By William J. Furney
Mind control. A fake pandemic. A global conspiracy engineered by the elite to gain even more power and cash reserves.
After all, who are these people who are ill and dying? Who are all these tens of thousands being tested for the virus every day? Many of us don’t know anyone who has fallen victim to the bug, and we don’t see huge, snaking queues of people lining up for tests.
Those people sans masks you passed on the street or in the shops earlier most likely buy into the growing coronavirus conspiracy theories: it’s all a controlling scam, the pathogen doesn’t exist — and they themselves are immune anyway.
Is one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world fibbing? Johns Hopkins University of Medicine updates coronavirus infections and deaths in almost real-time via its Coronavirus Resource Centre, and as of writing, the free service that much of the world relies on has recorded almost 76 million infections globally and more than 1.6 million deaths.
Parsing through all the corona-confusion this year, one thing is clear: the virus that’s believed to have leaped from bats on sale at a food market in China is not a threat to the majority of countries’ populations. Ebola has a death rate of up to 90 percent, for instance, but this newly discovered, multi-spiked organism kills at a rate of around 3% of people it infects.
Most people who get it experience mild cold or flu symptoms and quickly recover — others are asymptomatic — and those who have the toughest time are either in poor physical shape (fat, as victim Boris Johnson has described himself, after his 50-50 battle to survive) or elderly. And we’re told the average age of coronavirus fatalities is 82, many of whom surely had underlying health conditions that meant they were unable to shake off the corona-infection.
As the world endures rolling lockdowns amid a possible third wave of the bug that kills relatively few, compared to the number of infected, it’s little wonder the conspiracy theories emerged and are flourishing.
Going into 2021, every one of the 7.8 billion people in the world is hoping the various vaccines that have been swiftly developed — 10 months instead of the typical 10 years — and even more quickly approved by regulators (days, instead of months or even years) will put an end to the pandemic and give us back our lives.
Already it’s being rolled out to the elderly and healthcare workers in the UK, US and elsewhere. But lots of people say they won’t have the jab and not only because the long-term effects are unknown but because of those conspiracy theories that include injecting microchips into us to control the global population.
There is talk of vaccine or immunity passports being required to get about, including for travelling on planes, although the prospect of such a document, which would probably be in digital form, raises all kinds of moral and ethical questions, including threatening people’s basic freedoms and perhaps already chasmic inequalities. It might be possible, for instance, to be turned down for a job because you haven’t been inoculated.
What’s in the coronavirus vaccines anyway? A bit of the genetic material of the rona, designed to elicit an immune response in the human body, and a fatty substance it’s suspended in. Some who have had the injection, including medics, have said it made them ill and they thought they had come down with a full-blown case — although such experiences appear to be the exception.
Pfizer says of its two-jab vaccine that trials involving over 43,000 people showed it was “well tolerated and demonstrated 95% efficacy in preventing COVID-19 in those without prior infection seven days or more after the second dose”. It said “partial protection” from covid infection seems to appear around 12 days after the first injection.
“These pivotal data demonstrate that our COVID-19 vaccine candidate is highly effective in preventing COVID-19 disease and is generally well-tolerated,” said Pfizer’s Vaccine Research and Development chief, Kathrin Jansen. “They are a testament to the extraordinary efforts to deliver an effective vaccine with a favorable safety profile rapidly and serve as the basis for our regulatory submissions around the world,” she said.
“As COVID-19 cases continue to rise and ravage the lives of so many people, we hope that these data will build confidence in the global health opportunity for vaccines to help us combat this devastating pandemic.”
And the UK reels this week following the discovering of a new strain of the bug that may be up to 70% more contagious, according to scientists, and more people there find themselves in harsher lockdowns, effectively cancelling Christmas, all eyes on are on the jab — and not the Lord — as our saviour.