Date: 30/08/2021 07:55:37
From: mollwollfumble
ID: 1784309
Subject: COVID 30/8. Letter to an anti-vaxxer.
I wrote this letter to an anti-vaxxer.
Things few people know about covid
- The first coronavirus discovered was discovered in the year 1949. It was called Murine Hepatitis Virus. Don’t let the name fool you, it was called Murine Hepatitis Virus because it caused inflammation of the liver in mice, not because it is closely related to the human hepatitis virus.
- That said, coronavirus in appearance is a close match to human hepatitis virus. It’s a closer match in appearance to human hepatitis virus than to human flu virus or the most common type of the human cold virus (rhinovirus). It is not very different in appearance from all of these.
- Coronavirus is huge for a virus, as large as the smallest bacteria. That helps to make it stoppable by a well-designed mask. The weave of a mask is not intended to stop individual viruses, but viruses don’t travel alone. They travel in small aerosol droplets that carry hundreds of viruses. So a well-designed mask reduces the number of viruses that can travel together.
- The standard surgical mask is not a well-designed mask. There is way too much leakage around the edges. It only protects against large aerosol droplets.
- My research on coronavirus transmission in supermarkets for RMIT University showed that the greatest danger of transmission comes from walking through a cloud of small droplets that had been deposited in the air by someone who had passed a few seconds before. One way to protect yourself against coronavirus is to walk slowly. Another is to avoid talking face to face. This applies to all respiratory diseases, including colds, flu, bronchitis and pneumonia.
- The word “coronavirus” was invented in the year 1968, and appeared in an article in Nature magazine (issue 220 page 670 if you want to look it up).
- In that 1968 article, it was found that Murine Hepatitis Virus protected human cells against human coronaviruses. But avian coronaviruses did not protect human cells against human coronavirus. Humans are more closely related to mice (mammals) than avians (birds) so this makes sense. This is directly analogous to the smallpox case where cowpox (mammal) virus protects humans against smallpox but chickenpox (bird) virus does not.
- Am I saying that a live vaccine against Covid was already known in the year 1968? Yes, I am. It had not been tested for toxicity but it was already known to be effective in vitro.
- A vaccine doesn’t have to be very effective to be useful. Against a death toll of a million people, even a 2% efficiency of a vaccine correctly used would save 20,000 lives, more lives than in the whole history of airplane crashes.
- You will see, widely quoted, that 30% of common colds are caused by a coronavirus. The work that this is based on is a single research article testing only a few cases of common cold, it should not be treated as gospel. All we can say for sure is that some minority of common colds are caused by a coronavirus.
- If you’re looking for a familiar virus generally equivalent to Covid, think “pneumonia” not colds, flu or hepatitis. I can send you copies of X-rays of the lungs of a person with covid if you like.
- I knew about coronaviruses before the first case of covid. I even mentioned it in a cartoon I drew. Cartoon number 551. Instead of a “beware of the dog” sign I replaced it with “beware of the coronavirus 229e” sign.
- You will already know that SARS is a coronavirus. You probably know that MERS is a coronavirus. With SARS, the world was extremely fortunate not to have a pandemic on the scale of covid.
- The World Health Organisation (WHO) gave China strong rap over the knuckles for its lack of openness over SARS. China had already closed two hospitals because of SARS before the first case was discovered by western medicine in Hong Kong. If I remember correctly, the disease now known as SARS was known to China for two months before the WHO became aware of it. Because of WHO’s chastisement over its treatment of SARS, China has been completely open about covid, shockingly open. China has been more open about covid than any other country. More open than Russia. Much more open than both the USA and the UK, and Australia.
- The Wuhan Institute of Virology was founded in 1956. In 2014, this was upgraded to biosafety level 4, making it the first such secure site in mainland China. A couple of years later they had developed a new flu vaccine. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not the main source of information about the progress of covid in China. The main source of information is China’s National Health Commission (NHC).
- Australia doesn’t have any organisation equivalent to, or anywhere near as good as, the NHC. The equivalent in the USA would be the Centre for Disease Control (CDC).
- On the first day of January 2020, a cluster of unusual pneumonia patients was detected in Wuhan. On the very same day, amazingly enough, it was announced to the world, it was tracked to a fish market, the fish market was disinfected by medical staff and the fish market was closed. This was before the first death. No-one could ever accuse the Chinese government of being slow to act. Can you imagine the same speed of direct action in Australia? No way.
- The first pneumonia cases, even before the cluster was found, were treated twice. Once with western medicine and once with chinese medicine. Even before the cluster was found, cases were treated with chloroquine. By mid-January 2020, chloroquine had been replaced in China by hydroxychloroquine, which was just as effective and had fewer side effects. I found the debates about hydroxychloroquine months later to be amusing and depressing, its effectiveness had been proved so many months earlier.
- The first known death was on 11 Jan 2020. By 21 Jan there were six deaths. By 22 Jan there were seventeen deaths and by 24 Jan forty one deaths.
- The Chinese government recommended mask wearing for everyone mid Jan 2020 before the first human-human transmission was confirmed. They also started quarantine measures to screen people coming in from other countries in mid Jan 2020 before the first case was recorded in any other country.
- What we in Australia call “states” is in China called “provinces”. The province of Hubei contains the city of Wuhan. Also in mid Jan 2020, the chinese closed the borders of Hubei province. And when the chinese close a border they really close it, nobody in or out. Not even medical officials. The closure of borders of Australian states is a joke by comparison.
- The Wuhan Institute of Virology worked startlingly quickly to determine the virus responsible. They quickly eliminated SARS and MERS. Then eliminated all known viruses. They had the genetic code for this unknown virus sequenced faster than I would have believed possible, on 11 Jan 2020, the same date that the first known person died in China and long before the first case outside China.
- The first case outside China was in Thailand. If I remember correctly, the first case in Europe was in France.
- By 1 Feb 2020, coronavirus deaths had been recorded in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, the UAE, Finland, Germany, France, the USA and Canada. No other countries.
- The first country to be hit really hard by the disease was Italy. On the scale of deaths per capita, Italy in the first wave was hit three hundred times as hard by covid as China was. France followed Italy nine days later.
- It was clear to me from early on (from 26 Mar 2020 if you want to know) that different countries had different coronavirus strains. The “mortality rate” of a virus is the chance of an infected person dying. This is also sometimes called “case fatality rate”, though case fatality rate is calculated in a slightly less accurate way. Coronavirus around the world was initially dominated by four strains. Today we use the word “variant” instead of “strain” but it’s the same thing. The Australian strain had a mortality rate of 0.7%. The strain in South Korea and Canada had a mortality rate of 2.2%. The strain in China, Germany and Portugal had a mortality rate of 4% (later revised upwards to 4.1%). The strain in France, Belgium, Spain and the UK had a mortality rate of a whopping 18.5%. The mortality rate in the USA was initially 18.5% (16 Mar to 27 Mar 2020), before dropping to 9% in April, it clearly had multiple strains with one strain replacing another.
- I later saw a chart of coronavirus “variants of interest” for the period. One strain in China. Three each in North and South America. Ten or so in Europe.
- The point I’m making is that Australia the lucky country got off extremely lightly in the first wave. A 0.7% mortality rate is higher than the mortality rate from a bad flu season (below a 0.1% death rate) but most of those who died already had some deadly (eg. cancer) or dangerous (eg. hypertension) disease. There’s a subtlety about flu, but I’ll get back to that later.
- We could just about have ignored the first wave of coronavirus in Australia, and we just about did. The incompetence of the Australian government during the first wave is astounding. For example, the number one symptom of covid is high temperature. If you don’t have a high temperature then there’s no point in being tested for covid. For over five months including the whole length of the first wave, there wasn’t a single oral thermometer for sale in Australia anywhere. This is criminal negligence. The Australian government could have arranged for thermometer manufacture here and had them on sale in a couple of weeks. Even better would have been if they’d given oral thermometers away free to people with a high chance of catching or spreading covid. Gross negligence.
- PS, people talk about “symptomless covid”. That doesn’t mean that they have no symptoms, it means that symptoms are not bad enough for hospital admission.
- The Singapore strain of covid evolved later, by 25 Apr 2020, and had a mortality rate of only 0.05%. That’s low enough to be used as a vaccine. Exporting the Singapore strain to Europe when the mortality rate there was 18.5% could have saved thousands of lives, though I have to admit that this was not before the peak of the European first wave.
- Let’s talk vaccines.
- In April 2020, a CSIRO scientist told the press that they had a vaccine one day after receiving a sample of the virus from China. This would probably have been months earlier. That is not as impossible as it sounds. A virus takes only seconds to kill in vitro, and a killed virus is a vaccine. Not necessarily a very effective vaccine, effectiveness depends on the way that it is killed, but a vaccine that everyone knows is safe. I’ve heard this said by independently by three experts.
- I’ve already said above that a live virus vaccine against covid was already known in the year 1968, and at the time was known to be effective but not necessarily safe.
- The flu vaccine each year is quadravalent, it’s four separate vaccines in one flu shot. Every one of those flu vaccines, for every year since flu shots have been available, has been a killed virus vaccine. As I’ve just said, a killed virus vaccine can be made in a day, the time delay is the manufacturing up of sufficient quantities. I calculate that 100 doses can be made in a month from the first case, 10,000 doses in two months, and a million doses in three months. This may be an underestimate, perhaps as many as 10 million doses can be made in three months.
- The Hong Kong Flu of 1968 had similar epidemiology to covid. The vaccine from Japan was ready in 3 months from the first case. The vaccine reached the USA only a couple of days behind the virus. 9 million doses were available to the USA within the next month. The vaccine reached Europe and the rest of the world before the virus. Most deaths were in the USA, perhaps 60,000 people died. 15% of the Hong Kong population became infected. Because of the early vaccination, the global effect was much smaller than covid.
- Not even a single one of the covid vaccines currently being sold or under development is either a killed virus or simple live virus. The vaccines currently on offer are all designed for minimal side effects, minimum required dose, maximal effectiveness. And slowest possible production. I call these “generation 3 vaccines”. Over a million people died waiting for them. A million people whose lives could have been saved by simpler vaccines produced faster. It’s murder, but not the end of the murder.
- The Australian-developed covid vaccine was the only covid vaccine to be stopped before final approval. It, too, was a generation 3 vaccine, it had minimal side effects, minimum required dose, and maximal effectiveness. It was stopped because it could give a false positive test result for AIDS. It’s a ticklish moral question as to whether that should have been sufficient to stop manufacture.
- In brief summary, generation 1 vaccines includes the natural vaccines that create herd immunity, and include vaccines made from the serum of infected patients in the same way that antivenins are made by milking snakes and spiders. Generation 2 vaccines are purer (fewer side effects) and come from vaccines grown on tissue cultures as well as weakened natural viruses like the smallpox vaccine.
- The development of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was completed in late March 2020. I’ll find a copy of the announcement if you want it. So it should have been released three months later in late June. Yet it wasn’t even approved until early December. The vaccine finally approved in December is identical to the one developed in March. So all the delay for testing murdered nearly a million people.
- Russia began vaccinating people on a small scale in April 2020. By end November they had vaccinated 100,000 people of whom half were in the armed forces. So top marks for early vaccination, bottom marks for the choice of whom to vaccinate. The world didn’t find this out until CNN reported it in late December.
- China began “emergency vaccinations” in June 2020. By end November they had vaccinated 1.5 million people. As with Russia, the world didn’t find this out until late December.
- Some countries other than China and Russia will have vaccinated some people early, too, but won’t admit it in public.
- The words “emergency vaccination” are important, and provide a clue as to how government incompetence in so many countries around the world murdered even more people. When there is insufficient vaccine for everybody, every vaccination should be an emergency vaccination. There are very few countries even now that do have sufficient vaccine for everybody. Vaccinate those who are most likely to spread the virus first, and those least likely to spread the virus last. The Australian government, and close to 80% of other governments around the world (I counted them up once) are doing the exact opposite, vaccinating those who are least likely to spread the virus first and those most likely to spread the virus last.
- In emergency vaccination, vaccination is mandatory. But that’s not a problem because those who are vaccinated will be those who want to be vaccinated. Vaccine developers first (as was done in Russia), then only those medical people directly in contact with covid patients, then families of those with covid and vaccine manufacturers. Judge each case on its merits. Airport limo drivers would be high up the vaccination list, ditto those working at vaccine testing stations, ditto those staying in hotel quarantine. The Australian Governments did none of these, and hundreds died.
- China has done everything right. It looks as though it’s the only government in the world that has done everything right, with the tentative possible exception of North Korea. China reacted proactively, rapidly and intelligently to every threat. At the time, China seemed to be overreacting, but time proved that what looked like overreaction was really necessary. It has been open in its dealings with the rest of the world, almost shockingly open. Its quarantine has held. China refused to import food from anywhere where it might have been touched by a person infected with covid, I haven’t heard of that level of security from any other country.
- And China’s quarantine held. It’s the only country I can think of that held covid to a single wave. (Tanzania claims to have but I don’t believe them).
- China’s provinces other than Hubei never even had a first wave. There are 23 provinces in China, the equivalent of our ‘states’ and excluding Taiwan and Hong Kong. Six provinces had no deaths at all. A further 14 provinces had three or less deaths each, and this includes deaths of immigrants in quarantine. Only two provinces other than Hubei have had more than nine deaths and the worst, directly adjacent to Hubei, had only 22. China’s combination of strict quarantine, masks and emergency vaccination has worked startlingly well, amazingly well.
- For the whole of the rest of the world, quarantine is still leaking like a sieve. Even given a year and a half to tighten their quarantine, countries still let in delta variant infections.
- Truth. For first wave coronavirus, I was able to use statistics to pick up which countries were lying in their released data. I don’t think that this lying is malicious, just the result of incompetence and laziness. I turned this into what I called a “pants on fire” index. A value of 0 percent is when countries always tell the truth, and 100% when they always lie. Up to April 2020, countries that didn’t lie at all were China, Israel, Iran and Russia. India, Italy and Spain lied less than 7% of the time. Australia lied 36% of the time. The USA 43% of the time, the UK 80% of the time, and Brazil topped the table by lying 85% of the time. How did the UK lie 80% of the time? By never telling the truth about the number of people in the country who had successfully recovered from a coronavirus infection.
- There are some people who say that the Chinese announcement of 1,290 new deaths on 17 Apr 2020 means that the Chinese covid statistics are unreliable. Not so. These are the people who died at home from covid without ever visiting a hospital or getting tested for covid. China is one of very few countries that include covid deaths of people who were never officially diagnosed with the disease. That makes China’s death statistics more reliable, not less.
- I don’t want to say this, because I have a loathing for secret police everywhere. Members of China’s “secret police”, like members of the USA’s “secret service”, aren’t secret because everyone knows who they are. What I don’t want to say but in fairness have to say, is that China’s secret police must have had a very important role in stopping covid there. The number one job of secret police is contact tracing. They are professional contact tracers that would together be very much better at this job than either medical personnel or government bureaucrats in any other country.
- How does covid compare with other infectious diseases? Let’s start with Australia. Over the five years 2016 to 2020, there was one year with an exceptionally high death toll from infectious respiratory diseases, and it wasn’t 2020! It was 2018. If you know the reason, please tell me. Some strain of flu, possibly. The Australian death toll in 2020 was absolutely typical for a non-epidemic year.
- Worldwide, even at peak death rate for the first wave, the death rate was lower than that for AIDS. By Jan 2021, however, covid had taken over as the deadliest infectious disease in the world. So far as I know, deaths from covid worldwide still exceed those from every other infectious disease. Worldwide, the number of deaths from AIDS is dropping.
- Worldwide, covid is at least a hundred times worse than the flu. I promised you earlier that I’d say more about the flu because there are some subtleties involved. The dominant subtlety is that people who catch the flu are young, but people who die from the flu are old. Because so many young people catch the flu, the mortality rate is low, 0.1% or lower. With covid, the number of people who catch the disease is pretty will independent of age, it’s a difference to keep in mind when comparing the diseases.
- Do you know which country has been hardest hit by covid? It’s Peru. With Hungary a distant second. Thank whatever deity you believe in that you don’t live in either of those countries. Peru has a mortality rate of 9.3%, and has had that or worse since the first case there in Jan 2020. That means that if you catch covid there, you have a 9.3% chance of dying from it. Not good odds.
- Suppose that 1% of Australians catch the Peruvian strain of covid. That certainly is possible with a 70% vaccination rate. Then 24,000 Australians would be dead and we’d certainly know that we’d been nudged.
- Here’s a table of covid deaths per thousand population in various countries. Peru 6.0, Hungary 3.0, USA & UK 2.0, Russia 1.2, World average 0.6, India 0.3, Australia 0.04, New Zealand 0.005.
- Another way to look at covid deaths is the excess deaths over those in a normal year. Between May and Aug 2020 the death rate in Peru had tripled. Between Feb and mid-May 2021 the death rate in Peru had quadrupled. And that’s compared with deaths from all causes, including old age.
- Every wave of virus has a different mortality rate (except in Peru and Singapore for some reason). For Australia, the first wave had a mortality rate of 0.7% rising to 1.2% when Sydney got infected from the Ruby Princess cruise ship. The current mortality rate here is about 3%, which is four times as bad as when we first got covid. For the USA the first wave mortality was 9%, dropping to 4% for the second wave, and 1.8% for the third wave. For the UK the first wave mortality was 18.5%, dropping to 3.7% for the second wave, and 3% for the third wave. For Canada, the first wave mortality was 2.2%, rising to 9% for the second wave, back down to 1.8% for the third wave.
- In other words, the mortality rate from covid is unpredictable. It doesn’t vary significantly and systematically with age structure, country wealth, geographic location or improvements in medical care. Australia has been the lucky country so far, but there is no reason to expect that luck to continue.
- Thankfully, the initial western European covid strain with a mortality rate of 18.5% seems to have vanished from the world, and the Peru strain with a 9% death rate, initially present also in the USA and Canada, is currently limited to Peru and Mexico.
- We hear a lot about the delta strain. Initial news reports that the delta strain had a small mortality rate below 0.1% proved to be totally wrong. Mortality rates are between 1.3% and 3.2%.
- Another delta strain myth is that it originated in India. It originated in Nepal. India caught it from Nepal.
- The rapid migration of the delta strain around the world shows that quarantine measures everywhere are still leaking like a sieve.
- There is a myth about “herd immunity”. Herd immunity exists and is extremely important, but herd immunity cannot be generated by vaccination.
- Malta has had 17 deaths since 28 Jul 2021, which is a significant number for such a small population. Malta has a vaccination rate of 80% fully vaccinated. A high vaccination rate does not guarantee freedom from covid deaths. On the other hand, even a 0.1% vaccination rate can ensure complete freedom from covid deaths if the vaccine is distributed pro-actively to potential virus spreaders. As it did in China.
- The process of herd immunity is as follows. An infected herd animal exhales uninfective virus fragments that are breathed in by other members of the herd. These uninfective virus fragments are a natural vaccine that vaccinates other members of the herd. This is herd immunity.
- To reiterate, herd immunity is due to a natural vaccine exhaled by infected animals. It is not generated by injected vaccines.
- As a side note, vaccination is homeopathy. Homeopathy is based on “likes cure”, and that’s exactly what vaccination does. It stimulates the immune system to repel the disease. You can’t believe in homeopathy without also accepting the value of vaccination.
- Most homeopathic medicines didn’t require a literal billion dollars of testing and development before they can be approved for manufacture. So they aren’t as safe and effective as vaccines.
- Pro-vaxxer vs anti-vaxxer.
- Pro-vaxxers quote the 1968 Hong Kong flu. Anti-vaxxers quote the 1976 swine flu fiasco. I’m not sure if I have either of these stories correct. But this is my interpretation.
- The 1968 Hong Kong flu was first detected in Hong Kong, its influence on China was never disclosed. Three months after case zero the Japanese had a vaccine passed through all the stages of development, approval, manufacture and was starting distribution. The vaccine hit the USA almost simultaneously with the virus, only a couple of days later. The vaccine got to Europe and the rest of the world before the virus. Four months after case zero some nine million units of vaccine had been produced. IIRC, the total death toll in Australia from Hong Kong flu was one person. The vaccine reduced deaths worldwide by about a factor of ten.
- Keep in mind that the four months between case zero and the and the production of nine million units for Hong Kong flu was done with 1968 technology. Genetic technology has improved since then so we should be able to do it faster. So with covid that would mean nine million doses of vaccine ready by April 2020 if not before.
- In 1976, an unknown flu appeared in the American heartland. It was quickly found that those who had recovered from Spanish flu were immune to the unknown flu and only those who had recovered from Spanish flu were immune to the unknown flu. “This is the Spanish Flu!” was the only conclusion possible with technology available in 1976. This was an apocalyptic situation. Without a vaccine, a hundred million people worldwide, if not more, were going to be dead within two years. An American vaccine was rushed through using a dubious manufacturing method. It was found out later that the new flu was a hybrid of Spanish flu and a much less dangerous strain. The vaccine did more harm than good.
- A sensible response to the 1976 swine flu fiasco would have been “OK, we got it wrong, our new technology can distinguish between a genuine version of a deadly virus and a hybrid. We’ll avoid using that manufacturing method. As you were”. Instead, anti-vaxxer legislation was implemented that delayed vaccine approval by 8 months, delayed vaccine development by an additional 2 months. And it costs vaccine developers a billion dollars for each new vaccine. This absolute insanity was a product of the American court system.
- To see how insane the legislation is, consider malaria. 410,000 people die from malaria each year. That’s a lot of people. A malaria vaccine by GlaxoSmithKline was ready in the year 2010 (if not before). But it hasn’t been manufactured and distributed. Why not? Because the legislation has made the vaccine so expensive that African nations can’t afford it. Murdering four million people for some legal principle. Absolute stupidity.
