Jun 092021
 


Willem de Kooning Woman 1969

 

 

We’ve been talking a lot lately at the Automatic Earth about programs to vaccinate children. It’s one more thing that people appear to blindly accept as necessary and beneficial to our societies. While the only consideration really should be how beneficial it is to the children themselves. Most people here, at least, seem to agree on that. But that’s just here.

The US, Germany, Canada, and soon France and Spain all have plans, some already have been rolled out, to carpet bomb the virus by going after their children, and there is no doubt many more countries will follow their example.

Since we know there is no medical reason to do so, we must ask what the ethical and legal aspects tell us. And I can’t find those. How and why can you justify injecting people against something that is no threat to them, with a substance that potentially is a much worse threat?

I dug up a graph again that I posted in April, which spells out the Covid risk for all age groups, including children:

 

 

If your chance of survival is 99.99996%, there is no risk. And you don’t need to be inoculated. That would -at best- be equivalent to keeping your kids home 24/7 because you are afraid of what might happen in traffic, or in social life with other kids, or some bogeyman. The risk is never zero, but close enough that we do not act on it, and call it common sense.

The arguments that are usually used are that 1) kids must be jabbed to protect others around them, and 2) that the vaccines have been tested and proven safe. Obviously, 1) is very curious, and never been used before, and 2) is simply a lie: vaccines need years of testing for side effects, not months, and certainly not weeks, as is now the case for the effects on children.

The “testing” is simply that if not too many people drop dead after 5 minutes, well, then it must be safe, as institutions like the European Medicines Agency solemnly declare. Completely ignoring potential long term effects, something that seems essential in mRNA “vaccines” because of their potential effects on fertility etc. We just don’t know, but we should before applying the substances. There’s a reason none of the vaccines have been approved.

As for that alleged safety, this is from the European version of the American VAERS system:

 

 

1,5 million adverse reactions, and those are just the ones that have been reported. Now, I don’t know how many people in Europe have been inoculated, but I bet you this is not a 99.99996% success story. The numbers of deaths are not, either.

So I was happy to see some actual common sense reported in a Dutch paper today (Google translated), where the Health Council in the Netherlands injects at least some nuance into the debate. For kids with underlying conditions, like severe obesity or lung- and heart problems, some protection might make sense. I still wouldn’t go with mRNA vaccines, I would use ivermectin instead, but I get the reasoning somewhat.

Health Council: Vaccinate Children From 12 Years Old With Medical Risk Against Corona

The Health Council advises the cabinet to vaccinate children from the age of 12 with a medical risk against the corona virus. Vaccinating all children in that age group, as is done in Germany, France and the US, for example, is not yet on the agenda. An opinion on this will follow in a few weeks. The current advice concerns children aged 12 to 17 who are annually invited for the flu shot and children with severe obesity. According to the Health Council, vaccination of these children provides significant health benefits, because they run a high risk of a serious course of Covid-19. According to chairman Bart-Jan Kullberg, that risk is twice as high as in healthy children.

The corona pandemic also indirectly has a major impact on children at medical risk. To avoid the risk of contamination, for example, they do not go to school or social activities. The Health Council also takes this ‘social-emotional impact’ into account. The council cannot estimate the number of children involved. “It concerns, for example, children with a heart or lung disease. There are also many small groups with a rare condition. General practitioners and paediatricians have a good picture of these groups,” says Kullberg.

An advice on vaccinating healthy children will only follow in a few weeks. The vast majority of children do not or hardly get sick after a corona infection. So far, almost 280,000 children in the Netherlands are known to have been infected. Usually they had only mild symptoms, such as a cold and cough. In the age group 0-12 years, 379 children were hospitalized. In the 13-17 age group, there have been 101 since September. A total of three children have died; all three had an underlying condition. Last month, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) gave the green light for the use of the Pfizer vaccine in children from 12 years of age. More and more countries are also vaccinating all healthy children over the age of 12 to slow down the spread of the coronavirus.

Vaccinating children from the age of 12 against the coronavirus can make a significant contribution to curbing the pandemic, OMT chairman Jaap van Dissel already suggested last weekend. According to him, it reduces the reproductive value (R) of the virus in winter by as much as this. about 15 percent. “That can be important to keep the spread low during that period as well.” In Germany, for example, teenagers will be vaccinated from next Monday, in France from mid-June and in Spain from mid-August. The US and Canada have been at it for weeks.

Vaccinating healthy children, who themselves hardly run the risk of becoming seriously ill after a corona infection, requires a ‘broader medical, epidemiological, ethical and legal consideration’, according to the Health Council. “It also depends on the phase of the pandemic,” Kullberg said. Because the number of infections is currently falling sharply and more than a million adults are now vaccinated every week, there is no reason to make that decision hastily, he says.

Now, mind you, that is the same country that admitted depriving children of their freedom, their development, and normal lives, in order to manipulate their parents. Talk about ethics. As I said a few days ago, “Holland closed schools not to protect children, but to make parents stay home. Think about how crazy that is.”

The Netherlands Used Children As A Weapon In The Fight Against Corona

Due to the Dutch corona policy to close schools and thus keep parents at home, children have been used as a means to fight the epidemic. Our cabinet receives that hard slap on the fingers today in the annual worldwide children’s rights report, the KidsRights Index. According to the makers, the Netherlands has set a very bad example internationally, by not even trying to keep schools open safely. With all the consequences that entails for the mental health of our youth. The corona guidelines from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child have also been neglected. Youth has not been given any priority in Dutch policy, it sounds.

Statements by corona minister Hugo de Jonge, dated mid-December 2020, are presented as proof. Then De Jonge indeed mentioned on television as the reason why the cabinet decided to close the schools, that parents with children sitting at home will therefore start working from home more quickly. When parents take their children to school, that is another moment of contact, De Jonge explained at the time. “And we also learned from the first wave, when the schools were also closed, that the fact that primary education does not provide physical education also ensures that parents adhere better to another advice, namely: work from home as much as possible. ”, said the minister at the time.

“Children’s rights have been put in second place by the cabinet during corona time,” Marc Dullaert, founder of the international children’s rights organization KidsRights, now told this site. “They were the ankle bracelet for parents. These had to be kept at home in order to effectively fight the epidemic. At the expense of their mental health.” In the first phase, when everyone was looking for the right approach, this was understandable according to Dullaert. ,,But De Jonge’s statements came at a time when it was really no longer acceptable, in the second phase. And other countries – such as Belgium and Sweden – have done everything they can to keep the schools open, so there were alternatives on the table.”

Staying on topic, I liked this from the Conservative Woman site in Britain, with perhaps the best argument against child vaccination: “The sooner most of us are exposed to it, ideally in childhood, the sooner it will cease to be a major problem..”

Why Subject Our Children To The Risk Of Death From Vaccination?

All non-corrupted scientific commentators have known from the very start that this pandemic only ends one way: SARS-CoV-2 is going to become an endemic virus. It will always be with us. The sooner most of us are exposed to it, ideally in childhood, the sooner it will cease to be a major problem. High-risk individuals can choose to take a vaccine. Ivermectin and vitamin D can be used to prevent infection and treat confirmed cases. As we have seen, the argument that children must take vaccines so that we can achieve herd immunity is utterly false. Only those completely ignorant of virology and immunology would even attempt to make it. That brings us back to the original argument for vaccinating children against Covid: to protect them from the severe disease.

If this is the only reason to vaccinate children, there is only one calculation that parents should make: Is the risk from Covid greater than the risk from the vaccine? The present Covid vaccines being administered in the West are based on experimental technologies that are being used under emergency use authorisations (EUAs). Full safety studies will not be completed until 2023. The Covid vaccines were all created in the last year and we have no medium-term or long-term data on them. We don’t know if they will have an effect on children’s reproductive organs and fertility. We don’t know if they will produce auto-immune diseases. And we don’t know if they will lead to ADE (antibody-dependent enhancement) upon re-exposure to the virus (causing more severe illness).

We do know that the vaccines produce a range of cardiovascular and neurological events including strokes, myocarditis, pericarditis and paralysis in a significant number of people. In the small US state of Connecticut at least 18 children and young adults have come down with myocarditis, an extremely serious and sometimes fatal condition involving inflammation of the heart muscle (and they’ve only just started vaccinating children there). The Israel Ministry of Health has reported that the incidence of myocarditis for vaccine recipients is between 1 in 3,000 and 1 in 6,000 in young men.

In Canada (population 38 million) only 11 children have died from Covid since the start of the pandemic. In the UK (pop 68 million) 32 children have died. It is nearly certain that all of them had one or more severe comorbidities. The fact is, most children brush off Covid without even knowing they’ve had it. For all intents and purposes, Covid poses zero risk to healthy children.

And Michael Curzon:

Child Vaccination: Who’s Selfish Now?

A number of school leaders have swung into action following the approval of the vaccination of children against Covid (a disease which almost all children aren’t at risk from) using the Pfizer vaccine (trials of which only included 1,134 children). It wasn’t very long ago that the establishment line was: if you don’t get a Covid vaccine, you are selfish. Even the Queen (disappointingly) joined in with this line [..]. But now, adult advisers to the Government suggest that children should be vaccinated not to protect children but to protect…themselves. Professor Anthony Harnden, the Deputy Chairman of the Government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, says:


‘I think the vast majority of benefit won’t be to children, it will be an indirect benefit to adults in terms of preventing transmission and protecting adults who haven’t been immunised, for whatever reason haven’t responded to the vaccine and therefore that presents quite a lot of ethical dilemmas as to whether you should vaccinate children to protect adults.’ He notes that children themselves are ‘in the main’ not at risk from Covid. Over half of the adult population has been fully vaccinated (with seventy-five per cent having received at least one dose of a vaccine) and Covid deaths, while still exaggerated, have flattened. There is no reason to vaccinate most children and, given the potential side effects, many not to do so. If the Government bottles it on the vaccination of children, it is they who are being selfish.

The reactions to the virus are many times more dangerous than the virus itself. Because the reactions have been amplified by fear. Time to shake it off. But for that to happen, we need politics and media to change, because they’re doing the amplifying. Problem is, fear sells.

 

 

 

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Oct 042020
 


Herbert Draper Lament for Icarus 1898

 

 

Is it still allowed to talk about COVID without mentioning Trump? I am not sure. And now I did it anyway. Nassim Taleb made an interesting point about that:

 

 

Though I don’t follow the news in the Netherlands much, I happened to see something the other day that I think is a “beautiful” example of why so many countries get their “measures” wrong, their lockdowns, facemasks etc.

First of all, they all screwed up their initial lockdowns, which pretty much were March-June all over. And second lockdowns are more something they like to threaten people with than actually considered options. Unless things really get out of hand, if for instance numbers of deaths suddenly increase a lot, but given the change towards infections occurring in much younger people than before, that is not likely. Plus, of course, no-one wants even more economic damage.

And now what you see is the politicians don’t know what to do anymore. They turn to “their scientists” again, but many have before given advice that is different from what they say now, that hasn’t worked, and that often contradicts what their colleagues in other countries say. And so everyone starts blaming “the people”.

But the people have mostly obeyed the lockdowns and become experts themselves, or so they think, and seen them go nowhere. That makes the positions of politicians and “experts” much weaker than it was 6-7 months ago. It’s about credibility, and they’ve squandered it. Why “must we listen to the scientists” if that does us no good?

The Netherlands, like many European countries, is in a second wave that is seeing many more new daily cases than in spring. Partly due to more testing, but not entirely:

 

 

The number of deaths does not show a similar trend, which can be contributed to the infections mostly occurring in much younger people, and of course a better understanding in medical circles of the virus. However, hospitals are still filling up much faster than in June-July, and many younger people, too, end up with damaged brains, lungs, hearts etc.

 

 

This recent chart of the difference between August and September infection numbers throughout Europe is skewed because of the insane increases in Hungary and Georgia, but it shows that a 300% increase was entirely normal in that timeframe.

 

 

 

 

So what now? The Dutch government came with a whole new set of measures starting October 2. Because people “don’t obey the rules”. And people increasingly say: maybe the rules are not right. By the way, facemasks are not mandatory there in stores and other public places, there is only an “urgent” government advice to wear them. That is different from many other nations. Here are the new measures per Google Translate:

 

 

• Work from home as much as possible.
Receive up to 3 guests at home.
– Children up to and including 12 years are not included.
You may meet with a group of 4 people.
– For example in a cinema or restaurant.

– Children up to and including 12 years are not included.
• A maximum of 30 people may be together in an indoor space.
– Children count.
• Cafes, bars and restaurants close at 10 p.m. You must be gone then. You can enter until 9 p.m.
– You provide your name and telephone number. If someone gets sick who has been in the restaurant or cafe, you will receive a call.
• You must make a reservation to visit a museum or library.
• Stores only allow customers if there is enough space.
• In supermarkets there will be special shopping hours for the elderly and the sick (people with poor health).
• People with a contact profession must register customers. For example hairdressers.

 

 

The first reaction that I have, and I’m sure I’m not the only one: Why 3 people as house guests and not 4? Why 4 people at a restaurant table and not 5, or 30 total in an indoor space? There are family members we haven’t seen since Christmas, but a birthday party is out?

Where do those numbers come from? Did you just make them up? Also, closing bars and restaurants at 10 pm is going to be the death knell for many of the few that are left. Is that worth it?

About that number of 4 people at a restaurant table, the next article from NLTimes about worries in the hospitality sector says that in neighboring Germany and Belgium, 10 people can sit at that same -or preferably a bigger- table. Are Dutch people supposed to drive to those countries if they have a party of 8?

 

Gov’t Advice To Wear Masks In Public Space Met With Skepticism

On Wednesday Prime Minister Mark Rutte issued the urgent advice for all Netherlands residents to wear masks in publicly accessible indoor spaces. This advice was met with skepticism, especially from the hospitality industry. Former RIVM director Roel Coutinho would rather have seen a mask obligation instead of advice.

Hospitality association KHN doubts whether the advice to wear masks in public makes sense, the association said in a press release. “The fact that there is still no scientific substantiation by the cabinet and RIVM about the proven usefulness of face masks certainly does not help to create and maintain support. Moreover, face masks still form an extra barrier to visiting establishments.”

If the government turns its advice into an obligation, the KHN wants the Netherlands to follow Germany and Belgium’s example. According to the association, in those countries up to 10 people are allowed at a restaurant table. “Then we will be open to it,” the association said. The KHN also wants extra financial support should masks become mandatory.

Roel Coutinho, who preceded Jaap van Dissel as head of public health institute RIVM, is pleased that the advice to wear masks indoors now applies to the whole of the Netherlands, but regrets that the government did not make it mandatory. “On the basis of all the literature, I am convinced that wearing a face mask is useful. But only advice makes it particularly difficult for people,” he said to Nieuwsuur. “An obligation, as is also happening in countries around us, gives everyone much more clarity.”

An obligation will also help the stores that have to enforce the face mask rule. “Because what exactly should those shops or supermarkets do?” Coutinho said. “Because it only concerns urgent advice, the responsibility now lies with shops, which makes it very difficult. An obligation is not always pleasant, but it is clear and easy to enforce.”

 

But the best part is the following, the initial piece that got me thinking about this. Turns out that at the same moment the government issues an “urgent” advice to wear them, with a threat of making them mandatory, its chief Infectious Diseases expert, the Dutch Fauci, says he sees little benefit is wearing non-medical masks. As, ironically, Fauci, who used to say they were useless, now calls them very beneficial. Google translate again:

 

Van Dissel Insists: Ordinary Face Masks Have Little Effect

The frequent use of masks in other countries, the pressure of public opinion in his own country, or even a direct appeal from his famous American counterpart Anthony Fauci: Jaap van Dissel sticks to his position. When asked, the director of Infectious Diseases at the RIVM repeats that, according to him, masks have “an exceptionally small effect” on the attempts to contain the spread of the corona virus. In an interview with the NOS, he calls the cabinet’s recent decision to urgently recommend masks in public indoor spaces, therefore primarily a political decision rather than one based on medical grounds.

Since the start of the corona crisis, Van Dissel has emphasized that he sees little benefit in wearing non-medical face masks, especially because it could evoke a sense of false security and possibly divert attention from other rules. Although he acknowledges that there are studies that signal a positive effect of face masks, he believes they are difficult to extrapolate to the corona crisis.

“For example, medical mouth masks were often used in those studies and measures such as the one and a half meters are not taken into account,” he explains. There are also studies that are less positive about masks, he says. “That leads us to consider that we have not given a positive advice about it. That is just the story. That another decision is taken, based on political considerations, that it should be so.”

In addition, according to Van Dissel, the alleged effectiveness of non-medical face masks is nothing compared to the usefulness of other measures such as keeping sufficient distance from each other, washing hands regularly and staying at home in case of complaints. Earlier this week, the Outbreak Management Team, the advisory body of the cabinet which Van Dissel chairs, made some adjustments to the advice on face masks for the first time.

For example, the OMT wrote that masks could be recommended in places where sufficient distance from each other cannot always be kept “such as in busy shops”. For the same reason, a mask has been mandatory in public transport since June. According to Van Dissel, the change in the OMT advice has nothing to do with a changed view of mouth masks, but more to do with people’s sense of safety. “Of course, as OMT, we have also realized that some people would prefer to wear a mouth mask. If someone feels safer, we are fine with that,” he says.

 

The government says: wear a mask, and its chief scientific adviser says: don’t bother. Great message. And people don’t miss that. I’ve said it before: every government today should have a generous supply of N95 masks ready. They don’t because their experts long said they were not necessary. While some keep claiming cloth masks are useful, but “more to do with people’s sense of safety”.

I don’t know about you, but all these people with these useless masks on where they’re not needed, like outside, don’t make me feel safe at all. They make me think I’m surrounded by fools. And is anyone going to believe that 4 at a table is better than 10? How can they when just across the border the opinion is so different? If you ask me, the time of being able to order your citizens around on what to do and what not, may be ending for many governments. And they have only themselves to blame.

The only realistic thing to do at this point appears to be to give people back their own responsibility. If only because taking it away from them didn’t work.

 

 

 

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