Original post written by Chris Waldburger, rebuttal by Martin Odoni
FOREWORD:
A blogger on the Substack website, called Chris Waldburger, has released a post in which he claims to have found evidence in a UK clinical report, published on 6th of August by Public Health England, that the vaccination program against the SARS-Cov2 coronavirus, which causes the Covid-19 fever, is ineffective. This would be especially the case when guarding against the Delta variant, and may even be harmful.
Although I concede that Waldburger does highlight one interesting figure, which is that a high proportion of Delta-variant deaths have been people who are double-dosed, there are mitigating reasons for that, which will follow. But I also must disapprove of the scaremongering tone of many of his assertions, the irrelevance of some others, and the lack of attention he gives to other details in the report.
POST SAMPLE: (but please read the whole post)
This is an absolute game-changer*.
The UK government just reported the following data, tucked away in their report on variants of concern:
Less than a third of delta variant deaths are in the unvaccinated.
Let me say that another way – two-thirds of Delta deaths in the UK are in the jabbed.
To be specific:
From the 1st of February to the 2nd of August, the UK recorded 742 Delta deaths (yes, the dreaded Delta has not taken that much life).
Out of the 742 deaths, 402 were fully vaccinated. 79 had received one shot. Only 253 were unvaccinated.
The report is here.
But this is the crucial page. Look at the bottom line.
Again, 402 deaths out of 47 008 cases in vaccinated; 253 deaths out of 151 054 cases in unvaccinated. If you get covid having been vaccinated, according to this data, you are much more likely to die than if you were not vaccinated!
Obviously some allowance must be made for more elderly people being vaccinated, but not enough to change the bottom line: this vaccine is not nearly as effective as advertised.And with all its unknowns, and a much higher adverse reporting number than all other vaccines combined, a complete recalibration of global policy is the only moral option.
For the rest of the article, click here.
* [MARTIN’S NOTE: Oooooooooooh dear. Any online source proclaiming that its information is a ‘game-changer’ should set alarm bells off in the heads of all its readers immediately.]
MY REBUTTAL:
Sorry, but this post is no bombshell. It is clearly written with the intention of proving a conspiracy theory that was already decided upon, instead of as an objective assessment of the facts, and the ‘conspiracy’ being judged as a conclusion.
Firstly, Waldburger is treating vaccinated and unvaccinated as a fifty-fifty split. It is nowhere near that. As of Monday 23rd August, just over 40 million in England had been double-vaccinated out of 58 million. That is approximately 70% of the English population. When keeping in mind that much higher proportion of the population being fully vaccinated, even with the vaccine’s effects, it is likely that a higher proportion of those infected will have had both jabs. And these are dynamic numbers as well, with people getting vaccinated all the time. Also, as Waldburger himself has admitted, the highest-priority people in the United Kingdom for double-dose vaccination have been elderly, and that much increases the death-rate in that category due to unrelated conditions.
Secondly, Waldburger has somehow missed that the report is on Delta variant data in England, not across the United Kingdom as a whole. That may sound like a minor quibble, but in fact, the way, and degree of success, in which the pandemic has been handled has been markedly different between the four different countries of the UK, with the Scottish response in particular being generally more effective than the English response.
Throughout his article, Waldburger blurs over the issue of there being numerous different vaccines, and that the ones most likely to be used in some scenarios will be different to the ones used in others. In the UK, the likeliest vaccine to be used is the Pfizer version, followed by the Astrazeneca. The Janssen version, although approved by the British Government, is the least likely to be used in the UK. Later, Waldburger cities the example of one patient (a lot more on that later), treated with the Janssen vaccine as a demonstration of the same ‘problem’ he thinks he has uncovered in the UK. But the patient in question was not in the UK, but in Ireland and the Janssen vaccine is little-used in England.
The mask advice Waldburger links to is obsolete (published December 2020), and only deals with one side of the issue, which is wearing a facemask for purposes of self-protection. There is indeed no particular point in wearing a mask if one is purely trying to protect oneself, as the virus can spread through the air and enter the body through the eyes, or be picked up through contact with hands, which then, inevitably, make contact with the face dozens of times per day.
But the official advice is not to wear a mask for self-protection. The official advice is that wearing a mask is a substantially effective way for people who have been infected to protect others. Anyone with the virus will risk exhaling it every time they breathe out, but the facemask will catch large amounts of the micro-droplets carrying the virus, and substantially slow its spread.
Waldburger writes that the report makes “one other important admission.” He then provides a screenshot of text from the report.
Waldburger does not reveal which page it is on, rather annoyingly, but after much searching back and forth through the document, I found it in the Summary on page 3. Now Waldburger seems to think an identical or similar PCR (polymerase chain reaction) cycle threshold must mean identical or similar amounts of transmissibility, therefore there is no point getting vaccinated if your aim is to protect others. “You’ll have the same PCR cycle threshold whether you get the jab or not! Even if the vaccine helps you resist the virus, you can still carry it around and pass it on just as much as someone unvaccinated!”
Unfortunately, this suggests that Waldburger is not aware of what the PCR cycle threshold is about. Nothing to be ashamed of in that; I had to look it up myself before writing my response. Now accuse me of trying to steal Potholer54‘s thunder if you like, but there is something to be ashamed of in bluffing that you know the science when you clearly do not, and then trying to lecture others on it. In PCR testing, an identical or similar cycle threshold does not necessarily mean identical or similar transmissibility. It means similar or identical detectability i.e. if someone gets their jabs done, the vaccine antibodies in their bloodstream will not ‘cloud,’ hamper or distort attempts to detect virus antibodies in any test samples they give subsequently.
Returning to the issue of the Irish footballer who died, name Roy Butler, he really has no connection to this story, and dragging his name into this is really pretty low of Waldburger. Poor Butler is almost becoming an Irish version of Lee Rigby; Rigby’s parents are always begging right wingers to stop using their son’s death to spread Islamophobic propaganda. Over the last week, Butler’s parents have requested repeatedly that people stop using his death as speculation fodder against Covid vaccines. At the time of writing, they are still awaiting the final autopsy report, and this is a harrowing enough time for them without public exploitation like this. They are apparently already in a bitter row with the boy’s aunt over her spreading ‘anti-vaxxer’ propaganda relating to his death, and this is hardly the ideal time for family feuding like that either.
The reality is that there have been over 9 million doses of the Janssen vaccine in the USA. Only 28 cases of brain bleed or brain clots have followed the jabs at any stage, and only three deaths followed, with no particular evidence emerging of any of the brain bleeds being an actual result of the vaccine. Most of the bleeds in the US were women ages 16-48, and – this is the crucial part – all took at least two weeks, many longer, after vaccination to show symptoms of the bleeds, making it unlikely that the vaccine was the cause. (It is telling that Covid-deniers keep saying that a few-score thousand deaths is not very many to allow in the grand scheme of things when they are arguing against facemasks and lockdowns. But they suddenly shift to insisting that three deaths is too high a number to proceed, when talking about entirely speculative possible vaccine dangers.)
Therefore, if the vaccine caused Butler’s illness, it is probably the only time it has done so to anybody. Likeliest answer in that event is just extremely bad luck; he probably had a natural allergy to the particular combination of ingredients in the Janssen formula. This is certainly tragic, but allergies are individual, and a matter of chance. An allergy does not mean the substance is poisonous. (I am allergic to cheese, and almost always regurgitate it within seconds when I try to eat it, or feel incredibly ill for several days afterwards when I do not regurgitate it. By this reasoning, cheese is poisonous.)
Another possible scenario is that the brain bleed/clot might already have been present beforehand. As a footballer, Butler must have spent a fair bit of playing time heading the ball. Or he might have had a clash of heads with another player during a match. Either could have been a cause of a clot forming.
It is irresponsible and insensitive of Waldburger to cherry-pick one non-concluded example like this, and make such speculative noises about it before the final post mortem is released.
Remarkably, Waldburger makes no attempt to assess some far more telling and conclusive statistics in the table he highlights. Let me sum up the ones I refer to; –
- Total Delta variant cases – 300,010.
- Total such cases unvaccinated – 151,054.
- Total such cases vaccinated once – 70,107.
- Total such cases vaccinated twice – 47,008.
- (Undetermined vaccine status – 31,841.)
Dead or alive, over half the cases in England during the period under review were people who were unvaccinated. And roughly half of those left had only had their first jab. Those who had had both doses made up under one-sixth of the Delta cases. There is no doubt whatever that, even with the Delta variant, the vaccines do improve people’s resistance. And even when a patient does not die of Covid-19, that does not mean that the disease ceases to be something undesirable. Survivors with ‘Long Covid‘ are often so badly and permanently disabled by the condition that it is debatable whether they were lucky to live.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, while it is good that Waldburger is trying to keep in touch with the science of the Coronavirus, and more people should do so, he should approach it with a skeptical mind rather than a paranoid one. Encouraging people to see cover-ups just because of one odd statistic that can be twisted to say whatever he wants it to mean is not objective analysis, and is frankly insulting to the medical experts who are struggling hard to help keep the pandemic from slipping completely out of control. Some of the sources Waldburger uses, such as The Mail Online and The Spectator are notoriously anti-science and grossly unreliable, not just for failing to report scientific research accurately, but even for mis-reporting General News. The libertarian tone of some of Waldburger’s side-objections have a suspiciously familiar ring, and sound like many of the denialists on social media who are simply trying to rationalise not wanting to wear facemasks or get the jabs because… well, they just dislike them. They may even be scared of getting an injection. Because, you know, it hurts.
POSTSCRIPT for reassurance
Hey, I am not mocking. I am bad with needles too, and it took a lot of psyching myself up to get to the temporary vaccination ‘clinic’ near my home to get my first dose back in May (booster due this weekend). But I still got it done. And if anyone genuinely needs reassuring that it really is not all that painful, I can tell them that my first dose – the Pfizer version – was a surprising experience.
At the clinic, while two nurses were getting the syringe ready, they got a colleague to distract me from my rattling nerves by talking with me about the upcoming European Championship football competition. This meant I did not see them filling the needle. While we talked about the prospects for England, Scotland and Wales, I felt a slight discomfort in my upper arm, which I thought was them preparing the skin in some way for the injection. The sensation soon passed, and I carried on talking without a break-in-stride about how over-dependent I thought England would be on Harry Kane, when one of the nurses, a cheerful lady from Ireland, sidled into view to tell me it was all done.
My response was, “You’re KIDDING! That was it?”
I am not making this up. I barely even noticed it, and thought it was some kind of pre-jab preparation!
I have no doubt some readers will roll their eyes thinking that they have heard this all before, but I am being perfectly serious when I say that this is really all that happened. Yes, there’s a brief, slight sting, like from a nettle, and then your upper arm feels like it has a nagging bruise for about thirty hours. You may also run a temperature for a bit as your immune system practices fighting the inert virus cells, but nothing a hot lemon drink will have any trouble soothing.
Other than that, the Pfizer Covid jab really and truly does not hurt. At the very least, if you have the option of the Pfizer version, there really is no need to worry about the dreaded needle.
Either way, it is past time everyone stopped making excuses and stopped rationalising their own irresponsibility. Get your vaccinations done.
That includes you, Mr Waldburger. You are fooling no one.
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