For the past few months, the Netherlands has had a big wave of BA.1 Omicron, that has caused a lot of people to get infected. The number of deaths and hospitalizations was very low however. The government had implemented a complete lockdown, but it won’t shock you to hear that this had no real impact on the wave.
So what led to the low death and hospitalization rates then? This is quite simple: The elderly had received boosters. The boosters offer some protection against infection and because the elderly mostly mingle with other elderly, that’s sufficient to keep infection rates low. You can see the infection rates here:
I marked the height of the big BA.1 wave in the Netherlands here. Different age groups were infected at different rates. Depending on your definition, young adults were anywhere from 4 to 10 times more likely to get infected than the elderly, whereas during the previous winter, the elderly were actually more likely to get infected than the young.
In other words, if you would look at the total number of cases and compare this to the number of hospitalizations and deaths, you would be under the impression that Omicron must be a very mild variant. But if the elderly had been getting infected at the same rate as young adults, we would have seen record hospitalizations and deaths. We didn’t see these record hospitalizations and deaths, because the Dutch government used a lockdown in combination with a booster campaign to reduce infections among the elderly.
Unfortunately however, constantly injecting people with an old version of the Wuhan spike protein to protect them against new variants is a poor bargain. Here’s what happens:
- You vaccinate people and now they are at increased risk of infection for 2 weeks, or 1 week after the booster. These infections are counted as belonging in the previous category. The infections from the first shot (these are massive) are counted as happening in the unvaccinated, those in the weeks after the second shot are treated as happening in those who received one shot etc. This toying with the definitions always improves the apparent efficacy of these vaccines.
- After these weeks, you see a few months of protection against infection. Whenever you organize another mass vaccination round for high risk elderly, you thus drive SARS-COV-2 related hospitalizations and deaths down. Protection against infection is far from perfect, but the elderly mostly interact with other elderly, so case rates can decline by a lot, even with modest individual protection.
- After a few months, protection now begins to fade and you start seeing increased reports of breakthrough infections. Risk of infection for those with a waned immune response is actually higher than for the unvaccinated.
- After antibody levels have sufficiently waned, the elderly are now at increased risk of a severe infection, due to the decreased breadth of the immune response. With every additional shot, the immune system becomes increasingly more focused on the Wuhan spike protein, to the detriment of its ability to respond to other variants.
- Governments get very worried and decide to give all the elderly another shot, expecting this will buy them another couple of months.
And that’s for example, why you saw a pattern of deaths in Israel that’s very different from most Western nations:
Once Israel was hit by Omicron they were already in the stage where the effect of the third shot had started to wane. And thus all these people who had received three shots had to deal with this infection with an antibody response characterized by a decreased ability to adjust to new variants, like Omicron. The Israeli government responded by giving the elderly a fourth shot, which kicks the can down the hall for another few months.
Meanwhile, Israel is unique among the world’s nations, in the degree to which Omicron begins to evolve to overcome the vaccine induced immune response. There’s a variant now showing up in high rates in Israel, that’s not really showing up anywhere else, BA.2 with 346K. This is a variant we would expect to have an extremely strong ability to escape the Wuhan spike antibody response, much greater than anything we’ve seen before.
I can’t sufficiently emphasize, how stupid it is to constantly vaccinate people with the exact same Spike protein. It’s asking for a disaster. The evidence should be very clear from Israel, where deaths from the supposedly much milder Omicron variant exceeded deaths from the Delta wave.
The Netherlands is now planning the fourth round of injection with the Wuhan spike protein, so now we’re going to see two things:
- A number of boosted people have finally had enough of these vaccines and the associated side-effects, so their immune response will wane and they will be at high risk of a severe BA.2 infection in the months ahead.
- A number of people will go along with the fourth shot, buying them a couple more months of protection against BA.2, at the cost of severe side-effects and the inevitable waning of the immune response, leading to an inevitable next wave of infections once the fourth shot wanes.
We have actually seen something similar to what we’re now witnessing with SARS-COV-2, the failed Dengvaxia experiment in the Philippines, where children died after receiving an experimental vaccine against Dengue.
They gave a bunch of kids a vaccine against Dengue, then the kids who had no exposure to Dengue before receiving the vaccine began dying.
Let’s look at the numbers. A total 0f 800,000 children were vaccinated beginning in april 2016 and lasting until the end of 2017. Out of these children, 100,000 had no previous exposure to Dengue and thus suffered original antigenic sin imprinting, prohibiting them from generating a proper immune response against other variants of Dengue. This problem was only discovered in November 2017.
The program was stopped in December 2017, 12 deaths from Dengue were confirmed in these children. By September 2018, they were looking at 19 dengue deaths.
By June 2021, the 165th victim whose death could be linked to the vaccine was recorded.
So, if we just take the Dengvaxia experiment at face value, the deaths become apparent about one and a half year after the program starts. Then it takes about another year, before deaths genuinely begin to start piling up. If you want to dive into the details, there’s a model here that you can look at.
This is effectively giving you a glimpse at what you should expect in the coming years. Experiments like the one we have engaged in against SARS-COV-2 take some time to reveal their impact.
Of course what we did is much worse than the Dengvaxia experiment. We have engaged in a global mass vaccination experiment, which changes the evolutionary dynamics of this virus to a degree that SARS-COV-2 becomes forced to genetically adapt to this newly created niche. In that sense, there is no proper equivalent.
We can see some dynamics similar to those of homogenization of the immune response from mass vaccination in this study on the impact of viral adaptation to specific MHC genotypes in inbred mice. Virulence becomes much higher in mice with common MHC genotypes to which the virus has adapted than to rare MHC genotypes.
It’s not very hard to see what’s happening, I’ll divide it into a couple of different points:
-Neutralizing antibodies against SARS-COV-2 make it harder for someone to get infected and for them to pass on the infection.
-Versions of SARS-COV-2 that mutated to overcome our neutralizing antibodies are thus going to have a transmission advantage.
-The ideal transmission advantage would be seen if all of your neutralizing antibodies became useless.
-Your neutralizing antibodies don’t just obstruct viral transmission from one person to another, they also make the difference between a nasty cold and a life-threatening infection.
-It’s not possible for this virus to overcome all of our neutralizing antibodies, if everyone has different neutralizing antibodies, due to infections from different variants and naturally increasing breadth after infection thanks to somatic hypermutation of your B cells.
-It’s only possible for a variant to come into existence that overcomes all neutralizing antibodies, when everyone has a very similar pallet of neutralizing antibodies.
-By vaccinating everyone multiple times with the exact same Wuhan spike protein, we create a situation where everyone has very similar antibodies against this virus.
-This process of mass vaccination enables a variant to come into existence that overcomes all of our neutralizing antibodies.
-Such a variant would be both highly transmissible and highly lethal.
-We’re now in a situation where just two out of 19 monoclonal antibody therapies work against the new dominant variant, BA.2. Your own vaccine induced antibody response will similarly face massive antibody evasion from BA.2 and we should thus expect that we’re quite close to witnessing the emergence of a variant that is going to cause a mass wave of infections, severe illness and death.
Here you can see infection rates in Dutch elderly:
It should be obvious that this mass wave of infections is going to have consequences in the form of more hospitalizations and it should be obvious that with the waning boosters and the current wave of BA.2 subvariants, the infection rates in the elderly are going to get worse in the weeks ahead.
Infection rates in Dutch elderly are now five times higher than the previous winter’s peak. Unless you expect that natural immunity, vaccine induced immunity and the hypothesized mildness of Omicron will somehow reduce the risk of hospitalization per individual infection by 80% or more, hospitalizations will exceed what we saw last winter.
It could of course be that I’m missing something, that some deus ex machina will now show up to avoid mass hospitalization and death, but I honestly can’t think of something. If you think there’s some silver lining I’m missing, be sure to let me know in the comments.
Do we know for sure that mass omicron infection doesnt significantly reboot immunity to a broader crosssection of covid proteins in the vaxxxed?
Otherwise I got nothing
Doesn’t seem like it, because Omicron specific boosters show a strong OAS effect in animal experiments.
If the immune response of vast numbers of people are impaired, then either there has to be a therapy to reset the immune response (which would be fabulous for me and my allergies) a therapy to combat either the virus or the immune response itself, or a way to stop transmission better than masks and handwashing.
There has been some work on the last one, and would appear to be perfect for facilities like hospitals, assisted living and assisted care homes, and schools.
The study is into the use of 222nm bank UV to deactivate corona virus in transmission as aerosols.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-67211-2
It was always weird to me that the mask stuff didnt escalate to the point where they worked.
It would have eventually worked. If the whole population is in positive pressure moonsuits.
> then either there has to be a therapy to reset the immune response
Have a look at the therapeutic drug “Allocetra” which is in development. Could possibly be such a treatment. https://enlivex.com/allocetra/
@David Kindltot: what you are asking for already exists. Check Rituximab and friends, CD20 B linfo killers. Treated long enough even your kid vaccination is no longer valid. The problem is that takes forever to get back to a normal amount of linfocites, 50% have normal IgG levels after 5 years. Until then, you need regular IgG transfusions not to die of anything. Not recommended, unless you have linfatic cancer. So I do not think there is a fix that way.
On the other hand, early antiviral treatment should fix the problem of COVID-19.
Personal anecdote: my father (early 70s, healthy, no comorbidities,
no serious illness ever) is triple jabbed (first two doses in March/April 2021,
booster in October 2021).
He caught Omicron in beginning of February, nothing serious, “recovered” within a few days. Now 4 weeks later, he caught pneumonia that sounds pretty nasty.
In many European countries (including Netherlands)
I am seeing another uptick in cases. And this is
despite probably lower testing now as many countries
are starting to wind down testing.
And Denmark is an especially curious case. The death
rate is higher than it’s ever been. Of course, they claim
it’s all good now — covid is no longer an important
disease.
Same in the UK. A geriatrician friend says the elderly are now dying like they were pre-vaccination. But nobody is talking about this.
At least in Germany the uptick in cases is in part caused by people wanting to get covid. As the German government is planning a general vaccination mandate, many people (especially among the young) who do not want to be vaccinated see a covid infection as a way out.
If things go as you expect, what will happen to the unvaccinated? Of course, they won’t have the vaccine narrowing the focus of their immune systems. But will acquired immunity to the Delta or Omicron variants provide protection against new variants?
According to GVB, acquired immunity should provide broad protection for any future variants — even those created from evolutionary pressure of the vaccinated — so long as you have not imprinted your immune response with the shots.
Wait wait…
Vaccinations really began rolling out to the public, what, in early 2021?
If I understand you correctly, if approx. +1.5 years is when the bodies start stacking like firewood, then doesn’t that mean that sometime around like, September or so, we will finally see all of the covid believers face ADE, then death, followed by Hell?
I hate to double comment, but I realized I really wanted to ask you this also – do you have a projected death percentage? Like, what percentage of those who took covid shots you expect to see in the pits? That’s the real paydirt I’m looking for. TIA
I don’t get why the high transmissibility should imply high virulence/lethality. Wouldn’t it be logical to expect mutations that exploit the narrow immunity to spread like wild fire but ideally (for the virus) the symptoms would remain mild?
In fact, since the unvaxxed are a minority by a large margin, the virus can mutate to be mild and highly transmissible among the vaxxed but dangerous for the unvaxxed. This severity wouldn degrade the transmission alot because the unvaxxed are a minority. That would be a classical Marek scenario and really the wet dream for the vaxx pushers. Hope we avoid it!
>I don’t get why the high transmissibility should imply high virulence/lethality.
Well, if the virus becomes more transmissible because our neutralizing antibodies no longer work, then that also means we lose our body’s most important way of dealing with this virus.
>In fact, since the unvaxxed are a minority by a large margin, the virus can mutate to be mild and highly transmissible among the vaxxed but dangerous for the unvaxxed.
That’s unlikely to happen, because the antibody evading mutations have negative fitness in unvaccinated people. After all, if they had a fitness advantage in unvaccinated people, we would have expected them to already show up and start spreading before the vaccination campaign began.
Adaptations to vaccinated people through antibody evading mutations will come at the cost of adaptation to the unvaccinated.
Surely that would only apply if the unvaxxed had no infection acquired immunity? and almost certainly most do by now – those with acquired immunity and a strong innate immune system should surely be able to see it off (I hope, anyway, because that’s me).
It seems unlikely that a variant would take hold that would somehow evade the wuhan spike antibodies that a vaccinated person makes, allowing an infection to take hold and be transmitted to others, yet also rely on there being a an unnaturally high level of those self-same spike antibodies not to be lethal.
>Well, if the virus becomes more transmissible because our neutralizing >antibodies no longer work, then that also means we lose our body’s most >important way of dealing with this virus.
Makes perfect sense, but still high transmissibility could also come from mutations that are not necessarily AB evading. There was an article that attributed the high transmissibility of Omicron to the fact that it is more fit to infect cells in the upper respiratory tract as opposed to other variants that are more fit in the lower respiratory system. Hence the infectiousness is not directly linked to AB evasion, but rather the AB evasion seems like a byproduct. If I remember right, the vaccines do not elicit mucosal AB anyways, resulting in vaccinated and unvaccinated persons having the same viral loads as detected by PCR cycle counts. What I mean is that the AB evasion is actually not the primary goal of the virus. Much less so if the ABs just suppress the symptoms. Evolutionary the best path for the virus is to increase the transmissibility while keeping the symptoms low, and hence the AB evasion is not the objective of the fitness function. I am just thinking aloud – not a specialist in the field by no means.
>That’s unlikely to happen, because the antibody evading mutations have >negative fitness in unvaccinated people. After all, if they had a fitness >advantage in unvaccinated people, we would have expected them to already show >up and start spreading before the vaccination campaign began.
Agree with that! Hope you are right. Another argument is that the immune response of the unvaccinated and recovered is broader so they surely should be better off than the vaccinated. Me personally, i still haven’t had corona. No idea if I have some cross immunity or just got lucky so far. I work mostly from home but have kids in the school. Sooner or later we will all get it. I pray to God, I and my family and friends will be able to avoid the injection though.
Thank you for your great posts, Radagast!
So I had two doses of the Pfizer vaccine back in May 2021. Then I got Covid (I’m guessing the Omicron variant) in early January. Had a fever and cough and was over it in a week for the most part. What are the prospects for vaccinated people like me? If I don’t get any boosters, do you still anticipate I will have issues with future exposures to Covid variants?
>What are the prospects for vaccinated people like me?
I honestly don’t know. If infection recalls the Wuhan spike response (original antigenic sin) then you would expect a high risk of constant reinfections, but if there is a novel response specific for Omicron variants then you would now expect long term durable immunity to emerge.
The boosted don’t seem to develop durable immunity specific for Omicron, I see a lot of reports of constant reinfections. For the twice injected, I don’t know.
Maybe your Spike-ABs are still against the Wuhan variant, despite the Omicron infection, but you may very well have N-ABs that give a broad immunity. I am not aware of a formal study looking at this but in the UK Vaccine Surveillance Report (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1060030/vaccine-surveillance-report-week-10.pdf) on page 46 you can see that more than 35% of the blood donors have N-antibodies. Given that more than 70% of the UK citizens are vaccinated this means there are many who are vaccinated and have developed N-ABs. This is a very positive sign and I hope it is not due to unvaccinated people being strongly overrepresented among the blood donors. It basically means that vaccinated people can still develop N-ABs and hence get robust immunity after infection. Keep the fingers crossed for this – some very good friends were in a hurry to get the shot
You should be fine. Evolving variants are a natural thing and are perfectly normal. Original antigenic sin is overstated, because it suggests that the body can’t deal with having outdated antibodies. It can. Having old antibodies is not a death sentence, but it is a negativ factor. Just don’t get vaccinated again.
In the States, BA.2 doesn’t seem to be taking hold. Lots of folks, especially the vaxxed, were ill around the holidays, but right now no one seems ill. In fact, I can’t recall a winter with this little sickness of any kind.
Yeah the US had a very low booster rate, so a whole bunch of people got BA.1, which gave them immunity against BA.2.
Here in Western Europe most adults got the booster so they never got BA.1, but now that the boosters are waning, they’re susceptible to BA.2.
We could very well end up seeing BA.1 and BA.2 circulate besides each other in different parts of the world for a long time.
Another timely and I fear prescient post. In Scotland it looks like we are heading the way of Israel – record number of ‘cases’ and a rise in hospitalisations. Of course, Scotland like other countries changes the criteria of what a case is. This time last year it was a positive PCR test – now, a positive lateral flow test (handed out free like confetti at weddings – I was offered some at the supermarket last week) counts as a ‘case’ . However, the rise in hospitalisations is attracting my attention. I was interested by your comment that the booster shot offered “a few months of protection against infection”. As long as this is the case I fear that the vaccinators and the public health mafia will never let up in their quest to jab the populace. Is there any sign that with the 4th booster this period of efficacy has diminished?
Constant reinfection seems to be a big problem with omicron.
I think a good advice would be to take 6’000 to 8’000 IU of vitamin D3 daily as well as vitamin K2, vitamin C, zinc and maybe Becozym Forte(B complex) for the immune system. I have read that vitamin D depletes rapidly when you get infected.
Albert Bourla is on video distancing himself from the mRNA shots today, blaming the “they/thems.”
“They came to me and convinced me it was safe . . .”
My prediction is these shots will be pulled from the market by the end of the year, especially as the Omicron-specific shots are showing very little efficacy. I’m excited for the Nuremberg II trials.
Oh boy, it will be such a relief. It is so clear that the vaccines are highly dangerous and people still take them and mandate them.
Maybe the main reason that the injections are not off the market now is that the WEF crooks linked their digital ID agenda to the covid vaccines. Now any failure of the vaccines would jeopardise the digital IDs, and they cannot allow this to happen.
“Maybe the main reason that the injections are not off the market now is that the WEF crooks linked their digital ID agenda to the covid vaccines. Now any failure of the vaccines would jeopardise the digital IDs, and they cannot allow this to happen.”
I don’t get it..? How is something that is failing make something it is connected to more appealing? Isn’t that what you are saying? In other words, if you want to sell me the basket, do you give me the rotten eggs as well, so I will be more likely to buy the basket?
In the US they are selling the Digital ID without the failing vaccine, so people won’t smell the rat.
Tell me what I’m missing in your statement, because I’m looking too for that relief you mention.
I think you are right. No need for a vaccine to facilitate the adoption of a digital ID. If it comes then because it’s more convenient. At the moment and for some transactions or contracts you have to make a copy of your ID which is kind of a hassle.
You don’t need a devil to reduce you to a cog of the machine. You just need to be part of such a machine and they are everywhere i.e the West, China and also Russia. Humans are no more than cells of larger organisms but I fear they will never understand it. Too full of themselves and their importance.
I would even go so far as to understand money as a kind of neurotransmitter and the resources as macronutrients.
“I don’t get it..? How is something that is failing make something it is connected to more appealing? Isn’t that what you are saying? In other words, if you want to sell me the basket, do you give me the rotten eggs as well, so I will be more likely to buy the basket?
In the US they are selling the Digital ID without the failing vaccine, so people won’t smell the rat.
Tell me what I’m missing in your statement, because I’m looking too for that relief you mention.”
I totally agree with you. I just think they linked the digital ID to the the covid vaccines too early without realising how badly this will backfire. They sensed ‘ze great opportunity’ in the sars cov2 vaccines to promote the digital IDs and rushed too early to do so. They simply didn’t expect the vaccines to fail so miserably. Now that they are failing they are trying to hide it because the digital IDs and the vaccines are already linked in people’s minds. This was my argument. I totally agree with you that the digital ID would have been a hot sell with safe and effective vaccines and maybe will be if it is just promoted without any vaccine mandates at all.
Can you post the link to the video? Thanks.
https://gettr.com/post/pznqu082ee
I don’t follow your logic on one part of this. If the boosters are wrecking peoples ability to fight off newer mutations of Covid by continually exposing them to the original Wuhan spike protein thus making them unprepared to deal with anything else, then why would the boosters display any beneficial effect for any amount of time whatsoever?
You note that once people escape the 1 week window post jab that they do appear to have some protection for some time, but if I understand you correctly then I would expect no protection for any amount of time. I would expect that the reexposure to Wuhan spike to cause the immune system to cue itself up for entirely the wrong response for Omicron and buy no time whatsoever. But this isn’t what you observe in the data.
What’s the missing piece of the puzzle here?
” to cue itself up for entirely the wrong response for Omicron and buy no time whatsoever” – your mistake is thinking it buys __no time whatsoever__ . The new strains have some similarities to the wuhan strain, enough that the antibodies can bind to them but not as efficiently as if it was the wuhan strain. The wuhan antibodies become less and less effective but it’s not a completely on / completely off situation.
Well, a large amount of antibodies, which do not work well but work somewhat nonetheless, are created after the booster shot. The effect wanes and then you have not enough of these rather ineffective antibodies. That’s how I understand it.
According to GWB there is currently due to these leaky vaccines selection pressure that may even lead to ADE. The virus will then bind preferentially to a completely different domain (not AC2 anymore).
Speaking of mass waves of infection and death, anyone looked at Hong Kongs Chart lately? :0
https://nitter.net/jburnmurdoch/status/1503420660869214213#m
This thread suggests vaccines remain highly protective, at least against severe outcomes.
Also shows that HK heavily vaccinated the young but not the old for some reason?
Those graphs are weird. Deaths usually follow infections with a delay, not the other way around. Also I would be very careful with using official numbers, because evaluation depends on which narrative the government wants to sell. In NZ Jabcinda’s narrative is obviously pro-vax. Don’t know anything about Hong Kong, so I can’t comment on that.