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

< 1x

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.

* * * * *

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

Sir Patrick Vallance Covid “herd immunity” interview, March 2020

SSir Patrick Vallance urges "herd immunity" on Sky News, 13 March 2020

Covid Pandemic: Government and “Herd Immunity”

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.

TRANSCRIPT: The government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance tells Sky News that about 60% of people will need to become infected with coronavirus in order for the UK to achieve “herd immunity”.

Sky News 13 March 2020

Sky News: the uk’s chief scientific adviser who joins us from Westminster good morning to you. The big question here is why the advice that is being given to our government does seem to be different to the advice being given to many other governments who are taking much more stringent action

0:14
Sir Patrick Vallance: well we’ve got a panel of a very world leading scientists across epidemiology mathematical modelling viral OG clinicians and we’re taking input from leading academics to come try and come up with a plan that actually does what we want it to do and it doesn’t mean that the others are doing something wrong and in fact much of the advice and much of the actions if you look at them they’re trying to achieve the same thing and that is to try to reduce the peak of the epidemic flatten it and broaden it so that you don’t end up with so much intense pressure on healthcare systems at one time so that’s one aim is to reduce transmission try to make sure that we end up with a broader epidemic not a very sharp one that overloads the system and the second of course is to protect the elderly and vulnerable and to make sure that during that peak they are protected as well as you can because that’s the group that stand the biggest chance of having a serious outcome from this

Delaying the spread

1:18
Sky News: many people are asking the question and it has to be legitimate as to why if you’re trying to delay the spread of the virus and people can understand why you would want to do that while we basically seem to be allowing society to continue as normal you know that there’s no lockdowns there’s no shutdowns of schools or education facilities there’s still people going to restaurants and the theater isn’t that actually being gonna be problematic in terms of trying to delay the spread of the virus

1:51

PV: So the UK has actually done a good job of contact tracing and isolating so the first phase of this means that we’ve a little bit behind we in terms of where the outbreak is compared to others and the measures that were announced which is about self isolation even if you’ve got very mild symptoms will mean a large number of people actually at home being isolated because of this infection that’s a very big measure actually it’s going to have quite a big impact across a number of households a number of people so I don’t think that’s a trivial measure it’s all and all the modelling suggests that these sorts of measures and the other two that we discussed yesterday the ones that have the biggest impact there are other things which you’re quite right of things that do have some effect and and come in at the right time and mass gatherings is the one that keeps coming up and mass gatherings of course are a place where you can potentially get infection from somebody but the alternative is also important that if you’re not at the mass gathering you’re at a small gathering
2:52
and most of the transmission of these types of viruses occur in small gatherings not in big gatherings and therefore this concentration on getting people who got symptoms into their house isolated potentially the next step to last households to do it so you contain the whole thing in a household and making sure we protect the vulnerable and elderly are the first three things we need to do doesn’t cause stop the possibility that even relatively soon you need to do more than that but getting this right and making sure that we can monitor the outbreak is absolutely key.

Modelling

3:28
Sky News: you talk about the modelling Jeremy Hunt the former health secretary last night was talking about the modelling saying he would like to see if modelling particularly better behavioral science which he seemed to imply was taking some sort of precedence over the epidemiology

3:42
PV: oh I don’t think that’s correct, I mean I, I think the modelling and the behavioral science and the clinical input come together. It’s not absolutely not the case that behavioral science takes a predominance. But of course it’s an important consideration and it is the case of course that if you completely locked down absolutely everything probably for a period of four months or more then you would suppress this virus. All of the evidence from previous epidemics suggests that when you do that and then you release it it all comes back again so the other part of this is to make sure that we don’t end up with a sudden peak again in the winter which is even larger which causes even more problem.
4:25
so we want to suppress it not get rid of it completely which you can’t do anyway not suppress it so we get the second peak and also allowing us enough of us who are going to get mild illness to become immune to this to help with the sort of whole population response which would protect everybody.

[NOTE: China eradicated the coronavirus by day 43 of their 76-day lockdown that began 23 January 2020, almost two months before this interview]

4:46
Sky News: Yeah I mean that that herd immunity I know you talked about yesterday when you were appearing with the prime minister and in terms of building up a herd immunity within the UK. Well I mean what sort of percentage of people need to have contracted the virus?

5:01
PV: Probably about 60% or so and we think that this virus is likely to be one that comes back year-on-year become like a seasonal virus and communities will become immune to it and that’s going to be an important part of controlling this longer term.

SN: Sixty percent?

PV: Sixty percent is the sort of figure you need to get herd immunity.

Sir Patrick Vallance Telegraph GSK deferred shares

Death rate

5:25
SN: I mean even without even looking at the sort of the best-case scenario and I were talking last week and you were saying you know half of one percent to one percent fatality in something like this that’s an awful lot of people dying in this country.

5:39
PV: Well I mean of course we do face the prospect of as the Prime Minister said yesterday of an increasing number of people dying that is a real prospect this is a nasty disease
5:50
for most people it’s a mild disease. It’s important to know we don’t know yet nobody knows what proportion of people have this who are completely asymptomatic so the only cases that we’ve really got at the moment are people who’ve had symptoms or largely people who’ve had symptoms …

[NOTE: Vallance ignores China figures nearly two months after the Wuhan lockdown 23 January 2020. China bought us time, western interests frittered it away. Long Covid, damaging our immunity system, is now a sort of HIV in slomo.]

6:07
… that means that even estimating exactly what the death rate is from this is quite difficult because there may be many more people that haven’t been detected yet and that’s why some of the new tests that are being developed now going to be so important so we can really understand how this disease is spreading and we don’t have a handle on that yet.

Response

6:26
SN: In terms of our response so there’s a couple of points I want to put to you one the former Prime Minister of Italy was talking to Sky News yesterday you said yesterday we’re about four weeks behind Italy don’t you want to avoid being like Italy and their former prime-minister saying don’t repeat our mistakes don’t waste time

6:46
PV: yes it

SN: should we not heed some of that advice?

6:49
PV: I think I think my comments about being behind Italy about where we were on the the unmitigated curve of the epidemic we’ve been working on this since the beginning of January so this isn’t something that suddenly groups have come together to think about yesterday this is a group of people that have been working very hard on this giving advice over the whole time what we don’t want to do is to get into knee-jerk reactions where you have to start doing measures at the wrong pace because something’s happened so we’re trying to keep ahead of it we’re trying to lay out the path so people can see what the actions are that are being advised and then of course it’s up to ministers to decide which of those actions are the most appropriate to take so I completely agree with the Prime Minister of Italy you do not want to be caught on the back foot on this.

Prof John Ashton

7:37
SN: Professor John Ashton, who I’m sure you know, former director of public health England for the Northwest region, he said the response so far has been wooden and academic

7:50
PV: Well I think John will have his views on this and they’re perfectly legitimate lots of people have got views on this I think that what we’re trying to do is feed in the most up-to-date and relevant advice we can to enable sensible decisions to be made at the right time and of course during this sort of thing there are lots of people lots of different voices coming from all sorts of angles and if you listen to all of them they are largely mutually incompatible so it’s impossible to keep everybody happy with any response you do and that’s why we’re trying to base it on the best possible advice [!?] and actually the whole point is that this is very practical advice based on the science not something that actually is meant to be an academic exercise at all.

8:32
SN: Oh Sir Patrick you have the advantage of not being a politician although I know you don’t get to have the final say in all of this but are you prepared if this changes if you look back at this in a week and say you know what this hasn’t been the right action how flexible are you prepared to be in changing your position in your advice to the government?

8:52
PV: absolutely I will base it on the evidence and my job as chief scientific advisor is to is to speak scientific truth to power and say it as it is and that’s exactly what I will do

— Sky News transcript ends —

It gets even worse …

POSTSCRIPT 22 August 2024:

In October 2020, “herd immunity” is formalised by the Koch-funded Great Barrington Declaration, opposed by most of the science community. Because the coronavirus mutates faster than, say, chickenpox or measles, on top of the mortality rate, it is impossible to achieve mass immunity when the virus keeps changing. You wouldn’t deliberately expose yourself to cholera or typhoid.

At the start of the pandemic there were two competing strategies, Public Health versus Big Business interests. Various figures such as Lord Sumption have railed against lockdowns as being bad for business, reinforced by the establishment media’s attacks on China’s efforts which were twisted from “China bought us time” to “China lied, people died”.

However, in contrast to the UK and US, China had a clear aim: 1) Containment – Stop the virus transmission and spread; 2) Suppression – Decrease or stop community transmission; 3) Mitigation – Lower and delay the epidemic surge to reduce health-care demand.

China eradicated the virus by day 43 of their 76-day lockdown. They held up for two years but were finally overwhelmed by variants stewed up in the superspreader West and had to reopen.

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

China’s strategy eradicated the virus by day 43 of their 76-day lockdown. They held up for two years but were finally overwhelmed by variants stewed up in the superspreader West and had to reopen.

China had proved eradication was possible but Big Pharma had other aims. The UK and the US had the worst death rate in the world. The powerful, deeply entrenched anti-vaccination, mask and lockdown lobby illustrate the success of the Business strategy — class conflict at its sharpest.

THE NUMBERS – OFFICE OF NATIONAL STATISTICS (ONS): The BBC reports that more than 44 million people in the UK were estimated to have had the virus between April 2020 and February 2022, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Based on the survey, the estimated peak of the pandemic, in cases if not in deaths, was in late March 2022, where at one point about 4.9 million people were thought to have the virus. Just under 227,000 people died in the UK with Covid-19 listed as one of the causes on their death certificate. Since 9 December 2020, nearly 176 million Covid vaccines have been administered in various stages up to May 2023.

A HISTORY OF HERD IMMUNITY – THE LANCET: September 2020, “… any proposed approach to achieve herd immunity through natural infection is not only highly unethical, but also unachievable”. Sceptics raised other concerns, observing that other coronaviruses induce only transient antibody defences. … COVID-19 mortality in the UK and the USA has already taken a disproportionate toll on poor and minority groups, a reflection of systemic racism and poverty.

Herd Immunity to Fight Against COVID-19: January 2023, “… due to repeated mutations of the virus, it is evolving into new strains with more severity. Its consequences on the immune system and response to a vaccine are still a big challenge to overcome … The main barrier to acquiring herd immunity is that SARS-CoV-2 is undergoing frequent mutations in its spike protein, causing changes in its genome sequence and resulting in various modifications in the virus”

Herd immunity and COVID-19: What you need to know: “Herd immunity may not be possible when viruses change a lot in a short time, as with the virus that causes COVID-19. Reaching herd immunity is harder if a disease can be spread by people who catch the virus but don’t have symptoms”

The Government’s official advisory body of scientists including Patrick Vallance, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), is challenged shortly after its “herd immunity” advice by the formation of Independent SAGE, by scientists unaffiliated to government, in May 2020.

Reuters: Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic. Well this was obvious. Why only release this information in the run-up to the November election? 14 June 2024

Guardian: Hancock and Hunt failed to prepare UK for pandemic, Covid inquiry finds 18 July 2024 "Health secretaries failed to fix flaws in contingency planning before Covid killed more than 230,000 in UK." No-deal Brexit took priority.  Well, I did warn that geopolitical strategy to maintain western hegemony went: Brexit > Covid pandemic and now a nice war to divert attention and pillage the wealth of our global lifeboat and growth-engine. 18 July 2024

The Covid Pandemic: how coronavirus was weaponised. Covid pandemic timeline, commentary and research by Anna Chen as it happened

Originally posted at Anna Chen's website Covid Pandemic pages