Establishment UK newspaper. Letting slip that the whole thing is BS..
Behind a pay wall but someone provided this quote:
Data is proving that the vaccines don’t block transmission, a development that could prompt tighter travel restrictions once more
www.telegraph.co.uk
We’ve been fooled – two jabs won’t buy you holiday freedom after all
Data is proving that the vaccines don’t block transmission, a development that could prompt tighter travel restrictions once more
ANNABEL FENWICK ELLIOTT
SENIOR CONTENT EDITOR
12 August 2021 • 3:12pm
Annabel Fenwick Elliott
Well, that didn’t last long. For a couple of months, it really looked like being double-jabbed might buy you a ticket to free (ish) travel. More than that, it was our only exit strategy from this vicious circle of lockdowns at home.
But new evidence has thrown all this into doubt.
Anti-vaxxers will delight in this latest development: that being jabbed won’t stop you spreading the extra-infectious delta variant after all. It certainly protects you personally, to a high degree, from serious symptoms and death – but the vast majority of us weren’t at risk of that anyway.
What it won’t do, according to an increasing body of evidence, is prevent you from being a carrier and thus a danger to others. This somewhat defeats the whole point – and is certainly the only reason international travel has resumed of late.
Last week, in news that hasn’t got nearly enough airtime, Public Health England said in a statement: "Some initial findings [...] indicate that levels of virus in those who become infected with Delta having already been vaccinated may be similar to levels found in unvaccinated people. This may have implications for people's infectiousness, whether they have been vaccinated or not.”
What this means, in plain terms, is that those NHS Covid passes we’ve been using to escape quarantine both when visiting other countries and upon our return are going to plummet in value.
Already, UK festivals and other mass events are switching their entry requirements to require a negative test of everyone – regardless of vaccination status. International travel schemes such as the EU Covid certificate, will likely follow. Masks are back in America, where the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reversed its guidance on the double-jabbed being exempt.
Many will feel cheated by this. Certainly, the reason I rolled up my sleeve in the first place was not because I was afraid of Covid, but solely to get my freedoms back. I really did not want to get jabbed; for the same reason I’ve never got the flu shot, because personally I’d rather take my chances on catching the illness. Based on the Government’s own QCovid risk calculator tool, my risk – as a reasonably healthy 34-year-old – of being hospitalised with Covid-19 is 0.0218 per cent, and my risk of dying is 0.0007 per cent.
This should have been my gamble alone to take, but it has been a deeply unpopular and ‘selfish’ stance. Since the early days of the drive, it’s been rammed down our throats that in getting vaccinated, we were doing a public service to others. It was our only chance to reach ‘herd immunity’, we were urged – (a notion that has since been branded an unattainable ‘mythical’ goal by the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group).
Lo and behold, as data from the UK, the US and beyond is proving, the vaccines might well save you, but they won’t save everyone else. The messaging has thus changed.
Professor Francois Balloux, director of the UCL Genetics Institute, stated this week: “It is not so much anymore a ‘duty to others’ to get vaccinated but a protection for oneself. There won't be any 'herd immunity wall' to hide behind.”
Why, then, should we vaccinated Britons, from a nation where the delta variant is dominant, be any ‘safer’ as tourists in other countries to the un-vaxxed? With the science now clear that people around the world are still passing the virus to and fro despite being inoculated, the beleaguered travel industry – and our chance at recapturing freedom of movement – has hit another major stumbling block.
The warning signs were there months ago, when the countries with the highest vaccination rates in the world were also recording enormous surges in case counts. Many of these, heavily reliant on tourism for their GDP, had rushed to inoculate their entire populations as a matter of urgency purely for this reason: to reopen for visitors.
The Seychelles, for example, had by mid-May double-jabbed more than 80 per cent of its population, but regardless, its case count was 67 times higher than ours. According to Telegraph's live tracker, it has now vaccinated over 92 per cent of its citizens and its current infection rate is still a massive 336 per 100,000. Fat lot of good their drive did them, as the islands continue to languish on our red list.
The good news is that the vaccines have done their job in drastically reducing illness and death. And that while testing will likely be here to stay for some time should we wish to travel, the exorbitant cost will hopefully come down.
But all those with a saviour complex who had their jabs in an evangelical quest to ‘protect others’ should dismount their high horse. And all those who did so purely in pursuit of an easier holiday have every right to feel grumpy.
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