Current COVID-19 Outbreaks Show Vaccines Aren’t Pandemic Panacea

Cornell University campus at Ithaca, New York. guillegalmes/Pixabay.com

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For the past year, we’ve been told relentlessly that unless and until almost every American receives a COVID-19 vaccination, the pandemic will linger and continue to wreak havoc.

However, based on what is happening on many U.S. college campuses over the past few weeks, one can’t help but question the dogma that vaccines are the panacea to the pandemic.

For instance, Cornell University has a 97 percent vaccination rate among students and staff on campus. On top of that, most students and staff have also received booster shots. Yet, despite the near-universal vaccine status among its students and staff, the university is in the midst of a COVID-19 outbreak.

According to the university’s COVID-19 tracking website, 1,547 students tested positive for COVID-19 in the past 10 days. Shockingly, Cornell is currently sporting an 10.06 positivity rate.

This has caused trepidation among many Cornell students.

“Ninety-seven percent of the campus is fully vaccinated, a large portion of them have booster shots and there’s mandatory masking, and we still have this uptick,” Joe Silverstein, a student at Cornell, lamented to ABC News.

Marguerite Pacheco, a doctoral student at Cornell, was similarly flummoxed by the recent outbreak.

“If there’s that many students testing positive, despite being vaccinated, it is going to spread to other people extremely quickly,“ Pacheco told ABC News. ”It seems like the second that, you know, that there are cases happening in vaccinated students of that magnitude, you need to assume that it is just going to catch like wildfire.”

Like Cornell, New York City is in the midst of a case surge. Also, like Cornell, the city has an extremely high vaccination rate. As of this writing, 71 percent of New Yorkers are fully vaccinated and 80 percent of the city’s residents have received at least one vaccine shot.

If heavily vaccinated places such as New York City and Cornell University are experiencing massive COVID-19 case counts, are vaccines the sole solution to the pandemic? Based on the data, it seems less likely every day.

Yet, that hasn’t stopped our nation’s so-called health leaders from doubling down on vaccinations as the lone remedy to the pandemic.

For example, on Dec. 21, Dr. Anthony Fauci told CBS Morning News: “We first got to get the 50 million or so people who are eligible to be vaccinated who’ve not gotten vaccinated. That is critical. If you want to keep the level of spread in the country as low as possible, which would get us back to some degree of normality, you’ve got to get those unvaccinated people vaccinated.”

Of course, Fauci failed to explain how getting all Americans vaccinated will slow the spread when places such as Cornell, with a 97 percent vaccination rate, are experiencing large case counts.

President Joe Biden, too, has vilified the unvaccinated (and those with natural immunity) as super-spreaders, despite the mounting evidence that vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans are equally susceptible to new strains of the virus.

As Biden recently stated, “We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated—for themselves, their families, and the hospitals they'll soon overwhelm.”

At this point in the pandemic, we know that vaccines do prevent severe illness. However, we also know that vaccines don’t prevent the spread of COVID-19.

As such, our nation’s health care leaders should be stressing the cornucopia of therapeutic options, such as monoclonal antibodies, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, etc., as viable treatments for COVID-19, instead of manically mandating vaccines.

The evidence clearly shows that early treatment with a variety of therapeutic drugs can vastly reduce the severity of COVID-19. However, for reasons unknown, our nation’s health care leaders continue to downplay these treatments in favor of universal vaccination and continuous booster shots.

Unless and until Fauci and others come clean about the reality that vaccines aren’t the panacea they made them out to be, COVID-19 outbreaks will continue to spread unabated, even among those who have been double-vaccinated and boosted.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.