business battled it out from the start of the coronavirus outbreak in 2020 in an unadorned class struggle. The poorest and ethnic workers had the highest rates of infection and died. Transport workers, nurses and NHS workers can’t work from home. 

As soon as China’s model of lockdown quarantine was raised, political figures such as Lord Sumption railed against lockdown as “bad for business”: “A refusal to examine the collateral consquences. … No society in history has made itself healthier by making itself poorer”. They were rapidly sidelined by growing public awareness of the dangers, informed by respected scientists in publications such as The Lancet. 

However, business interests soon marshalled their forces. 

The mainstream media soon picked a side and it wasn’t public health. Information that China had eradicated Covid by day 43 of their 76-day lockdown was suppressed. Instead, China’s winning strategy was trashed, and the country was vilified, as were health figures who failed to support the Business narrative, such as the WHO’s Tedros Ghebreyesus and Anthony Fauci.

Trump sets the Covid bar low

President Trump set out his stall in the early months, calling the coronavirus a hoax, stigmatising masks and holding superspreader events, despite being briefed by the Pentagon on the dangers of the pandemic on 28 January 2020. We now see the spread strategy revived in the majority of aggressive social media responses, anti-vax, anti-mask which took Trump’s initial position and blew it up into the dominant narrative. 

On 12 March 2020, the day before Patrick Vallance’s “herd immunity” interviews, Trump was forced by the weight of national sickness and death into abandoning his Cnut denial of the pandemic and changed tack, issuing the first social distancing mandates and deflecting by calling it “Wuhan flu,” “kung flu” and “Chinese virus”. 

His U-turn was closely followed by a White House cable to State Departments launching communications instructions “in relation to China”, and on 17 April with the publication of the Republican 57-page “blame China” memo; a training manual for China hawks to attack the rising superpower and Covid patsy. 

And in October 2020, the billionaire Koch-backed Great Barrington Declaration, pushing the discredited “herd immunity,” was released against all serious scientific knowledge. 

This has been a major gaslighting exercise, aided by decades-long US expertise in advertising and mass manipulation using armies of psychologists. 

Herd immunity in all but name

In Britain, we are currently seeing a Covid surge but figures are no longer kept. The media plays it down. The debilitating effects of Long Covid on the immune system – essentially HIV in slomo – are ignored. In the NHS, few wear masks even around immunity-compromised patients. Childhood ailments are on the rise, everyone is getting sicker. but there’s barely a murmur in the MSM. Perversely, when these issued are raised, vaccines are blamed. 

The UK nearly got Covid to zero in first lockdown before the saboteur lobby clamoured to get Prime Minister Boris Johnson to open up early, leaving a reservoir of the virus in the population. Zero Covid is now a dirty phrase. Johnson’s chief science officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, has thrived.

Johnson had previously mirrored Trump, closing down the UK pandemic team shortly after winning the June 2019 general election, around the same time that Trump closed the Beijing branch of the US CDC which was supposed to monitor disease outbreaks. 

Trump had already closed the White House pandemic team in May 2018, with some original team members absorbed into National Security Council chief John Bolton’s new counterproliferation and biodefense directorate which included a weapons of mass destruction unit along with arms control and nonproliferation, and global health and biodefense. 

Population – that’s us.

Like Trump, Johnson’s own superspreader actions were masked by a clownish ineptitude schtick. Amusing, appalling and effective.

Adding to the eugenecist mindset, Johnson declared the need to get the population down in 2007: “…  a horrifying vision of habitations multiplying and replicating like bacilli in a Petri dish.” His own father, Stanley Johnson, has written extensively on population issues, prioritising per capita GDP growth over the population. He says, “In sheer economic terms, how can you sustain an increase in per capita income when you have rising population without rising economic growth? A declining population, which is what I would aim for.” 

Labour’s history in power indicates it is there to manage the decline of capitalism, not to defend the public that elects them. The appointment of the former chief science officer during one of our darkest hours to the House of Lords and government only reinforces that view.

A word on vaccines – Edit 3 September 2024

“Herd immunity” was always about profits before people. 

After initial fumbles, China identified, sequenced and released the SARS-Cov-2 genome to the world by 11 January, within days of finding the “strange pneumonia.” They then used their huge scales of production to make PPE and vaccinations urgently in bulk for a Global South largely ignored by the West. 

However, instead of working to contain and eradicate the virus with the time bought by China, efforts to quarantine the population from SARS-CoV-2 were constantly resisted in the US and UK by the government. 

In America, President Trump’s MAGA allies including The Washington Times, Fox News and Steve Bannon began to “flood the zone with shit,” starting the Wuhan lab-creation rumour just two days before, we are told, the president learnt from the 28 January NSA Covid pandemic briefing how deadly it was. 

Disinformation grew ever more shrill with each of China’s successes. Meanwhile, Trump sent the CIA to gazump all available PPE. 

The race between traditional and mRNA vaccines

The anti-science, anti-vaccination messaging started out trashing China’s vaccinations such as Sinovac (CoronaVac) and Sinopharm which used the traditional inactivated (dead) whole-virus method of inoculation. The Pentagon even set up a secret operation to denigrate Sinovac that was doing most of the world’s heavy lifting. Russia’s Sputnik vaccine was similarly monstered but also proved safe and effective.

Because Chinese vaccinations used the traditional method, and not the relatively new messenger RNA (mRNA) favoured by the western pharma industry, they were produced reliably, earlier, and cheaper. More tolerance and fewer side effects are seen. They were also much easier to store than the West’s mRNA which required subzero temperatures of -80C, a big ask for hotter Asia, Africa and the central and southern Americas. 

One Singapore study of the elderly indicated that 4 doses of mRNA might be more effective than inactivated whole-virus vaccines. Although mRNA has a slightly higher risk of side effects in young males — heart: myocarditis and pericarditis — these are small compared with the risks of catching the disease itself. 

The coronavirus is incomplete RNA, not complete DNA like bacteria, which means it requires a host to survive and reproduce itself. Lockdown quarantine deprives the virus of a host, not only containing it, but starving it to extinction. 

China’s aim was to eradicate the virus. Vaccinations were never a magic bullet. They wouldn’t stop you catching Covid but they would empower the immune system to minimise the damage and stop health services collapsing while the virus died out. That chance was lost. China was eventually overwhelmed by variants cooked up outside its borders and abandoned its Zero Covid strategy, reopening after two years. 

The geopolitical disinformation backfired into a perpetual need for juicy profitable Covid vaccines which many neither trust nor want. As you’d expect, there’s plenty of fighting over the spoils: watch Moderna try to sue Pfizer and BioNTech for patent infringement. This is the industry, after all, that tried to copyright the human genome. 

Then there is Covid medicine. Pfizer is to charge $1,400 per five-day course of Paxlovid. Do the maths and weep.

The pandemic is not over. Wear a mask.

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The Covid Pandemic, Page 1: How coronavirus was weaponised
The Covid Pandemic, Page 2: Sir Patrick Vallance’s Sky News “herd immunity” interview, 13 March 2020. Full transcipt.
The Covid Pandemic, Page 3: THIS PAGE How “herd immunity” won and changed humanity’s health forever. Public Health vs Big Business conflict.
The Covid Pandemic, Page 4: Medical journals and videos on damage to the brain and immunity system by SARS-CoV-2
The Covid Pandemic, Page 5: I caught Covid again and it’s not getting any better. Covid Inquiry: denial of Airborne vs Droplets mode of transmission prolonged the pandemic

Chief science officer Sir Patrick Vallance promotes Covid “herd immunity” on Sky News, March 2020