Vaccines failing: Europe looks to lockdowns as fatal fourth wave breaks. By Oliver Moody.
Yesterday the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s infectious diseases agency, registered a record 50,196 new Covid-19 cases in the previous 24 hours. Until this month there had never been more than 33,000 in a single day.
A fourth wave is rolling across a vast area of northern, central and eastern Europe, stretching from the Adriatic and the Black Sea to the Arctic Circle. Norway, Finland, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia have all reported their highest daily infection rates to date this week. …
Bavaria in Germany has announced a “state of catastrophe”, with its intensive care system nearing collapse. Austria is threatening to impose a full lockdown on the unvaccinated by the end of the week. “This is a real emergency,” Professor Christian Drosten, 49, one of Germany’s most eminent virologists, said on his weekly podcast. “We’re worse off than we were a year ago.”
Vaccines disappoint and the official narrative is wrong, yet again:
Up to now the conventional wisdom in many affected countries was that they had moved into a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. … Part of the appeal of this reasoning was that it gave grounds for some comfort, or even for political complacency. It implied that the fourth wave would rage among the unvaccinated and then by and large burn itself out. It would, in other words, be containable.
There was no need to pay too much heed to infection rates and there would be no need for universal lockdowns. Those who had done their bit and got the jab could carry on much as before.
That wisdom is beginning to look questionable. There is evidence from German hospitals that vaccinated people have gone from making up scarcely one in ten of the patients on their coronavirus wards to nearly half. This is partly because the clinically vulnerable who were first in line for the jab are seeing their immunity wane, raising the tally of “breakthrough” infections. …
The vaccination centres are closed. The free rapid tests offered by the state were abolished a month ago, although they may soon be back. The much-admired contact-tracing system has gone into meltdown. A booster vaccination campaign is under way but so far only 3.3 million doses have been administered. …
“We’ve lost control,” Alexander Kekule, 63, professor of medical microbiology and virology at Halle-Wittenberg University, said on a podcast. “Really the politicians have long given up the battle on a number of measures. And the virus is rejoicing, if I may put it like this, and cheerfully replicating.”
Kekule believes that Germany will be left with no alternative but to impose a lockdown in all but name, with schools closed and public and private gatherings strictly regulated. “Actually, I think they will do something like a lockdown through the back door,” he said. “They won’t call it a lockdown, because that’s become a taboo in politics.”
Germany’s neighbours are faced with much the same dilemma. Vaccination and general weariness have made lockdowns politically unpalatable. Yet inaction is equally impossible. …
The Netherlands registered a record number of Covid infections yesterday (Thursday), 16,364, breaking previous highs from December last year. The Dutch government is discussing advice from experts that the country needs “lockdown-like measures” to halt the spiralling infections. …
Denmark, which celebrated a “freedom day” of its own in September, will revive its coronavirus passport system today. Norway is dusting off discarded measures such as compulsory tests at its borders and mass testing in schools.
Not working for them, won’t work for us.
Let’s do what India and Indonesia did — worked for them, will work for us. Too bad for Pfizer.
Vaccines are not working for the US either. For example, Washington DC, which is mostly vaxxed, has had a mask mandate for months now. Can’t wait for Western Australia to let covid in, so we have to mask up too.
