Meme - "Everyone took a test before the party. ldk, I work for a doctor & he said you can't catch covid from food or drinks because the bacteria in your mouth and stomach kills it. It's only volatile when you touch your eyes & nose or breath it in. But again he is colonizer so idk"
"Girl this what that colonizer told me ! I don't trust MDs no more only DOs"
Clearly, grievance mongering is good because it makes minorities trust health experts more and reduces their risk of covid
Ian Miller on Twitter - "Well everyone, it’s officially well over 14 weeks since Michael Osterholm said back in January that the next 6-14 weeks would be the darkest of the pandemic Cases are down -76% Score yet another win for The Science™"
From May 2021
Before epidemiologists began modelling disease, it was the job of astrologers - "Astrologers were seen as important authorities for the health of communities as well as individuals. They offered public health advice in annual almanacs, which were some of the most widely read literature in the premodern world."
How dare people question The Science?!
LEVY: Vaccinated retirement home residents isolated for meals again | Toronto Sun - "Cooper says the dining room is often the “only outing” for her mom, who will be 87 in May and has physical limitations. After being confined to her room almost continuously for more than a year now, what was once mild cognitive impairment has degraded so much that Bernice is no longer able to discern between clean and dirty laundry, she is so confused by the remote control she watches only one TV channel and she can’t remember whether she’s eaten or not, her daughter says... “She spends her days alternating between sleeping and crying,” Cooper said of her mom. “She is desperately lonely and confused.” She wonders what’s the point of vaccinating everyone if they are still being confined to their rooms — a move she feels is “cruel and unjust". “If I kept my dog locked up in his crate 24/7 for over a year I would be arrested and hauled off to jail for cruelty to animals,” Cooper said. “Yet keeping seniors confined to their rooms 24/7 is okay?""
From 2021. Of course, even in 2023, covid hystericists still think the vaccines don't work
Numerous Human Rights Declarations Speak Out Against Coercive Medicine - "Since the horrors of WWII, and the diabolical things done by the Nazis – including the German medical and scientific communities – there has been a slew of various human rights declarations, health acts, and ethics codes written around the world. Many of them seek to counter and offset the sorts of things that were done in Nazi Germany. A common theme found in almost all of them is that there should be no coercion or compulsion in medical treatment, and full informed consent should be insisted upon. Before any medical treatment or intervention is undertaken, a person must first give consent – without any coercion or manipulation. This vitally important principle seems to have been thrown out the window by far too many politicians, leaders, governments and businesses during the Covid crisis, especially in regard to mandatory vaccinations. Many states are simply demanding that people get the jab – end of story. And numerous businesses and companies are doing the same. Not only is this creating a new medical apartheid, a two-tiered society with a health underclass, but it goes against these vital human rights charters and ethics declarations. Places like Australia – where much of this medical coercion and health segregation is taking place – happen to be signatories to many of these covenants and declarations. Indeed, at both federal and state levels Australia also has its own acts and declarations on these things."
The vaxhole cope will be that "consequences" are not coercion. Presumably that means that it's okay to tie welfare payments to sterilisation; one can also say that if you show that you need welfare, you are harming society, so this is justified to prevent you from burdening society even more
Johns Hopkins professor SLAMS Ivy League universities for 'anti-scientific and cruel' COVID policies - "At Georgetown University students are tested each week for COVID and if they are found to be positive, they must isolate for 10 days At Cornell, masks must be worn at all times when indoors and they are strongly encouraged outdoors when distancing is not possible Students at Emerson are required to stay in their dorms and only leave to be COVID tested, go to work, get food or get their mail But over the last six months, the risk of a person 15 to 24 dying of COVID was 0.001 percent and they were mainly among people with comorbidities. The policies could also negatively affect a student's mental health...
Dr. Marty Makary blamed groupthink at such higher learning institutions as Georgetown, Cornell, Princeton, UMass and Emerson for creating undue harm on the mental health of college students... 'At these institutions of higher learning and thousands more, science is supposedly held in the highest esteem. So where is the scientific support for masking outdoors? Where is the scientific support for constantly testing fully vaccinated young people? Where is the support for the confinement of asymptomatic, young people who test positive for a virus to which they are already immune on a campus of other immune people?' Markay wrote. 'The data simply do not justify any of it.' In fact, Makary wrote, colleges could be putting healthy students at risk by mandating vaccines and booster shots after a study found that as many as 1 in 1,860 men 18-24 years old developed myocarditis after the second shot... There is, however, a risk to a student's mental health, Makary argued, citing a study by The Jed Foundation, a nonprofit that combats adolescent suicide, which found that over the course of 2020, 31 percent of parents said their children's mental health was worse than before the pandemic. In June, the CDC also found that the proportion of mental health–related emergency hospital visits among adolescents aged 12–17 years increased 31 percent in 2020 when compared to the rate in 2019. The US Surgeon General has since declared a mental health crisis among young people globally, citing studies showing that 25 percent of adolescents saying they are experiencing depression and 20 percent saying they are experiencing anxiety... 'Everyone's just fed up at this point,' the unnamed student said. 'People walk around the library and yell at you if you drink a sip of water. And that was during finals.' She said she is thinking of transferring to a school in the South 'just to have an in-person experience.'... Makary blames the mainstream media and public officials for silencing any criticism of these 'draconian' policies. 'Over the past several months, students from around the country have reached out to me, outraged at excessive policies imposed upon them,' Makary wrote. 'They were afraid to be identified in this essay for fear of retaliation. And for good reason. Around the country students have been punished, suspended, and even expelled for violations of draconian masking and socializing policies. 'It’s time for them to speak out.'
He closed by posing a serious of questions that officials have refused to answer but must be asked, including:
Will boosters be required every 3-6 months in perpetuity?
How many healthy college students have died from Covid during the pandemic?
Will we continue to take all these precautions next year if influenza poses the same case fatality rate?
If I have circulating antibodies from prior Covid illness, will the university recognize those antibodies as countries in Europe do?"
From 2022. He dared challenge The Science, so his medical degree should have been revoked
Marty Makary MD, MPH on Twitter - "New study: Myocarditis seen in 11 per 100K boys/men 16-29 after vaccination. Study methodology far more accurate than VAERS. This is why IMPORTANT to recognize natural immunity & respect parents who choose 1-dose (what I've been recommending for boys<30"
CDC identities a potential safety signal with Bivalent vaccines - "This administration's vaccine policy has been horrible, and always erred on the side of pushing doses. They initially denied the safety signal of myocarditis. They delayed pulling J&J in young women. They never banned Moderna in young men. And they rubber-stamped kids vaccines with inadequate efficacy data. All the while, they made no exemption for prior infection. They pushed vaccines in a reckless way, so much so that Marion Gruber and Phil Krause resigned from FDA’s vaccine division. The worst offenders have been: Walensky, Murthy, Jha, Califf, Fauci and Marks. Most recently, long after the emergency phase of the pandemic ended, this administration granted EUA to the bivalent booster (down to 5 year olds!) based initially on mouse data, and, to this day, supported only by confounded observational studies. Arguably this is an illegal action as there is no emergency to justify boosting 20 year old men who had 3 doses. Sensible doctors knew this was an error, as did the American people. Less than 20% signed up for the booster. Pfizer had a 100 billion reason they should have performed and RCT, but this administration felt it better they save that money than run a study. Now a reminder comes why this was bad policy... it appears a safety signal of stroke may be identified. Of course, there is nothing magic about 65, so it may also occur at younger ages. What is the absolute risk? Where is the press conference? Sadly, no further info followed. A sensible FDA commish would hold a press conference and state what was known. Instead of that, our FDA commish tweets a picture of himself in a grow house. Who told him that the best way to handle the announcement of a novel vaccine safety signal was to immerse yourself in lettuce? Bottom line is: when you approve products without RCTs that can prove a net clinical benefit, even modest safety signals can be devastating. This administration is playing fast and loose with the agencies credibility. If this safety signal turns out to be salient. Their reputation will rightly be in tatter. They may not care, but reputation matters."
Anyone who doesn't Trust the Science is a Denier
Thread by @MartyMakary on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The association that stoke is more common after the bivalent vax *disappeared* when CDC re-did the analysis "using the same data but different methodology" But you can't just run different stat tests until you get the result you want Make the data public Remarkably the FDA lobbied not to release the result to the public because it "would fuel anti-vaccine sentiment and scare older Americans into avoiding the boosters" Why is FDA, the nation's drug regulators, working so hard to supress data? If there is an association of the bivalent vaccine with ischemic stroke, it wouldn't be surprising. The Covid vax was recently found to increase the risk of P.E. (blood clots to the lung) by 50% The study published last wk of 30M people is 2yrs too late"
Thread by @MartyMakary on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "“According to CDC data, three groups benefit from booster dosing with regard to protection from hospitalization..” the elderly, the immunocomp & those with mult comorb that put them @ risk of sev dis
“Healthy young people are not in those 3 groups..That’s the CDC data.” -Dr Offit
Interesting to see our nation's chief drug regulator defend Pharma after Dr. Offit and other vaccine experts have challenged the universality of the bivalent vaccine-for-all recommendation"
Marty Makary MD, MPH on Twitter - "A new FDA group put together by the commissioner defines misinformation as any view different from the official govt position on Covid. And California can revoke your medical license for disagreeing with the CA dept of health. We should all agree doctors need freedom of speech."
Vaccination rates drop among US kindergarten students in 2021-22
Clearly nothing to do with how covid vaccines have been politicised and rammed through
AB-2098 is an unjust law and it is our duty to oppose it - "Today AB-2098 went into effect as law in California. This is the law that will empower the Medical Board of California to revoke the licenses of physicians who disseminate “Misinformation” or, as the bill says “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus” on COVID-19. I am both a practicing physician in California and an epidemiologist who has published numerous peer reviewed articles on COVID-19 transmission, vaccine risks and benefits and evidence for masking children. During the pandemic, repeatedly what has been called “scientific consensus” has later been shown to be false. It was the physicians and scientists (and other smart people; you really didn’t need any specific credentials) who were most up-to-date on the data who saw there was no consensus and they usually saw it from the beginning… because the error in thinking was the same: people (our public health leaders) were too quick to declare there was a consensus. Probably the most famous example was the claim vaccines stop transmission. Second, there was the idea masks effectively stop transmission. Our own CDC director said they could do this by “by more than 80%”. My understanding is this statement was based on the results of a telephone survey… and was a far cry from a randomized study, which so far have found no to little (in Bangladesh, though even that has been called into question) efficacy of masks against COVID-19. Then there was the myth that in adolescent boys and young males post COVID myocarditis was more common than post vaccine- also shown to be false. All of these are now disproven and, if AB-2098 had been in place 1-2 years ago, stating the above, which initially went against consensus but turned out to be correct, may have resulted in California physicians unjustly losing their licenses. Are we really incapable of learning from the past? Very often it feels like it, but to be honest, we don’t even need to bring up the myriad examples in medicine and science where the dominant narrative of the day went on to be proven false (after all, disproving widely held beliefs is science)... We can simply see now that some of the text of the bill is basically always inaccurate... we are far from being able to say there is “scientific consensus” on the current efficacy of the primary series or boosters or bivalent boosters - period, especially given such a high estimate of current infection-based immunity (in November 2022 up to 94% of the population were estimated to have been infected in the US.. though this is a based on a model). The text of AB-2098, as it stands, reads like a script that physicians are supposed to say that is perpetually incorrect, misleading and lacking context and individualization. It requires no knowledge of the law to see how problematic it is for a government to script a physician’s speech in a way that ignores all context and individualization. Next, we have this line in the text of the law that says “safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines have been confirmed”. What does this mean exactly? What are physicians allowed to say? For example, what about risks of post-vaccination myocarditis in including death as published in the New England Journal? What about the on average higher chance of a young adult male of having myocarditis from a booster than having a COVID-19 hospitalization prevented from one? And what about our own CDC reporting in the Lancet 27% of post vaccination myocarditis cases require ICU admission? What about the fact even the NEJM is published data finding total lack of vaccine effectiveness against infection by 4 months in (previously uninfected!) 5-11 year olds?... “the law’s vagueness renders it unconstitutional”... if physicians are not free to give their fully-informed opinions, this infringes upon patients’ rights to receive information"
We're still doing Covid censorship in 2023
Weird. Liberals keep saying that the government should not interfere in healthcare decisions, which should be between patients and their doctors. That doesn't apply when liberals disagree, of course
COVID-19 vaccine boosters for young adults: a risk benefit assessment and ethical analysis of mandate policies at universities - "In 2022, students at North American universities with third-dose COVID-19 vaccine mandates risk disenrolment if unvaccinated. To assess the appropriateness of booster mandates in this age group, we combine empirical risk-benefit assessment and ethical analysis. To prevent one COVID-19 hospitalisation over a 6-month period, we estimate that 31 207–42 836 young adults aged 18–29 years must receive a third mRNA vaccine. Booster mandates in young adults are expected to cause a net harm: per COVID-19 hospitalisation prevented, we anticipate at least 18.5 serious adverse events from mRNA vaccines, including 1.5–4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalisation). We also anticipate 1430–4626 cases of grade ≥3 reactogenicity interfering with daily activities (although typically not requiring hospitalisation). University booster mandates are unethical because they: (1) are not based on an updated (Omicron era) stratified risk-benefit assessment for this age group; (2) may result in a net harm to healthy young adults; (3) are not proportionate: expected harms are not outweighed by public health benefits given modest and transient effectiveness of vaccines against transmission; (4) violate the reciprocity principle because serious vaccine-related harms are not reliably compensated due to gaps in vaccine injury schemes; and (5) may result in wider social harms. We consider counterarguments including efforts to increase safety on campus but find these are fraught with limitations and little scientific support. Finally, we discuss the policy relevance of our analysis for primary series COVID-19 vaccine mandates."
In defence of Karol Sikora - "Professor Sikora is the cancer expert who has been questioning the Covid consensus for the past few months. He has queried the need for harsh lockdowns and kicked up a necessary fuss over the NHS’s suspension of various forms of medical treatment, including for cancer. In the fog of fear about Covid-19, Sikora has shone a light of hope. We’ll get through it, he says. Don’t live in dread, he counsels. Let normal life, and normal medical treatment, continue as much as possible, he’s advised... For the supposed crime of not being entirely right about the course coronavirus would take, Professor Sikora is now public enemy No1 in the eyes of the lockdown fanatics. Leading the mob, as is so often the case these days, is Guardian columnist Owen Jones. From the very start of the Covid crisis, Mr Jones, like many other privileged millennial leftists, has relished the authoritarianism of the lockdown. In March he expressed delight at being ‘placed under house arrest along with millions of people under a police state by a right-wing Tory government’. Yes, if you are well-off, middle class, capable of working from home and cancer-free, lockdown was probably a riot. For other people, however, it wasn’t. Professor Sikora’s chief sin was to express this truth – to say that lockdown will exact a wicked toll on many people – and now privileged beneficiaries of lockdown like Mr Jones are out to destroy him for it. Jones’ complaint about Sikora is that he has been wrong about some things and he has criticised the policy of lockdown. He takes aim at Sikora’s proposal that instead of locking down the entire population, we should pursue shielding measures for certain sections of the population – ‘the old and vulnerable’. He mocks Sikora for being too chirpy. ‘The Positive Professor.’ Optimism is a crime in the land of the misanthropes. But most notably, letting slip his illiberal tendencies, Jones doesn’t merely criticise Sikora – that would be fine; everyone must have the right to criticise everybody else. No, he also suggests that Sikora should be denied the oxygen of publicity. The media outlets who give Sikora a platform should be ashamed of themselves, he says. They are ‘helping to spread disinformation’ and that is dangerous during a pandemic. In short, dissent kills. Criticism of consensus is not only wrong, it is potentially lethal – it threatens to pollute men’s souls and encourage people to take reckless risks that could literally sicken them. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it has been the cry of every censor in history, from Torquemada to Joe McCarthy to the blue-haired posh kids running riot on campuses in the Anglosphere right now – ‘words are not only wrong sometimes, they are also dangerous and murderous’, all these people have crowed. Now the same is being said about Sikora and other dissenters from the lockdown consensus. Jones’ column is a new low, even for him. It is a shrill, vindictive and transparent effort to achieve the expulsion from media life of a man who has dared to say we need more balance in our approach to Covid-19. Jones is not alone in the war on Sikora. The right-wing authoritarian Sam Bowman has branded Sikora and other sceptics, including Sunetra Gupta, a professor of epidemiology at Oxford University who supports the Great Barrington Declaration, as ‘cranks’. Bowman, senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute, detests these people’s suggestion that we should try to shield vulnerable people in the name of preserving liberty. He is far more keen on China’s approach to Covid, which, let’s not forget, involved literally locking people in their homes and silencing sceptical doctors. Who predicted that in 2020 the ASI would shill for Chinese communist dictatorship? Elsewhere, Sikora has been censured by YouTube and is regularly subjected to insults and accusations that he is killing people. We are now in full-on witch-hunt territory... Gupta says she regularly receives emails calling her evil and dangerous. She has even wondered: ‘Would I have been treated like this if I were a white man?’ Of course, identitarians who normally stand up for women from ethnic minorities who are being trolled and harassed have nothing whatsoever to say about the war of words against Gupta, because to them she is scum. Well, she’s critical of the lockdown, so she must be, right? This is the chilling climate that the lockdown dogmatists have helped to create: one in which it is now tantamount to a speechcrime to raise a peep of criticism of the strategy of lockdown. Big Tech will censure you, mobs will hound you, neo-Stalinists will demand that you be added to a blacklist... His voice has been far more refreshing, and fundamentally honest, than the 24-hour rolling-news of horror and hysterical fearmongering that has intensified people’s sense of despair and atomisation. And secondly, even more importantly, there’s the small matter of freedom of speech. Of freedom of conscience. These things don’t become less important when society faces a significant challenge like Covid-19 – they become more important. Dissent is always good; but in an era of unprecedented authoritarianism it becomes essential... Dogma is the enemy of progress. Dissent – however irritating the police, the government and the Guardian might find it – is the guarantor of progress. It is the means through which all of us, including society more broadly, entertain the possibility that we are wrong. That lockdown is a mistake, that giving teenagers puberty-blockers is an error, that the Earth is not in fact at the centre of the solar system. Dogma protects even immoral policies and incorrect thinking from criticism by demonising dissenters; dissent, on the other hand, helps to shine a light on the wrongness of certain political strategies or ideological beliefs by encouraging criticism and scrutiny. Even where dissenters are wrong, factually, the climate they help to create is of enormous benefit to society and to mankind."
From 2021. Of course, if Gupta had supported the liberal consensus, the hate mail she got would've been condemned. But hate mail is good when directed at those opposing covid hysteria
FDA vaccine advisers 'disappointed' and 'angry' that early data about new Covid-19 booster shot wasn't presented for review last year - "Some vaccine advisers to the federal government say they’re “disappointed” and “angry” that government scientists and the pharmaceutical company Moderna didn’t present a set of infection data on the company’s new Covid-19 booster during meetings last year when the advisers discussed whether the shot should be authorized and made available to the public. That data suggested the possibility that the updated booster might not be any more effective at preventing Covid-19 infections than the original shots. The data was early and had many limitations, but several advisers told CNN that they were concerned about a lack of transparency. US taxpayers spent nearly $5 billion on the new booster, which has been given to more than 48.2 million people in the US... A former FDA scientist who helped run the agency’s vaccine division told CNN that if he were still at the agency, he would have advocated for sharing the infection information with the advisers, even if it was made available only a short time before the meeting. “I don’t think there’s any excuse for excluding it,” even with its imperfections, said Dr. Philip Krause, who served as deputy director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccine Research and Review until he resigned in October 2021... Bernstein added that he was disappointed that the data had not been presented to him and the other advisers. Offit, the member from the University of Pennsylvania, said he was angry. “I was angry to find out that there was data that was relevant to our decision that I didn’t get to see. Angry because they should trust us to make the decision based on all the data. These agencies, whether it’s the FDA or CDC, can’t make that decision for us. That’s the point of having an independent advisory committee”... About a month after the CDC advisers met, studies were released from researchers at Harvard and Columbia suggesting that the new vaccines didn’t work any better than the original... Offit, the FDA vaccine adviser, said the Columbia and Harvard studies convinced him even more that the infection data and all the related caveats should have been given to the advisers from the beginning. “This was not acceptable. I understand we’re in the middle of a pandemic. I understand we’re building the plane while it’s still in the air, but you can’t do this,” he said. “It did shake my faith. It shook my faith in how these decisions were being made.”"
Since they dare challenge The Science, they need to be fired
Why health-care services are in chaos everywhere | The Economist - "The imposition of lockdowns during the covid-19 pandemic had one overarching aim: to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. Governments hoped to space out infections, buying time to build capacity. In the end, however, much of this extra capacity went unused. England’s seven “Nightingale” hospitals closed having received only a few patients, as did many of America’s field hospitals. A study of Europe’s experience in Health Policy, a journal, found only one example where there were more covid patients than intensive-care beds: in the Italian region of Lombardy on April 3rd 2020. Although there are now stories of overwhelmed Chinese hospitals, as the country confronts a great exit wave, it is too soon to know whether these are isolated examples or represent broader, systematic failure. Outside China, covid weighs less heavily on people’s minds these days. Yet health-care systems in much of the rich world are closer to collapse than at any point since the disease started to spread. Unlike for unemployment or gdp, there are few comparable, up-to-date figures on health-care performance across countries. So The Economist has trawled statistics produced by countries, regions and even individual hospitals to paint a picture of what is going on. The results suggest patients, doctors and nurses are experiencing the brutal after-effects of the pandemic... Even the richest, most competent systems are feeling the strain. In Switzerland there are fewer free intensive-care beds than at most points in the pandemic. Germany is seeing similar problems, with a surge in patients reducing intensive-care capacity (see chart). In Singapore patients waited for about nine hours to be seen in the average polyclinic at the end of 2021. By October 2022 they were waiting for 13... Even in the darkest days of the pandemic few states reported paediatric wards under stress (which we define as 90% or more beds being occupied). In early November fully 17 states were in this position, the result of a rise in all sorts of bugs in kids. The collapse in the quality of health care is contributing to an astonishing rise in “excess deaths”—those above what would be expected in a normal year. In many rich-world countries 2022 proved deadlier even than 2021, a year of several big waves of covid... In the oecd club of mostly rich countries, health expenditure is now not far short of 10% of gdp, having been below 9% before the pandemic (see chart). Of the 20 countries for which there are data for 2021, 18 spent more per person than ever before. Almost all spent more as a share of gdp than in 2019. Even adjusting the figures for ageing populations does not meaningfully change these findings. Thus the immediate problems facing health-care systems are not caused by a lack of cash... Although falling productivity growth is an economywide phenomenon, health care currently suffers from additional pressures... “Donning and doffing” protocols to replace protective kit, and cleaning requirements after dealing with covid patients, both of which are still in force in many countries today, slow everything down. The segregation of covid from non-covid patients limits bed allocation... Productivity has fallen—but it has not plummeted in the manner that would be needed to explain the chaos. This suggests the true explanation for the breakdown lies elsewhere: in exploding demand. Coming out of lockdowns, people seem to require more help than ever before. Some of this is to do with immunity. People went two years without being exposed to bugs. Since then, endemic pathogens such as respiratory syncytial virus have bloomed. Everyone you know has the flu. But the pandemic also bottled up other conditions, which are only now being diagnosed... Covid continues to add to demand as well"
Clearly we needed more lockdowns to protect people, and it's conservative governments' fault that healthcare systems are collapsing because they are not funding healthcare properly, and greater disease burden is really due to covid weakening immune systems
"I was appalled to see the prime minister making those comments": A U of T epidemiologist on the myth of immunity debt and the real reason everyone's getting sick
Too bad multiple experts disagree, even if you ignore the chief medical officer of health, even though he pretends that immunity debt is something only laypeople talk about. Naturally, he blames covid. Covid is the unified field theory. It is notable that in Europe they believe differently
Did COVID measures cause immunity debt behind child hospitalizations? - "At Ottawa’s CHEO, “it’s heart breaking to see so many children and families waiting so long to be seen,” Dr. Mona Jabbour, interim chief of CHEO’s department of pediatrics said... “In previous years, younger babies would have had these illnesses, and by the time they’re aged two, three, four, they have some immunity to these viruses,” Jabbour said. “Because we didn’t see these viruses in the last few years, we’re seeing them all come together, and there isn’t that immunity that we usually see in older children.”... Some researchers believe the immune system needs constant poking, that exposure to germs and bacteria in the environment are important to the development of the immune system. Without that prodding, the immune system is slower to respond to future infections. Being exposed to seasonal viruses every year also acts as an immune booster, shoring up antibody levels to combat naturally waning immunity, Russell said... The idea of “immune debt” was cautioned when we first started hiding from SARS-CoV-2, Russell said. French researchers reported last year that a lack of “immune stimulation” could lead to more intense RSV and flu epidemics in coming years. “The longer these periods of ‘viral or bacterial low exposure’ are, the greater the likelihood of future epidemics”... If a pathogen like RSV or flu basically disappears for a series of years, “All of the people who normally would have been infected during those years don’t get infected, and that susceptible pool of people accumulates,” said McMaster University infectious disease expert Matthew Miller. Take off the brakes — lift the public health measures — and a virus like RSV can spread quickly, with a high attack rate. More people susceptible to a disease means more infections. “It’s just a numbers game,” Miller said."
Immunity debt is not a myth: Why it seems like everybody is sick now - "Michael Rose, a pediatric resident at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, noted in a recent column that he’s seeing fewer mothers pass antibodies to their newborns, resulting in babies that are uniquely susceptible to infections of cold and flu that they otherwise might have dodged. “Immunity debt is Immunology 101: Hosts whose immune systems haven’t been properly primed are more prone to infection and severe disease,” wrote Rose... The issue isn’t quite as controversial in Europe, where medical figures have been far less hesitant to identify nationwide spikes in coughs, sore throats and fevers as an expected echo of pandemic restrictions. Nature, the renowned scientific journal headquartered in the U.K., was stating unequivocally in early November that cold and flu viruses were scything through Western populations that had been rendered “immunologically naïve” by COVID restrictions. Another U.K.-based medical publication, New Scientist, struck much the same tone. “It is possible for two things to be true: it was right to have lockdowns and yet the restrictions also had downsides,” wrote medical correspondent Clare Wilson. And as early as September, a study published in The Lancet was using national health data to identify a direct link between pandemic measures and a post-COVID surge in British RSV cases. The numbers “confirm the concept of immunity debt as an unintended consequence of non-pharmaceutical interventions,” it read."
