JAUNDICED EYE

Déjà vu, much? The World Health Organisation (WHO), the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC), and the Irish government all separately in the past week warned against a resurgence of measles in their respective bailiwicks.

Measles is an extremely contagious airborne disease that is particularly dangerous to children, immunocompromised adults, and pregnant women. Like that other ancient scourge, polio, it’s fortunately easily contained through preventative vaccination and, before the Covid pandemic, both diseases had been virtually eradicated in the developed world.

All three of these venerable institutions lamented the decline in the number of parents immunising their children. None of them identified one of the major culprits in the growth in vaccination scepticism — themselves. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

They have lost through their actions during the 2020 Covid pandemic much of the previously unquestioning scientific and moral authority they once enjoyed. That has helped what were once fringe moments gain influence. 

Remember Covid-19? A word once on everyone’s lips and the focus of obsessive media coverage, it has now almost disappeared from public consciousness. Aside from Britain, where the ongoing Hallett Inquiry is examining its government’s response to the pandemic, there’s barely a word uttered elsewhere about that tumultuous period. 

Although the disease is still around — spewing new variations and doubtless still claiming lives — the “Covid Dashboards” on every news site, daily updating the statistics, are long gone. And while there are still regular recommendations from the WHO, national health agencies, and pharmaceutical companies urging the public to report for another round of vaccinations, these go virtually unreported and totally unheeded. 

The public amnesia is quite remarkable, especially given the devastation that the pandemic caused. 

First, there are the quantifiable costs. Between 7 million and 28 million died from (or with) Covid, depending on who calculates the figures and how. It also caused the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression with 100 million jobs, according to the International Monetary Fund, lost worldwide.

Then there are the social costs — both of the disease and the measures taken to combat it — which are incalculable but substantial. The intricate web of daily life was transformed in an instant into a world of loneliness, isolation and fear. The disruption of schooling and the tragic effects of deferred treatments for other life-threatening medical conditions are still being felt. 

And here’s another important effect that the political establishment refuses even to acknowledge exists, never mind deal with. It’s how the management of the pandemic by the WHO, national governments, and the mainstream media has seriously damaged the public’s trust in these keystone institutions. 

The evidence, however, is accumulating. In most developed countries, but especially in Europe and the United States, routine immunisation against preventable childhood diseases is in decline. Polio, which was on the brink of eradication, is creeping back. So, too, is measles, despite the long-proven efficacy and safety of the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination. 

In part, this disease resurgence is because in many parts of the world routine vaccinations were missed during the Covid-19 pandemic. But that’s a self-correcting problem; after lockdowns were lifted, normal vaccination uptake patterns were expected to resume. 

That’s not happened. Instead, because of the way the pandemic was handled by officialdom, there has been a marked rise in vaccination scepticism, which has morphed into a more general distrust of health authorities and scientists in general. 

Consequently, there should be little doubt that when the next pandemic strikes, national governments and international bodies will not get the same levels of public cooperation that marked especially the early stages of the Covid pandemic.  

And we’re not here talking about conspiracy nutters. Most of the citizenry comprehends that during a global crisis, which the pandemic was, trade-offs had to be made between swift interventions and unintended, potentially harmful, consequences. Especially when these decisions had to be made based on sketchy information.

What they don’t appreciate is the high-handedness and dishonesty. The WHO, dutifully parroted by national health authorities everywhere in the democratic world — with the admirable exception of Sweden — proclaimed certainties about matters that, at best, were scientifically murky and of dubious value.

Think of the masking, isolation, school closures, travel restriction and lockdown mandates that were issued with such confidence. All, to some degree or entirely, were misguided and counter-productive or simply wrong. 

It’s not that there were no credible counterarguments to consider. Despite claiming to “follow the science” in pursuit of evidence-based decision-making, as the authorities claimed to be doing, they ruthlessly closed down dissenting voices, no matter how mainstream. 

The Great Barrington Declaration, which expressed “grave concerns” about the “irreparable damage” that would be caused by lockdowns, was authored by three epidemiologists from Oxford, Stanford and Harvard, and cosigned by 46 medical luminaries from around the Western world. Their concerns were scornfully dismissed out of hand by Dr Anthony Fauci (who headed the US public health response) and the WHO. The director of the US National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, told the media that the authors were “fringe epidemiologists”.  

Shamefully, as was the case with virtually every statement emanating from the medical establishment, the legacy media meekly accepted the official line. The only dissenting voices, which we’ve since learnt the US government went to great lengths to suppress illegally, were the online media, especially Twitter.

The pattern of obfuscation, misdirection and vilification that met the medical scientists on the issue of lockdowns was extended subsequently to most aspects of the official Covid-19 response. 

It’s now pretty clear that while the elderly, those with comorbidities and those who were immunocompromised, benefited from Covid vaccinations, there was little need to extend the immunisation campaign to healthy adults and none justifying the vaccination of healthy children. Masking, too, was an expensive waste of time and provided little more than a false sense of security.

However, to this day, neither the global medical nor media establishments are willing to acknowledge that they were often wrong. In a similar vein in South Africa, we have yet to see those who were arguing for legislated mandatory vaccinations— including leading medical ethicists, as well as the influential, constitutional guru Prof Pierre de Vos — concede that they got it nightmarishly wrong.

In 2022 the Cochrane Reviews — considered the gold standard of medical research — had two respected Oxford scientists conduct a systematic analysis of the research that had been used to justify masking during the academic. They found the quality of much of the research to be “abysmal” and failed to find good quality evidence of mask effectiveness.

Their “wrong” — meaning embarrassingly right — conclusions caused an academic and bureaucratic firestorm. There was considerable pressure on the Cochrane Reviews to withdraw the study (it hasn’t) and the authors, Dr Tom Jefferson and Prof Carl Heneghan, were excoriated in the media and had their research misrepresented to a US House Committee by the US Centres for Disease Control  (CDC) director, Dr Rochelle Walensky. 

The CDC is still sticking to its “we-know-better” position. When a panel of scientists, picked by the CDC to update its protocol on controlling hospital infections, recently came up with conclusions that they didn’t like — that the evidence suggests no difference in efficacy between N95 respirators and inexpensive surgical masks for infection control — the CDC didn’t modify its protocol. Instead, it instructed the panel to go away and rework their conclusions.

The medical and media establishments acquitted themselves during the Covid pandemic. Worst of all, they appear to have learned nothing from it. 

Neither should be surprised at its waning influence. To regain public trust they need to get back to basics: evidence-based medicine and even-handed journalism. How difficult can that be?

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