[Richie Allen]: Language is a funny thing. Take the opening paragraph of David Cox’s piece in today’s Telegraph.
It reads:
NHS England has begun offering a second booster dose of the Covid vaccines to over-75s, all care home residents and the clinically vulnerable, but not everyone is jumping at the chance to get the jab.
We’ll come back to the reluctance. Second booster dose? Really? Don’t they mean fourth jab? Wouldn’t that be a more accurate way of putting it?
The NHS will say that the first dose comprised of two shots and that the third dose was the booster, hence this is the second booster shot.
I reckon this is a play on words to distract people from the reality that they’re being offered a fourth jab for a pathogen that has by now succumbed to herd immunity.
They – NHS England and the Joint Committee on Vaccination & Immunisation – say that the fourth jab is timely because cases of the BA.2 are rising steadily. But, where’s the proof? Nobody in the media has asked for any proof that the variant exists, or that it is running rampant through the population.
BA.2 is a variant of Omicron by the way. Me? I don’t believe a word of it.
David Cox (writing in today’s Telegraph) believes that vaccine fatigue is a problem, saying:
My parents were particularly sceptical when I asked them whether they planned to get the new booster dose. While my mother turns 75 in July, and my father has just turned 78, placing both of them firmly within the vulnerable category, the idea of yet another shot left them feeling distinctly hesitant.
Vaccine fatigue is becoming a very real phenomenon, with a substantial proportion who have already been double vaccinated not bothering to get boosted. When the first booster became available to the wider population in December, a survey from University College London suggested that one in 13 who had already received two jabs, would not opt for a third.
For my parents, their reluctance stemmed from a belief that the threat has largely passed, and an unwillingness to endure more side effects, only six months after their last jabs. “Is it really necessary?” my mother asked. “The last one left me feeling really exhausted. Covid doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore.”
Except that it is. Infection rates have begun to soar over the last two weeks, due to the rise of two new variants – the BA.2 strain, a more infectious version of the omicron variant, and the deltacron strain, a combined version of the delta and omicron variants.
I’d love to sit down with David Cox and ask him how he knows that BA.2 is soaring. That’s a really important question. How do you know David?
The answer is pretty straightforward. He went here: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
He went to the government’s website and basically just copied and pasted the information he found there. That’s not journalism. That’s propaganda.
It’s his job to challenge it. He should have a hundred questions. Let’s help him out with a couple.
How many of those in hospital tested positive after being admitted for something else? That’s a vitally important question.
What is the exact number of those who tested positive, but had no symptoms whatsoever? Another very important question.
Of course, the government, the Office for National Statistics and NHS England don’t have the answer. Why? Because there is absolutely no follow-up with positive cases.
Amazing isn’t it? You’d have thought that someone would be in touch a week or so later to ask; “Any symptoms at all? Headache, fever, sore throat? You’d have thought it would be very important to log that data. But, no.
The reason for that is simple. From the outset, they set out to equate cases with illness. They succeeded. Over the weekend I asked a neighbour why she was wearing a mask. She told me that the cases are going up.
I hope Cox is right though and that people are beginning to ask questions about the jabs. They should be hesitant. They should be reluctant.
There’s hope yet.