Covid Was Never As Deadly As "Experts" Warned
Covid Was Never As Deadly As "Experts" Warned
The Experts were wrong. Covid does not pose a serious danger to healthy, non-elderly people.
Update: an earlier version of this article mistakenly linked to an older IFR paper by Ioannidis. The new paper is now linked in the article.
The primary basis for our societal response to Covid was explicitly stated to be its alleged lethality. We were told that lives were on the line and hospitals were incredibly overwhelmed. To this day many “experts” still claim that new waves of Covid are set to cause ‘significant hospitalisations and deaths’ for young and healthy people.
With caveats, while this appears to correlate for elderly, immunocompromised groups, public health authorities failed to make any distinctions for younger, healthy populations in their sweeping recommendations and mandates. Lockdowns, masks, and vaccine policies were often absurdly the same for 18-year-old boys as they were for 85-year-old seniors.
At the onset of the pandemic, approved public health experts collectively pushed an egregiously high Covid infection fatality rate (IFR). In March 2020, the WHO claimed that 3.4% of people infected with COVID had died.
While such numbers quickly became indefensible, the apocalyptic public messaging remained constant. Anointed public health experts often stated the infection fatality rate was 0.2 - 1%.
Renowned Yale epidemiologist Dr. Nicholas Christakis - who many had viewed until then as balanced and rational because of his prior reputation - was one of them. Christakis began to openly advocate alarmist assessments of Covid risk, the need for mandates, and vaccine efficacy on some very large platforms.
In December of last year, Dr. Christakis made an appearance on Sam Harris' Making Sense podcast (of which this author is a listener) and claimed 1 in 100 people infected with Covid had died. Apparently, and because of such a ‘high’ risk he faced as a 60-year-old man, he prided himself in vaccinating his 13-year-old son (which he suggested would protect him). As we now know, none of this holds true.
Based on this exaggerated risk, Christakis vocally supported institutionalised vaccine mandates and the systemic marginalisation of the unvaccinated.
He elaborates here via a different media platform:
“I think we should have a kind of light force applied, not a heavy handed force…so I think if you truly are willing to withdraw from society… there are all kinds of things..many people can do from home, or otherwise limit their interactions with society...But on the other hand if you wish to participate in society for many important activities we’re gonna require you to be vaccinated. If you wanna fly, if you wanna go to school, if you wish to work at certain workplaces, you don’t have the right to come to my work place and infect me. Or if I’m a business owner it’s bad for my business if there’s an outbreak at my business..they have every right to say “no”, we’re a private industry and we require vaccination”
Dr. Nicholas Christakis
Stunned by the implausible rate he gave (1%) on such a massive platform with great confidence, this author emailed Christakis to clarify.
Christakis promptly responded,
"The IFR is probably in the 0.5-0.8 range, and possibly as high as 1.0%." Christakis then sent a link to a recent meta-analysis showing a range of 0.5 - 0.8% and a new Nature paper putting the estimate closer to 1%.
In attempts to make sense of this information, this author proceeded to consult Stanford medicine professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya - advocate of the Great Barrington Declaration and co-author of the crucial 2021 seroprevalence study in Santa Clara County. Dr Bhattacharya was mystified by Christakis' figures.
"Wow, that's really off...that's just wrong," he initially reacted.
After examining further the studies Christakis cited to support his position, Bhattacharya stated:
"The meta-analyses that assert higher values (in the 0.5%+ range worldwide) typically include studies with substandard methodologies, including modelling studies, well as excluding studies with very few deaths, and inadequate coverage of poorer countries."
More accurate meta analyses, contain "more appropriate inclusion and exclusion criteria" and "tend to find estimates in the 0.2% range, with a very sharp age gradient in infection fatality risk," he added.
The most reliable, robust meta analyses on Covid IFR have been conducted by Stanford medicine professor Dr. John Ioannidis.
Unlike other studies relying on highly flawed modelling data, Ioannidis' work has used more accurate seroprevalence stats. Ioannidis and his colleagues have published a new review of the literature, examining 40 national seroprevalence studies covering over 30 countries.
Source: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.11.22280963v1
Ioannidis’ new research focuses on the pre-vaccination Covid infection fatality rate in the non-elderly population. The paper begins by acknowledging the statistical difference between the elderly and non-elderly populations which have wildly disparate Covid outcomes:
“The infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID-19 among non-elderly people in the absence of vaccination or prior infection is important to estimate accurately, since 94% of the global population is younger than 70 years and 86% is younger than 60 years.”
After conducting a rigorous analysis of international seroprevalence data, Ioannidis and colleagues report a median infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.035% for those aged 0-59, who represent 86% of the global population.
In other words, the survival rate for 6.8 billion people across the world who were infected with Covid in 2021 was 99.965%. However, this statistic isn't precise enough to assess individual risks since no one lives in the average.
The authors provide age-stratified risks:
Ages 0-19: fatality rate 0.0003%; survival rate 99.9997%
Ages 20-29: fatality rate 0.003%; survival rate 99.997%
Ages 30-39: fatality rate 0.011%; survival rate 99.989%
Ages 40-49: fatality rate 0.035%; survival rate 99.965%
Even these numbers may exaggerate individual risk since they include both healthy and severely ill people. For example, the risk of a highly fit 23-year-old college athlete with no comorbidities is lower than the average risk of 0.003% for all 20 - 29-year-olds. Moreover, these are pre-vaccination statistics. In the age of Omicron - a less deadly variant which has conferred high rates of natural immunity - Covid risks are far lower.
The authors go on to explain why other estimates were far higher than theirs.
"Our median IFR estimates are roughly 10-fold lower than these previous calculations among children and young adults and 3-6-fold lower among adults 40-69 years old...The previous IFR calculations (4-8, 59) were based on more limited national representative studies’ data and also included data from non-national samples with potentially larger bias."
Crucially, the authors state,
"Consistent with the very low IFR estimates in non-elderly that we have obtained in this work, excess death calculations (71) show no excess deaths among children and adolescents during the pandemic in almost any country that has highly reliable death registration data."
A disease with a survival rate of more than 99.9% for most people does not warrant the panic, hysteria, and violation of core societal principles that the West has seen. Elementary school students were forced to mask in classrooms, vaccines were mandates in workplaces and undergrad colleges, and gyms and exercise facilities were closed for the unvaccinated -- to name just a handful of disturbing, baseless decisions made by those in power.
Driven by ongoing hysteria that Covid poses a serious threat to the non-elderly population, fourth vaccine doses are being pushed on children as young as five years old in the United States (based on single-digit mouse data).
Several prominent universities (such as Harvard, Fordham, Columbia) are clamping down on students with a newly updated vaccine mandate which will expel triple-vaccinated undergraduates who refuse to get the new bivalent jab.
All for what? A virus that poses a 0.035% fatality risk?
The highly flawed IFR data propagated at the start of the pandemic (uncritically covered by the media) produced a cascade of global authoritarianism which has shocked those with any core ethical principles. Those who wrongly claimed one in a hundred infected people were dropping dead from Covid ought to apologise. They should also retract their odious demands to fire those who refuse to take a vaccine for a disease posing an infinitesimally low risk to them.
Unprecedented and untold harm has been perpetrated against the world using an abuse of risk calculations. Now that we have rigorous data showing how wrong public health experts were, we must not allow those who advocated for stripping society of all its established liberties to pretend they were following the science all along. They were not. They were busy hounding, denigrating and smearing those who were.
Never forget that.
This article was originally published in Maajid Nawaz’s Substack. Consider subscribing to his publication here.
I'm also from BC and your work has been invaluable in my legal case against my employer for forcing a no jab, no job mandate on the workforce. Thank you for keeping journalism alive.
It was the greatest crime in world history!