Dr. Berman on Vaccinating to Herd Immunity
Claim: Mass vaccinations of the entire eligible population (excluding those previously infected) is the surest and most optimal path to achieve herd immunity and end the covid pandemic.
This is part of a series to highlight the ineptitude and sheer illiteracy of the experts my community has relied upon for covid medical advice. I am only employing arguments that can be made from the data/studies and other information available at the time the claim was made.
Claim: Mass vaccinations of the entire eligible population (excluding those previously infected) is the surest and most optimal path to achieve herd immunity and end the covid pandemic.
Source: On the Covid Vaccinations, published 6/21/21
Background: Widespread establishment opinion was that the vaccines stopped transmission.
The Facts:
Pushing mass vaccination as the only solution exaggerates the risk in the minds of an already frightened population, making it that much more difficult to break the inbred instinctive fear of covid, something necessary to the restoration of normal life.
Mass vaccination can have unexpected results because of various factors, especially evolutionary pressure of a mass-distributed narrowly tailored and leaky vaccine, leading to new vaccine-resistant variants.
Mass vaccination might reduce the quality of everyone’s immunity if it succeeds in driving covid out of circulation temporarily.
Since kids don’t spread covid in meaningful numbers, vaccinating kids is mathematically unable to have a significant effect in reducing transmission.
Covid treatment is a superior alternative to vaccination that carries none of the vaccine’s risks, both side effects and the epidemiological macro-level evolutionary pressure that can (and did) drive the virus to mutate around the existing immunity while becoming more potent.
Every documented pandemic involving a respiratory pathogen ultimately transformed from epidemic to endemic. All of the common-cold coronaviruses in circulation today initially began as pandemics, whose lethality collapsed following successive waves that established across the general population enduring immunological memory as they receded into perpetual endemicity. There was never any reason to presume that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus will prove novel in this regard. It is therefore prudent to assume that SARS-CoV-2 will ultimately remain a part of the seasonal coronavirus pantheon indefinitely.
Working within this paradigm, there were two conflicting epidemiological strategies regarding how best to mitigate the impact of SARS-CoV-2 moving forward. The choices were either to attempt to drive covid out of circulation to the greatest extent possible by maximal immunization of the population, or to focus disease burden mitigation efforts on those uniquely vulnerable to covid while allowing it to circulate freely in the same manner as do the other seasonal respiratory viruses. (I don’t see a “compromise” option as being epidemiologically distinct from the latter option; I framed it as targeted protection because that would be the most sensible, as there would be little utility from an epidemiological standpoint in vaccinating covid-‘naive’ persons without risk factors under this rubric.)
Since historical observation strongly counsels that SARS-CoV-2’s eventual endemicity is unlikely to be thwarted, it is imperative that public policy enable and assist societal readjustment from regarding covid as an exceptional danger towards acceptance of covid as an unremarkable routine virus (which despite the teeth-gnashing and litany of anecdotes from doctors has nonetheless per worldwide data been the case for the majority of demographics). Cognizance of the baseline susceptibility of the frail end elderly to common-cold coronaviruses is likewise essential moving forward, as a society with vivid recollections of covid devastation is liable to erroneously interpret any death caused by covid as indicative of enduring potent lethality.
(For the purpose of providing at least a basic response to anyone whose sensibilities are triggered or traumatized by what I just asserted, NYC represents a wildly aberrant manifestation of covid where numerous aggrandizing factors coincided to produce a disease profile markedly at odds with the rest of the world, including the subsequent winter recurrence of covid in NYC. The initial covid wave that overtook NYC is a subject that desperately requires its own article. It is my emphatic contention that little practical or functional epidemiological knowledge can be extrapolated from that particular covid manifestation (excluding obvious, clearly reproducible micro-level factors, such as the failure of aggressive ventilation). It is irresponsible in any event to extrapolate dispositive fact from the most aberrant instance of something faced by insurmountable contra-indicating evidence. The failure of many doctors and clinicians in the frum world to recognize the profound influence of their traumatization from experiencing (and heroically soldiering through) an apocalyptic nightmare signals disqualifying incorrigible bias afflicting their clinical judgement.)
Returning from our digression, this adjustment is true both psychologically and physiologically.
Psychologically, people must be emotionally detoxed from the overwhelming fear of covid, which presents a formidable barrier not only to the resumption of normal life, but to the necessary wholesale restoration of mental and emotional health (currently itself a catastrophic epidemic), especially for children who have been horrifically impacted in ways we are only beginning to appreciate. A persistent and ubiquitous vaccination push, especially for those who bear no meaningful statistical risk from covid, sends a strong and unmistakable signal to the public that covid not only remains a lurking peril, but that it is likely to retain its perilous character indefinitely. A vaccination campaign furthermore inevitably results in evocative fearmongering (aptly illustrated by contemporaneous rhetoric), as medical professionals seeking to convince recalcitrant people ultimately cannot afford to refrain from portraying real or imagined risks of covid in stark, vivid terms employed specifically for their capacity to convey a sense of horror and terror necessary to overcome stiff emotional resistance, especially regarding children where there is an incomparably greater wariness for potential harms by their parents.
Physiologically, the tendency for immunity to wane when not confronted by its complementary pathogen (as circulating antigen-specific immune cells die out and are not replaced, among other reasons) suggests that the apex strength of a population’s collective immunity to an endemic virus occurs when there remains at least a minority within the population capable of transmitting the virus onwards thus keeping it at minimum in low-ebb circulation, similar to the famous Laffer Curve visualizing the optimal tax rate for the government to maximize its tax receipts. Sufficiently widespread vaccination that temporarily drives a virus out of circulation may result in a population with unexpected novel epidemiological characteristics. As immunity wanes without sporadic re-exposure to a virus, an entire population deprived of such periodic interactions may result in greatly enhanced pathogenicity and lethality of the virus when it inevitably returns to face a somewhat debilitated immunity, unleashing the very monster thought defeated.
This possibility is compounded by the preferential evolutionary pressure inevitably resulting from indiscriminate mass vaccination prejudicially favoring vaccine-resistant variants (due to) carrying a spike protein mutation, seriously jeopardizing not only immunity potency but also threatening severe ADE pathologies greatly enhancing the pathogenicity of subsequently emerging variants. Each additional booster further complicates a cost/benefit analysis that must recalibrate to account for increased occurrence of side effects, which continuing the trend of the sizable rate increase from the 1st to 2nd doses would present an exponential model of increasing risks for a largely undefined epidemiological impact.
Furthermore, a virological ‘arms race’ with a pathogen likely possessing artificially enhanced adaptability traits increases the probability for the ascendance of an immunologically invisible SARS-CoV-2 strain, similarly far more pathogenic and lethal than any currently circulating variant. Although the probability of these hypothesized possibilities is difficult to gauge, the very fact of this abstrusity cautions restraint until further research can reasonably prognosticate differing future epidemiological progressions of covid with elevated granularity.
In any event, the lack of a comparable epidemiological precedent buttressing the conjectured virtues of indiscriminate mass-vaccination makes difficult to justify that those who don’t bear covid disease burden should assume definite risks in the hopes of maybe warding off speculative future injury to others.
Dr. Berman asserted that the ideal path forward is to pursue the extirpation of covid to the extent physically possible for now, however fleeting the victory may prove to be, which in his mind justifies vaccinating the population to the greatest extent possible, including demographics who bear insignificant statistical risk of covid morbidity and mortality. Undoubtedly this is inextricably bound to his assumption of numerous faulty premises, including his inaccurate perception of the vaccine’s risk profile.
This sort of assessment ultimately is perfectly consonant with the myopic, one-dimensional thinking emblematic of the historically unparalleled public-policy abominations that have not only wrought hitherto incomprehensible harm and societal upheaval far disproportional to any potential benefits of such barbaric cruelty but also worsened the targeted virological harms that the policies sought to alleviate. At a minimum, a course of action whose benefits are at best heavily speculative concurrently burdened by serious doubts of possibly encouraging the very harm it attempts to prevent is one ill-suited for practical implementation (and I would add certainly unscrupulous to be employed as a justification to require others to assume personal risk of harm, however slight).
Additionally, the epidemiological impact of vaccinating children is likely insignificant, because there is ample data from around the world demonstrating that children aren’t significant transmission vectors in the first place, in addition to a marked and profound dearth of actual observed cases of asymptomatic transmission (one of the most pernicious lies disseminated during this pandemic). Further bolstering this argument is the fact that – [even!!] per the CDC - almost 40% of children by this point in time had already been infected with covid, which (besides for proving the impotence of the barbaric mitigation efforts such as masking and social distancing,) indicates that there is already some degree of herd immunity among children in any event; married to their innate disposition as non-vectors even without a significant portion bearing immunity unambiguously, this refutes the utility of vaccinating even the remaining naïve children.
A further absolutely critical point is that Dr. Berman seems to be operating under the profound misconception that there exist no viable alternatives to vaccination effective in warding off covid infection or treating covid disease. This is emphatically untrue. The medical community’s standards regarding covid treatments is pockmarked with rank hypocrisies, inconsistently applied vacillating standards, and undeniable corruption. As Dr. Berman didn’t explicitly raise this issue, and considering the already mind-numbing length of this essay, I will forgo a proper analysis of prophylactic and treatment options. Vitamin D, HCQ protocols, and especially Ivermectin are all incredibly potent treatments/prophylaxis that are supported by incredibly robust data, which present not just viable but superior alternatives to the dangerous vaccines currently in use.
Regardless, incomplete transient geographically-constricted extinction is a strategy both epidemiologically unsound and ethically dubious.
Wow! Amazing Very informative & superbly written!
Simple: "The Pfizer Shot is a Bioweapon." Dr. Richard Fleming