by John Ward
But does the new variant add up to more than a hill of beans?
Episode #113, in which The Slog deconstructs the fake news coffee-grinder of doom emitted by the media on a daily basis.
The “role” of the Brazilian variant in whatever plan lies behind Covysteria is fairly easy to determine: it seems at first sight to make herd immunity a hopeless goal, because Sars Cov2 is mutating quite rapidly….”experts say that the existing vaccines may well be ineffective against the new strain”.
First of all, we need to eschew the route of following science (as defined by the re-writers of it) and instead return to the sanity of Truth. Covid19 is behaving like any other seasonal virus: rebuffed by natural or “vaccinated” resistance, it changes its modus operandum. This is the very reason I never take the annual flu vaccine, because it almosts always fails to work on this year’s virus. Nobody has ever thoroughly investigated this flaw in Pharma vaccine marketing, but it is real enough.
Second, viruses adapt their form of attack to suit the resistance, climate and culture they find. Even if the new 501Y.V3 nasty has a high death rate in Brazil, that does not mean it will have the same rate in, say, the UK or the US. Early on in this tragicomedy of errors (March 2020) I predicted that the Chinese death rate would not be repeated in most of the First World, and this has proved to be true. Despite all the alarmist raw numbers and case v death sleight of hand used by medical bureaucrats and Leftist bedwetters, the bottom line so far is that SarsCov2 has largely replaced flu, not added to the global cull of the elderly.
The third factor to get real about is that it may not be a “Brazilian” mutant at all: it could easily be Japanese. It was brought to Brazil by holidaymakers on their return from Japan – and only recently.
Is it any more deadly than the “original” virus….bearing in mind that it would be hard to be less ‘deadly’? While it’s true that Brazil has a comparatively large deaths per million score at 1,200, only a fraction of that is down to the new variant: the country has poor medical services, a large weak-immunity indigenous indian population, and vast areas of cool, wet forest ideal for Covid transmission.
So the next job is to look at countries where there are longer data series about the Nipponezilian P1 SarsCov2 Covid 19 501Y.V3 variant or whatever the media might be calling it by next Friday.
In Japan (a hugely populous country where transmission is easy and 501Y.V3 has the longest track record) the deaths per million stands today at 64…..5% of the Brazilian number.
In Brazil itself, Reuters (the leading Covid alarmist on the planet) headlined, ‘Brazil minister says Amazon coronavirus variant three times more contagious’ before quietly stating in the body copy that the chap blurted this out ‘without providing evidence for the claims’. Further, more contagious doesn’t mean more deadly.
The excellent site TRT world confirms that:
‘While researchers have said that the new strain is more transmissible, there is no evidence it has an increased risk of causing severe infections. While the new variant may increase the number of re-infections, there’s no evidence that it causes new infections to be more severe,” said genetics expert Renato Aguiar, “The severity of and mortality [rate] from Covid-19 has no direct connection with mutations – it has much more to do with the characteristics of hosts,”.
This is, of course, a reference to the virus overwhelmingly killing the very old, very fat and very unhygienic. Thank you for making this clear, Renato….your point won’t go down well in the We’re Doomed camp, so do check underneath your car from here on, amigo.
In the US, the variant now “rampaging through the Brazilian rain forests” has been present for six weeks. Below is what’s happened to cases (left) and deaths (right) in that period:
Now, you could argue that none of this means very much…and in every sense, I’m inclined to agree with you. So one is bound to ask, therefore, why just about every Fleet Street title has had an attack of the vapours again.
‘Race to beat Brazil Covid-19 variant before schools open,’ screams the Times. All one case of it.
‘Missing patient who tested positive for Brazil variant STILL not found, ministers admit’ the Mail admonishes.
And mysteriously, in the Mirror, ‘BREAKING: Covid deaths drop by a third in a week but total fatalities nearly 20% above average’ – which the paper clearly couldn’t stand up, because the link to it goes nowhere. The BBC calls the Okey-cokey P1 SarsCov2 Covid 19 501Y.V3 “a cause for concern” (which it quite clearly isn’t), and our old favourite The New York Memes runs this hilariously Freudian headline:
The bigger issue by far remains the destruction of our freedoms and the complicity of leaned-upon media in that process. At the weekend, Peter Hichens chose to ignore the link, and argue that submitting to a half-baked crypto-vaccine did not spit on his campaign against the corporate State at all. Today – alongside the Monarch and Michael Caine – the apologists are joined by Suzanne Moore at the Daily Telegraph, who uses this header as her kicking-off point:
I dislike being rude, but the piece really is a dire exercise in moving goalposts with the force of Blairite drivel. If she has to give up her privacy, then what is the resultant freedom worth? And because stupid people let Big Brother into the house via fibre-optic cables, ergo two wrongs make a right. A bit of “it’s only a” nonsense thrown in for good measure; and if we all need vaccine passports from now on, then where is the normality?
There is no eclectic thought on display in this piece – no knowledge of the pointlessness of vaccines, no interrogation of the cost/benefit farrago, and no appreciation of the world her vacuous reasoning will leave behind. One is left solely with the feeling that Ms Moore figures she’ll be fine come the New Normal, because being a loyal Party member, the Top Down State will reward her with the right to turn off the two-way screens that bedeck her walls.
One by one, the hidden élitists of the Establishment are slithering out from under the skirting boards. Perhaps if Covid19 produces that result, then one day we might be grateful for it identifying the idiotic megalomaniacs and opportunists who launched, hyped and became rich on the back of the bloody thing. Perhaps that really will have been a price worth paying.