On 9 July, President Joe Biden’s former Covid czar Ashish Jha conceded that vaccine mandates, which he had backed, ‘bred a lot of distrust’ in the long run and did cause harms as well. Studies continue to be published to the effect that policy interventions to fight the pandemic – lockdowns, masks, vaccines – saved millions of lives. Thus a study by Watson et al. published in Lancet Infectious Diseases in June 2022 estimated, using mathematical modelling of course, that just in its first year to 8 December 2021, vaccinations saved 14.4 million lives. Christopher Ruhm, in an article in JAMA Health Forum on 26 July, found that if all US states had followed the restrictions of the ten most restrictive states, there would have been 118,000-248,000 fewer US deaths in the two years to 8 December 2022. Perhaps.

Other studies claim that to the contrary, the number of deaths that policy interventions have caused and are likely to cause in the long term from the combined downstream effects, including severely disrupted healthcare and pharmaceutical supply chains, missed childhood immunisations, learning disruptions, hunger and poverty, will greatly exceed the sum of lives saved. On 19 July a 520-page paper by three Canadian researchers, based on data from 125 countries for 2021 and 2022, calculated the number of all-cause excess deaths ‘associated with’ Covid vaccines to be 16.9 million – 2.4 times the number of Covid deaths until February 2024 as per the World Health Organisation. An article published online on 21 June in Forensic Science International, based on a systematic review of autopsy data, found that 73.9 per cent of all Covid-related deaths were either caused or significantly impacted by Covid vaccines.

In September 2021, the UK government, acting on the advice of Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty who overrode the more cautious Joint Committee on Vaccines and Immunisation (JCVI), authorised the vaccination of 5-to-11-year-old children. This was done despite a warning from a group of 26 Tory MPs that overruling expert advice from the JCVI risked ‘dissolving the bond of trust’ between the public and the government. A new preprint on 20 May from a team at Oxford University reports on a study of a total of 415,884 vaccinated and unvaccinated children. They came to three important findings: there was not a single Covid-related death in either group among otherwise healthy children; the vaccinated had marginally better health outcomes on hospitalisation (1 additional child per 10,000) and A&E attendance (1 per 20,000); but these were mostly offset by the incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis which put 1 in 25,000 vaccinated kids into hospital. The economic cost worked out at £1.3 million for each hospital visit saved and £600 thousand for each A& E attendance saved (not death) that was averted. The moral of the story: trust neither the science nor the scientists.

Record-level data for ten million people in the Czech Republic were analysed by Steve Kirsch to show that all-cause deaths among 45-to-69-year-olds given Moderna vaccines were more than 50 per cent above those from Pfizer vaccines. Treating the latter as the placebo group allowed him to control for other potentially confounding variables and limit causality to vaccines. An Israeli study published on 26 June in the high-impact journal Nature explained how the Pfizer vaccine causes menstrual irregularities. For one compilation of scientific studies documenting vaccine injuries, with hyperlinks, see: https://ladycasey.substack.com/p/scientific-studies-on-vaccine-injuries

Yet, articles and reviews critical of the official narrative on masks and vaccines, authored by well-credentialled experts and published in leading scientific outlets after rigorous peer review processes, were sometimes retracted or had cautionary notes added by nervous editors, only to be vindicated months or a year later, greatly diminishing their impact during the critical period. The eminent British oncologist Angus Dalgliesh wrote on 11 July that there’s been a systematic suppression of the truth about the link between Covid vaccines and cancer and death.

In an interview with the Brisbane Times on 30 April 2020, Queensland’s then-chief health officer (and now Governor) Jeannette Young made it clear that her logic on school closures was primarily political. She accepted the evidence that schools are not a high-risk environment for the spread of the virus but argued that closing them helped to convince people how grave the situation was. ‘So sometimes it’s more than just the science and the health, it’s about the messaging.’ There’s additional evidence of the creeping politicisation of the medical profession. The British Medical Association has rejected the Cass review into gender-identity services in England. Last week it called on the government to lift the ban on puberty blockers for adolescents disoriented about their sexuality. In another sign of the creeping ideological takeover of medical science, an article published in JAMA Pediatrics on 1 July substituted ‘pregnant people’ and ‘pregnant persons’ for pregnant women.

On 1 August, the Australian Medical Association warned that the nation’s overstretched health system is at a tipping point with a real risk of life expectancy falling over the next ten years. Yet the AMA went along with all the questionable Covid eradication policies that wasted billions of dollars that could otherwise have been used to strengthen the public health infrastructure, and also with un- and even some anti-scientific interventions and mandates that damaged trust in the medical profession. A 24-wave survey of 443,455 US adults across the 50 states, published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that overall, trust in physicians and hospitals had plummeted from 71.5 to 40.1 per cent between April 2020 and January 2024. Trust had fallen in every group in the survey by age, gender, race and income. Unsurprisingly, lower levels of trust correlated with lower rates of vaccination. There’s little reason to believe the situation in Australia is much different.

The media could have helped to contain the deepening loss of public trust in the medical profession and the public health clerisy by adopting its customary role of interrogating official claims and reporting fearlessly and neutrally on the significant minority of medical and scientific opinion that expressed disquiet at the abandonment of an established public health consensus on managing pandemics. Instead, as Adam Creighton argued in the Australian on 3 April 2023, ‘a too credulous, incurious mainstream media’, with too many journalists acting as ‘cheerleaders for the health bureaucracy and politicians’, must wear much of the blame for the ‘Covid vaccines’ wall of infallibility’ that has caused so much lasting harm.