Joe Plummer
There are two fundamentally different ways of looking at infectious disease risk and intervention. The first is indiscriminate. It treats the population as a single body that needs to be protected. The second is specific. It treats the population as a collection of individuals, each with their own risk profile. These opposing views lead to different conclusions about how to intervene. We'll refer to the first as the "vaccinate-everyone" conclusion and the second as the "focused-protection" conclusion.
In a vaccinate-everyone system, policy recommendations are not based on an individual's risk or their need for vaccine-induced protection. Instead, perfectly healthy individuals with an extremely low risk are treated the same as those facing a risk that is 10, 100, or even 1,000 times higher. Vaccinating everyone is justified in the name of lowering aggregate risk within "the herd."
In a focused-protection system, policy recommendations are based on individual risk. Additionally, advocates of focused protection aim to protect three core tenets of medical ethics:
- Informed Consent (which cannot exist alongside manipulation or coercion)
- First, Do No Harm (unnecessary interventions carry unnecessary risks)
- Apply the Smallest Intervention Necessary (which includes zero intervention)
When vaccine policies are based on individual risk and focused protection, it makes no sense to unnecessarily vaccinate 2 people for every 1 that might benefit. The idea of vaccinating 100, 1,000, 10,000 or more for every 1 that needs protection is indescribably worse. It goes far beyond "makes no sense." It qualifies as medically unethical. It's like medicating 100% of the population with antidepressants to ensure the small percentage who might benefit get their dose. It would take a great deal of manipulation to sell that policy.
This raises a couple of obvious questions: Why do we maintain "vaccinate everyone" policies when the stated goal of protecting the herd is achievable without them? Is something other than public health playing a role? Before we can answer those questions, we need to establish the actual "risk" that medical professionals use to justify vaccinating everyone.
Since we count on our experts to warn us when our risk is high, or calm our nerves when our risk is low, it's important that we understand how they define "high" and "low." But as you'll soon see, there is a striking inconsistency in how they assess and communicate these measures of risk. Oddly enough, their inconsistent assessments seem optimized to produce a consistent outcome. And that outcome might answer our questions above.
Extremely Low Risk of Death or Injury
When describing a surgical intervention that carries a 1 in 1,000 risk of death or debilitating injury, medical professionals assure patients that their risk is "extremely low." And, to be fair, they're not lying. A 99.9% survival rate without any lasting injuries is excellent. Even if you were unfortunate enough to need that surgery half a dozen times, your odds of escaping unscathed would remain overwhelmingly high. So, it's perfectly reasonable to define that as "extremely low" risk.
However, when discussing infectious disease with a risk that is 10 times lower than our "extremely low" surgical risk, medical professionals dramatically change their tune. Now, a 1 in 10,000 risk is deemed intolerably high. So high in fact, that it justifies violating all of the core tenets of medical ethics outlined earlier. (Informed consent/no manipulation or coercion. Do no harm. Minimal required intervention.) Stated clearly: Even when 9,999 people out of 10,000 do not need a vaccine to survive without problems, "the experts" will insist that every single one of those people must be vaccinated.
In this situation, even a casual observer will see that the experts aren't making sense. How can a 1 in 1,000 risk be defined as "extremely low," while a much lower risk of 1 in 10,000 is considered so dangerous that it justifies discarding basic medical ethics? It doesn't add up, until the casual observer asks a different question: What if profit, not public health, is driving narratives and policy? What if its influence exceeds that of all other considerations combined?
Through that lens, the inconsistent messaging makes perfect sense, because it leads to a predictable result. The surgical messaging generates greater surgical uptake, and the infectious-disease messaging generates greater vaccine uptake. Regarding the latter: if your messaging convinces people that they're facing an infectious-disease apocalypse, it makes no difference how low the risk actually is. Think I'm exaggerating?
Not Even Zero Risk is Low Enough
We've established that medical professionals consider a 1 in 1,000 risk of death during surgery extremely low. In a logical world, a much lower risk of 1 in 10,000 would be presented as significantly lower than "extremely low." It's difficult to imagine that anyone would define it as "intolerably high."
Likewise, if a 1 in 10,000 risk is significantly lower than 1 in 1,000, what words are appropriate to describe a 1 in 100,000 risk? At that level, we're approaching the odds of being struck and killed by a bolt of lightning. Yet our vaccinate-everyone experts will still insist on a needle in every arm. And they won't hesitate to employ the level of manipulation and coercion necessary to achieve their goal. Recent history provides irrefutable proof.
When COVID-19 policy makers defined the enemy as "vaccine hesitancy," they simultaneously defined their objective: 100% vaccine obedience, regardless of individual need. Consider the implications.
From that moment forward, gathering and conveying evidence of any vaccine-induced harm would undermine their policy. So, even reports of minor harm were suppressed.[1] Providing context about mortality risk between frail nursing-home patients (as high as 20%) and healthy seniors (over 100 times lower), would undermine policy, so the enormous risk disparity was never communicated. Effective alternative treatments, acknowledging naturally acquired immunity, even the concept of informed consent itself; they all would undermine policy. Therefore, they all needed to be suppressed.
This illustrates the inevitable problem with a vaccinate-everyone policy: truth, transparency and general ethics become liabilities, irrational fear, censorship and coercion become assets. The more unneeded the intervention, the more necessary it becomes to mislead and coerce the public. And by pulling on psychological, financial and administrative levers, that's exactly what they do. Case in point:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the odds of COVID killing a healthy child were essentially zero. In fact, that's exactly what a large German study found: zero deaths among 13.7 million healthy kids.[2] The study did attribute a total of 14 child deaths to COVID, but all of those children were sick with other life-threatening diseases. Many of them were already receiving end-of-life care.
Regarding child hospitalizations, even the American Academy of Pediatrics acknowledged that most healthy kids were unnecessarily admitted for COVID; a "precautionary" measure rather than a clinical need.[3] That policy drastically inflated the childhood hospitalization risk estimates.
However, despite practically zero risk of death and very low risk of clinically justified hospitalization, the CDC recommended COVID shots for every healthy child in the U.S., including infants as young as 6 months old. And those who resisted the government policy (from doctors to parents, scientists to students), were met with a mix of hostility, threats and punishments.
Remember: we're talking about a rushed, experimental mRNA vaccine with no long-term safety data. A vaccine that was only authorized for "emergency use." Well, if a near-zero risk of death qualifies as an emergency (so dire that it justifies vaccinating more than 70 million healthy kids), what wouldn't qualify as an emergency? And if this doesn't hint at something other than public health driving policy, what would?
The Profit Motive
It's time to address the elephant in the room: Is it possible the pharmaceutical industry is more interested in generating profit than optimal health? This probably isn't too difficult to imagine. We'll set aside the fact that the FDA, CDC, WHO, media, politicians, medical journals, and research institutions all depend heavily on pharma profits. We'll pretend those billions of pharma-distributed dollars don't influence narratives and subsequent policies. Instead, we'll focus exclusively on pharma's profit motive. Let's begin with senior citizens during COVID.
In 2020, COVID was blamed for approximately 1.5 million global deaths in those over the age of 70. Using relentless fear-based manipulation, the media and government convinced people that this was tantamount to an apocalypse. They convinced people that a huge percentage of seniors (if not a majority) were likely to die. If you're among those who arrived at that conclusion, the truth will shock you.
Contrary to what the media messaging implied, COVID did not kill 50%, or 25%, or 10% of seniors. It didn't kill 5%, or 2% or even 1%. Rather, the death toll in 2020 represented 1/3rd of 1% of the global senior population. (1.5 million deaths out of 450 million seniors.) For context, the normal annual death rate among seniors is over 15 times higher (5.5%). In other words, 25 million seniors were going to die in 2020 without the pandemic.
Let that sink in.
Even in the most vulnerable demographic, well over 99% of seniors survived 2020 without access to vaccine-induced "protection." And if we stratify risk among those seniors (as we should), we see that almost all deaths occurred in those already suffering from multiple illnesses. The risk to healthy seniors was much lower than the global average of 0.33%. And if you compare healthy seniors to those facing the highest risk (nursing home patients with multiple comorbidities) the risk was orders of magnitude lower.
Simply stated: 99.67% of all seniors survived COVID in 2020 without a vaccine. COVID death was rare among the entire senior population (about 1 in 300 globally), and the small number of seniors facing very high risk were easily identifiable candidates for focused protection.
Does that sound anything like what you were led to believe? If not, consider the possibility that you were intentionally misled into an enormously exaggerated perception of risk. Why? Because accurate perception of risk would have gutted demand for the "emergency" vaccine that showed up in 2021. And nobody who stood to benefit from $100s of billions in vaccine profits wanted that.
The Profit Multiplier
To illustrate the point, consider how much an effective focused-protection model would have reduced the number of senior "customers" (and subsequent profits) during the pandemic. The addressable market would have fallen by two orders of magnitude. To convey the gravity of that reduction, let's personalize it. Pretend you're offered a job with two pay options: $20 per hour, or $2,000 per hour. ($40,000 per year versus $4 million.) In this example, pharma taking the focused-protection route (high-risk seniors) would be the equivalent of them choosing the $40,000 option when $4 million was on the table. That would be a truly massive pay cut. However, as big as that is, it's nothing compared to the lost profits in our next example. Watch what happens when we apply focused-protection to healthy children…
When the CDC recommended COVID vaccines for all children, including infants, it accomplished two things: First, it opened the door to a much larger market. (The 0-17 market is five times larger than the 70+ market.) Second, the recommendation transformed a microscopic clinical need of maybe 1 dose per 100,000 children into a regulatory justification to vaccinate them all.
In this case, a focused-protection system would have cut pharma's addressable market by FIVE orders of magnitude.[4] Returning to the hourly wage analogy, that's the difference between earning $20 per hour, versus earning $2 million per hour. ($40,000 per year versus $4 billion.) But even this doesn't capture the full insanity of the CDC's recommendation. To truly grasp the scale, we need to visualize it.
If you've never seen the Rose Bowl in California filled to its 90,000-seating capacity, do yourself a favor and pull up an image online. As you're looking at that sea of human beings, imagine you're looking at 90,000 healthy kids, aged 12 to 17. Now imagine a pharma rep tells you that an extremely deadly virus is circling the globe and every one of those children need to be vaccinated. You ask a logical question: "How many of these children are likely to die if we don't vaccinate them?" The rep gives you an honest answer: None.
If that isn't ridiculous enough for you, imagine a second Rose Bowl, also filled to capacity with 90,000 healthy kids. Now you're looking at 180,000 children. You ask again "How many lives will be lost if we don't vaccinate them?" The answer is the same: None.
So, you double the number of kids again. Now, you've got four stadiums filled to capacity; 360,000 healthy children. You're imagining a needle going into each and every arm. But the answer to your question hasn't changed. And it won't change if you double the number again to eight packed stadiums. Even if you fill TEN of those stadiums to capacity, and vaccinate all 900,000 of those children against the "extremely deadly" virus, the answer to your question will remain the same: None.
Who can possibly consider this a rational public health policy? It's so insane it hardly seems real. But it is real, and it suggests that those billions of pharma dollars flowing annually into politics, media, regulatory agencies, medical journals and research institutions create an overwhelming shared-interest dynamic. Those dollars shape "acceptable" narratives and subsequent policies. Those who depend on that flow of money have no incentive to bite the hand that feeds them.
Our Focused-Protection Future
At this point, we've covered the perverse incentives and ethical costs inherent in any vaccinate-everyone system. Scratch the surface, and it looks a lot less like optimizing for "public health" and a lot more like optimizing for profit.
Sadly, this isn't unique to COVID. The same profit-maximizing playbook is applied across the entire vaccine schedule. First, they deploy psychological coercion (people are intentionally misled into believing the risk is orders of magnitude greater than it is). Then, after provoking enough fear, a single solution is offered (vaccinate everyone). From that point on, it's just a matter of sustaining the fear in order to "justify" the financial and administrative coercion that follows. The result? Unnecessary medical interventions move from optional to mandatory. Profits soar, liability shields protect manufacturers, and every physical or financial cost ultimately falls on the patient and/or their family.
Needless to say, nobody on the winning end of this system has any incentive to change it. That's especially obvious when we look at the pharmaceutical companies. Why would they develop and aggressively market a treatment for rare individual instances of severe disease when they can earn 100 to 100,000 times more by preemptively vaccinating everyone?
I think we'd all like to imagine a pharma meeting where the Chairman stands up and says: "Ladies and gentlemen, it's a marvelous time to be alive. We now have the ability to develop targeted treatments that cut unnecessary vaccinations by 99.9% or more. Yes, it's true that these new treatments will wipe out the billions of dollars we earn annually from mandatory vaccines. And yes, it's also true that the new treatments will be optional and address a much smaller market. However, it's the right thing to do."
Unfortunately, it's easier for most of us to imagine the Chairman explaining a way to suppress distribution of a new treatment because it threatens their company's bottom line.[5] In fact, we don't even have to imagine that scenario; we have real-world examples. But despite this, there is good news…
Awareness among the unnecessarily vaccinated has reached a tipping point. A countervailing shared-interest dynamic has formed, and "market forces" are now pressuring the politicians, media, regulatory agencies, medical journals and research institutions who still insist on the vaccinate-everyone model. This pressure will continue building as more people learn about existing alternatives[6] and the revolutionary advancements that we'll see within the next five to ten years.[7] In short: it's not a matter of "if" the current model will be swept away, it's a matter of when. Within our lifetime, vaccinating 100, 1,000, 10,000 or more for every 1 person that needs protection will finally be seen for what it is. And the rational future of disease management (focused protection backed by advanced therapeutics) will become the norm.
Note: I'd like to express my sincere gratitude to those who drafted and supported the Great Barrington Declaration. Despite attempts to smear and censor you, your courage sparked a crucial debate about global infectious disease management. Thanks to you, it's no longer "fringe" to point out the harm of implementing one-size-fits-all policies. By now, I hope that many of you have taken a closer look at policies unrelated to COVID and concluded that there is still work to be done.
Update: Addressing Some Objections
There are a few common arguments against shifting away from indiscriminate vaccination and toward focused protection. For those who favor the latter, hopefully this short section will help.
OBJECTION 1: Vaccines are safe and effective.
Even if we accept that assertion, it doesn't matter. Why? Because most
people already have a "safe and effective" way to protect themselves
against serious disease: their immune system. And when dealing with
healthy people, the protected percentage jumps from "most" to nearly all.
OBJECTION 2: What about our obligation to those who can't take the vaccine?
If I'm vulnerable to a disease but my
neighbor isn't, I have no right to forcibly vaccinate him to protect
myself. Likewise, if I can't ethically force him, how can I force his
wife, his son, his daughter, his parents, his grandparents, his friends
and extended family? The answer is simple: I can't. As a society, we
either honor the concept of informed consent or we don't. Coercion and
consent are mutually exclusive.
OBJECTION 3: What about poor people? They can't afford individualized treatments.
Our government spends (wastes?) billions of
dollars annually vaccinating people who don't need protection. If severe
disease only occurs in 1 out of 10,000, individualized treatment could
cost 100 times more than a vaccine and it would still be 99% less
expensive than unnecessarily vaccinating 10,000 people. And it goes
without saying, that leaves plenty of money to vaccinate anyone who
still thinks it's necessary.
Endnotes
↩ [1] Policy makers were so determined to undermine informed consent, they invented a new word (malinformation). If you aren't already familiar, malinformation is any factually accurate information that might lead to vaccine hesitancy. As an example, if you watched somebody drop to the floor, have a seizure and die on the spot after taking the COVID vaccine, and you posted the story online, you were guilty of spreading "malinformation." This policy was so unethical that even Google's AI (known for defending nearly every COVID policy), recently acknowledged the problem: "That policy, which essentially labeled truthful information as 'malinformation' if it had the potential to increase vaccine hesitancy, has been a central point of criticism. Critics have pointed out that censoring or suppressing factual accounts of adverse events, even those with minor or rare but serious outcomes, raises significant ethical and communication concerns, as it can damage public trust and violate principles of informed consent."
↩ [3] https://publications.aap.org/hospitalpediatrics/article/13/4/e75/190823/Volume-and-Severity-of-Pediatric-COVID-19
↩ [4] Instead of counting only the 0.33% who died, we're expanding the focused-protection market to also include those who suffered severe disease but survived. So, even at 1%, it's still a 100x reduction.
↩ [5] Here are some examples of pharmaceutical companies using anticompetitive tactics to protect profits: (1) The FTC v. Mallinckrodt/Questcor case: Questcor acquired a potential competitor, Synacthen, to "extinguish" the threat to its Acthar monopoly. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2017/01/mallinckrodt-will-pay-100-million-settle-ftc-state-charges-it-illegally-maintained-its-monopoly (2) The Turing/Daraprim case: Distribution was used to block generic manufacturers from getting samples needed for FDA-required testing, thus preserving monopoly pricing. https://www.biospace.com/martin-shkreli-vyera-pharmaceuticals-sued-for-scheme-to-prevent-daraprim-competition (3) Pay-for-Delay: This is a direct payment from a brand-name manufacturer to a generic manufacturer. The generic company agrees to delay its cheaper product from entering the market in exchange for a significant payout, royalties, or some other compensation. These deals cost consumers and taxpayers billions in higher drug costs annually. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforcement/pay-delay (4) Product Hopping: In this tactic, a company stops selling an older drug just before generic versions become available. Then, it releases a reformulated version of the drug that has its own new patent. https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2019/10/11/stopping-the-pharmaceutical-product-hop/
↩ [6] Monoclonal antibodies are already having a major positive impact on human and veterinary medicine. As an example: There is a brief period when a puppy's risk of experiencing severe disease from Parvo is high. (Roughly the period 10 weeks to 20 weeks, when maternal antibodies have waned, but the puppy's immune system has not yet matured.) IF the puppy is exposed AND experiences severe disease, monoclonal antibodies are a game changer. They bind directly to the pathogen, preventing it from entering and destroying intestinal cells. In this study, a single treatment prevented death "in all CPMA-treated dogs…Canine parvovirus monoclonal antibody-treated dogs also experienced less severe and/or shorter durations of diarrhea, fever, vomiting, CPV-2 shedding in feces, and lymphopenia." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38295522/
↩ [7] Artificial intelligence and quantum computing will merge within the next few years. Together, they will accelerate drug discovery and personalized treatment in ways we can hardly imagine. New therapies will be designed and "tested" at the molecular level and, instead of guessing, quantum computers will analyze billions of data points to determine efficacy and side effects based on individual genetic profiles. In short: Within a decade, these tools will revolutionize the creation of personalized therapies, compressing years of design and testing into days or even hours. The most likely bottleneck for individual access will come from existing regulatory frameworks.
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