Commentary
It’s being called “Varmagate,” but most people are missing the most important point.
This past week, a hidden video rocked the world news. It was a discussion between an unnamed woman and Dr. Jay Varma, who ran the COVID-19 response in New York City in 2020 and 2021. He did morning briefings on television. He was also the major influence on the policy that closed public accommodations to those who refused the COVID-19 injection.
This policy shut down restaurants, theaters, museums, bars, concerts, and libraries to those who refused the vaccine. Between August 2021 and March 2022, places of gathering in the city were shut to those who would not get the shot. This was enforced with a vaccine passport, later pulled from the market, plus police checks on bars and other places.
This new policy of vaccine segregation spread to Boston, Washington, Chicago, New Orleans, Seattle, and other places around the country. There was a period in late 2021 and early 2022 when large parts of the major population centers in the United States were closed to a vast swath of the population.
How well I recall! It was strange to walk along city streets but then be denied entry even to grab a slice of pizza or a beer. It was street food or nothing. Nor were the shows open. Sometimes even the churches and other houses of worship were closed or segregated.
To be sure, the businesses did only cursory checks, enough to confirm that the requirements had been satisfied just in case there was a sweep of the place by the police. Those did come, often without warning. Any noncompliant establishment was heavily fined and risked getting shut down.
To be sure, many of the paper vaccine cards were forged. There is no way to know how many, but anecdotally it was quite a few. Doing this came with its own risks, and no one knew for sure how much risk was being undertaken. To be fully compliant with legitimate credentials was certainly the safe route.
It was during this very period when showing up at the emergency room without a vaccination card meant being put last in line for medical services. It was routinely called a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” although many later studies demonstrated that the shots increase the risk of multiple infections.
Back to the tape of Varma. The woman says, “I know people that, like, won’t have sex with someone that didn’t get the COVID vaccine.”
Varma laughs and shakes his head: “Sorry, that’s, like, a weird, like—I think it’s a weird, like, belief that somehow like their body is different. It doesn’t make any difference at all! Everybody’s been exposed to the virus, whether you’re exposed to the virus because it’s breathed on you or because you got it injected into you. It’s the same immune response.”
He is correct about this, of course. What is astonishing is to hear him admit it.
Exposure to a respiratory pathogen works like a natural vaccine without the risk of side effects. There was simply no dispute about this. Everyone with even rudimentary training in virology, including middle school students of several generations ago, knew that exposure trains the immune system to resist a more serious infection.
This point about exposure and risk has been known since the ancient world. Thucydides’s “History of the Peloponnesian War” notes that those who recovered from the plague seemed to gain immunity. He mentions that survivors could nurse the sick without contracting the disease again. Even when Gen. George Washington wanted his troops inoculated for smallpox, he exempted those who had previously had the disease, including himself.
The original understanding of vaccines is that they provide sterilizing immunity. If you get the shot, you do not get the disease. It was also widely understood that no such hacking of the immune system was possible for a fast-spreading respiratory virus. This is because the virus mutates too quickly and the vaccine cannot be adapted in time. This is why, as I was taught when I was young, there is not and could never be a vaccine for the viruses that cause the common cold, many of which are coronaviruses.
“As variant SARS-CoV-2 strains have emerged, deficiencies in these vaccines reminiscent of influenza vaccines have become apparent. The vaccines for these two very different viruses have common characteristics: they elicit incomplete and short-lived protection against evolving virus variants that escape population immunity. Considering that vaccine development and licensure is a long and complex process requiring years of preclinical and clinical safety and efficacy data, the limitations of influenza and SARS-CoV-2 vaccines remind us that candidate vaccines for most other respiratory viruses have to date been insufficiently protective for consideration of licensure, including candidate vaccines against RSV, a major killer of infants and the elderly, parainfluenzaviruses, endemic coronaviruses, and many other ‘common cold’ viruses that cause significant morbidity and economic loss.”
This is a welcome admission of what I thought everyone knew before COVID-19 came along. Anyone in the industry or in medicine already knew in advance that the shot, even if based on a new technology, could not protect against infection or transmission. In that case, they cannot on their own contribute to herd immunity. That’s another way of saying that while they might, under specialized conditions, provide a temporary personal benefit, they do not provide a public health benefit.
Again, all of this was known even by nonspecialists long before the pandemic came along. In the understood dynamics of viral epidemics, exposure to the live virus will always provide broader and more durable protection against disease than any vaccine. This is why the nurses who treated COVID-19 patients should never have been subject to vaccine mandates; they were the most likely to possess natural immunity.
This is also why finding the immunity levels of the population should have been a priority from the earliest months of discovery, which were likely all the way from October 2019. Had such studies been done, we might have had a better fix on the infection fatality rates of the virus, which were more along the lines of those of a severe flu, rather than panicking the population into believing that fatality rates were 3 to 4 percent, as the World Health Organization claimed in the early days.
The errors that unfolded from 2020 to 2023 were astonishing in their scope and the degree to which the measures stood in extreme contradiction to the established principles of public health. Among them were the widespread masking mandates, which were even imposed on children.
“The highest quality evidence available for masking children for COVID-19 or other viral respiratory infections has failed to find a beneficial impact against transmission. Mechanistic studies showing reduced viral transmission from use of face masks and respirators have not translated to real world effectiveness. Identified harms of masking include negative effects on communication and components of speech and language, ability to learn and comprehend, emotional and trust development, physical discomfort, and reduction in time and intensity of exercise.”
And yet there we were, looking at millions of kids all over the country with their faces covered. This happened as cities shut down, travel was restricted, business enterprise was forced into half capacity, and government spending to make up the difference soared to the heavens.
It might have been possible to chalk all of this up to human fallibility, but this Varma interview shakes that presumption to the core. In this interview, he flat-out admits that there was no difference between the vaccinated and unvaccinated and that exposure is as good as the shot (of course it turned out to be better).
Let there be no mystery about the loss of trust in public health. Authorities have squandered their credibility, at immense cost to the social order and to health in general.
