Calculated risks

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I'll wait a little longer to vaccinate, at least until after the summer

So I did not go to get my Astra shot two weeks ago. This led to shocked and even indignant reactions in my circle of friends. Among them are a number of doctors, proud that they already have a shot themselves, and other sensible and educated friends who are worried about me and point out the statistics to me. I still want to share how I feel about it. I am also concerned, but about their fear and how they have become part of the state propaganda.

[edit dated 15 May: This article in the Lancet strengthens me in my considerations]

"The statistics prove you wrong: the virus is more dangerous than the vaccine"

Of course, fewer people die from vaccinations than from Covid-19, that's true. When I then ask how that works per age category, it usually becomes more difficult – most have never actually come that far and some find that too 'wappy'. You don't ask such critical questions. But that only 1% of all deaths are younger than 50 years old is not known and the announcement itself does not do much, most do not just calculate that. Now I am over 50 myself, but it's not just about me, I also think about 'the other'.

To vaccinate or not to vaccinate is a personal decision. What weighs heavily for me is that the chance of getting infected is many times smaller for me than for the average Dutch person. He does not know how to protect himself against corona. In fact, their protection is counterproductive. People feel safe with face masks, disinfected hands and/or a distance of one and a half meters. That leads to accidents, as if you tell people that they can cross the highway quietly if they wear checkered socks and have a dime in their right trouser pocket. That goes wrong – and we see that reflected in all curves.

After all, overseeing the entire process, you first have to get infected. To do this, you have to let yourself be infected somewhere by standing for some time talking into the aura of an infected person or staying for a longer period of time in a poorly ventilated room where there is contaminated air. I don't do both. Contamination is therefore already virtually excluded.

To get sick from an infection, you have preferably never thought about your Vitamin D intake - let alone Zinc - and your BMI is (much) too high, maybe you are heading towards diabetes. You don't like to eat vegetables and as fruit you prefer to eat grapes in fermented form. The fact that people are still infected is mainly because they respect the rules and do not take their resistance seriously.

Anyway, if the average Dutch person does get infected, despite all the above risk-increasing characteristics, he still does not get sick in about 85% of the cases! The amount of virus must exceed a threshold value of a person's individual resistance. If that doesn't happen to 85% of the unsuspecting, what about if you take both your environment and your resistance into account? I estimate that to be minimal. Yes, of course you can be unlucky, but that is also possible if you are vaccinated.

Then you have to get so sick that you have to go to the hospital, which is also a small chance (about 15%), and there your condition has to worsen so that you have to go to the ICU. That's just a small, mostly obese and Vitamin D-deficient part, but of course you really don't want that. Fortunately, the chance that you will end up there is very small, the chance that you will die there is even smaller (now about 25%, quite a lot of people come out of the ICU alive these days).

Of the deaths that eventually remain after that entire process, 1 in a hundred is under the age of fifty, above that the percentages rise. 90% are over 70 years old. Three-quarters of corona deaths bring forward the expected date of death by a few months at most.

"It's a deadly virus, though"

Mortality is no longer as high as when the pandemic was declared. It is actually surprising that for a flu-like illness of this severity, daily life is still stopped. The graph below shows that mortality in autumn and spring is lower than in winter, in relation to hospital admissions. This could have to do with the lower doses and fortunately the treatments in hospitals are also getting better. If we can ever get started nationwide with supportive medication such as Ivermectin, hopefully not much will remain of this killer virus.

The beautiful spring will take a while, but another week or two and then all the lines will drop back to zero. It is only in September/October that things pick up again: Covid-21. Let's hope that the Covid-19 vaccine is still just as effective.

So to have me injected with a few months old, conditionally approved vaccine, just for next summer, while it may no longer work after the summer... I'll wait a little longer. At least for myself. Who knows, maybe some interesting data will come out in the coming months.

"You also do it for someone else"

The AstraZeneca vaccine protects 60%. Pfizer protects more than half(!) better: for 95%. In the summer, there is not much to protect. So it is better, also for 'the other', to wait until the autumn for Pfizer. It seems a bit useless to take an Astra flu shot just before the summer that only protects 60% – if it turns out to be effective at all, next winter. After all, the persistent mutants are hard to find.

Even more risk assessment

In which age category do I fall myself? I can't deny that I'm 62. Now the over-60s fall into a high-risk category and when I look at my peers, I understand that too. Almost all of them are (much) too fat, at least a big belly. In my own circle, they are also often those straight types, averse to nutritional supplements. Bon vivants, some avoid vegetables... There is good wine drinking and some smoking here and there, but that used to be worse.

That is only in my circle of acquaintances. Yesterday I looked around the market in Amstelveen. I understand very well how it is possible that the risk is a lot higher in my age group: you see a lot of unappetizing fat people who (therefore) eat badly. A growing number do not understand the wheel of five, have ever heard of the cold ground, many have skin that does not make Vitamin D and regularly have to share each other's breath in groups in rooms where they sometimes all speak or sing at the same time and can scatter their possible germs around. And all this while at that age your immune system really starts to lose its indestructibility. They depend on the scaremongering in accessible media ('fear sells').

So I count myself a lot richer: no overweight, Vitamin D and Zinc up to standard, excellent eating habits thanks to my hobby cooking wife. I understand how infections work and take my CO2 meter and ionizer with me everywhere. That sometimes seems exaggerated and hopefully it will become superfluous. If I don't trust the indoor climate somewhere and window/door can't open (well-known example: closed consultation rooms at doctors) then I'll be gone quickly.

I don't rule out that I will get sick, but in my opinion that chance is comparable to the side effects of an injection with a substance for which the research results will become available in two years.

If you calculate with absurdly high infection risks, the picture looks different, of course. This is calculated with a "coronavirus incidence" of 20 per 10,000, which would be comparable to the top of the second peak in the UK. That peak was (in terms of mortality) 15 times higher than the current situation in the Netherlands, so the comparison is a bit flawed there. Divide all the blue dots by 15. Furthermore, the impression is created that we have a tight view of the "serious harms" of vaccination. Unfortunately, I don't have that impression, for example because of statements like the following.

The side effects according to the EMA

"We don't have data on long-term side effects, so we're not worried about that. "

A spokesperson for the EMA with Patrick Lodiers on Radio 1, 30 April.

Actually, he didn't say it literally like that. He said: "We have no data that gives us cause to worry about the side effects of the vaccine." You may find my paraphrase lame, but it is correct in terms of content. This 'misquote' is therefore deliberate, to expose the implicit meaning and is nothing at all compared to the destructive disinformation that is spread over us every day.

The core of the sentence is: "We have no data."

So what data does the EMA have?

There is another thing to criticize about the statistics themselves. First of all, you assume that the figures are correct. But there are hardly any figures on side effects, except for the studies done by the manufacturers. The track record of the pharmaceutical companies is not impressive in that respect. If it went well, it went well, if it went wrong, the examinations beforehand were just as reassuring.

The studies exclude groups such as pregnant women, people with comorbidities, vulnerable people. In general, the test subjects in those trials are therefore healthy and in the prime of their lives, even if the sick people to be treated are mainly patients in the last phase of life – which is the case with corona. The research population of model citizens will be able to process vaccinations well – just like corona infections, by the way.

We don't know anything about long-term side effects yet, the vaccines simply exist too short for that. Test subjects who had received a placebo have now also been vaccinated for ethical reasons, so the comparison of those two groups has ended. Especially with such a new mRNA method, that is quite a gamble. The effect among the population will have to be conclusive.

The vaccines may therefore only be administered "under conditions". One of those conditions is strict monitoring.

The promised status is "Conditional marketing authorisation". You can read here conditions attached to this.

An important condition:
“Facilitating the conduct of high quality, multi-centre, independent post-authorisation safety
studies (PASS) with a focus on observational research”

I don't have the impression that the Netherlands adheres very strictly to this focus on observational research. For that, the registration and reporting must be in order in any case. Fortunately, our society is transparent enough to know that this is not the case.

[Edit: I updated the part below on August 20 in https://virusvaria.nl/lareb/, also posted on maurice.nl ]

Look, for example, at the deaths after corona vaccination. These are important, which is why they are also mentioned on Lareb's updates (the last one dates from April 25):

"So far, there have been 286 reports of death after corona vaccination."

Lareb.nl 2 May 2021

Lareb explains: "These are very complex reports. When someone is older, there are often underlying diseases and you often don't know exactly what someone will die of. What was going on medically before the vaccination, and what after? Is there a pattern to be discovered? Has something like this been reported in other countries? These are all questions that our people, doctors and pharmacists, then investigate. They are also thinking about whether the effect of the vaccine can explain what has been reported."

It is nice that such a nuanced distinction is made between dying WITH or FROM a vaccine. That doesn't happen with the flu, for example. Then the entire winter excess mortality is attributed to flu in one sweep. And with corona, two seasons are even effortlessly added together.

But only 286 deaths after vaccination reported, that's not much! So that's good news? Nevertheless? Less than expected probably? Let's take a look.

Roughly speaking, about 2,500 people over 60 die every week. In two weeks, there are 5000.

There are 4.5 million people over sixty in the Netherlands. They have largely been vaccinated, many twice now.

If you vaccinate all 4.5 million, about 5000 should die within two weeks of vaccination. If you assume two shots, you could even end up with 10,000, depending on your calculation model. If the Lareb now says that there are 286 reports of 'death after vaccination', what can we conclude from that? Even if you were to only report the deaths within 1 week after vaccination, it is only a fraction of what must have actually happened. Something seems to be going wrong with the "focus on observation".

Agnes Kant (of side effects hotline Lareb) recently said on TV that she did not know exactly either. That is not possible because if you receive less than 10% of the reports, you will never recognize a pattern in time.

Still, we have to take it as good news that only 286 reports of side effects have been made of "Death after vaccination" while we know that number should have been in the thousands.

A critical journalist could panic about such a report. It makes it clear that the phenomenon of "death after vaccination" is NOT reported, monitored, let alone closely investigated. Patterns that everyone thinks 'that's a coincidence' do not come to light in time. Over time, this may still happen, based on the mortality rates. Hopefully we are lucky and it is not too bad. But again, this is something that undermines my confidence in the vaccine push.

The fact that there is such nonchalant experimentation with the population is completely in line with how we are bullied with the curfew, the face masks, the one and a half meters etc. etc. People just try something. People just do something.

Al met al: ik wacht liever nog even.

P.S.: Leestip: https://stopdelockdown.wordpress.com/2021/05/02/veel-meer-jongeren-op-ic-totale-onzin-bekijk-de-cijfers-niet-de-hype/