It is said that don't know history are bound to repeat it.

@hippyjoe1955 that means my tax money was wasted on vaccine development

@hippyjoe1955 The vaccine or his country's vaccination scheme?

Different things! Their scheme was seen as one of the most rapid and efficient in the world.

@ArishMell He was talking about how all the covid cases in the hospital are people who have been vaxed. The program went according to plan. The vax did not perform as expected. IOW it was a complete failure.

@hippyjoe1955 How many people vaccinated with the full two doses?

Of them, how many later contracted the illness severely enough to need hospital treatment?

It would be a "complete failure" only if everyone who has been vaccinated fell seriously ill.

I have the feeling you want it to be a failure, that you do not want anyone to take even the chance to be protected from the disease. If so... why?

@ArishMell You will have to take that up with the CMOH since those were his words not mine. What I do know it that where I live most of the people in hospital with covid were double jabbed. In Scotland According to the spreadsheet provided by Public Health Scotland; which includes the quantity of deaths by type of vaccine and the date they occurred, 1,877 deaths have been due to the Pfizer mRNA jab, 3,643 deaths have been due to the AstraZeneca viral vector jab, and 2 deaths have been due to the Moderna mRNA jab. But you go ahead and get jabbed if you want to. I still don't know anyone who has had covid.

@hippyjoe1955 What is the chance of dying from a side effect of the virus - genuinely that, not co-incidences - and the chance of dying from Covid?

If the stuff was as dangerous as you want us all to believe they woul dnot be using it, but be desperately searching for alternatives while people all around drop dead from the illness that has killed far more than the vaccine may have done.

If you don't know anyone who has caught disease, is that because they were careful to avoid it or because they were vaccibnated, or both?

I did know one person who caught Covid; before the vaccinations were available. It killed him, though he was already weak with other problems; a common combination.

I have been vaccinated, with minimal after-effects, so has pretty well everyone else I know. We are all still alive...

@ArishMell You make all kinds of silly assumptions. I work with homeless people. Sometimes 50 a day. They don't take care of themselves. They don't avoid things like sleeping in tents together or sharing a bottle. They don't wash their hands all the time and most of them don't have a mask to wear. Yet not one of them has had covid. Hmmmm. Then you make the silly assumption that 'they' wouldn't administer a dangerous substance. "They" were the ones that created the virus in the first place. They were the ones that created the panic. They are the ones forcing people to get vaxed even though they know that there have been thousands of deaths resulting from the vax. Here is a thought experiment. What if those you are trusting to protect you are the ones seeking to do you harm? Would you be aware enough to figure it out?

@hippyjoe1955 I admire your work for the homeless. It may be that living as they do will help their natural immunity; and of course they are are likely not to be in close proximity with many people.

Silly asuumptions though? Like your idea that an un-identified "they" has wilfully created the whole thing and is wilfully administering a potentially lethal vaccine...?

Hmmm.

@ArishMell When a cold breaks out the homeless get it. Many of them avoid the shelter because of the endemic cough the is always present there. When it gets really cold out they go to the shelter and they all get the same hack. They don't have any more natural immunity to diseases than any other person. They live a much more risky life and they tend to die young. So you are not aware of the man made gain of function virus created by the Americans and Chinese? Very strange. Maybe you should brush up on the subject.

@hippyjoe1955 [quote]man made gain of function virus created by the Americans and Chinese?[/quote]

Never heard of it, but I looked it up.

It would seem a perfectly feasible research route but I can see it could be dangerous if an altered virus escapes - but one would hope a vaccine against it would have been developed with it.

The fact remains though that however Covid-19 it has embarked on a highly successful world tour, and refusing to be protected against it, or playing politics with it, helps no-one.

@ArishMell given that there is no vax for it and given that there are effective therapies for it that are being denied who exactly is playing politics with a "gain of function" virus and why?

@hippyjoe1955 You seem to think the whole pandmic was a deliberate act but some unidentified "they" for no idendifiable reasons!

I can accept the virus may have escaped from a laboratory just as it may have come from very poor animal-handling hygeine. I don't know this any more than you do.

Nor do you or I know if this particular virus was a so-called "gain of function" test species.

The stark truth is that we don't really know the pandemic's [i]origin[/i], only where it was first [i]identified[/i].

Same with the variants working their way down the Greek alphabet (Physics and Maths will never seem the same again!) Though at first given regional names, the places are only of initial identification.

The Chinese Government has not been very co-operative in this, but it's important to understand Chinese society beyond her present politics. Asian societies generally tend to defer to authority; but China's local Prty and Police officers are of a society whose deferral to and fear of authority has been ingrained over many centuries. Her Revolution simply replaced a succession of Emperors with a self-perpetuating committee. It's largely that which led to behaviour that raised so many suspicions, especially during very strained East-West relations.

'

There is another reason the illness' real origins are vague. Its symptoms in mild cases are much like those of other respiratory illnesses. It's entirely possible that the thing was already quite well established from an untraceable source before it was first identified in a definite town after an unusually large number of cases of very bad coughs or even something like pneumonia. This too in busy towns with live-animal markets lacking proper standards of hygeine and animal welfare.

The Chinese then made a huge mistake in trying to suppress the news, by local officials fearful of those above them. Once they did realise what was happening the Government was very quick to publish the virus' genetics around the world so researchers everywhere could start finding if not a cure then certainly a vaccine.

If intended as a biological weapon but it escaped prematurely, the Chinese government would have found their own vaccine, but they would have not published the virus' and vaccine's nature abroad.

''''

Coronavirus diseases are very hard to "cure". They cannot be treated with antibiotics and it comes down to reducing the symptoms and helping the body heal itself. The UK Government's Porton Down biological laboratory spent some decades trying to find a vaccine and cure for one Corona-virus disease, only to find it always stays a step ahead. That disease? The Common Cold.

Luckily, despite your apparent wish for vaccines to fail, the Covid-19 species so far at least can be held at bay by vaccine, but a vaccine works by bolstering the body's defences, not by attacking the virus itself.

'''''

So we cannot prove that the SARS-Covid_19 virus was a laboratory escapee; there is certainly no point in thinking it was deliberately let out; the wretched thing is all around the world.

So it is up to the world to work together to fight it.

- That fight is not helped by certain national leaders having tried to deny the disease is real or at least play it down, for their own political reasons.

- It is not helped by people who refuse to believe it and refuse to obey any advice or rules intended to protect each other.

- It is not helped by that other pernicious virus: ignorance and lies spread on "[anti?]social media".

That last is not just genuinely ignorant private individuals claiming they "heard of someone who said the vaccine made her best friends' cousin's great-aunt, infertile", or "read that the vaccine holds miniature 5G 'phones". Anyone with an ounce of sense would ignore piffle like that.

The real problem, not just affecting the pandemic, is a raft of very deliberate, professionally-produced on-line magazines looking like serious, analytical "news" to mislead so readers into following the line intended. I have been shown a few of these, not just about the pandemic; and whilst they all looked American I think at least one may have have been from Russia.

'''

So [i]who [/i]is politicising it?

Well, first the Chinese government by trying to hush things up for its own reputation.

Later and much more seriously by an unholy mix of "pandemic-deniers": a few national leaders, various conspiracy-fantasists, opponents of public health services and regulations, and murky professional sources of anti-vaccine and other propaganda designed to undermine anything governmental.

The last sources are not necessarily in the target countries. Though nor involving the pandemic, the UK Government has recently banned one neo-Nazi group that appears American, but was found to be run from Russia. The nucleii might not even be formal organisations, just anonymous individuals on-line; though some might be acting on state commission.

'''

[i]Why[/i]? the politicising?

We may well ask.

We'd have to ask those presidents, public-health opponents and propaganda publishers themselves, but they won't or can't say, of course. It almost looks as if they want pandemics to spread, huge numbers of people to die, businesses and public services to be crippled. Only they can say why; but I suspect many would be unable to give any sensible, convincing, logical explanation.

I wonder if these types think the same of vaccines against many other really nasty diseases: TB, polio, tetanus, etc.?

@ArishMell https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/07/20/senator-rand-paul-confronts-a-very-nervous-and-lying-dr-anthony-fauci/

@hippyjoe1955 Hmmm. I'm not getting drawn into your country's febrile domestic politics. It's not my place and I don't understand them or know about the individuals.