What it seems we know now about Covid-19 (Part II)

The second part of my summary of what we now know about Covid-19 and how it seems likely we will interpret things 2-4 years down the road.  

Governments around the world have shown an astonishingly uniform preference for coercive and repressive public health approaches abrogating many or most of our civil rights during the pandemic with little basis in science and little demonstrated competence or effectiveness.  

While it would be ideal to order these observations by degree of egregiousness, the public health failures have been so large, so comprehensive and for such a sustained time duration, that it is difficult to disentangle all the elements from one another.  Almost completely, our public health institutes have done things which they should not have done and not done the things which they should have.  It is quite remarkable and not yet accepted.  And of course, there will be areas where my interpretation is simply wrong.  But here is what I suspect will eventuate.  

The initial Covid-19 vaccines will come to be seen to have a far faster decline in effectiveness than was anticipated, both in absolute terms for the variant for which they were developed and in terms of their effectiveness across new variants such as omicron.  

Original Antigenic Sin will be recognized as a real issue reducing the benefit of Covid-19 vaccines both in the short and the longer term.  It is possible that people who escaped the first one or two Covid waves and then succumbed to omicron will end up being the one's to have had the best health outcomes of all.  It is still possible that the original formulation vaccine plus a case of Covid-19 will be better.  Vaccinated with boosters are likely to be seen as having the worst outcomes.  

It will be acknowledged that Covid-19 vaccines induce a two-week period of suppressed resistance in which death rates spike before subsiding.  It will be understood that it was a mistake to classify these as unvaccinated deaths when they were due to the first injection.  In addition, it will be understood that we were mistaken to launch major vaccination drives during increases of Covid-19 cases (i.e. during seasonal upticks) rather than during periods of falling cases.  Launching a vaccination campaign when cases are rising will be seen as having caused extra deaths.

While myocarditis (and yet to be discovered other negative consequences) will be small in percentage terms, they will be material for those groups who have otherwise low to no likelihood of serious health consequence from Covid-19.  In other words, young healthy men should not be getting the vaccines because the risk of negative consequences is greater from the vaccine than from Covid.

The importance of effective vaccine tracking will become understood and the current unreliable system will be seen as having been a crucial failure which delayed understanding and caused deaths.  Negative vaccine reactions will become more clearly traced and tracked and will be much higher than are currently acknowledged.

The biggest failure will be assessed as our having pursued a Zero Covid strategy rather than an Endemic Strategy.

That Zero Covid strategy will be understood as having led to excess all-causes mortality.  While the first six months of Covid-19 pandemic will be excused owing to lack of knowledge of the Covid-19 specifics, data was already available by mid-2020 strongly suggesting that Covid-19 was a low mortality endemic disease not amenable to Zero-covid strategies.  

It will be seen that Covid-19 deaths were massively over-reported blurring the line between those who died with Covid-19 into the much smaller groups who died from Covid-19.  

 

Once deaths with Covid are separated from death from Covid, the pandemic will be seen as very near much ado about nothing.  Again, this was not quite clear in the first six months but was increasingly clear from mid-2020 onwards.  The justification for a Zero Covid strategy will be completely undermined and the importance of targeted protection for those in an endemic environment will be valued. 

Public health agencies and institutions will be seen as having wrongly pursued Zero Covid and then failed to update their priors and shifted to an endemic strategy which would have saved more lives at less cost when the information became available in mid- to latter-2020 to support such a change.  

The most profound CDC failure, and the most easily avoided, will be seen as a failure of definitions, measurement and modeling.  We could and should have had good measurement programs in place from the beginning and we did not.  The original and core mission of CDC is infectious disease control and they demonstrated a staggering institutional incapacity to do their core job despite 10,000 employees and billions in investments.  Once we plunged into the pandemic with bad measurement protocols, we never caught up and we still have incomplete and terrible data.  Without good data, most these questions are far harder to answer with confidence.

There will be far greater recognition that the MSM had a massive financial incentive to catastrophize all covid news and peddle panic.  Additionally, there will be concerns about the incestuous institutional interests of the mainstream media and health agencies.  Health agencies were incented to increase the level of population and policy made panic (increase budgets and increase compliance) while the MSM bottom line was correspondingly boosted by that panic.  The MSM never acted as the institutional brake and skeptic that they could and should have done.  Finally, it will once again be illustrated that one of the critical needs of the MSM,  numeracy and the capacity for rational or empirical thinking is still badly absent.

I think there is also a good probability that the public will discover that there are institutional and incentive problems which Congress really needs to address.  It is possible that a few individuals in the CDC and FDA will be sacrificial lambs to public outrage but the real issue is not about individuals.  It is about misaligned incentives for institutions.

There should be a cascade of apologies from MSM, public intellectuals, government agencies, politicians, academia, etc. for being so dramatically and consistently wrong for two years despite  reasonable and increasing evidence against their bad policy recommendations.  There should also be restructuring and resignations.  I regret that I don’t anticipate that there will be.

The entire two years of the pandemic has also fore-fronted the powers of censure and coercion.  Whenever given a choice, public health policy has oriented towards suppressing free speech (under the guise of eliminating what has frequently been incorrectly interpreted as misinformation), de-platforming critics, and stripping citizens of rights through coercion (vaccine mandates).  The Great Barrington Declaration was issued in October 2020, advocating for the endemic approach and protecting the vulnerable in contrast to the government's Zero Covid strategy.  Instead of engaging in debate based on the data and evidence, government agencies (and Fauci) disparaged the declaration, demeaned the respected signers, and tried to suppress the Great Barrington Declaration.  Early on they were quite effective using MSM propaganda at putting discussion of the Great Barrington Declaration of principles beyond reasonable discussion.  In hindsight, we can now know with confidence that the Great Barrington Declaration was right and the government approach was wrong.  

The one thing we should learn (and I do not think we will learn) is a simple one.  The population needs to choose to lead healthier lives.  Almost all deaths are among those of great age and/or with multiple morbidities, obesity being perhaps the most avoidable.  Absolute death counts and certainly death rates are dramatically lower in countries, even very poor countries, with younger populations and with populations less subject to the diseases of affluence (obesity, diabetes, blood pressure, etc.) 

It will become clear that the vaccines developed for Covid-19 had unexpectedly short lives in terms of effectiveness and that our health agencies were resistant to recognizing that reality despite the data. 

 

It will also become accepted that boosting was not the answer, that vaccines do not protect one from infection past a certain point, that vaccines do not prevent a person from being contagious, and that there are real and yet unaccounted for side effects which have to be taken into account.

We will revisit the failure of tracking and tracing.  These are techniques useful when dealing with low contagion diseases but not high contagion diseases such as the omicron variant.  The more infectious, the less track and trace are able to keep up.  Especially when you do not have the infrastructure in place at the beginning of the outbreak.

It will be unclear for a good while as to whether the indisputable net benefit of vaccines in the early days will outstrip the problems seen in later periods (OAS, myocarditis, etc.).

It will become clear that over the course of evolving variants, the effort to demonize and "other" the unvaccinated was always morally wrong in addition to being functionally ineffective.  The enemy has always been the virus and not the victims of the virus.  It seems from current data that with the omicron variant, that the vaccinated are more likely to succumb to Covid than the unvaccinated.  It appears that higher vax states also have higher death rates than lower vax states.  

A corollary is that planning for, development of vaccinations against, development of treatments should all never have been politicized.  That there were has almost certainly caused increased confusion, decreased effectiveness, and elevated death counts.  

The overconfidence in unfounded assumptions will (or should) come under heavy fire in our public health agencies.  For those agencies to try and demonize the unvaccinated for institutional advantage was a massive error in judgment generating great loss of trust.  To have that confidence but no demonstrated reason for that agency to have had that confidence was even worse.  

It will become clear that we should have always acknowledged and tracked natural immunity (from having already had Covid) as an explicit part of any vaccine and treatment approach.  It is unclear yet to what extent omicron will confer full immunity, though it seems reasonably probable, but people who earlier had Covid-19 seem to be far less susceptible to omicron and less ill from omicron.  By ignoring natural immunity, our public health agencies have repeatedly misled the public on risks and have in particular, for many age groups, inflicted greater risk than was warranted.

It will be seen that the seasonality of Covid-19 is real and needs to be factored into forecasting, especially when new variants emerge.  As an example, given the deaths from suppressed immunity, public health agencies should be conducting vaccinations at the end of a seasonal cycle, not the beginning.  By launching such campaigns at the beginning of seasonal rises in cases, the public health agencies certainly increased the death toll in the thousands.  

It will become clear that with short durations of vaccine effectiveness, high effectiveness of natural immunity, the speed of new variant evolution (and the ineffectiveness of old vaccine formulations against new variants), the prevalence of asymptomatic covid, etc. that vaccine mandates were never a good approach, either functionally or morally.  

Boosters may end up not only having been not very effective but dangerous in themselves based on the most recent EU findings and decisions.

It seems likely that long-covid will turn out not to be a real condition and that the MSM stories about long-covid were mere efforts to sustain the panic.

It seems desirable that in the future, bureaucrats administering agencies which give grants should not be involved in crafting pandemic public health responses.  We don’t want to be in the position, as we are now, where the grant giver likely responsible for the development of Covid at Wuhan Viral Institute (Dr. Fauci) is also in charge of the pandemic response and whose scientists are dependent on being in his good graces for their future funding.  We already have documentation of scientist knowing some unpalatable facts being hesitant and actively resisting having to reveal that fact for fear that it might damage Fauci, the grant giver of the future.  This is among the institutional reforms which should be top of mind.

The catastrophic failure of the supposed best and the brightest to deal with a run-of-the-mill low lethality but novel virus might, hopefully, erode some of the mythical stature of both IQ and credentials.  Many, many high IQ, highly-credentialed people have been recommending not just ineffective policies, not just actively damaging policies, but abominable to the point of evil policies.

Track and Trace capability needs to exist for the right circumstances.  It is unclear, after serial debacles, whether CDC is prepared for effective track and trace.

Measurements should include, infections, hospitalizations from infections, ICU from infections, ventilation from infections, and death from infections.  All-causes  death rates should also be at the center of all discussions as it serves as a fail-safe measurement and holistic measure of effectiveness.  A number of countries with full on responses to covid-19 (lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, etc.) have excess all-causes-mortality while others with less consequential actions (Sweden being an example) have lower all-causes-mortality outcomes.  

It will become accepted that a focus on cases was always a misleading measure, particularly given the high infection rate, the low lethality, the inability of the vaccines to inoculate people, and the high rates of asymptomatic infection.  Indeed, it is not unlikely that we will eventually see a case focus as merely a propaganda ploy to generate fear and compliance (and funding).  The proper measures are all-causes-mortality, deaths from covid-19, ventilations from covid-19, ICU occupancy from covid-19, and hospitalizations from covid-19.  All numbers much lower than those we have been tracking.  

 

Questions remain.  How will we conduct accelerated trials of new vaccines in the future given the problems associated with the inadequate trials this time?

Will we track specific vaccine batches against consequences as we should have done this time?

Will we finally, eventually, focus on treatments as the necessary compliment to vaccines as we should have, but did not, from the start.  Failure to rigorously, expeditiously, and objectively evaluate treatments has almost certainly cause some tens of thousands of avoidable deaths.  

How can we restore confidence and trust in public health agencies when they have this time demonstrated both an inability to do their job and provided strong evidence that trust has been unwarranted (lying about herd immunity levels; efforts to co-opt private technology companies into suppressing knowledge being generated around the world about better treatments and approaches; active efforts to destroy the reputations and livelihoods of scientists with better evidence; etc.) 

Finally (owing to time constraints, not because of an exhaustion of evidence of systemic institutional perfidy), respect for due process, consent of the governed, and respect for scientific evidence.  This should have been front and center all along but was largely circumvented.