You are being lied to
There was the example of the video about Liverpool Primary Care ICU being full of young Covid patients who hadn't been vaccinated. I immediately condemned that as an obviously constructed lying propaganda film.
There is no such ICU, no Liverpool hospital having an ICU of that name. The name Liverpool Primary Care belongs to a group of nine GP surgeries providing the usual doctor's services. The clues were obvious in the video, the emotively expressed commentary while showing doctors looking at records, clearly trying to influence expectations before showing the beds. Then the images of the patients in beds so heavily fuzzed out they could have been window dummies or pigs carcases. All previous videos we've seen of ICUs have clearly shown patients with masking and ventilators, so why not this one? See above, to hide the lie.
We are also being subjected to vague statements of ICUs in general being entirely or 80% occupied by people who are unvaccinated, none of them giving any verifiable evidence. But now we do have a verifiable case. Yorkshire's hospitals have issued data showing that 42.9 % of their Omicron occupied ICU beds are occupied by unvaccinated patients. Of course that means that 57.1% are occupied by vaccinated patients. So much for vaccination preventing hospitalisation.
And of course there is all the scaremongering about ICUs about to be overwhelmed. Strange that only yesterday the news announced that London's hardest hit area with Omicron and the worst in the country was well within their ICU capacity. That of course is very inconvenient since London has a very low vaccination rate, far, far lower than the rest of the country so hardly selling the line that the vaccines are saving us, especially since London's Covid death rate is lower.
So why the lies? I've spelt it out once before but here it is again. From bringing us Brexit, through his spell as foreign secretary to his premiership, Boris Johnson has been an unmitigated disaster, and he knows it. The only thing he might have going for him to save his skin is the vaccines being a great success.
Trouble is that in truth, they haven't been. Up until Covid we all knew that we had vaccinations to prevent us catching the diseases in question, but of course the Covid vaccines still leave us liable to catch Covid and spread it. So that inconvenient fact triggered the first lie, that the main purpose of a vaccine was to prevent us suffering as badly if we did catch Covid.
As the vaccine coverage expanded, that's been often followed by easing lockdowns to emphasis how well the vaccine are doing, such as now with a refusal to lockdown before the new year. And of course the booster campaign is another way of convincing that it's the vaccines that are saving us. This despite clear evidence that the current Omicron variant is now dominant and nothing like the threat that the original Covid-19 or Delta variant were, plus the fact that the vaccines don't even begin to prevent us catching Omicron.
I am not an anti-vaxxer and have had both jabs and the booster, so I firmly believe we all should do the same. But we should all also have a healthy degree of scepticism regarding anything this government or even their experts say. Even their own data tools show that they lie when it suits. It's what politicians and their minions do, and not just for parties.
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fullfact.org
metro.co.uk
www.theguardian.com
