Amnesty? The LA Times thinks we're 'still a danger' - Opinion

It’s a long way from Boston to Los Angeles. So long, it appears, that LA Times’ Health Correspondent Melissa Healy hasn’t yet heard that The Atlantic, based all the way over on the East Coast, has called for an amnesty on all things COVID. Amnesty is a nice way of saying, “We know we were wrong.  Please forgive us.” Melissa is having none of it.

“Are the unvaccinated still a danger to the rest of us?” she writes.*

There’s no way anyone could mistake Melissa for an unvaccinated pariah. She describes the genuine suffering experienced by the unvaccinated in America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and beyond, as nothing more upsetting than being subjected to “earnest pleading and financial inducements, social-media shaming and truth campaigns.” Oh, and they “missed weddings, birthday celebrations and recitals, and even [wait for it] forfeited high-stakes athletic competitions.” 

Then, Melissa falsely claims that only “until last month” were the unvaccinated “barred from entering the United States and more than 100 other countries.” In fact, the unvaccinated are still barred from entering the United States, although the rest of the world has finally come to its senses – in this respect, at least.

But Melissa doesn’t seem to welcome any return to one’s senses. With thinly veiled disgust, she describes how the unvaccinated now “mingle freely in places where they used to be shunned for fear they’d seed superspreader events. It’s as if they’re no longer hazardous to the rest of us,” she complains. “Or are they?”

Good question. Are they? The closest Melissa gets to trying to back up her claims is a lame suggestion that the vaccines “appear to reduce the amount of virus a sick person sheds by coughing, sneezing, or simply talking [whereas] unvaccinated people are . . . more likely to spread it to others.” We know that’s not true. In fact, “vaccinated” people often have higher viral loads, because the shots do nothing to prevent COVID from multiplying in their nasal passages and actually dull their immune response, making them more likely to spread COVID. Other studies suggest that the viral loads of “vaccinated” and “unvaccinated” are similar. But the great interest currently being shown in nasal-spray vaccines (dozens of which are currently in the process of development) is certainly a big giveaway.

Melissa, happily oblivious, plunges right ahead, blithely spraying misinformation and disinformation like confetti at a wedding, with a sprinkling of “seems to,” “appears to,” “could,” and “might,” to guard against legal action, in case anyone was worried. She lurches from one disproven claim to the next, hoping that somehow, some of the mutant seeds of her hatred will take root. 

Let’s look at the rubbish she spouts on herd immunity. According to Melissa, “about 30% of Americans have yet to complete their initial series of COVID-19 shots,” which, she asserts, is one of the main reasons why U.S. officials have failed in their quest to cause the outbreak to “sputter out”. The only problem with that is that Mr. Science, Fauci himself, said that “herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent.”

Fauci later backtracked, saying, “Forget this issue of herd immunity and just get as many people vaccinated as you possibly can, as quickly as you possibly can.” Melissa hasn't backtracked, though.

The other reason for the failure to kill COVID is, according to her, the fact that the virus “continues to evolve in ways that erode vaccines’ protection.” Here too Melissa makes a valiant attempt at proving that this is all the fault of those who refuse to toe the vaccine line. Wisely, she refrains from straight-out claiming that variants are the fault of the unvaccinated. She even admits that they are not “prolific incubators of genetic variants.” But she has to blame someone, so she blames a new category of people she calls the ”undervaccinated”. 

“There’s concern that unvaccinated and undervaccinated Americans could accelerate the emergence of new coronavirus variants,” she writes. Apparently, the more “undervaccinated” people there are, the more likely “surges” of COVID are to occur.

Sadly, Melissa actually got this one right. Instead of venturing to explain why this is happening, however, she merely demonizes people who are weary of getting injected with toxic substances, or are already vaccine-injured and maimed for life. 

It’s quite true that people who get off the COVID-shot train are more likely to get COVID. So true, that studies (this is just one of many) show “vaccine” effectiveness against infection entering negative territory less than half a year after the latest shot. That is to say, those who get the shots but stop “updating” them with boosters are more likely to contract COVID than those who never got them in the first place.

Melissa’s solution, naturally, is for people to simply keep getting boosters. “Until more Americans embrace booster shots, the ‘undervaccinated’ will steadily swell the ranks of the vulnerable,” she warns. She doesn’t specify how often (every month?) or which type (the original Wuhan booster, Pfizer-style, or Moderna’s offering, or perhaps the all-new Omicron-specific booster which has been shown to be worse at protecting against Omicron than the non-specific booster). She certainly doesn’t mention that another recent study showed that boosters of any kind fail to provide any significant T-cell response, so critical for protection. 

So much for her good idea. Is there a better one? She actually suggests herself that getting infected by COVID might help, though here too she gets her facts all muddled up, claiming that getting infected after the shots is better than before. In fact, we’ve known for a some time that the shots cripple the immune response for at least months, and most probably years, if not forever. Natural immunity derived from recovery from COVID doesn’t confer the same level of protection on a “vaccinated” person as it does on someone who never got the shots.

We still didn’t answer the question – Is there a better way? It’s a question doctors all over the world are grappling with as they try to help their patients recover from the long-term deleterious effects of the COVID shots. Tragically, there is no good answer. 

Meanwhile, as Melissa writes, “The steady waning of immunity raises a discouraging prospect, that over time, people who are still called ‘fully vaccinated’ will become indistinguishable from the unvaccinated unless they’ve received a booster. Wherever they are, they’ll help keep the pandemic going.”

Melissa thus answers her question: Yes, she believes the unvaccinated (and the undervaccinated) are still a danger to us. But as the number of “us” dwindles daily, with dismal levels of booster uptake across the world and phials of “vaccine” slowly perishing on pharmacy shelves, Melissa might take heart in the fact that _____ (Fill in the blank. I can’t think of a single thing.)

* The article also appears here without a paywall: https://www.columbian.com/news/2022/nov/03/are-the-unvaccinated-still-a-danger-to-the-rest-of-us/?utm_source=ground.news&utm_medium=referral