In my opinion one of the very best commentators on the Coronavirus situation in Britain has been Christopher Snowdon. Whilst there are other commentators such as Respectful Innocence who I believe have done a really great job of exposing the various charlatans, vaccine conspiracy theorists and health grifters that have emerged during the pandemic, Mr Snowdon has concentrated almost entirely on the increasing amount of data that has emerged about Coronavirus. Also unlike many other commentators who are based in the USA, Mr Snowdon is firmly based in the UK and knows Britain like the back of his hand.
Mr Snowdon has for me been one of those centrists on the issue of Coronavirus who have dragged me away from various dead ended rabbit holes. In the pandemic situation it is all too easy to find yourself joining one of two major camps, those who are into the idea of zero covid or those who have fully surrendered to the lure of the tin foil hat and the blandishments of charlatans like Delores Cahill. I freely admit that for a short while, because I was looking for an alternative to the panicky and sensationalist tone of the MSM over Covid, that I went walking down some paths that I really wish I had not travelled, gave support for organisations that I now wish I had not supported and treated as truthful the untruths spoken by people whom I once had a great deal of respect for because of their work in other areas. I teetered on the edge of a rabbit hole but it was the likes of Christopher Snowdon and the microbiologist Dr Wilson of Debunk the Funk, that metaphorically pulled me back from the edge. There are an awful lot of plausible charlatans out there and sometimes they are very difficult to spot. To my shame I didn’t spot enough of them in time to avoid embarrassment.
Christopher Snowdon is neither a zero covid fanatic nor a covid denier or similar tin foil hatter. He’s definitely in my view a centrist on this issue. He recognises that Covid is a serious disease for many who get it and unlike the tin foilers he supports the use of Covid vaccines.
Maybe because Mr Snowdon is a centrist on the subject of Covid and is firmly wedded to the use of trustworthy data as evidence for positions, I’ve found that he’s more often than not been correct about Covid. He’s had to make a few corrections but then who doesn’t have to make corrections at some point whether they are a writer or just a normal human being.
Mr Snowdon has written a tremendously good article packed with data and references on the subject of Covid going from an epidemic to an endemic disease similar to seasonal influenza for Spiked Magazine. In this article Mr Snowdon argues that we are on the cusp of Covid becoming an endemic condition that will still take lives and will still cause illness, but which is in no way as big a threat to health as it was in early 2020.
In the article Mr Snowdon compared the situation now in November 2021 with the situation just one year ago.
Mr Snowdon said:
If we could have seen then where we are now, most would have agreed that things have gone… pretty well, actually. The so-called Delta variant caused this year’s restrictions to last longer than we would have liked, but fears about a new variant escaping the vaccine turned out to be unfounded. The vaccine roll-out was a triumph and there was less public hesitancy than expected.
We always knew there would be an exit wave and we always knew that the vaccines would not prevent every hospitalisation and death. Those who were paying attention understood that Covid had become an endemic disease that most people would get in their lifetime, perhaps more than once. We always knew that the name of the game was to get the risks down to the level of flu.
Seasonal influenza is always going to be a risk to some individuals, it will make some people really ill and even kill some. However the risk from flu is one that we choose to live with. It’s also an easier risk to live with because there are now seasonal vaccinations that confer a reasonable amount of immunity from the worst effects of that years main variant of influenza. If we have got the risk of death and serious illness from Covid down to the levels of seasonal influenza then a great deal has been achieved. It should not be forgotten that Britain had a particularly high level of case fatality rates for a Western country at around the 2% mark. This was not as high as some places like Yemen for example where the death rate from Covid infections was around 18 – 20% at one point but it was very high for an advanced and crowded Western country like the UK.
Mr Snowdon added:
In the six months between October 2020 and March 2021, there were 3.8million recorded cases of Covid in the UK and 85,000 deaths. In the following six months, during which restrictions were reduced to nothing, there were 4.8million recorded cases and 14,000 deaths. Based on these figures, the case fatality rate fell from 2.2 per cent to 0.3 per cent. Since around half of all infections are not recorded, the infection fatality rate is now around 0.15 per cent, not much different to seasonal influenza. And remember that these statistics include a large number of deaths among the unvaccinated. For fully vaccinated people, the risk of dying if you catch Covid is lower still.
It’s when you see figures like those quoted by Mr Snowdon that you get some idea of how much things have improved. In the last six months we have had more infections but less deaths with deaths mainly occurring among those who have chosen to remain unvaccinated. The vaccinations have worked, they might not provide 100% sterilising immunity of the sort provided against Measles to children who have completed their Measles vaccination course, but they have stopped a lot of people dying and a great many more from long term serious health repercussions.
Having read the article from Mr Snowdon and digested the data within it the picture is quite clear and it shows that we are well on the way to making covid endemic. It’s still going to be a health problem but much less so than it once was. I suspect that what will happen is that as with influenza there will be a need for a once or twice yearly top up vaccine or amended vaccines to cope with new troubling variants, but in the great scheme of things and compared to the damage that covid can do, a yearly vaccination to keep covid at bay is no great biggie. It’s very much looking as if to all intents and purposes covid will, in Britain at least, be under control. It’s certainly under control enough to say that there is no need for the extreme social control that we have seen and that the government is correct to be starting on Operation Rampdown the gradual removal of coronavirus related controls, restrictions and support, something that should be fully achieved by early summer next year.
I do have criticisms about the way the Government has managed covid. Their messaging has been less than clear at times and this lack of clarity has been in my view a key factor in letting vaccine sceptics and covid deniers crawl through the cracks in government messaging. Another criticism I have had and still have about the Government’s handling of covid is their failure to close the nation’s borders. The government created a situation where the pubs were closed but the borders were wide open. Not only did this issue make a mockery of tying to prevent the spread of disease it also damaged the Government’s credibility among the public and sent some into the arms of the tin foil hat types.
With covid now approaching an infection fatality rate similar to that of seasonal influenza I feel that Mr Snowdon is correct in saying that we should now be thinking of putting covid behind us. I believe that now we should be dealing with the damage that not just the disease itself has caused but also the damage that some of the non medical responses to covid have caused, such as the damage to education and to the mental health of individuals.
As regards covid itself I’d not say that we are completely out of the woods yet but we are certainly starting to enter a very large, expansive and sunlit clearing. This is something that needs to be recognised not just by the people of Britain but also by the media who have a tendency to want to highlight bad news rather than good news. We should all, whether we be individuals or media organisations start to see that things are clearly not as dark as they once were.
PS
The aforementioned Dr Wilson of Debunk the Funk is a structural microbiologist with a Phd. However at one time he was one of the tin foil hat types that he now debunks and derides. I found his short video on how he moved away from tin foil hattery by learning to respect the data both illuminating and very moving and is well worth a watch here.
