COUNTRY STRATEGIES

Did they work?

For some time we have been concerned that after governments spent billions of dollars arranging for us to be vaccinated - did these vaccinations actually do anything? 

It has never been the intention of Pandemicia to step outside the mainstream, and we are always pro-vaxx - we have always taken every vaccination available including five for Covid-19,  and we can only applaud the success of vaccination in eliminating several major diseases. But there have been reasons to be suspicious in this case for this particular disease. We state this although we are aware we are stepping into territory firmly occupied by cranks, and therefore we risk censorship by social media and other gatekeepers on behalf of the authorities.

First it has been quite obvious the vaccinations did nothing to stop the spread of the disease, especially when the virus itself easily outpaced the rollout by mutation. We were warned about this possibility by first-ranking experts long before vaccines were ever produced. Second, although trials organised by the biotech companies claimed to show a two-thirds reduction in hospitalisation and mortality, we did not see this occurring in the statistics produced by Australian governments; once most people were vaccinated, there was no obvious extra mortality among those few who were unvaccinated.

The procedure here is to compare countries who were not able to stop the disease in the first year, before there was any vaccine, with countries who were able to stop the pandemic in the early years and had their main deaths later, to see if there were lesser mortality rates once everyone was vaccinated. 

Underlying this approach is the lack of knowledge about why some people have the disease so much worse than others. It is known that death rates among the elderly and those with compounding factors is much higher. However, even among the high risk categories, the considerable majority have only mild disease. The progress of the disease therefore has been to eliminate those who are vulnerable, and once they are gone, the death rate falls.

Country groupings 

Group 1 - the leaders

The first group of countries were the "leaders" who had outbreaks of the disease in the first few months of the pandemic and were unable to control it. Figure 1 shows deaths per million in four typical countries.

Figure1 1. Daily COVID deaths per million, four leader countries

In Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, the response was disorganised but mildly effective. Sweden specifically chose to keep the country open. 

The progress of the epidemic was quite similar in all members of the group. There were four main waves peaking in deaths around March 2020,  December-January 2021, February 2022 and March 2023, with smaller waves around June and September 2022. 

• The second wave was the sharpest in the UK and the USA in terms of weekly deaths per million, and was the largest in total deaths in all four countries.
• The USA peaks were extended, because they operated over a much wider geographical area, with leader-follower areas. Italy had an extended peak in April 2021.
• Sweden had a sharp fourth peak in early 2023. Otherwise the peaks declined - either from the loss of the most highly affected population, or from improvements in treatment 

Excess mortality has also stayed consistently 10-20% higher in these countries during the whole Covid period

Figure 2, Excess mortality %, 4 countries, Covid period

The argument for the effectiveness of vaccines stems from a sixfold rise in daily cases between the second and third wave peaks, when mandates were abandoned, while daily deaths were only three-quarters as high. However - this is not definitive for several reasons

• By the third wave Omicron was dominant. It spread much deeper into the youthful population who had a very low mortality rate
• In this wave, many of the older people had previously had other variants. Many of those most sensitive to the disease had already died.

Group 2 - the followers

August, jan, August, jan