Jesus said, "Recognize what is in your sight, and that which is hidden from you will become plain to you . For there is nothing hidden which will not become manifest." Gospel of Thomas (5)
Felix Dima, 13, from Newcastle receives the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at the Excelsior Academy in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, on Sept. 22, 2021. (Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)
‘Waste of Time’ to Keep Vaccinating People: Ex-Head of UK Vaccine Taskforce
It is a “waste of time” to keep vaccinating people against the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, the former chairman of Britain’s Vaccines Taskforce has said.
Dr. Clive Dix, who played a key role in helping pharmaceutical firms create the COVID-19 vaccines, told LBC radio on Jan. 16: “The Omicron variant is a relatively mild virus. And to just keep vaccinating people and thinking of doing it again to protect the population is, in my view, now a waste of time.”
Dix said the focus now should be on protecting vulnerable people, such as those over 60, 2 percent of whom remain unvaccinated.
“We should have a highly-focused approach to get those people vaccinated and anybody else who’s vulnerable,” he said.
Though he supports the ongoing booster campaign, he said he has been “critical” of boosting everybody as he is not convinced “it was needed or is needed” for younger people.
Dix said, “I think the thinking of the time was very much to stop infection and transmission where clearly these vaccines don’t do that.”
He said the government needs to be “very focused” on educating itself for the “future vaccination programme” next winter.
He suggested that an “immune status study” should be conducted to “understand exactly where everybody’s immunity is,” so that “by next winter, we can really have a policy of vaccination that’s educated, using the right vaccines at the right time for the right people.”
“We now need to manage disease, not virus spread,” he said. “So stopping progression to severe disease in vulnerable groups is the future objective.”
The UK government’s medical advisers have already acknowledged that it is “untenable” to jab the population every three or six months.
Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK’s chief scientific adviser, said on Jan. 3 that it is not the government’s “long-term view” to give everyone a booster vaccine every few months.
Professor Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and chair of the government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), told The Telegraph that it’s “not sustainable or affordable” to “vaccinate the planet every four to six months.”
On Jan. 7, the UK government’s vaccination advisory committee recommended against giving a fourth dose of COVID-19 vaccine to nursing home residents and people over 80.
The JCVI said the three doses of the vaccines are still providing “very good protection against severe disease,” and an immediate second booster dose to the most vulnerable would “provide only limited additional benefit against severe disease at this time.”
Lily Zhou and PA Media contributed to this report.
Professor Ehud Qimron, head of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Tel Aviv University and one of the leading Israeli immunologists, has written an open letter sharply criticizing the Israeli – and indeed global – management of the coronavirus pandemic.
Professor Ehud Qimron (center) at Tel Aviv University (Haaretz)
Original letter in Hebrew: N12 News (January 6, 2022); translated by Google/SPR. See also: Professor Qimron’s prediction from August 2020: “History will judge the hysteria” (INN).
Ministry of Health, it’s time to admit failure
In the end, the truth will always be revealed, and the truth about the coronavirus policy is beginning to be revealed. When the destructive concepts collapse one by one, there is nothing left but to tell the experts who led the management of the pandemic – we told you so.
Two years late, you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail. You do not admit it, because you have admitted almost no mistake in the last two years, but in retrospect it is clear that you have failed miserably in almost all of your actions, and even the media is already having a hard time covering your shame.
You refused to admit that the infection comes in waves that fade by themselves, despite years of observations and scientific knowledge. You insisted on attributing every decline of a wave solely to your actions, and so through false propaganda “you overcame the plague.” And again you defeated it, and again and again and again.
You refused to admit that mass testing is ineffective, despite your own contingency plans explicitly stating so (“Pandemic Influenza Health System Preparedness Plan, 2007”, p. 26).
You refused to admit that recovery is more protective than a vaccine, despite previous knowledge and observations showing that non-recovered vaccinated people are more likely to be infected than recovered people. You refused to admit that the vaccinated are contagious despite the observations. Based on this, you hoped to achieve herd immunity by vaccination — and you failed in that as well.
You insisted on ignoring the fact that the disease is dozens of times more dangerous for risk groups and older adults, than for young people who are not in risk groups, despite the knowledge that came from China as early as 2020.
You refused to adopt the “Barrington Declaration”, signed by more than 60,000 scientists and medical professionals, or other common sense programs. You chose to ridicule, slander, distort and discredit them. Instead of the right programs and people, you have chosen professionals who lack relevant training for pandemic management (physicists as chief government advisers, veterinarians, security officers, media personnel, and so on).
You have not set up an effective system for reporting side effects from the vaccines and reports on side effects have even been deleted from your Facebook page. Doctors avoid linking side effects to the vaccine, lest you persecute them as you did to some of their colleagues. You have ignored many reports of changes in menstrual intensity and menstrual cycle times. You hid data that allows for objective and proper research (for example, you removed the data on passengers at Ben Gurion Airport). Instead, you chose to publish non-objective articles together with senior Pfizer executives on the effectiveness and safety of vaccines.
Irreversible damage to trust
However, from the heights of your hubris, you have also ignored the fact that in the end the truth will be revealed. And it begins to be revealed. The truth is that you have brought the public’s trust in you to an unprecedented low, and you have eroded your status as a source of authority. The truth is that you have burned hundreds of billions of shekels to no avail – for publishing intimidation, for ineffective tests, for destructive lockdowns and for disrupting the routine of life in the last two years.
You have destroyed the education of our children and their future. You made children feel guilty, scared, smoke, drink, get addicted, drop out, and quarrel, as school principals around the country attest. You have harmed livelihoods, the economy, human rights, mental health and physical health.
You slandered colleagues who did not surrender to you, you turned the people against each other, divided society and polarized the discourse. You branded, without any scientific basis, people who chose not to get vaccinated as enemies of the public and as spreaders of disease. You promote, in an unprecedented way, a draconian policy of discrimination, denial of rights and selection of people, including children, for their medical choice. A selection that lacks any epidemiological justification.
When you compare the destructive policies you are pursuing with the sane policies of some other countries — you can clearly see that the destruction you have caused has only added victims beyond the vulnerable to the virus. The economy you ruined, the unemployed you caused, and the children whose education you destroyed — they are the surplus victims as a result of your own actions only.
There is currently no medical emergency, but you have been cultivating such a condition for two years now because of lust for power, budgets and control. The only emergency now is that you still set policies and hold huge budgets for propaganda and psychological engineering instead of directing them to strengthen the health care system.
This emergency must stop!
Professor Udi Qimron, Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University
Top U.S. health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, scrambled in early 2020 to respond to public reporting of a potential connection between COVID-19 and the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
This response, which included a secret Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference, was loosely detailed in previously released and heavily redacted emails. Those emails strongly suggested that Fauci and a small group of top scientists sought to promote the natural origin theory, despite having evidence and internal expert opinions that pointed to the possibility of a leak from the Wuhan lab.
Unredacted versions of some of the emails made public by lawmakers on Jan. 11 further confirm this.
The newly unredacted emails, released by House Oversight Committee Republicans, confirm and illustrate a pattern of lies and coverup. From the emails, it appears the effort was spearheaded by Fauci himself but also involved his boss, recently retired National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins, as well as Jeremy Farrar, the head of the British Wellcome Trust.
It was previously revealed that at least two scientists, both of whom had received funding from the NIH, had told Fauci during the teleconference that they were 60 to 80 percent sure that COVID had come out of a lab.
The most significant new revelations in the unredacted emails come from two of these scientists, Robert Garry and Mike Farzan, who both noted the difficulties presented by the presence of a furin cleavage site in the COVID-19 virus—a feature that would later be cited as the defining characteristic of the virus.
‘Bothered by the Furin Site’
Farzan, an immunologist who in 2005 discovered the receptor of the original severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus, sent his post-teleconference notes to Farrar, who then shared them with Collins, Fauci, and Lawrence Tabak—top officials at the NIH. In those notes, Farzan wrote that he was “bothered by the furin site” and had difficulty explaining it “as an event outside the lab.” Farzan noted that it was theoretically possible the virus’s furin cleavage site could have arisen in nature but that it was “highly unlikely.”
The furin cleavage site is the defining feature that gives COVID-19 the ability to easily infect humans and has long been puzzled over by scientists, since no such site has ever been observed in naturally occurring SARS-related coronaviruses.
Farzan, like scientist Kristian Andersen, who has received funding from Fauci’s NIAID, works at the Scripps laboratory. As was already known from previously released emails, Andersen had privately told Fauci on Jan. 31, 2020 that the virus looked engineered. Andersen would later spearhead Fauci’s efforts to promote a natural origin narrative.
Then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins listens during a Senate Appropriations Labor, Health and Human Services Subcommittee hearing looking into the budget estimates for National Institute of Health (NIH) and state of medical research on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 26, 2021. (Sarah Silbiger-Pool/Getty Images)
Farzan told the senior members of Fauci’s teleconference group that “a likely explanation could be something as simple as passage SARS-live CoVs in tissue culture on human cell lines” for an “extended period of time,” which could lead to the accidental creation of “a virus that would be primed for rapid transmission between humans.” This mutated virus would likely have specific “adaptation to human ACE2 receptor via repeated passage.”
A recent study in the science journal Nature noted that the COVID-19 virus was uniquely adapted to infect humans, as it “exhibited the highest binding to human (h)ACE2 of all the species tested.”
In layman’s terms, Farzan concluded that the pandemic likely originated from a lab in which live coronaviruses were passed through human-like tissue over and over, accelerating virus mutations with the end result being that one of the mutated viruses may have leaked from the lab. Farzan placed the likelihood of a leak from a Wuhan lab at 60 to 70 percent likely.
The emails indicate that Farzan was cognizant that the Wuhan lab conducted these types of dangerous experiments in Level 2 labs, which have a very low biosecurity standard. This fact was later admitted by the Wuhan lab’s director, Shi Zhengli, in July 2020. Notably, since the start of the pandemic, Farzan has received grants totaling almost $20 million from Collins’s NIH and Fauci’s NIAID.
‘Can’t Figure Out How This Gets Accomplished in Nature’
Further revelations in the newly unredacted emails came from Garry, another scientist funded by Fauci’s NIAID, who told the senior members of the teleconference group in no uncertain terms that “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus” to COVID-19.
Garry cited the remarkable sequences that would have to occur naturally, telling the group that “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. Do the alignment of the spikes at the amino acid level – it’s stunning.” He noted that a lab-created virus would readily explain the data he was seeing, telling Fauci’s group that “Of course, in the lab, it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted.”
The P4 laboratory on the campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, on May 13, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
Along the same lines of what Farzan had said, Garry was telling Fauci’s group that it was extremely unlikely that the furin cleavage site could have evolved naturally, whereas creating it in a lab was easy.
The primary difference between Farzan’s and Garry’s view lies in whether the lab created the furin cleavage site through serial passage in human-like tissue or through direct insertion of the site. In either case, both scientists thought it was likely that the virus came out of the Wuhan lab rather than having originated in nature.
Scientist’s Private Views Conflicted With Public Statements
Garry’s privately stated view is even more remarkable because only a day earlier, on Feb. 1, 2020, Garry had helped to complete the first draft of the Proximal Origin paper that promoted the idea that the virus had originated in nature. That paper became the media’s and the public health establishment’s go-to evidence for a natural origin for the COVID virus.
It was published online on Feb. 16, 2020, and firmly excluded the possibility of a lab leak.
One of Garry’s co-authors for the Proximal Origin paper, Andrew Rambaut, also is cited in the newly redacted emails. In congruence with the other two scientists, Rambaut told Fauci’s teleconference group that he also was bothered by the unusual furin cleavage site. But unlike Garry or Farzan, he speculated that the virus might have arisen in another animal, a so-called intermediate host.
Peter Daszak, right, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, is seen in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 3, 2021. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
Two years later, no such host has been identified. In the case of the original SARS virus as well as the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) virus, the intermediate host was found within a few months. Rambaut also recognized immediately the peculiar fact that the furin cleavage site “insertion has resulted in an extremely fit virus in humans—we can also deduce that it is not optimal for transmission in bat species.”
Rambaut lamented the lack of data being shared by Wuhan scientists and concluded that only the Wuhan Institute of Virology knew what had happened.
Fauci’s Group Misleads National Academy of Sciences
The day after these three scientists shared their views with the senior members of the group, on Feb. 3, 2020, Fauci attended a meeting at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). That meeting had been urgently convened at the behest of White House Director of Science and Technology Kelvin Droegmeier, who wrote that he was seeking answers about the origins of COVID-19.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, White House chief medical advisor and director of the NIAID, shows a screengrab of a campaign website for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) while answering questions at a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on Jan. 11, 2022. (Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images)
The meeting, which included a presentation by Fauci, was also attended by Peter Daszak–the person through whom Fauci had funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology–and Kristian Andersen. Fauci and his group promoted the natural origin theory to the Academy, despite having just been told on the teleconference and in subsequent emails that a lab leak provided the most likely explanation for the virus.
While they were pushing their natural origin narrative to NASEM, and by extension to the White House, Fauci and his group made no mention of their private discussions—which were taking place at the same time—that the virus most likely originated in a Wuhan lab.
NIH Hiding Behind Unjustifiable Redactions
The new emails fill some of the gaps left by previous redactions, but still only cover a small portion of the many emails that remain redacted. A close examination of the newly unredacted emails reveals that none of the usual justifications for redactions, such as private information about people or threats to sources and methods, apply. Instead, it appears that all of the redactions were made solely on the basis of shielding the NIH from scrutiny over its coverup of the virus’s origins.
These efforts at obfuscation tie in with the fact that we only found out about these new emails after a months-long battle between the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the parent organization of Fauci’s NIH and NIAID, and House Republicans.
The Capitol building in Washington in a file photo. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
In order to obtain this information, House Republicans were forced to avail themselves of a rarely used law from 1928, the so-called Seven Member Rule. Under this law, an executive agency, such as HHS, is required to provide requested information when requested by seven members of the House Committee on Government Operations (now called the Committee on Oversight and Reform).
It isn’t known why Republicans haven’t used this law earlier or with greater frequency.
Eventually, HHS allowed the House Republicans’ congressional staffers to view the unredacted emails in person. The staffers then transcribed what they saw, which is how we came to know about these new revelations.
NIH Silences Dissenting Views
These new emails are crucial in that they confirm that by Feb. 2, 2020, Fauci’s teleconference group had identified evidence pointing to a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. These scientists knew that the virus’s unique furin cleavage site was very likely the result of experiments conducted at the Wuhan lab. Notably, they also knew that these experiments were being conducted in minimum biosecurity Level 2 labs.
These facts presented a major problem for the heads of the NIH, who had funded the experiments.
Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a biostatistician and epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Connecticut on Aug. 7, 2021. (York Du/The Epoch Times)
As the new emails confirm, their response was to cover up the lab leak evidence and push a natural origin narrative.
Then-NIH Director Collins, who would later call for the public “takedown” of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, asked his group for a “swift convening of experts” in order to prevent the “voices of conspiracy” from doing “great potential harm to science and international harmony…” through public discussion of a lab leak theory.
Collins’s view was mirrored by another participant in Fauci’s teleconference, Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier, who told the group that “Further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.”
Jeff Carlson co-hosts the show Truth Over News on Epoch TV. He is a CFA-registered Charterholder and worked for 20 years as an analyst and portfolio manager in the high-yield bond market. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed on Twitter @themarketswork.
Hans Mahncke co-hosts the show Truth Over News on Epoch TV. He holds LL.B., LL.M. and Ph.D. degrees in law. He is the author of numerous law books and his research has been published in a range of international journals. Hans can be followed on Twitter @hansmahncke
Remember what they said
Fast forward to today
They lied, they will keep lying
2021 COVID-19 Recap: 200 Million Vaccinated, 450,000 Dead
By Petr Svab
January 3, 2022Updated: January 4, 2022
News Analysis
With the New Year’s Eve passing, 2021 is now the second year defined by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic and the global response to it. Compared to 2020, last year was not only deadlier, but also more complicated. Issues such as virus variants, vaccine resistance, and vaccine efficacy have come to the forefront. Mandatory vaccination went from a “conspiracy theory” to official policy in a matter of months. Increasingly prominent were also legal battles over government restrictions on the population, with approaches taken by different states further diverging.
Although 2021 started with a massive wave of COVID-19-related hospitalizations, there was also an expectation that the pandemic would soon end or at least fade into the background. Vaccination was billed as the ticket to normalcy, and initially it looked that way. By mid-June, about 180 million Americans had received at least one does of one of the approved vaccines and even states with the most authoritarian approaches, such as New York, had lifted most of their restrictions.
Delta
However, the respite was brief. In July, infections started to spike again. The CCP virus mutated into a new variant, dubbed Delta, which appeared to be less deadly, but more infectious. Vaccine uptake slowed down and Delta appeared to be somewhat more resistant to it. The solution presented by authorities was to take yet another shot of the vaccine—a “booster.”
The virus also showed signs of seasonality. In the winter, it pummeled the northeast, but not so much the south. In the summer, the situation seemed to reverse.
In August, President Joe Biden, plagued at the time by what was widely panned as a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, announced a major policy shift—mandatory vaccination for government workers, contractors, and even private employers with over 100 employees. Just months earlier, the administration was dismissing the idea of vaccine mandates. Any suggestion that the government may force people to take the novel vaccine, still in the process of long-term clinical trials, was even ridiculed by some as a “conspiracy theory.”
Soon after Biden’s announcement, some Democrat-heavy states and localities followed with various mandates of their own, with New York City spearheading the effort. Bit by bit, New York had mandated the shot for government workers, private school staff, most indoor establishment workers, and even patrons of gyms, entertainment venues, and restaurants. To see a movie, exercise, or eat indoors, a New Yorker now must show proof of “full” vaccination, which for now does not include boosters, as well as photo ID. Outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio also added a mandate for all private employers and the state mandated the vaccine for all health care workers.
Legal challenges to the mandates have been a mixed bag of failures and partial victories. Oftentimes, courts would block the mandate only to later allow it to go into effect. Challenges to Biden’s mandate for private employers are expected to be heard by the Supreme Court.
Another phenomenon associated with Delta was an increase in severe illness and even deaths among children. While in 2020, about 0.05 percent of all COVID-19 deaths were children, the number rose to 0.1 percent in 2021, according to CDC, making for a total of 678 deaths associated with COVID-19. For comparison, the agency recorded 358 pediatric deaths during the 2009-2010 flu pandemic.
Omicron
With the winter approaching, about 50 million Americans got booster shots. If that was to give them a sense of security, however, it would be short-lived. Out of South Africa emerged a yet new variant capable of wide spread, named Omicron. There are indications that vaccines and to a lesser extent natural immunity acquired through previous infection only provide limited resistance to Omicron. On the other hand, the variant appears to be yet more infectious, but again, less lethal than Delta, with reports of much milder symptoms and far fewer deaths worldwide.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that Omicron comprised about half of COVID-19 infections in the week ending Dec. 25. Those are modeled projections, though, as data from its variant surveillance system lags about three weeks.
Omicron or not, hospitalizations attributed to COVID-19 have surged in the northeast. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul responded by again requiring people to wear masks in indoor establishments, regardless of vaccination.
Republican-led states have generally gone in the opposite direction, not only refraining from mandates, but sometimes even outlawing them. Florida went as far as expressly prohibiting local governments and school districts from imposing mask and vaccine mandates on their staff or in their facilities. The state, led by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, also restricted private businesses from imposing vaccine requirements by carving out a number of exemptions, including for health concerns and prior infection. Florida legislature even authorized the state to ditch federal Occupation and Safety Hazard Agency (OSHA) and create its own to preempt Biden’s vaccine mandate, which OSHA should enforce.
Information War
Last year has also been marked by a number of revelations regarding what appears to be a lack of candor on part of a number of experts and public officials.
A series of documents released under Freedom of Information requests showed that a group of experts, including NIH head Anthony Fauci, coordinated efforts to discredit the theory that the virus originally escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. The evidence, in fact, appears to lean in that direction. But Fauci et al. have a personal stake in hiding those indices as they were involved in financing or conducting dangerous “gain-of-function” experiments with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci explicitly denied to Congress his NIH funded such research, only for a growing stack of evidence to indicate otherwise.
The information tug-of-war around potential therapeutics expanded last year. In addition to hydroxychloroquine, some doctors also tried off-label prescriptions of anti-parasitic drug Ivermectin. In one episode, popular talk show host Joe Rogan was both praised and vilified for taking Ivermectin upon announcing he tested positive for the virus. He then invited CNN’s Sanja Gupta on his show and criticized his network for claiming he took a “horse de-wormer,” when in fact he took the human formulation of the drug as prescribed by his physician.
Study results on both hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin remain mixed. Some show improved results in patients under certain circumstances, while others do not.
Conversations regarding the vaccines’ safety also morphed. After initial claims of no serious side effects, authorities have gradually shifted toward acknowledgement that some serious side effects, such as myocarditis, do occur.
Administration
The Biden administration’s handling of the pandemic has been mixed. The administration managed a smooth rollout of the vaccines, but after the initial wave, the uptake has since slowed down. Gallup reported in November that the percentage of adults who are or plan to get vaccinated plateaued at 80 percent. By Dec. 30, over 205 million people were “fully” vaccinated, meaning 2 shots of the vaccines that require them. Over 68 million got boosters as well, leaving about 23 percent of the adult population.
A December poll by the Trafalgar Group found that a large majority of American likely voters opposed new mandates and restrictions, regardless of new variants (pdf).
After months of promises to tackle the pandemic, Biden recently conceded that there’s “no federal solution” to it. The year concluded with over 450,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 and over 33 million detected infections. That’s up 27 percent and 67 percent respectively from the year before.
A high immunity among South Africans that stems primarily from prior infection is likely a contributing factor to the lower hospitalization rate the country has recorded amid the surge in COVID-19 cases after the Omicron variant of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus became dominant, according to a pair of new studies.
COVID-19 infections in South Africa have skyrocketed in recent weeks, but hospitalizations have risen much more slowly compared to the previous wave, which was driven by the Delta variant.
In the first 31 days of the current wave, 164,911 cases were recorded, but just 3,432 patients required hospital care, and 194 died.
In comparison, during the same time period of the last wave, 38,577 cases were recorded, with 10,088 requiring hospital care and 668 dying.
“We believe that the evolution of cell-mediated immunity from prior natural infection and vaccination is resulting in the uncoupling of the high case rates seen with the Omicron variant and the rates of severe disease,” South African researchers said in one of the new studies, a preprint done with funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The immunity is “primarily due to natural infection, with or without COVID-19 vaccination,” they added later.
In the other study, also not yet peer-reviewed, South African scientists said people who get infected now face roughly 80 percent lower odds of needing hospital care when compared to individuals who got COVID-19 from the Delta variant.
Additionally, people who do get admitted to hospitals have a lower chance of developing severe disease and are staying, on average, for fewer days than before.
That’s likely due in part to “high levels of population immunity (due to natural infection and/or vaccination),” wrote the researchers, who received funding from the South African Medical Research Council.
While seropositivity estimates have been high in South Africa, vaccination rates have been relatively low. As of this week, about half of adults 18 or older had received a COVID-19 vaccine, including people who only got one shot.
A man receives a dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in Johannesburg, South Africa on Dec. 15, 2021. (Luca Sola/AFP via Getty Images)
Early studies indicate Omicron can better evade immunity from both prior infection and vaccination, though both have held up well against hospitalization and severe disease. Just 1.7 percent of patients with COVID-19 were needing hospital care in South Africa, compared to 19 percent during the Delta wave, Health Minister Joe Phaahla told reporters last week.
Vaccine booster doses, meanwhile, show promise against Omicron, though experts aren’t sure how long the restored protection will last.
In South Africa, most people who have been admitted to hospitals or died with COVID-19 in recent weeks either did not receive a vaccine or just received one dose, according to the country’s National Institute For Communicable Diseases. Officials there are encouraging people to get a vaccine or get a booster if they’ve already gotten one.
Cheryl Cohen, an epidemiology professor at the University of the Witwatersrand who helped with the second study, told reporters in a virtual briefing Wednesday that researchers could not tell if vaccination, natural immunity, or an intrinsic reduced virulence of Omicron have played the largest role, but that she believes the findings are generalizable to other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, which have similar levels of previous infection.
“I think what is unclear is how the picture will be similar in countries where there are high levels of vaccination but very low levels of previous infection,” she added. “The baseline epidemiology is different. But I think, compellingly, our data really suggests a positive story of a reduced severity of Omicron compared to other variants.”
Real-world data from other countries also points to a reduced severity, including lower hospitalization rates in Denmark and the United Kingdom when compared to previous waves.
At the same time, Imperial College London researchers said last week that they found no evidence of lower severity with Omicron versus Delta; and in Denmark, “the jury is still out” because of the small amount of data to study thus far, Troels Lillebaek, professor of infectious diseases epidemiology at the University of Copenhagen, told The Epoch Times in an email.
Still, there does seem to be enough evidence out to show Omicron is less severe than previous strains, “but we do not know yet if this is because of increasing cellular immunity in the population in December 2021 versus an inherent property of the strain that makes it less virulent or both,” Dr. Monica Gandhi, director of the University of California, San Francisco-Bay Area Center for AIDS Research, told The Epoch Times via email.
Omicron variant, known as B.1.1.529 is more misinformation to distract attention from Ghislaine Maxwell Trial that starts today and trying to get our children jabbed by their poison.
Variant B.1.1.529 was identified in November 2021 in Botswana and South Africa; one case had travelled to Hong Kong, one confirmed case was identified in Israel in a traveler returning from Malawi, along with two who returned from South Africa and one from Madagascar. It is known to have dramatic genetic differences from other variants.
As of Nov. 27, the variant had spread to Europe with cases detected in two people in the United Kingdom, two in Germany and at least one in Italy, according to health officials in their respective countries.
Public health officials are studying the new variant but its significance for the pandemic is not yet known. “Preliminary evidence suggests an increased risk of reinfection with this variant, as compared to other variants of concern,” said the World Health Organization on Friday, Nov 26.
The US banned travelers from South Africa and seven nearby countries out of concern over the new variant.
In this courtroom sketch, Ghislaine Maxwell enters the courtroom escorted by U.S. Marshalls at the start of her trial on Monday in New York. Two years after Jeffrey Epstein's suicide behind bars, a jury is set to be picked Monday in New York City to determine a central question in the long-running sex trafficking case: Was his longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's puppet or accomplice? (Elizabeth Williams/AP) (Elizabeth Williams/AP)
Big Pharma, Big Tech, Fake News Media, Dirty Government and Congress biggest fear is…YOU!!! We don’t fear them and their man made virus’, fake news stories… THEY FEAR YOU!!! 🔥🔥🔥
Dr. Judy Mikovits explains the current state of play in the medical industry and crimes against humanity.
Crimes again humanity is governed by international law what is known as the Nuremberg code. If we remember the Nuremberg trials were a series of military tribunals held following World War II by the Allied forces under Bureaucrats. international law and the laws of war. The trials were most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, judicial, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany, who planned, carried out, or otherwise participated in the Holocaust and other war crimes. The trials were held in Nuremberg, Germany, and their decisions marked a turning point between classical and contemporary international law. Today the same thing is happening. Every corrupt politician and bureaucrat, in every corporation, every government entity, world wide that were involved in the plandamic will be held accountable by We the people.
At a university in #Virginia, an assistant professor of criminology has just come out and said that society should remove the stigma surrounding #pedophiles—and instead, we should be referring to them as MAPs, or Minor Attracted People.
Children are being murdered with the Covid vaccines notes David Martin, PhD
BREAKING: CBS Whistleblower GOES PUBLIC, Exposes Internal Diversity & Inclusion Training “I challenge you [journalists] to stop thinking in terms of objective journalism…that’s not really feasible anymore…”
God gave you an immune system better than any manmade jab.
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Thousands of protesters against the NYC vaccine mandates march along Brooklyn bridge into Manhattan, New York, on Oct. 26, 2021. (Sarah Lu/The Epoch Times)www.theepochtimes.com
9,000 NYC Workers, Including Firefighters and Officers, on Unpaid Leave Over Mandate: Mayor’s Office
By Jack Phillips
November 1, 2021Updated: November 1, 2021
About 9,000 New York City workers, including firefighters and police officers, were placed on unpaid leave Monday for not complying with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
“Nine thousand people [were] placed on leave without pay today,” Mitch Schwartz, a spokesperson for de Blasio’s office, told media outlets on Monday. “The rest are in various stages of having their accommodation requests reviewed. They can be at work.”
Data released by the mayor’s office on Sunday night said that about 22,800 municipal workers are not vaccinated. Around the same time, de Blasio wrote on Twitter that “more than half of the workers who haven’t been vaccinated yet have submitted exemption requests and those requests are being processed.”
A day earlier, the Democrat mayor confirmed that 91 percent of city workers got the vaccine as of Saturday night, a jump of about 8 percent from the previous day.
Starting Monday, city workers who have not got at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine would be placed on leave, triggering concerns about shortages of firefighters, EMS workers, and police officers.
De Blasio, however, said during a news conference on Monday the vaccine requirement has not led to service interruptions at police, fire, or sanitation offices around the city. A high number of employees called in sick, he said.
“We have every reason to believe there’s a lot of people out there claiming to be sick who are not and it’s not acceptable. So the thing to do is to do the right thing. Come to work, protect people as you took an oath to do,” de Blasio said Monday.
New York City’s fire chief, Daniel Nigro, said that the increase in sick calls are “related to protests against the mandate, it’s obvious.” He added: “Generally 200 people come into our medical office every day, in this past week, it’s been 700 a day. Most, the majority of them, are unvaccinated. This is completely unacceptable.”
NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said in the news conference that his agency has an 85 percent vaccination rate as of Monday.
“Members of the police department responded to this [vaccine mandate], they came to work as they always do and there is literally no effect on service at this point,” Shea said.
In contrast to de Blasio’s remarks, the heads of various unions said that they expect departments to be closed down over the mandate and staffing shortages.
It is “not entirely clear how many fire companies will be closed” on Monday as a result of the mandate, Andy Ansbro, the president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association union, said in publicly available remarks.
“We’re here today because of a mandate that was put on the, you know, our members, but also on all New York City employees given nine days to make a life-changing decision on their career or whether or not they can take a vaccine,” he added. “And we’re going to live with the aftermath of this right now.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.), who represents areas in New York City, warned that 26 firehouses stopped operations on Saturday due to the mandate.
“As of 7:30 this morning, 26 FDNY stations, including five in my district, have closed due to Mayor de Blasio’s decision to lock unvaccinated firefighters out of work,” Malliotakis said in an Oct. 30 statement.
The Fire Department of New York City and de Blasio’s office have not immediately responded to a request for comment.
Jack Phillips
BREAKING NEWS REPORTER
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Jack Phillips is a breaking news reporter at The Epoch Times based in New York.
Grace is the spiritual freedom that arises when you realize that life is a gift. From this awareness you seek to live in harmony with the Infinite Creator, the power that creates the cosmos. From this friendship arises a profound feeling of happiness as well as spiritual, emotional and mental freedom. When you awake, you will realize, we are the light, we are the truth, we are the way, we are the Christ Consciousness the world is waiting for, the second coming of Christ.
notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, judicial, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany, who planned, carried out, or otherwise participated in the Holocaust and other war crimes. The trials were held in Nuremberg, Germany, and their decisions marked a turning point between classical and contemporary international law. Today the same thing is happening. Every corrupt politician and bureaucrat, in every corporation, every government entity, world wide that were involved in the plandamic will be held accountable by We the people. 
