The coronavrius narrative from the Government is turning more and more destructive.
Let us go back one year (almost like another century now). There were initial reports from Wuhan, and the mortality rate was uncertain due to the relatively long duration of the disease. The death rate could have been as high as 50%!!
The Government fail to act on this when they should have reacted instantenous and closed the borders, and internate every citizen coming from high risk places.
The Prime minister bagatalized it and called it flu. The other false narrative was that this was coming from the markets in Wuhan, but I from the start thought it was much more likely that it came from the virus facility in Wuhan as they have an ongoing research on Coronaviridae that are primarily isolated from bats. It is still unclear to me if this was an accident or done strategically by the Chinese, but I would say it is 80% likely that it was done strategically.
When the virus was already inside Norway and other countries, then the Goverment started lock-downs, but now it was already to late and not mitigating much risk at all. Also, the economic and societal effects (psychological health etc.) were massively in favor of going for a herd immunity strategy (even factoring in some uncertainties about the immune response (effect, duration)), that the death rate of the virus was proven to be rather low and the victims where 90% patients in nursing homes, where it is also impossible to find out if they died because or with corona.
The lock down strategy was also based on the mostly irrelevant R-number. For example in Oslo most of the infected are immigrants where the R-number is several time higher than ethnic Norwegians. This could be due to lower vitamin D levels that are known to be protective, more contact between the indivuals in the group (huging, kissing etc. (Norwegians have a 1 meter rule by default) and most likely several unknown factors.
The rule was the 1 meter rule, which is very arbitrarely, and not backed by science. At first it was recommended to use a face mask (not firmly backed by science), but now it is heavily promoted and most people use it. I think it is likely that the 1 meter rule and face masks can have a minor protective effect, but there are many unkown unknown about the kinetics in viral spread (could be a topic for several posts), and warranting some humility from the governement. The Goverments are showing their true colors: The measures were to late, ineffective and doing much more harm than benefit. It also shows how ridiculous it is to treat every person equal.
The measures should, if any, be directed against immigrants, and rest of the Society could be kept open. For example there are almost no example of viral spread in gyms, bars or shops, but they are still forced to close or not serve alcohol for the bars. Just like all regulations from the state.
So I expect the coronavirus story to lead to big sociological and political chagnes. It is also ridiculous to see that most politicians make regulations based on the number tested and not the positives with symptoms. I do not believe that most politicians have the intelligence to understand even the basics here. For example the city council lead in Oslo is a plumber, with extremly poor mathematical skills.
Ok. Back to the vaccines. The plan from the state was to try to minimalize the infection, while waiting for the vaccines, giving a lot of power away from the people to the pharma industry, NGOs, Gates etc.
The move was risky, but we got vaccines pretty early, and this can have some positive effect about how early we can get medicines to market in general (more dynamic studies, less regulatory work etc.).
The idea is seems is that every citizen, disregarding risk for corona, should be vaccinated, and also that you perhaps need a vaccine passport to travel, firmly putting the regime amongst the collectivistic and dictatorial, reducing the freedom for the individual incrementally, but at an alarmingly fast rate.
Are the vaccines safe? Or more important, how is the risk benefit for the individual?
We do know that risk for a healthy ethnic Norwegian is low. Should a 30 year old healthy, blonde woman take it??
Probably not. The Pfizer and MODERNA vaccines are so called mRNA vaccines which is a new technology. With introducing viral mRNA the human cells themselves can producing antigens. The risk I can see for healthy individuals is that they can overproduce antigens, which make their strong and healthy immune system overreact leading to deadly immune reactions (anaphylactic shock / SIRS (systemic inflammatory response syndrom / vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia ). For me, this make me very skeptical that healthy individuals should take it.
The Astra Zeneca vaccine is based on a more conventional approach and contains weakened versions of the common cold virus with genetic material from the coronavirus leading to an immune reaction.
However, it has been shown that some people overproduce antiviral antibodies leading to hyperviscosity in the blood with blood cloths and bleeding, so called vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT). This interesting findings with 5 patients form Norway where published in New England Journal of Medicine yesterday: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2104882. 3 of the patients, all healthy young healthcare personel, died because of VITT.
This is of course extremly tragic and my thought goes to their families. Keep in mind that from a risk benefit perspective there should be almost no death of younger healthy people before the vaccine is doing much more harm than benefit, i.e. killing people.
I do believe at this point that younger healthy people should not take the vaccine, and I will actively give that recommnedation. For older people, I would probably say that the risk benefit is in favor of taking tha vaccine for now.
It will be interesting to see how this Saga continues. Will it be a tragedy? Will the state back down on their approach (highly unlikely)? Will the rational philosophical thoughts be more actualized, leading to a change in politics? How will decentralization and the crypto economy affect this?
Interesting times ahead of us, and may you all feel blessed to live in such interesting times.
At least I do.
