Vaccine Failure and the Way Out

The Corona vaccines don’t work very well. Ubiquitous statistics showing that the vaccinated enjoy substantial protection against serious illness and death seem wrong. In some cases they are probably manipulated. They are certainly confounded by the different testing regimes to which the vaccinated and the unvaccinated are subjected. Once you forget the specifics of efficacy and look at the broader picture, it is easy to see where we are. The vaccines have not reduced Corona mortality compared to the same time last year in any jurisdiction that I know of. Countries with high vaccination rates are now seeing the same number of deaths, or more, as they had at the beginning of September 2020. Time is a flat circle.

If you peer deeper, you’ll generally find this: The vaccinated remain substantially protected against serious illness or death, but the unvaccinated are entering the hospital and dying at very high rates indeed, as if to compensate. Thus Israel has maintained the same case fatality rate of around 0.7%, before and after mass vaccination. If this is just Delta being more dangerous, then we would expect countries with lower vaccination rates to be enduring truly staggering mortality right now, but they are not. In heavily vaccinated countries, Delta is raging with a rare fury among the unvaccinated, but in lesser-vaccinated countries it is doing nothing unusual. This means that the efficacy statistics are broadly unreliable. The exact reasons don’t really matter: Either the vaccines have the power to change the whole picture, or they don’t.

None of this should surprise us. Vaccines against coronaviruses have been used in animals for decades, and none of them work very well. Generally they begin to fail after a few months. Despite their technical sophistication, our mRNA and vector vaccines against SARS-2 are no different. They had some success when they were first rolled out, but if anything that probably made things worse. They effectively killed off the older Kent lineage and reduced the overall genetic diversity of SARS-2. Cases plummeted in the United Kingdom and Israel, and Delta emerged victorious from this bottleneck event. When newly vaccinated Icelanders travelled to the Delta-saturated UK for holiday, they did not even enjoy an initial period of protection against infection. They brought Delta back to Iceland, where the new strain circulated among vaccinated and unvaccinated at nearly the same rate.

In a world where the symptomatic mostly stay home, Corona is locked in a balancing act. It can’t make people too sick too soon, or its hosts will remove themselves from circulation and infect nobody. Delta is more aggressive than prior strains, probably to the point of disadvantaging itself in containment-happy countries. The more aggressive, earlier replication allows it to get the jump on immunity in the vaccinated, however, who can also tolerate more virus replication with fewer symptoms. Together with ordinary antigenic drift, this would seem to be the mechanism that has brought Delta to prominence. We are probably justified in calling this phenomenon a weak Marek Effect. Our universal vaccination campaigns worked just well enough to speed up the evolutionary processes that are always and everywhere optimising Corona.

It is impossible to believe that this failure was not foreseen. The scientists who developed the vaccines knew for sure how things would play out. That’s why they concluded the trials after three or four months and vaccinated their controls. It’s why they have been talking about boosters from the very beginning. It’s why, if you listened carefully, you never heard Zero Covid sloganeering coming from Team Vaccine. Only the comparative morons on Team Lockdown ever talked like that.

Our politicians and our new public health dictators, on the other hand, remained oblivious to the limited potential of the vaccines. They continue to insist on universal vaccination and green passes, while it is obvious that these will do nothing to influence the course of the pandemic. It is worth asking why, because when you think about it, you can see that the vaccine roll-out came with an inbuilt exit strategy. The vaccines arrived most everywhere in the spring, as Corona was going out of season anyway. Policymakers immediately claimed declining infections as a victory for the vaccines, but they failed to take the next step and declare the war won and either discontinue their case counts, or at the very least exclude the vaccinated from infection and mortality statistics. Instead, they deployed half measures, devising new regulations that exempt the vaccinated from testing most of the time, while failing to shut the door on the pandemic and maintaining numbers that are just reliable enough to reveal the futility of their policies.

This was the second time our brave health dictatorship failed to use the obvious, purpose-built exit ramp of seasonality. The first was in Spring 2020, after the entire West (with the exceptions of Sweden and Belarus) bought into mass containment and Corona infections collapsed everywhere in April. Establishment scientific voices had by this time spent two months denying that there would be significant seasonal effects, on the basis of some superficial modelling studies. As with the vaccine roll-out, denying seasonality allowed them to declare a policy victory. As with the vaccine roll-out, the stage was set for everybody to say that they had defeated Corona, fold up shop and go home. This is, you will note, exactly what China did. They tightened official testing criteria, declared the pandemic over with and never looked back. Western countries, though, kept the ball in the air all summer long, just as they are keeping the ball in the air now.

Governments are both more powerful and more paralysed than they have been at any other point in history. Powers have diffused throughout the realms of bureaucracy. By distributing power in this way, occupational classes ensure loyalty and unanimity across the whole of the civil service, academia and the press. The consequence is that states have become profoundly and permanently demobilised, incapable of acting according to coherent strategies. Over and over in Corona, we see clear hints of strategic thinking in certain quarters – the exit ramps are among the clearest signs – but these are always overridden by the broader momentum of countless thousands of nameless, faceless optimisers and hystericists who sit on hundreds of boring pointless committees performing the same iterative destructive acts of governance over and over.

These are bureaucratic processes of untold complexity, all of them steered in roughly the same direction by a loose system of Schelling points. The mysterious power of globalist organisations like the World Economic Forum is the coordination they provide, by acting as venues for the occupational elites to formulate policy schemes among themselves and to propagate these plans and ideals through loose networks of affiliated tycoons, journalists and NGOs. Until now, Corona policy in every western country has unfolded more or less according to the same script, devised by the World Health Organisation at the end of February 2020. The final act was supposed to be the wide-scale eradication of Corona after mass vaccination. It is now clear that this will never happen. For the first time since March 2020, there is no obvious international consensus on the way forward.

A few countries, or perhaps even a few prominent politicians or public health pundits who do not have their heads up their asses, could change everything. Everyone who is not crazy needs to start insisting on the same simple message:

We have to live with Corona, it will always be with us. Biannual boosters for the entire population will not solve anything. They will only reduce the effectiveness of vaccines by encouraging antigenic drift. The vaccines are, at best, a solution for the elderly and the vulnerable only. Everyone will get Corona, even the vaccinated, and children need to get it while they are still young and while it poses no risk to them. In this way, SARS-2 will become an unimportant virus in the coming years.

UPDATE: My critics complain that Delta has a different seasonality, so calendar-date comparisons are inappropriate. This was only an attempt to simplify. Compare mortality statistics however you want: They have, as a rule, not improved. My critics complain further that Israel’s unchanging case fatality rate is an outlier, and that the CFR is declining elsewhere. This is true! I only cited Israel to illustrate the shifting burden of mortality and hospitalisation to the unvaccinated. Official case fatality rates are obviously determined by local diagnostic policies and in themselves they mean almost nothing.