Living with the unvaccinated. By Chris Kenny.

The author is not up on the latest data on vaccine ineffectiveness, but he shows where opinion is moving:

Covid-19 vaccines have been very effective in reducing the incidence of serious illness and death but not so in preventing infection and transmission.

Only in their honeymoon period of a few months.

The only burden imposed on society by the unvaccinated is a disproportionate load on our hospitals because of their higher risk of serious illness. But we could say the same for the overweight, smokers, drinkers and motorcyclists.

Omicron is much less severe than previous strains, now only just worse than flu if you have vaccine protection:

Not that the risks of serious illness for healthy adults or children are high, especially now with Omicron. The weekly epidemiology reports published by NSW Health show a dramatic drop in virus danger. Delta sent 10 per cent of cases to hospital, with 2 per cent ending up in intensive care units and one in every 100 dying.

Since late November the hospitalisation rate has dropped by a factor of 90 per cent to just 1 per cent, and only 0.1 per cent of cases require ICU, while the mortality rate is now running at 0.04 per cent.

Omicron is far more contagious but dramatically less dangerous than Delta. The numbers are far lower for healthy adults and children, of course, with most serious illnesses and deaths in the over-70s.

It is worth comparing all this with the national influenza report for 2019. …

There were more than 950 influenza deaths, a mortality rate of 0.03 per cent, which is significantly less deadly than Delta but on a par with Omicron.

These comforting statistics reflect the benefits of widespread vaccination and improved treatments, as well as the milder variant. Little wonder Denmark has scrapped all restrictions and is no longer treating Covid-19 as a “socially critical disease”. …

Australian restrictions are too unrealistic:

I write this week from home isolation because my 10-year-old son tested positive last weekend. He was ill with a fever for 24 hours — which is worse than most kids suffer — but has been robust all week and should be back out on the cricket field by the time you read this.

Yet his 24-hour illness has cost him and his brother their first week at school and kept his mum and me working from home all week even though we have not been able to conjure a positive test between us. This is not only unnecessary but, replicated everywhere, it is crippling the country.

With tens of thousands of often asymptomatic cases knocking out close contacts from work or school, the country is dislocated for no good reason.

We should not be far from a Denmark-style realisation where the symptomatic or sick stay home and the rest go about their business with due regard for social distancing and hygiene. Yet most media and politicians are stuck in a theatre of paranoia that dramatises infections and heightens fears. …

Sadly the author does not yet realize that vaccine fatigue is lowering the effectiveness of the body’s immune system against everything, including cancers. How much and for how long is not yet established (the vaccines were never properly tested), but the signs are sufficient that it is now a pretty sure bet that we will not be proceeding to fifth or sixth jabs.

And since covid vaccines only work for 3 to 6 months (and shrinking with each successive jab), we are going to need to investigate alternatives real soon now in order to keep the Omicron death toll as low as the flu. That means anti-virals, and that means ivermectin.

But the official sector is still denying all that. Give them a few months?

In its pre-vaccine, Alpha phase, Covid-19 was a horrible threat cutting a swath through aged communities. But for years into the future it is likely to be one of the viruses we are alert to, keeping our vaccinations up to date, knowing it will be at least partly responsible, along with the flu and the common cold, for the deaths of some of our elderly. We need to concentrate on protecting these vulnerable cohorts.

Australian National University infectious diseases expert Peter Collignon .. says Covid-19 deaths will be with us for years to come and, to some extent, the virus will replace other ailments as a cause of death.

Former deputy national chief medical officer Nick Coatsworth told me vaccine mandates have a “time-limited role in a pandemic”. However, he believes Australia will need to put the Omicron wave behind it — probably within the first quarter of this year — before we consider ending existing mandates, with health and aged-care workers the last to be relieved of these requirements.

Discussion of this practical reality is at odds not just with current media hysteria but with the way governments and the private sector are treating vaccines and the unvaccinated — politicians have demonised the unvaccinated. …

Yet if vaccination does not prevent infection and transmission, what is the argument for denying someone employment over their refusal to get the jab? The unvaccinated are putting no one at risk but themselves.

Untested and ineffective vaccines were only ever authorized because health officials pretended there were no other alternatives. But there are other alternatives — anti-virals. We could bring the covid wave to an end any time we wished, by deploying ivermectin. Other countries have shown how it’s done. It’s only a mystery to those who only read the mainstream media.

However, abandoning vaccines and adopting anti-virals would first require the mother of all back-downs by the health authorities and western governments. So it won’t happen. But it must, because it is becoming obvious that vaccines are becoming progressively more ineffective against covid and are weakening our immunity against other problems.

Vaccine use is not sustainable. Tick, tock.

hat-tip Stephen Neil