Refuting the Big Pharma/Big Government/Big Medicine/Big Media’s “Approved” Narrative Concerning Sweden’s Successful Approach to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the Disastrous Lockdown and What Constitutes True (Natural) Herd Immunity (without the need for vaccines)
Duty to Warn
Refuting the Big Pharma/Big Government/Big Medicine/Big Media’s “Approved” Narrative Concerning Sweden’s Successful Approach to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the Disastrous Lockdown and What Constitutes True (Natural) Herd Immunity (without the need for vaccines)
By Jeremy Hammond – October 6, 2020 (1041 words)
After the UK, the US, and other countries around the world implemented "lockdown" measures that were sold to the public as strictly temporary measures to "flatten the curve" and avoid hospital overwhelm, Sweden was scorned by the lockdown advocates.
Because of the Swedish government's decision to "experiment" with their population by not implementing extreme measures to shut down the economy and infringe on individuals' liberty, we were told that disaster would ensue.
Their hospitals would be overwhelmed and the death toll would be catastrophic, the doomsdayers warned.
But, as we all know, the dire predictions of these false prophets never came to pass. Sweden's hospitals were never overwhelmed. They successfully flattened the curve without deliberately destroying people's livelihoods and relying on authoritarianism as the solution. It was all the lockdown countries who have been conducting a mass uncontrolled experiment on their populations.
The lockdown advocates refused to acknowledge Sweden's success, however, and decried Sweden's greater rate of deaths per capita than its locked-down Scandinavian neighbors. Yet its death rate still remained below that of other European lockdown countries, including the UK, which these same doomsdayers said couldn't possibly be the outcome of Sweden's "failure" to follow the same path.
Moreover, the doomsayers refused to acknowledge that the relatively higher death rate in Sweden was primarily due to a failure to protect elderly persons living in long-term care facilities -- which had nothing to do with the decision to not implement strict lockdown measures.
That is easily demonstrable by the fact that many states in the US that did lockdown also saw 50% or more of COVID-19 deaths occurring among nursing home residents.
By July, the epidemic wave in Sweden was rolling away, and even the lockdown-loving New York Times had to admit that Sweden was "in significantly better condition than the United States."
Today, by all appearances, Sweden has reached a high level of herd immunity.
But how could that be?! We were told by the likes of Anthony Fauci that natural herd immunity could not possibly be achieved or considered an endgame solution to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic because to get there would require accepting a cost of millions of COVID-19 deaths, with a herd immunity threshold requiring 60% or more of the population to become infected.
Serological studies in Sweden show that no more than 20% of the population in Sweden has been infected so they are very far from herd immunity, Fauci argues!
His position should have completely discredited him as an "expert" because the fallacies underlying his assessment have long been illuminated by the scientific community.
There are two main explanations that I'm aware of for how the herd immunity threshhold could be much lower than the doomsdayers have been saying from the start, which together can explain how it could be that Sweden has already achieved.
The first is that the modelers and other doomsdayers failed to consider individuality in transmission dynamics.
From the start, we've heard a lot about the "R-naught" metric, or the reproduction number, and have been told that every person infected with SARS-CoV-2 will on average infect 2 to 3 others.
But that's not how the virus has actually been spreading. In fact, scientists have recognized that most infected individuals spread the virus to precisely zero people. Small numbers of individuals, on the other hand, are "super-spreaders" who transmit to many others.
Rather than outbreaks being associated with people not wearing a mask while passing others in the aisles at supermarkets, there have been "super-spreader" events generally involving mass gatherings where people interact in very close contact.
The "super-spreaders" represent a unique group of individuals who are highly likely both to become infected and then to spread the virus, whether due to some unique physiological characteristics or simply due to their behavior.
Most of us, though, are less likely to either be exposed or to spread the virus if we do become infected.
The doomsday modelers assumed that everyone is equally a "susceptible". But that's wrong. Once the pool of highly susceptible individuals is depleted, it is just not the case that everyone else will continue becoming infected and transmitting at the same rate as those who've done so initially.
Rather, there is a great deal of heterogeneity in transmission dynamics that Fauci and others have failed to take into account, such that once the pool of those most likely to catch and spread the virus has been sufficiently depleted, the virus will simply not be able to spread so easily anymore because, for whatever reason, most of us do not share the characteristics of the "super-spreader".
The second explanation is that there is already some background immunity to SARS-CoV-2.
Whereas Fauci touted studies indicating that most of Sweden's population has no evidence of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 as proof that most of its population remain
susceptibles, the truth is that an absence of detectable SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies is not evidence of susceptibility to infection.
This is because antibodies are neither always sufficient nor even necessary for immunity, and in the case of SARS-CoV-2, many studies now have shown that cell-mediated immunity, as opposed to antibody or humoral immunity, plays just as important -- or, arguably, an even more important -- role.
Numerous studies have shown that even people who have never been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 may still have some level of cross-protective immunity due to past exposure to common coronaviruses (which are a common cause of common colds worldwide).
That is, the immunity gained by infection with a common-cold-causing virus is not only protective against that particular coronavirus, but, evidently, also against the related coronavirus that causes COVID-19, which, as it turns out, is not nearly so "novel", immunologically, as originally assumed.
As a result of the heterogeneity in transmission dynamics and the existing background immunity, the threshold for achieving natural herd immunity is far lower than the doomsdayers keep claiming.
So those of us who've argued from the start that natural herd immunity is a better strategy than the "lockdown until we can mass vaccinate the global population" endgame have science on our side.
We must stand up and fight the authoritarianism and the fearmongering that is used to manufacture consent for policies that both violate fundamental human rights and cause massive harms.
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