UK Covid death toll

[baggiebuckster]

How can Whitty explain away the potential milder effects of Omicron due to a higher level of immunity in SA?

They have 25% jabbed compared to our 80% so by that logic it implies that natural immunity is the driving factor and therefore better than vaccine induced immunity.

Or that it's summer over there and they have a younger population. Can we please stop trying to play down the importance of the vaccines when we saw what 12 months was like without them (110k excess deaths) compared to this year (60k to week 48). And those figures are heavily countered by the lockdowns we had to endure and the knock on affect of those lockdowns to businesses and lives, and also the strain on the NHS because of the wards full of covid patients which impacted on all other procedures and the knock on affect that will have on health going forward.

It is simply foolish to consider that we could be in any better situation without the ongoing requirements for getting jabbed.

I made no reference to the events of the last 12 months. I was purely referencing Omicron and the comments made by Whitty about this particular variant.

You were directly referencing the past 20 months by suggesting that natural (herd) immunity is better than vaccine immunity. 

You are also comparing what is happening in South Africa with what is happening here despite:

• It being summer over there;
  
• They have a smaller population spread over 5 times the area
  
• The median age in SA is 28, compared to 41 in the UK
  
• The largest city over there has a population of 3M, compared to London's 7M
  

And your conclusion is that it must be down to natural immunity. It's probably a bit more nuanced than that if I'm honest.

Half of those facts are irrelevant. He was clearly referencing the level of severity of disease in people that caught Omicron - not how many caught it in the first place. The only factor in your list that may be an influencer on severity is the age factor.

So the implication from Whitty was that people who caught Omicron didn't suffer too badly due to prior immunity which can't all have been from the vaccine.

As much as you accuse me of trying to ignore/manipulate facts/opinions etc you are in danger of placing these vaccines on a pedestal when this variant has clearly changed the landscape. Let's be honest nobody (you included) have a clue if this mass rollout of boosters is going to make a huge difference because the data on protection over anything longer than a couple of months simply isn't there.