The Legault government launched its latest offensive this week: convincing the recalcitrant to get vaccinated. Echoing the words of Bill Gates – one of the first to have called for a massive vaccination campaign in April 2020 – the minister responsible for leading this initiative, Lionel Carmant, repeated that it was “the key to stopping the pandemic”.
Unfortunately for the crusade of the Dr Carmant, what seemed obvious two years ago is considerably more complex today. Distrust not only of governments, but of vaccines themselves is at its zenith. “All the work we’ve done over the past few decades to inspire confidence in vaccines is being eroded by mandating vaccines that often don’t make sense scientifically or public health,” said Dr.r Martin Kulldorff, as reported by the Dr Norman Doidge, in an important text published in the Globe and Mail.
Norman Doidge is not a conspirator, rest assured. Psychiatrist and director of a think tank on health, he believes in vaccines and public health. Only, he dares to draw up an exhaustive assessment of the errors of the last two years – including the lack of debate, precisely, surrounding health issues. At the outset, he mentions fluvoxamine, a drug authorized by Ontario, half-heartedly just before Christmas. It is a “repurposed drug”, initially designed as an antidepressant, but which has proven effective in treating the coronavirus in vulnerable people.
Who has heard of it? The arrival of fluvoxamine coincided with the approval in Canada of Pfizer’s Paxlovid, another anti-COVID treatment which nevertheless made headlines despite major drawbacks. Paxlovid costs 30 times more ($500) than the generic form of fluvoxamine ($15) and does not have a proven track record like repurposed drugs. This new drug has received preferential treatment because of Pfizer, that’s clear. In general, however, the treatments offered during a pandemic (think of the monoclonal antibodies mentioned in this column) have gone unnoticed. The reason is simple: vaccines, “the only thing that will allow us to breathe, to regain normality”, Bill Gates said straight away – his foundation is heavily involved in the production and distribution of vaccines – have taken up all the square.
Once established as the way of salvation, we only had eyes for them. The extremely rapid production and distribution of vaccines added to their odor of sanctity. And then the military rhetoric — we had to wage a merciless “war” against the virus — did the rest, says Norman Doidge. From then on, it became inappropriate to criticize vaccines (or their parent companies) for fear of discouraging mobilization. “In a war, you shut up and follow orders,” he wrote.
From that moment, we had to find ourselves on the right side of the trenches, that of the sanitary measures, regardless of the lack of justification or the painful consequences on people’s lives. “Science”, we were told, dictated it. Now, the scientific mind, says the Dr Doidge, is the opposite of this type of purism. “Modern science emerged as a reaction to dogmas and orthodoxies that were unquestionable at the time. This is why the Royal Society, the first scientific institution, had as its motto:Nulias in verba (Don’t take anyone’s word for it). »
With the best intentions in the world, to save lives, encourage social cohesion and counter misinformation, the authorities wanted to speak with one voice to better promote health measures. Curiously, another kind of misinformation ensued. A kind of involuntary censorship. Who knows, for example, that Pfizer has never made its clinical trials public? The pharmaceutical company was asking for a period of 75 years (!) before filing all the data used to produce its vaccine. A judgment obtained on January 7 will fortunately oblige him to reveal everything within 8 months.
Even after the arrival of Omicron, which seriously damaged the reputation of messenger RNA vaccines, the discourse of the authorities did not change much. The effectiveness of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines – which at the beginning was a dream, around 95% – fell to 39-42% after only 6 months of use and, with the arrival of each new variant, this one is called to drop further. We also discovered that the nature of these vaccines — which only targets a small part of the virus, the spike protein — encourages the proliferation of variants by being easier to circumvent. However, we continue headlong as if all these data did not change the initial plan and always advocating more booster doses.
Another fly in the ointment underlined in the essay by Dr Doidge: An Israeli study shows that unvaccinated people who have had COVID are 27 times less likely to be reinfected than vaccinated people, and are nine times less likely to be hospitalized. The kind of information that the health authorities do not want to publicize. But should it be kept quiet? Rather than helping to convey the message of health measures, silencing disturbing information, while imposing coercive measures, is a recipe that encourages disillusionment and civil disobedience. It’s already started.
When will there be a new strategy, more open, more frank, less coercive and better suited to today’s pandemic?
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