Why Are The UK And Europe Leading The Way by Easing COVID Restrictions?

To start with, there are at least three major countries across the pond that have decided to remove mask mandates, and drop vaccines passports altogether.

The UK was the first to start the trend with Boris Johnson ending the Plan B restrictions.

In the U.K., the government said Wednesday, it would lift the coronavirus restrictions it imposed last month to deal with Omicron in England.

As of Thursday, the government said it would no longer recommend people work from home. Face masks will no longer be mandated in shops and classrooms. From Jan. 26, people will no longer have to provide proof of vaccination or a negative Covid-19 test to enter nightclubs and other large venues in England. The government said it should soon lift the legal requirement to self-isolate after a positive Covid-19 test. Scotland will also drop most restrictions from Monday.

Reported U.K. cases have fallen 33% in the latest week from the week before, while hospitalizations have fallen nationwide by 7% week-on-week and Covid-19 intensive-care cases haven’t come close to levels earlier in the pandemic. Deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test continued to climb, however.

Case rates have fallen, but the number of deaths within 28 days of a positive test continued to climb? That doesn't sound right, if the vaccines were working, this would not be possible. It's also worth noting that the lifting of mandates is somehow not front page news on the BBC website.

Ireland also decided to drop their COVID restrictions.

The Tanaiste Leo Varadkar said on his way to the Coalition leaders meeting that if there is ‘no longer a public health rationale for any particular restriction, there is no political rationale for it’.

‘The other thing I’d say is a particular thanks to the Irish people. It’s been a very long two years. Certainly not over yet, but we’re in a much better place than we were previously. That is really down to a world-beating vaccine program.

Really? The same vaccine program that is not reducing the death rate in the UK?

Finally, there's France. France has also decided to drop their COVID restrictions.

Europe is moving fast to exit the emergency coronavirus measures that have disrupted all aspects of life for the past two years, a recognition that the measures have been largely futile against the omicron variant.

Ireland is set to announce it’s dropping most pandemic restrictions on Friday, days after England outlined its own dramatic move to scrap rules forcing people to wear face masks in shops and ending mandatory isolation for positive cases.

France is also relaxing curbs even after reporting a record number of cases -- almost 470,000 -- in one day earlier this week.

The various announcements mark a growing sign that the road back to normal, or something resembling it, is well under way in Europe. But they also reflect the fact that omicron appears practically unstoppable, with the EU reporting more than 2.3 million cases on Thursday alone.

With omicron symptoms milder than the earlier delta variant and hospitalization rates in check, governments are struggling to justify imposing curbs on people and businesses. Some have already started talking about treating Covid-19 as endemic, a as they move toward “living with the virus” policies.

The obvious question would be why now? They were all touting more lockdowns just weeks ago. France has reported record case numbers, why ease restrictions now? Why all around the same time? I believe there are two major factors here.

The WHO has redefined herd immunity to include people with prior infections. It was changed at the start of the pandemic to only include people who were vaccinated.

Here's the WHO website in November of last year.

‘Herd immunity’, also known as ‘population immunity’, is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.

Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it. Read the Director-General’s 12 October media briefing speech for more detail.

Vaccines train our immune systems to develop antibodies, just as might happen when we are exposed to a disease but – crucially – vaccines work without making us sick. Vaccinated people are protected from getting the disease in question. Visit our webpage on COVID-19 and vaccines for more detail.

Here's the WHO website today. Notice they added the part about previous infection.

'Herd immunity', also known as 'population immunity', is the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection. WHO supports achieving 'herd immunity' through vaccination, not by allowing a disease to spread through any segment of the population, as this would result in unnecessary cases and deaths.

Herd immunity against COVID-19 should be achieved by protecting people through vaccination, not by exposing them to the pathogen that causes the disease. Read the Director-General’s 12 October media briefing speech for more detail.

The second part is the court order from a federal judge in Texas.

Jan 7 - Score one for transparency.

A federal judge in Texas on Thursday ordered the Food and Drug Administration to make public the data it relied on to license Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, imposing a dramatically accelerated schedule that should result in the release of all information within about eight months.

That’s roughly 75 years and four months faster than the FDA said it could take to complete a Freedom of Information Act request by a group of doctors and scientists seeking an estimated 450,000 pages of material about the vaccine.

Still, the FDA is likely to be hard-pressed to process 55,000 pages a month.

At that rate, the 10 employees would have to work non-stop 24 hours a day, seven days a week to produce the 55,000 pages a month (and would still fall a bit short).

But as lawyers for the plaintiffs Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency pointed out in court papers, the FDA as of 2020 had 18,062 employees. Surely some can be dispatched to pitch in at the FOIA office.

Keep in mind that the FDA only approved Comirnaty for use outside of the U.S. not the EUA version of Pfizer's vaccine.

Now that the documents from the FDA can be released in a reasonable amount of time. Lawyers all over the world, and in Europe are going to see what the real trial data reveals.

There are two sides to this as well. We know from the Pfizer government contracts, that Pfizer doesn't have to cover any legal costs as it relates to vaccine related injuries, the government which agreed to the contract does.

When people start suing governments all over Europe, how will that turn out? I think they are backing off on this because they know that lawsuits are coming at an alarming level. The only way to thwart that is to put some time between when the FDA documents become public, and when vaccines were last administered.

This would also explain dropping the vaccine passports. Because they are documents that prove when someone received the vaccine. Governments don't want people having vaccination records, because that can prove the date in relation to adverse reactions.

I don't think that the protests had anything to do with the decisions being made. I think it was all driven by the threat of lawsuits --lawsuits which could actually bankrupt governments.

I'm sure MANY more European nations will begin dropping their mandates since the time of this writing.

What do you think?

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