Just Showing Up... at the Board of Health
Just Showing Up... at the Board of Health
According to the Westfield Regional Board of Health, COVID and flu are quieting down. It’s norovirus we need to watch out for, and hand sanitizers (alcohol-based disinfectants) will not cut it. So, for this virus, the recommendation is wash your hands.
According to Director Megan Avallone, a review of hospital records from December and January show that “only” 25-30% of those hospitalized with COVID have been boosted. To the BOH, this is evidence that boosters are somehow good and Avallone therefore recommends people go out and get more of them.
BOH logic is fascinating.
The board seems to have experienced collective amnesia with regards to prior discussions about the ability of bi-valent boosters to address new variants. I have to wonder if they might have interpreted the 25-30% differently if they had reviewed recent studies.
The updated COVID-19 vaccine boosters intended to defend people against emerging Omicron variants don’t appear to provide any better protection than the original shot does, two new studies find…
Together, the two studies “suggest that with this rapidly evolving virus, vaccines developed for different strains are not going to add a huge difference in terms of protection,” said Dr. Greg Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group…
“It may be that people’s immune systems are so primed to respond to the ancestral strain spike protein that a reformulated booster is unable to fully stimulate the immune system because it has been ‘imprinted’ by the original version of the virus,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
The upshot — people will receive a temporary increase in COVID-19 antibodies from a bivalent booster, but the antibodies aren’t necessarily that much better at targeting newer variants.
You can read the studies here and here.
That was pretty much it before public comment.
Since religious exemptions continue to be threatened in New Jersey, I decided to address that today.
Here’s my testimony.
Good afternoon.
I understand that the Board of Health can only make recommendations with regards to religious exemptions, but as they always seem to be under threat in NJ, I’d like to revisit this.
In their eagerness to get people vaccinated, public health institutions are seeking to restrict religious and parental rights as they dismiss legitimate concerns about the shortcomings of vaccines and the risks associated with them.
Scientific discussions around COVID shots have highlighted some of these shortcomings. While many COVID mandates remain in place, we now know that these shots do not stop infection or transmission and they also come with significant health risks, particularly to young people
If we were to revisit some of the other vaccines on the mandated schedule- and we should - we’d see that other shots share these shortcomings.
Pertussis vaccine is another one that does not stop infection and can instead produce silent carriers that can actually amplify public health risks as the vaccinated can spread disease without knowing they are infected.
Additionally, vaccinating for tetanus, diptheria and Hepatitis B has no impact on public settings. And the inactivated poliovirus vaccine also fails to prevent infection.
Even the revered measles vaccine has failed to deliver on its public health promise. Measles research scientists have long been aware of the “measles paradox.” Poland and Jacobson’s 1994 paper notes, “The apparent paradox is that as measles immunization rates rise to high levels in a population, measles becomes a disease of immunized persons.”
We saw this during the Disney outbreak in CA, where some cases were among the vaccinated and well over a third of the measles virus sequences were vaccine sequences.
Furthermore, Evidence of both primary and secondary vaccine failure are all around us.
The need for boosters for many of these shots demonstrates that they fail to produce lasting immunity, and as each individual produces somewhat different immune responses, there is virtually no way to determine the duration of immune protection.
Given these facts and growing number of adverse events linked to some of these shots, which are amplified as the recommended vaccine schedule grows, public health official owe it to us and to our children to revisit the science and preserve our religious and parental rights.
Until public health authorities address some of these issues, it would be irresponsible of any public health authority to recommend removing religious exemptions or any individual rights.
Thank you.