Its been announced that a new "Kent" strain of COVID, based upon the South African variant, is capable of evading the body's immune system. This throws all of the current COVID strategies based upon the development and roll-out of vaccines into chaos. A vaccine is simply an artificial means of creating herd immunity by tricking the body into producing the anti-bodies, and other immune responses that would normally result from infection. But, if this new variant can evade the immune system, that makes vaccines also ineffective, for the same reason. That puts all of the vaccine nationalism nonsense of the last week into perspective.
There is a basic lesson, here, that is being emphasised once again. Viruses, like every other organism change over time. As fairly basic organisms, small changes in their DNA result in multiple and increasingly significant changes in the nature of the virus. This is Darwin's theory of evolution operating in practice before our eyes. The Creationists might not want anything to do with that theory, but the theory is having something to do with them. The lunacy of the strategy of lockdown,, was that its stated purpose was to slow down, and, thereby, extend the period of infection, so called flattening of the curve. That inevitably meant that the virus was in circulation for longer, and so had longer in which to mutate into the different, and potentially more lethal variants.
The new more deadly variants of COVID are a direct result of the strategy of lockdown that governments have pursued, on the advice of a section of the scientific community that is closely connected to the medical-industrial complex whose interests lie in the development of very expensive methods of treatment of illness, rather than the lower-cost prevention of illness.
The evidence available so far is that existing immunity from previous infection, or from vaccination, may not prevent reinfection from these new variants. It may be sufficient to prevent deaths, or more serious illness. But, that is less likely to be the case with those who already have compromised immune systems, i.e. the very elderly, those with existing illnesses such as pulmonary illnesses, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, and so on. There is no evidence that it will be more lethal to the 80% of the population that have always only suffered mild symptoms, or even no symptoms at all.
The strategy of lockdowns has been a total disaster. Yet, we continue to hear pundits on TV claim that it has been a success. How? Most countries have been in some form of lockdown now since last March. They have completely failed to stop the spread of the infection. They never could do so, because its impossible to actually lock everyone down for any period of time. I heard one pundit on Sky News' Press Preview, last night, make this claim and suggest that everyone should stay away from work! he didn't seem able to connect the dots that if they did, then Sky News would not be being broadcast, for him to make such a ridiculous call, nor indeed would there be any electricity production, for anyone to watch TV, or for the whole of society to be able to function!!!
Not, only have lockdowns failed to prevent infections, but nor have they prevented deaths. The biggest effect on deaths was the Summer, when mortality rates fell sharply, largely because of the seasonal effect that, in the Summer, fewer old people become sick, or have accidents, and so fewer of them go into hospital, where they are then likely to be infected with the virus. As its elderly people who are the ones affected by COVID, its that process, and the associated one of the spread of the virus in care homes, that explains the large number of deaths that have occurred in the last few weeks, despite the imposition of even harsher lockdowns. In fact, the big increase in deaths in the last few weeks, despite increased lockdowns shows the extent to which they are a complete failure.
The reality is that lockdowns, along with the much vaunted, and now hardly mentioned, test and trace, were simply diversions, intended to fob people off until the medical-industrial complex could come up with expensive vaccines to sell to people, either directly or via socialised healthcare systems, and paid for out of taxation. This is one reason why there has been so much heat generated over vaccine nationalism.
The medical-industrial complex acts like a giant state capitalist monopoly. Some on the Left have proposed the idea of nationalising the big pharma companies. This shows the extent they are distant from Marxism, or any kind of ability for critical thinking. Suppose the big pharma companies were nationalised. The clue is in the word NATIONalisation. If you think there is vaccine nationalism now, imagine what would be the case with individually nationalised big pharma companies. Britain would most certainly ensure that its drugs remained only for British use, and so on. That is a sure fire recipe for ensuring that economic competition between companies becomes competition between individual nation states, whose rational conclusion is war between those states! That certainly should not be a strategy that socialists have anything to do with.
But, the reality is that the medical-industrial complex does act like a nationalised concern. The big pharma companies get paid billions by states either directly, or indirectly in grants of various kinds, and via their association with universities, such as that with Imperial College, or with Oxford, and so on. The universities play a crucial role for big pharma, because they use state funding, and the brightest and best of academia to develop new drugs and so on that the big pharma companies that take up and produce, and from which they make billions in profits. That is why the medical-industrial complex is so keen to ensure that society is sacred witless about every health problem, and is only ever going to see the solution as coming from some new, very expensive cure. This is exactly what marx and Engels described in Anti-Duhring of the nature of state monopoly capitalism, where the state basically undertakes the risk, but the owners of shares and bonds draw huge amounts of revenues rom the profits made by these huge companies. Its the privatisation of gain, and socialisation of risk on a systemic scale.
But, now the development of the new variant, a direct product of lockdowns itself, means that this strategy has itself been blown out of the water. The main reason for relying on vaccines was to be able to vaccinate the elderly who are the ones who cannot obtain natural immunity, because of their compromised immune systems. But, now, vaccines will be useless for the elderly too. As I said nearly a year ago, that means that the elderly, i.e. those over 60, as well as those with compromised immune systems, will face the prospect of more or less indefinite isolation in order to prevent infection.
The latest twist means that governments will have no alternative but to resort to a strategy of focused protection, so as to ensure that those groups are not infected. The tragedy is that, if a strategy of focused protection had been adopted from the start, herd immunity could have been obtained, cost-free and safely very quickly. It would have ensured that the virus then could not spread, and died out quickly, so preventing its mutating into all these new strains. It would have meant that the economy would not have been wrecked as a result of lockdowns, and it would have meant that the period in which the elderly and vulnerable had to isolate was reduced to just a few months. But, of course, there was no profits for the medical-industrial complex in such a strategy, no big new grants for university research and development, no expansion of health bureaucracy empires and so on.
Meanwhile, Sweden, which imposed no lockdown has had better per capita mortality rates then most countries in Europe that imposed lockdowns, particularly since August, when the achievement of a certain level of herd immunity seems to have been achieved. At the same time, its economy grew by 4.5% quarter on quarter, in the third quarter of last year, and by 0.5% in the fourth quarter, as against the economic devastation that lockdowns have caused elsewhere, and which threaten lives and livelihoods, not to mention the ability to finance healthcare, education and so on for decades to come.
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