As a conservative policy writer and podcaster, I never thought people would one day flood my email and phone with requests for medical help. Then again, I never envisioned a time when 99% of doctors would refuse to treat pulmonary inflammation and I’d be lucky enough to have access to the few dozen or so doctors who have the brains and compassion to treat (or better yet, pre-empt) COVID pneumonia. Now I’m suspended from Twitter from mentioning one of those cases because the person in the hospital with COVID whom I mentioned is fully vaccinated.
At around 3 p.m. Eastern on Friday afternoon, I tweeted the following:
Shortly thereafter, the tweet was flagged and taken down, and my account was suspended without warning or notice for cause. There’s really nothing new about Twitter suspending anyone who has homed in on the truth, but let this serve as a vivid illustration of the cowardice of the other side. Their views are so fallacious and fickle that, just like a door left open a crack radiates light to the dark interior, they can’t withstand a modicum of dissent coexisting with their propaganda.
In general, I’ve thankfully been getting fewer calls of people in respiratory distress seeking help, as Omicron is much milder. However, there is still some Delta circulating, and it’s hard to know which variant a person is afflicted with. The last few cases I’ve gotten in my home state of Maryland were all fully vaccinated. This individual I referred to is a 62-year-old male on a ventilator receiving the same subpar care with remdesivir, and his friend called me for help getting a true expert doctor to try to help the family ask the right questions and propose better treatment plans.
By definition, there is no way Twitter can know that a single element of that tweet is false. The reality is that the powers that be don’t want people to know the dirty little secret – that not only does the shot not work against infection, but increasingly, many people (at least before Omicron) were getting seriously ill despite having all the shots.
What is so tragic about the corporate blood libel against us is that they are engaging in the dangerous misinformation they project upon us. Lying to people, telling them that everyone in the hospital with COVID is unvaccinated, gives the impression that they don’t need to seek early treatment because it’s impossible for them to get more than a cold or perhaps flu-like symptoms. It is this senseless, idolatrous hope in failing shots that is getting so many people killed.
The notion that everyone in the hospital with COVID is unvaccinated was always an illogical proposition. Take Maryland, for example. According to Maryland’s COVID dashboard, nearly every senior alive has at least one shot, and over 92.5% of all those above 18 have at least one shot. Even if the unvaccinated still compose a relatively dispropionate share of the hospitalizations, there are simply not enough of them to go around to “flood the hospitals.” You can still say there is a degree of efficacy for some people for serious illness (pre-Omicron) without fully lying to people and exaggerating to the point that they believe almost nobody with the shots gets clinically ill.
What am I supposed to do? Erase the guy’s vaccination status to comport with Twitter’s rules? The week before, I had the sister of a 47-year-old diabetic in Rockville, Maryland, who was in the ICU with COVID after having gotten all three shots. These are not isolated cases. Just keep in mind, there is only one country that has put out continuous, granular, and universal national data on deaths and cases by vaccination status. The U.K.’s latest data demonstrates the absurdity of politicians in America suggesting that “nearly everyone in the hospital with COVID is unvaccinated.”
The latest vaccine surveillance report from the U.K.’s Health Security Agency tabulates the exact number of people who died from COVID during weeks 49-52 of 2021 (December), and breaks down the numbers by age and vaccination status.
Now, I’m not a mathematician, but if you add up all of the unvaccinated deaths reported following 60 days from a positive COVID test within that window (928) and divide it by all the total deaths (3,718), you get 24.95% of the deaths being unvaccinated. In other words, 75% of the deaths recorded during that period were indeed vaccinated, nearly all of them double-vaccinated. So, if anything, I do apologize for the misinformation in the tweet where I said the vaccinated accounted for 72% of the deaths. It was actually slightly higher.
Obviously, given the age-stratified vaccination rates, this still shows some degree of efficacy against mortality for the shots. For example, 83% of all deaths among those ages 80+ were vaccinated, but almost everyone in that age cohort is vaccinated. None of us discount that fact. But that is a very different story from saying that the overwhelming majority of deaths in raw numbers are among the unvaccinated. The point is that the efficacy of the shots even against critical illness is too tenuous for people to rely upon, and they still need early treatment.
So the next time I get a call from a family member of a vaccinated COVID patient seeking treatment, I will tell them that it wasn’t the vaccine that failed their loved one. They failed the vaccine. They just weren’t good enough to be graced by its protection.