Gags, jabs and rags

This is just another miscellany of current COVID madness, with some explanation of why it is planned to continue indefinitely.

First, catch these videos from Dr Pierre Kory before YouTube takes them down. He is the US physician who has been championing Ivermectin against Big Science, but like so many professionals who start looking closely, has concluded the dirt goes even deeper than that, much as was say saying here even before COVID was happening. The Zoom contact with the host apparently broke down, so for a more or less continuous presentation, watch this to around 52:14, and then this (timestamped to carry on where he left off).


Second, a word on the strange (if we weren’t entirely expecting strange anyway) pronouncement that UK citizens over 50 will need a third jab and regular boosters come autumn, maybe of new-variant vaccines yet to appear untrialled, maybe of your original tipple, or maybe of one of the others to ring the changes on side-effects.

My observation here is that there appears to be no trial data whatsoever on which to base either the need, or the effectiveness, or the safety, of this. “It is thought…” does not constitute a compelling medical case for a therapy, except to charlatans. Compare that with their demand for large-scale RCTs before even allowing Ivermectin to be prescribed in most countries.

As far as is known, all the vaccines produce both a decent antibody and a decent T-cell response, so there is every reason to believe immunity will last as long as SARS-1 immunity has. On what evidence is the need for a booster based?

Then it is suggested that mixing vaccine types or giving a booster of the first will give lots more immunity to fight variants in the absence of a new formulation. That seems pretty speculative, not to mention absurd. If a new variant were to arise that bypassed natural or vaccine immunity from available vaccines, why should more of the old antigens make one any more immune to new ones? Two flu jabs will make you no less susceptible to measles. And of course, both in theory and practice it is unlikely that a Coronavirus will mutate significant novel variants – unless through selection due to vaccinating too many people. Variants appear to be another fearmongering scare, rightly labelled “scariants”. It comes from the same power bases that want to 6uild 6ack 6etter.

Dr Kory’s presentation gives the entire reason why governments, government advisers, the WHO, and those who call the shots in Big Pharma and NGOs would promote this (whilst militantly suppressing knowledge of Ivermectin, Vitamin D and so on). Persuading the whole world they need vaccines annually is a potentially endless source of revenue (especially as the aim is to hike up the prices post-pandemic). Whilst one can maintain the public fear and the vaccine-passports, it is also a wonderful means of political and economic control. If people die through the vaccines (over 1,000 yellow-card vaccine deaths in the UK now) or the denial of effective, cheap treatments, it’s a small price to pay for staying safe. Or something.

But the main reason I won’t be volunteering for a booster is that, as well as being totally unnecessary for an immune person of my age for an endemic virus, the increasing theoretical risk of cytokine storm with multiple doses of RNA vaccines makes the cost-benefit balance increasingly like Russian roulette. One might as well give the vaccines to well children, of whom only nine died of COVID between the ages of 12 and 19 last year, and none below that age… oh, that’s happening too? Yes, even as we speak the long term safety trials are beginning before mass rollout in four months time: it’s as much of a triumph for British paediatrics as routine circumcision was 50 years ago.

This might serve the interests of those, like Bill Gates, who say the world is overpopulated. An amazing number even of COVID and climate skeptics have swallowed the doomsday pill on population (but see here). I’m not afraid of dying, but I’m damned if I’m going to volunteer in order to keep Astra-Zeneca and David Attenborough happy.


Lastly, since the rumour on the streets is that mandatory face-masks are likely to be an ongoing sign of our new-found freedom come June, I thought I’d give some reminders from a medic’s perspective, in case you’ve forgotten how nonsensical masks are. I said a little about their ineffectiveness in my last post, but here is some homespun wisdom to demonstrate why, and just how ineffective.

Dr Kory’s work was amongst the first to demonstrate that COVID is spread atmospherically, ie by aerosols rather than droplets, leading to the realisation that medical staff dealing with it need N-95 type masks to stay safe. COVID spreads by particles 20 times smaller than smoke particles – the reason that social distancing is useless (they are planning on abandoning that come June). If you can’t avoid the smell of a smoker in the room through your mask, even less is it keeping out any SARS particles. Chain-link fences do not keep out flies, whatever a government scientist might tell you.

N-95 masks need to be fitted carefully to the face, must not be touched in use, and have to be renewed every couple of hours. Maybe that’s why they’re called “respirators,” not masks. They cost a pound each, and even if civilians can afford that, the research has shown they are ineffective when used by the general public, for the obvious reasons that they’re not fitted carefully, are uncomfortable if they are because they have five layers, will seldom be replaced if touched accidentally and will certainly not be renewed several times a day for walking round Tesco. Oh yes – and my green friends will certainly object to all that single use plastic littering the Pacific.

But in my operating theatre days, surgeons didn’t wear N95 masks, though our masks were still sterile and single-use for each procedure. To fit the face reasonably well, they had separate ties at top and bottom – definitely not a one hand “slip it on in the supermarket” job. Yet since my day, research has shown that, despite their mythic status, surgical masks have no effect on the rate of bacterial wound infection. That’s either because surgeons don’t actually dribble, or more likely because bacteria pass through them, but a net that won’t keep a shark out is no use for catching herring. Try it.

But surgeon’s masks are too expensive for nurses doing their wound care in the clinic (and for minor ops sessions in general practice, once it became mandatory in the NHS to look the part in gloves and masks). So they use those cheapo ones with the elastic that goes round the ears – yes, the ones sold as “disposable surgical masks” on Amazon. Given how recently the work on surgeon’s masks was done, I’m not at all sure that there has ever been any controlled trial of their effectiveness. Maybe that’s because it’s not very clear what they’re for, other than to make the nurse look more medical and reduce the smell of the wound. Any of you nurses know of a single paper published on them? You can bet, though, that if proper masks don’t stop bacteria, these Type 2 masks have no effect at all on filtering viruses. (Incidentally, that reminds me that the old term was “filterable viruses,” because they passed straight through a porcelain filter – so don’t bother to wear a china mask, either).

That self-evident problem of scale is what makes mask mandates so pernicious. When they came in last summer, “pensioners hours” at supermarkets were discontinued in the superstitious belief that the masks were as effective a protection (that said, the SARS aerosols would still be drifting around in a cloud even once the younger shoppers left the shop). You’ll maybe also have seen policemen getting in the faces of protestors against lockdown, and then excusing their own lack of social distancing by pointing to their Type 2 dispos. All utterly, utterly useless, and even counterproductive, yet imposed by decree on penalty of fines – though admittedly a couple of plys less polluting than the N-95s.

But it’s not only keen environmentalists who eschew these totally disposable masks in favour of re-useable cloth masks, which would fail by orders of magnitude even any test that Type 2’s pass. After all, you can’t put a slogan or a union jack on a paper mask, whereas cloth masks can make a virtue-signalling fashion statement even though they’re no more effective at keeping viruses out than string bikinis are at keeping out winter gales or film directors.

Anybody out there able to crochet me a mask that says, “Yours doesn’t work either”?

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About Jon Garvey

Training in medicine (which was my career), social psychology and theology. Interests in most things, but especially the science-faith interface. The rest of my time, though, is spent writing, playing and recording music.
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