“As time moves on the line will blur. It will no longer seem to be the simplicity of good versus evil, but good versus fools who think they are good.”
Criss Jami, Killosophy
The title of this piece is a statement by Julius Caesar and was thus voiced about two thousand years ago. Although science has worn seven-mile boots for the past 2,000 years, the boot size of human wisdom has remained virtually unchanged.
An estimated 750,000 scientific papers on COVID19 and the SARS-CoV-2 virus have been published in the past one and three quarters of a year, with hundreds more being published every day. The vast majority of these consist of experimental studies and modeling studies.
The roar of this digital (pseudo)scientific avalanche is so deafening that it drowns out any reliable and purely scientific sound.
In the Netherlands, the debate about COVID19 – and the policy mapped out – is based on what frosted glass-reading modelers predict, regardless of how often they have been incorrect in the (recent) past. Virtually every prediction of these theorists is accompanied by very wide confidence intervals, and even then, with great regularity, reality sails a wide arc around these outermost beacons of theoretical reliability.
This fully concurs with the substantiation for introducing the coronavirus entry pass – as with so many other measures taken. The alleged necessity is based solely on the ‘predictive’ model of Jacco Wallinga, member of the OMT. It is (again) the excuse for Hugo de Jonge to introduce a draconian, useless, and severely restrictive measure. The coronavirus entry pass was something he apparently already had been obsessing on for some time, but about which he repeatedly and shamelessly lied by telling the Dutch people that this would never happen.
The reasons stated by Hugo de Jonge are, that vaccinated people are considerably less contagious compared to unvaccinated people, and people who have tested negative by means of an rt-PCR cannot further spread the virus. In this way, Hugo de Jonge argues, it is possible to not only protect unvaccinated fellow men, but also already vaccinated elderly, already vaccinated people with severe underlying conditions and already vaccinated people with a significantly dysfunctional immune system.
And no matter the large number of studies showing that vaccinated people are just as contagious as unvaccinated, it does not penetrate the stronghold of ignorance of which Hugo de Jonge is Lord of the Castle. Not without reason, Comtesse Diane de Beausacq already in the 19th century expressed the following: “The mind serves everything, especially to put goodness into practice; the fools want to be good but cannot.”
Eventually, practice beats every theory though, kicking and hitting it wherever it can hit it.
On September 30, “Eurosurveillance” published an article with the convincing title: “Nosocomial outbreak caused by the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant in a highly vaccinated population, Israel, July 2021.” (1) This article describes a lightning-fast outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in an Israeli hospital.
If one wants to compare the entrance to Israeli hospitals with the coronavirus entry pass, it is justified to equate the first with an intact sea dike, and the second with a broken river dike that needs to be reinforced with sandbags. Any patient to be admitted to Israel must have a “Green Pass” stating that he or she has been fully vaccinated or be tested for admission via a rapid test followed by an rt-PCR. If a person has not been vaccinated, he or she will remain in strict isolation until the rt-PCR shows to be negative. The nurses come in full combat outfit: surgical apron, head covers, gloves, splash shield and an FFP2 face mask. The patients, even if they have been vaccinated, wear a surgical face mask, certainly in case of contact with doctors or nurses.
The ‘index patient’, being the patient to whom the outbreak could be traced, was a fully vaccinated seventy-year-old, with kidney failure, dependent on hemodialysis. He was admitted with a fever and cough, but not tested on admission as his complaints were attributed to a systemic infection with present heart failure, and, of course, because he had been vaccinated.
He then was put in a four-bed room, amidst three other patients. Together with a roommate, he went for hemodialysis every other day in the dialysis ward. Four days after admission, he was diagnosed with COVID19, based on his physical complaints and symptoms, as well as a positive rt-PCR. His three roommates were also tested and tested positive as well. Thereupon, the index patient was transferred to a special COVID ward, the other three were admitted or discharged, according to their clinical condition.
Source and contact investigation were expanded to the dialysis ward and another hospital ward where one of his three roommates had spent one day. 27 People with a positive PCR result were identified: 16 patients, 2 family members and 9 employees.
All 16 patients – including the index patient – were transferred to a ward, of which half was assigned for patients with COVID19 and the other half for non-COVID patients. This was due to the low number of patients with COVID19 admitted at that time. On the day of transfer, the index patient was cared for by a nurse who had gone through COVID19 and, according to protocol, had received one vaccination.
Three days later, this nurse worked in the part of the ward that was assigned for patients without COVID. He cared for three patients in one room, of which two, after two days, developed physical complaints and symptoms indicating COVID19. All three patients were found to test positive. Source and contact research has been conducted in this department as well. In total, 19 people tested positive: 10 employees, 8 patients and 1 family member.
The percentage of people with a positive test result on the rt-PCR compared to the total number of people who could theoretically have become infected was calculated, with the criteria for exposure to an infected person being defined very broadly: as soon as source and contact research resulted in two infections in one ward, all employees and patients in that ward were screened, regardless of whether they had been in contact with the infected person or not. Despite all this, the percentage of infections was considerable: Among employees 16/151 (10.6%) people were infected and among patients 23/97 (23.7%). Of this group, 238/248 people were fully vaccinated, which corresponds to a vaccination coverage of 96.2%.
The phylogenetic analysis – determining the interrelationship of the viruses found in patients – showed that in three employees the infection was probably not the result of the outbreak caused by the index patient.
Of the 42 people diagnosed with infection, 38 had been fully vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine, three were unvaccinated, and 1 had earlier suffered from COVID-19 and had subsequently been vaccinated once. The day the infection was diagnosed, 24 of the 42 people had signs and symptoms consistent with COVID19, but in the following days this number rose to 36 people. The employees developed no or only mild symptoms; of the 23 patients on the other hand, 8 became seriously ill, 6 patients got into a critical condition and of this last group, 5 people died.
Obviously, the patient group was considerably older than the group of employees. The median age of employees was 33 (22-48), that of the patients 77 (42-93). The median time between last vaccination and infection was just under six months, with a minimum of five months. All patients had underlying pathologies – hardly surprising, as they were hospitalized – including six people with dialysis-dependent kidney failure and eight people with weakened immune systems.
The astounding conclusion must be that, in a hospital – during just a little over a week – an outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus can occur, caused by just one fully vaccinated patient. That fully vaccinated patient ended up infecting 39 other people, including 23 patients. Of these 23 patients, 8 became seriously ill, 6 were in a critical condition and 5 of those 6 perished. Extensive source and contact investigations also revealed 3 employees and 1 patient clearly infected, but where the source of infection cannot be traced, and who are most likely no factor in this outbreak.
And note: this occurs in an anti-corona stronghold with rigorous checks for vaccination status at the gate, fast and exhaustive source and contact investigations executed in the event of an outbreak and strict rules for isolation. Together with abundant testing during hospitalization. The infections occurred even though nurses and doctors encountered the patients in full anti-corona combat outfit, and most patients wore a surgical mask in defense.
More than 96% of people who could have been infected were fully vaccinated, and of those actually infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, only 3 out of 42 people were unvaccinated, meaning 92 % of infected people were fully vaccinated. In addition, Ct levels were low, in both the symptomatic and asymptomatic groups, suggesting that most of these people were able to further disseminate the virus, as in fact proven by the actual outcome.
Despite all experimental and modeling studies, and notwithstanding the profound and lengthy gazing into modeling opalescent crystal balls by science prophets like Neil Ferguson and our own Jacco Wallinga, the above is the tough reality. Group immunity does not occur through vaccination, simply because vaccination does not (sufficiently) stop transmission. Vaccination does not create a cordon sanitaire to protect the elderly and vulnerable, as Jaap van Dissel repeatedly tries to convince the House of Representatives, and that cordon sanitaire will never exist. Only just one dike has been breached, and the residents of the small houses behind the dike couldn’t care less whether there are 5 or 10 breaches. The dike simply does not protect against the rising water, and that is what matters here.
The completely idiotic, and by no means scientific obligation to wear a surgical mask is completely pointless: Even FFP2 masks did not protect fully vaccinated nurses and doctors against re-infection. And one had to wait just five months after vaccination to see such outbreak result. And presto, it is claimed that a third shot could ‘possibly’ reverse this development, and unsurprisingly, there is no scientific evidence for this claim.
The big question now is, to which group of people one wants to belong to:
Does one want to belong to the flock of naive sheep, containing many vaccinated elderly, vaccinated people suffering from underlying conditions and vaccinated people with a severe dysfunctional immune system, who are misled with luscious corona-free green meadows by Hugo de Jonge and the OMT, ascertained by them by the introduction of the coronavirus entry pass? And while they, enjoying this ‘freedom’, are in all reality being hauled off to the corona slaughterhouse?
Or does one want to belong to the group of people who really want to derive the maximum during their lives and want to enjoy social happenings, with all the pleasant aspects that go with it, regardless of the time they have left? Realizing that they will (anyway) encounter the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and must hope that vaccination will sufficiently protect them against serious illness and death? Moreover, knowing that for some that might not be?
The alternative is to live in isolation at home, worrying about an elusive virus, realizing that, sooner or later, they will run into it. To linger, in isolation and solitude, for the moment the Grim Reaper with his Scythe rings their doorbell after all, to show them one of his many other tools. A moment that will appear anyway, regardless of the number of shots one takes, or how many healthy unvaccinated people are banned from restaurants, theatres, cinemas, and museums.
Holding the unvaccinated hostage for the objective of Hugo de Jonge and the OMT is completely ineffective. Time will tell in the end, and each lesson is simply repeated as often as necessary, until Hugo de Jonge and the OMT also learn from it. Given the strategy pursued in the past one and three quarters of a year, one must fear that it will take a very long time before they too will actually have learned this lesson.
Those who leave extremely complex matters to extremely simple-minded people should not be surprised that practice mercilessly beats theory, and eventually knocks it out.