Thought of the Day - December 28 2021 - COVID Therapeutics ScoreCard - Rather Disappointing

I figure I would do a quick review of what we have gotten for our nearly one trillion dollar investment in COVID remedies worldwide. I know this sounds like a number out of an Austin Powers' movie, and indeed it is just an estimate. An estimate of how much governments around the world have spent so far on the development, procurement, administration, policy-enforcement and delivery of COVID remedies.

By far the biggest money-pit has been the corona-virus vaccines.

As you are aware, the current COVID vaccines are really just therapeutics. They do not stop transmission, they do not provide immunity (personal or herd). In fact, they do not actually meet the definition of what a vaccine is supposed to do.

This is the reason many countries have been forced to change the definition of what a vaccine is ( Thought of the Day - November 8 2021 - When is a Vaccine not a Vaccine? ).

The issues with our coronavirus vaccines are:

1. They have, for the most part, been designed to stimulate blood antibodies. While this works well for non-respiratory viral infections, they do not as well against coronaviruses. Our immuno-response system is many-layered, for aerosolized infections the first line of defence is our mucus membranes. Thus it is essential they also become involved. Otherwise, the virus must fully enter the body for any kind of response. In order to stop the rapidly progressing disease our blood antibodies must be fully active - the memory cells, which are the key to most vaccines, are just too slow to react. Thus the reason that protection starts to wane in a matter of months as your body stops producing uncalled for blood antibodies ( Thought of the Day - October 27 2021 - Antibodies Shmantibodies ).

2. Many of the vaccines, particularly the mRNA vaccines, are coded to specific parts of the viral protein (i.e. the corona spike) and so have limited tolerance for variants. Right now the EU (EMA and ECDC) are recommending you take as many different brands of vaccine as you can get your hands in order to have the best effect.

Thus the need for booster-after-booster. In short, these are really therapeutic defences not immunizing vaccination. To be fair the COVID vaccines turned out to be a decent treatment for the Delta variant. They probably saved 10s if not 100s of thousands of lives. But of course now with Omicron, breakthrough cases are becoming much more common.

Next, there are convalescent plasmas - using blood from people who have active antibodies. While this sounds like the treatment the members of the Rolling Stones use to stay alive as long as they have, it is actually a COVID treatment. However, for whatever reason, the WHO has now decided this is also just a bunch of witchcraft.

There are also the newly developed, newly marketed, and newly approved antiviral pills. Canada has bought millions of them, from Merck and from Pfizer. Sorry to say, France, for example, has now concluded they really don't work. That is why, despite all of your money that has been spent, you are not hearing much about them anymore as a miracle cure here in Canada.

But this is not the first time Canada has been duped. There was the Remdisivir travesty back in 2020. Canada also bought millions of these treatments only to find most provinces abandoned them shortly after ( Thought of the Day - October 16 - COVID-19 Clinical Treatment ).

And of course, there are other somewhat effective preventive treatments. Treatments like Vitamin-D, Zinc and Ivermectin - but these are never mentioned in the popular press. First, because there is no money to be made, so no one is paying for such articles, and also, for some reason, it is just human nature to want to buy the latest snake oil!

Cheers

Cliff