Declare the COVID Pandemic Over and remove the mandates and emergency declarations! The time has come to move on!

I have submitted to publish, lets see what the editor says; I put lots in it as to references but all the same, I wanted to write on this bringing in the Shanghai lockdowns and the new BA 4 and BA 5

Declare the COVID Pandemic Over and remove the emergency declarations! The time has come to move on!

Paul Elias Alexander, PhD

Yes, the COVID lockdown lunatics are at it again and what damage they have done must not be forgotten and we must get accountability for every policy decision that harmed our society and costed lives. Each and every one must be examined in proper public hearings and inquires. Yes, Dr. Anthony Fauci is also at it again causing panic, confusion, hysteria, and distrust in the society with his illogical para ‘pandemic is over’ one day and ‘pandemic is back on’ the next day statements (e.g. “The United States is finally “out of the full-blown explosive pandemic phase”). Despite this, the time has come. It is time we declared the pandemic over and drop all these nonsensical unscientific mandates and the underpinning emergency powers. It is time we moved forward and accepted that we will manage COVID and live with it as we do for other viruses. This is the approach that was needed in February/March 2020, where we should have used an age-risk stratified focused protection approach, with strong protections of the vulnerable and allowing the rest of the well, healthy, low-risk society to live largely normal lives. Using early therapeutic treatment as needed.

This now is about taking back our rights, liberties, and freedoms, and it is about the risk we accept as free people living in free societies. Normal infection is the risk we accept in a free society that comes with day-to-day living. It comes with freedom to make commonsense decisions, based on one’s personal risk profile, one’s own needs, values, and preferences. 

It is way past time we allow policy to be made by the States as POTUS Biden has indicated. Whether or not you thought he was being honest, it is the right thing to do. Omicron (and sub-variants) based on mildness to date, has presented the unique opportunity for the federal and local governments to declare success, that the risk is very low for Omicron, and that COVID May 2022 is not COVID February 2020. 

I have always felt that it is ‘we the people’ who must end this pandemic, it is we the people who must stand up and tell the governments ‘nada mas’, and it is we the people who must be willing to wage the greatest battle now, civilly, peacefully, and law abidingly, to even hold the government’s hand to help them end the pandemic. If they are too spineless, weak, feckless, and pusillanimous, then we have to lead them out of this pandemic insanity, this lockdown lunacy.

It is time we shed reliance on inept, highly incompetent, illogical, irrational, reckless, absurd, non-sensical, and specious COVID drivel from so called lockdown lunatic medical ‘experts’, our public health leaders at CDC and NIH and FDA, who have been nothing more than academically sloppy and cognitively dissonanced in all they have stated. They either do not read the science, do not understand the data, or do not ‘get’ the science. They, the public health officials and COVID Task Forces and Science Tables have exuded a depth of corrupted ineptness for over two years now that is staggering. They may be blinded to the objective evidence by their own personal biases, prejudices, and politics. Whatever it is, nothing, absolutely nothing they have stated on COVID since day one, early February/March 2020, not one COVID policy, has been correct and all lockdown, school closure, and mask mandate polices have failed. Every one of them!  It is time we turn them all off and begin trusting ourselves, our own decision-making, based on being informed.

The vaccines have shown themselves to be ineffective now and there are adverse effects and even deaths post vaccine. This is a real concern for the vaccines are not properly safe and were not studied for safety or the proper duration to detect safety signals, and forms part of my view that we must end this now. All of it. To the extent that vaccines were ever needed, my view remains ‘no’, that this vaccine/injection/inoculation/gene delivery platform was never ever needed and should have been only offered and not mandated. Moreover, if we knew very early on that COVID was amenable to risk stratification and that there was a clear gradient based on risk, age etc., then we should have geared this injection only to the ‘at-risk’ population only, that is, persons who were older and at high risk.

Yes, I can repeat what I have stated repeatedly and for well over a year now (AIER) and into two years and more recently (Brownstone), that the lockdowns are and were very futile, and so were the school closures and mask mandates. That mass testing and isolation/quarantine of asymptomatic persons was useless and actually harmful. That you could never ever defeat a mutable respiratory virus and especially one with an animal reservoir and open borders. That you could never bring a vaccine for a respiratory coronavirus. That the lockdown policies caused crushing harms on societies and especially those least able to afford. That we shifted the morbidity and mortality burden to women and children and particularly the poorer among us. That business owners and laid off employees and children self-harmed and took their own lives. That the Fauci and Birx lockdown and school closure policies and mandates caused our young children to hang themselves. That you would deny people the right to choose vaccination or not (their natural immunity), with relentless infringement on their liberties and humanity. That you would force a vaccine that is ineffective (does not confer immunity) and does not stop transmission, while also being harmful as per accumulated evidence. That you would work to wrongfully and without scientific basis, separate the society based on vaccine status. That you would claim success when the epidemic waves declined without any regard for seasonality and the natural behavior of the epidemic and as such, insist you do more and more of the same failed policies.

Yes, I could go on and on and on about the catastrophic failures of the lockdowns and near every pandemic policy and action taken, but this is not the place. We have to focus on moving forward for the society is dangerously fractured, polarized, and divided. The society is devastated by the lockdown lunatic policies. Yes, we have plenty of time to revisit and examine what went wrong and I do not wish to be sidetracked and want to focus on the ‘ending the pandemic emergency’ and ‘moving forward’ immediately given the trauma to the society.

The fact is that we know extensively more on who is at risk and how to manage and treat COVID. We know that baseline risk is prognostic on severity and mortality. Very stably. Omicron can allow the government to now save face and declare success. We can thus begin healing our societies. It is way past time we learn to manage this virus and go on with life, and start by ending the emergency, the restrictions, and mandates. Now. The nation is suffering and especially our children, and in many respects, needlessly.

It is time now. It is time we be brave as a society. If the government with all of its arrogance and hubris cannot say it is time, then we say it for them and we move on. ‘We the people’ lead. It is way past time to end the pandemic state of emergency. It is time also to end the controls, the closures, the restrictions, the plexiglass, the social distancing stickers and the exhortations, the distancing announcements, and also the vaccine mandates given the overwhelming evidence implying that the infection explosion globally that we have been experiencing – post-double vaccination and even triple vaccination in e.g. Israel, UK, US etc. – may be due to the vaccinated becoming infected and spreading Covid as much or even more than the unvaccinated. There is clear evidence that the vaccinated are also becoming ill and facing hospitalization and mortality at increasing numbers post vaccine.

We had emerging indications that 95% of infections in Germany are among the fully vaccinated. Additional evidence of the failure of the vaccines emerged when Omicron cases spiked in Germany’s most vaccinated state. Israel considered a fourth vaccination for the elderly (given that the prior three shots have been largely ineffective with vaccinal immunity rapidly waning) and also whether to end vaccination in everyone except high-risk people, thus admitting to and adopting a ‘herd’ immunity policy. 

The former COVID czar of Israel had alluded that Omicron “will give Israel herd immunity without swamping ICUs.” In Israel, it became increasingly clear that Omicron could lead to population-level herd immunity. Denmark also admitted Omicron’s deliverance from the COVID-19 pandemic, stating “it will impart a kind of herd immunity shielding the country from future variants.” Now Denmark (April 30th 2022) has moved to end all vaccine mandates, signaling it is done with COVID. “Denmark has become the first country to halt its Covid vaccination program, saying it is doing so because the virus has been brought under control.” We even had evidence that Omicron arrived on all 7 continents, as 36 cases were reported in Antarctica. 

Vaccines and mandates are and were increasingly being called into question in the face of Omicron with health experts saying “the highly transmissible Omicron variant could help countries reach herd immunity as cases continue to rise.” This has recently led experts to state that SARS-CoV-2 will remain and be very controllable, signaling that the end of the pandemic is near. “COVID-19 will become another recurrent disease that health systems and societies will have to manage. For example, the death toll from omicron seems to be similar in most countries to the level of a bad influenza season in northern hemisphere countries…after the omicron wave, COVID-19 will return but the pandemic will not”.

I am saying as clearly as I can that COVID has been circling and spiraling the drain and signals that this pandemic emergency can end now. This will take courage and political will however. Nations like Canada on the other hand appear stuck in March 2020 mode with COVID, despite nations all around it dropping mandates and opening up or at least trying to. Ending this is really a societal decision where the population must decide it is time to go on with usual life, making reasonable commonsense decisions and taking necessary precautions. This means we will have to come to terms with living with the pathogen alike how we live with other common cold coronaviruses and seasonal influenza, and that this is reasonable and was expected. This signals a healthy society. We already have the Great Barrington Declaration and a 20-step Alexander/Brownstone Model as signposts to help us emerge. 

The evidence shows that there is/was no marked difference between the vaccinated and unvaccinated in terms of infection risk and harboring of heavy viral load, relative to previous variants. We have accumulated evidence that appear to strongly support this (Brownstone here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. 

What these studies have repeatedly shown are that vaccines have not protected against the Delta and Omicron variants and have largely failed and are even harmful. A recent paper by Dr. Martin Kulldorff in Brownstone raises further very troubling questions on the mRNA vaccine as it failed to show benefit in reducing mortality. Importantly, accumulated evidence shows that the vaccines cannot stop the disease from spreading and eventually infect most of us (or replicating). That the vaccine does not sterilize the virus and does not protect the upper airways. That is, while the vaccines may provide individual benefits to the vaccinee, and especially to older high-risk people (still a subject of debate), the public benefit of universal vaccination is in grave doubt. In fact, our best debates indicates that the public benefit is near naught.

As such, Covid vaccines should not be expected to contribute to eliminating the communal spread of the virus or the reaching of herd immunity. These vaccines cannot cut the chain of transmission and thus have no role in contributing to herd immunity. We also have accumulated evidence that the vaccines are harmful for many (over 1,000 studies), and alarmingly in young persons e.g. myocarditis in males < 40 years of age (Patone et al.). What we are seeing is that the vaccines are very limited in stopping Omicron infection that now dominates. It is becoming increasingly clear that we will have to rely on natural immunity (COVID-recovered) to get us to population-level herd immunity. 

This unravels the rationale for vaccine mandates and passports. “The notion that we have to vaccinate every living, walking American – and eventually every newborn – in order to control the pandemic,” writes Marty Makary, “is based on the false assumption that the risk of dying from COVID-19 is equally distributed in the population. It's not. We have always known that it's very hard for the virus to hurt someone who is young and healthy. And that's still the case.” There is more than a thousand-fold difference in risk of death from COVID between an elderly person and a young child. Again, control measures must be age and risk specific.

We also know that natural immunity is superior to vaccine immunity and it always was. Any suggestions otherwise by public health leaders and officials have been an effort to deliberately misinform and mislead the public into vaccinating. It is actually a scandal, outrageously so, that the natural immunity (COVID-recovered) of persons is not being recognized as equal to and even superior to vaccine immunity as it is. 

It turns out that we have data to show that natural immunity is life-long, with data showing that it is robust near 100 years after exposure e.g. researchers find long-lived immunity to 1918 pandemic virus, CIDRAP, 2008 and the actual 2008 NATURE journal publication by Yu. We also know of the research that exposure to prior common cold coronavirus provides protection and that we were likely all immune at some level e.g. exposure to common cold coronaviruses can teach the immune system to recognize SARS-CoV-2, La Jolla, Crotty and Sette, 2020 and selective and cross-reactive SARS-CoV-2 T cell epitopes in unexposed humans, Mateus, 2020, as well as those who had SARS-1 in 2003 were immune to SARS-CoV-2 now e.g. SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell immunity in cases of COVID-19 and SARS, and uninfected controls, Le Bert, 2020. 

It is becoming more apparent then, that the pandemic is on its last legs and Omicron has ushered this endemic phase in, thankfully. This variant is milder yet highly infectious (based on all the data on sub-variants and what we know to date on emerging BA.4 and BA.5). Yes, we have had approximately 1 million new cases in one day in the United States as January 2022 arrived and we have to take this seriously and be on guard as the pandemic winds down. 

Importantly, while there has been an increase, the massive hospitalization has not occurred and the ICU and death curves that typically follow the infection and case curves by approximately one to two weeks, have not materialized. This remains stable to 30th April 2022. The omicron deaths are about one-tenth of Delta’s. The New York Times has reported that Omicron is not more severe for children, this despite increasing hospitalizations. Dr. Fauci has also weighed in by stating “hospitals are overcounting COVID-19 cases in children because they automatically get tested.” “Dr. Anthony Fauci says statistics for hospitalizations among children with COVID-19 are getting overblown because many young patients are being admitted with unrelated ailments before they test positive.”

This is tremendous news for populations. We have been fortunate that COVID has spared out children unlike seasonal influenza or respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). We have been fortunate also that the variants have been mild as expected (Muller’s ratchet), yet there is always a small risk that a novel variant can be pathogenic, especially our concern that the vaccination program in the midst of an ongoing pandemic with tremendous infectious pressure and sub-optimal immune pressure on the spike, using a non-sterilizing vaccine that does not neutralize the virus, can drive new lethal variants (via natural selection). We continue to be hopeful that the mildness and non-lethality of Omicron remains so and we have no data or evidence to suggest otherwise. A vaccine that does not sterilize the virus and cut the chain of transmission is the gravest nightmare for virologist, vaccinologists, and immunologists.

The very good news is based on the best data to date. The vaccines have served their purpose, yet I argue they have not and have failed very early one. They have shown themselves to be insufficient against the Delta and Omicron variant, which by the very infectious nature of this latter variant, affects virtually everyone regardless of vaccinations. This showed us that the vaccinal antibodies were a mismatch to the dominant viral spike protein (target antigen) and will continue to be. Setting the ineffective (and not properly safe) vaccine aside, the belief is that after current steep rises, there will be peaks and declines and reductions of what is left of Covid to small endemic pockets that may recur in the fall like flu but will continue according to best evidence as mild if annoying infections. 

The evidence accumulated rapidly that Omicron quickly escalated, peaked, and then declined as rapidly (here, here, here, here). Forecasters were roughly accurate in their assessments, “If you look at the United States, the bulk of the infections should be mid-January, and we should start seeing a decline in the second half of January…so it's, in a sense, very soon.” 

Research findings out of Hong Kong gave us even more good news, and forecasted largely how omicron has operated. Researchers reported that “Omicron SARS-CoV-2 infects and multiplies 70 times faster than the Delta variant and original SARS-CoV-2 in human bronchus.” This helped account for why this variant was spreading faster between humans than prior variants e.g. Delta. Their study also showed that “the Omicron infection in the lung is significantly lower than the original SARS-CoV-2, which may be an indicator of lower disease severity.” 

Researchers found that “the variant replicates much faster in the bronchus, which connects the windpipe to the lungs, 24 hours after infection. Yet it reproduces more than 10 times slower in the actual human lung tissue.” 

In sum, this is all great news. 

Yes, there has been putative evidence of reinfection (though the data is still being robustly collected and expert immunologists explain this represents more of an ‘immune rechallenge’ and breach of innate immunity but not pure breach of natural acquired/adaptive immunity) but by all accounts, the symptoms have been mild (more problematic for vulnerable higher-risk persons as would be expected), with reports that even the elderly required limited treatment (or lesser aggressive treatment) and that symptoms are/were short-lived. This is excellent news and we see no indications that this has changed over the course of omicron (we will nonetheless be watchful as BA.4 and BA.5 sub-variants emerge). At the same time, we should always expect some modest amount of death in vulnerable persons, as we would for seasonal influenza and even common cold. In effect, COVID can be considered being over and Omicron has hastened the pace of endemic transition. Omicron is being exalted as nature’s vaccine, a gift, an off-ramp, an exit strategy for governments and COVID policy decision-makers, should they have the courage and will to avail themselves of it. 

In summary, it is now time to end the pandemic’s state of emergency and everything associated with it. All mandates. It is time we accept that we will live with COVID as we live with other mild common cold coronaviruses. There is never ‘zero risk’ and vulnerable persons may succumb but if there is one thing COVID has taught us or reminded us, it is that we must properly and strongly protect the vulnerable (elderly) and high-risk persons among us ‘first.’ But ‘zero COVID’ or ‘stop COVID at all costs’ only destroys economies (look at what is being done to the people in Shanghai, China with the brutal punishing lockdowns, see here, here, here, here, here, here), and the collateral damage as to harms and suicides are crushing. China has brutalized it's people to achieve ‘ZERO-COVID, driving up suicides as people are reportedly starving under the crushing weight of lockdowns. Lockdown lunacy! This suffering due to lockdowns and restrictive COVID policies is particularly so for women and children and especially those poorer among us who can least afford to shield or lockdown. We must never take this path again or allow our governments the emergency powers to implement these liberty- and human rights-crushing lockdown policies. Lockdown costs (financial and otherwise) have been catastrophic and will incur millions of years of life lost to Americans.

It is time we allow policy to be made by the States as POTUS Biden has indicated. Omicron has presented the opportunity for the federal and local governments to declare success, that there is abundant natural immunity, that the risk is very low for Omicron, and that COVID January 2022 is not COVID May 2020. 

We know extensively more on who is at risk and how to manage and treat COVID. We even have povidone-iodine (or hydrogen peroxide) as nasal-oral washes that could kill the virus and act as potent prevention. Truth is that Omicron can allow the government to now save face and declare success. We can thus begin healing our societies. It is time we learn to manage this virus and go on with life, and start by ending the emergency, the restrictions, and mandates.