Dr John Lee, shining light of rationality and proportionality, talks with gentle common sense here, in a lay-friendly way.
YouTube link. If it is removed I will update to other links.
Propaganda feeds an aggressive silencing of dissent whereby critical analyses are dismissed and ridiculed as conspiracies, as many of today’s public health luminaries have experienced. Dr Lee states that “Rational discussion and calm assessment of facts and figures seem to have flown out of the window. I’m retired <so> I’m free to speak out as I would see fit“. Pre-existing immunity even gets an honorary mention.
“One of the arguments for the effectiveness of test and trace [which doesn’t work for this type of virus, as he explains] has been Australia and New Zealand and some of the Asian countries. But that assumes that their populations started from the same basis with regard to Covid, as our [UK] population did.
One of the other contended features of the Covid epidemic has been the extent to which people have got pre-existing immunity to this virus. It was claimed at the beginning that because it was a new virus, there was no pre-existing immunity at all. And yet we know that in a normal winter, one in six colds are caused by coronaviruses, in the West. So that means that these viruses are similar enough to Covid to be called coronaviruses, and yet different enough to be identified as a different species. It is quite likely, therefore, that our immune response to one will at least to some extent, overlap with our immune response to the other, and therefore give us resistance to that.
When people have been looking at immunity to Covid, the test that has tended to be done, because it is the easiest, is to see whether people have antibodies. It is quite possible that in the Far East, which is where these viruses seem to originate … these viruses originate more frequently than we are aware of … that more people have more pre-existing immunity to other coronaviruses, but also to this one.
In which case the explanation for the apparent success of test and trace in places like Australia and New Zealand, isn’t particularly to do with the test and trace. It is because their populations were started from a different baseline with regard to pre-existing immunity, than our population was“.
Absence of antibodies does not equal absence of immunity. Enduring and robust immunity comprises an intricate process involving T-cells. A year ago mention of T-cells was ridiculed as an oddball conspiracy. In the face of undeniable evidence this premise collapsed and we can now once more mention T-cells. A glaring omission seems to be studies examining T-cell immunity in Oceania populations.
alicespringstomind 