As I was gathering ‘materials’ (a very popular term, with diverse interpretations’ among present-day students), I received this ‘Breaking news’: ‘The 4th wave of Oga-Coro has been postponed as all media houses have been busy covering Ukraine crises and forgotten about Covid experience. New release dates of new variants of Covid will be announced in due course. Sorry for the inconveniences’!
This was a follow up to the earlier, equally sarcastic tweet by Dr Eli David that ‘The war in Ukraine has ended Covid; the once in a century pandemic is gone overnight. Nobody talks about it; nobody cares about it again.
Isn’t science amazing’? Another related message is that the Ukraine crises has given Oga-Coro, a TKO (Technical Knock Out) because since the war started (then in its 10th day), nobody had died of the monstrous virus.
In effect, the antivaxxers, naysayers and conspiracy theorists have been having a good laugh at the expense of Oga-Coro and its various stakeholders.
Their argument is that a pandemic, which has cost the world about $11 trillion (according to Mr Oramah, CEO of Afrexim Bank) has suddenly been subdued because everybody has turned attention on the Russian MIR (Might is Right) action in Ukraine.
The above messages also hypothesise that the various waves, variants, and even deaths were concocted by people and thus could be announced at appropriate dates!
There are also some developments that support their assertions that Oga-Coro has been subdued. Israel, where Covid vaccines were demystified, had abolished its Learning & Covid Testing scheme, which means that it will no longer be required to test or fill out health declarations before accessing educational institutions.
Google has stopped requesting its US-based workers to be vaccinated just as US Defence and Justice Departments no longer require masks to be worn indoors in Washington area.
Funny enough, while people are rubbishing vaccines, many others are doing ‘good’ business and making good money by selling vaccine cards all over the world, including Nigeria
France had dropped vaccination passes and forced masking while passengers are no longer required to be vaccinated before or after visiting the UK. Kenya has also joined the league of countries dismantling Covid mandates.
In West-Virginia, the House of Delegates by 68 against 28 vote for Bill 4320 to the effect that employers should accept natural immunity in lieu of vaccines.
In South Carolina, the House also proposed a law to stop employers from asking about the Covid status of their staff. People have also raised eyebrows about the 47000 adverse affects and 127 deaths recorded in the first three months of Pfizer vaccine, an outcome that is in tandem with the VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System), recalling that in the 1974 swine flu, vaccination was stopped after 25 deaths.
There was also the report by the Israeli Ministry of Health that in a random survey of 2049 people who took booster shots; 75 percent women and 58 percent men reported at least one side effect within 21-30 days.
While most of these affects were minor, 51 percent of the women and 35 percent of the men reported that the side effects had prevented them from performing their daily activities.
Furthermore, 5.5 percent had chest pain, 4.5 percent experienced neurological side effects with 0.29 percent reporting hospitalisation within 30 days. 24 percent of those with pre-existing autoimmune and 5-10 percent of those with diabetes, hypertension, lung and heart disease had worsened conditions.
They held that the Pfizer report and Israeli research were belated and that these support their views that the vaccines were harmful and should not have been pushed with such aggressiveness by ‘Covid-cultists’ across the globe.
Antivaxxers also relied on insurance claims to ‘prove’ that vaccination was deadly and that its promoters and enforcers have hidden, anti-life, agenda. Dutch insurer, Aegon, which does most of its business in USA reported that its insurance claims rose from $31 million in Q3, 2020 to $111 million, 2021 (258%). MetLife and Prudential Financial also reported higher claims settlements while Old Mutual raised its 2021 forecast for Covid related health claims by 33 percent.
Antivaxxers aver that all this was due to the impact of aggressive vaccinations that took place in 2021. The US-CDC had also affirmed that whether you had been vaccinated or not, if you had prior infection, you were one-third as likely to catch Covid as those who had been vaccinated. In effect, the Covid-recovered are better protected than the vaccinated; another bullet in the armoury of antivaxxers
The Israeli case was actually a quagmire to the global medical-scientific community.
According to Professor Y Jerris, about 70-80 percent of the severe cases had received triple jabs, an indication that the vaccines could not deflate the frontal attack by Oga-Coro and these were suffering from the Omicron variant, which was more ‘friendly’ than Delta.
Covid cases inexplicably got worse after the Israeli fourth booster shot, which led to the tongue-in-cheek tweet by Dr Eli David that Israeli’s fourth booster shot was a roaring success! Mercifully, the Covid-19 infections are decreasing in Israel, with 5 new infections, as at 15/3/22, about 7 percent of the peak recorded on 25/1/22.
Read also: Nigeria’s most vulnerable omit vaccination in plans to survive COVID-19
There has also been a rash of breakthrough infections and deaths across the globe. Breakthrough cases are when somebody Fully vaccinated gets reinfected or dies, especially within 14 days of the last dose.
Between January22 and 29 this year, Massachusetts Health Department reported 290 breakthrough deaths, making it 1789 of such deaths. During that period, there were 27530 new infections and 555 new hospitalisations among the fully vaccinated, making the total breakthrough tally for the state at 422132 infections and 6440 hospitalisations.
The Israeli quagmire and the avalanche of breakthrough cases raised, once more, the issue of the usefulness of vaccines. If Israel, the most vaccinated nation in the world had a large-scale recrudescence, and if people fully vaccinated are becoming ‘re-coronised’ and re-hopitalised, with some dying in the process, then, the case for vaccines becomes porous.
But even though I do not have any medical background, the explanation for this situation is obvious. In the first instance, no vaccine has ever claimed 100% efficacy. A vaccine that has 95% efficacy means that about 5% of the vaccinated would not be protected.
5% is small but when you extend that to a country like Nigeria, it means that if we all had that 95%-efficacious vaccine, about 10m of us would not likely be protected. Secondly, we are all different and our bodies react differently to the same regimen. This excludes those with underlining conditions.
Funny enough, while people are rubbishing vaccines, many others are doing ‘good’ business and making good money by selling vaccine cards all over the world, including Nigeria.
These include Jullie DeVuono, proprietor of Wild Chile Pediatric Healthcare, Amityville, and her employee-nurse, Marisa Urraro, who had made about $1500000 before they were caught as well as 5 Nigerians arrested in Bauch for buying and selling the Covid-19 Green cards. It is better to be a certified antivaxxer than to fraudulently obtain the card and pretend to have been vaccinated.
The WHO has also announced that Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Senegal South Africa and Tunisia would soon start vaccine production. This is after many of our experts have declared that Nigeria cannot produce vaccines.
These experts include D.O Oluwayelu, a Professor of Virology, Faisal Shuaibu; Director General of NPHCDA, DR Fidelis Ayabae , Chairman, Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Group, MAN, Prof Abdulahi Mustapha, Director General, National Biotechnology Development Agency. Furthermore, Moderna has just signed a $500m MoU with Kenya for the production of vaccines.
So? Vaccines are still in the market and will continue to be in the market and I believe that they are useful. Furthermore, Oga-Coro has not been subdued. I believe that we have just decided to treat Coro as one of those things so that we can move on with our lives. That is why countries are cancelling or moderating their Covid19 mandates.
