Fact Checking the BBC Fact Checkers
'Get vaccinated for others' never happened
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Rachel Schraer is a senior reporter for the BBC, covering health and misinformation. During the pandemic she was in charge of the health team, highlighting misinformation about vitamin D and ivermectin. She was then appointed as the first specialist health and disinformation reporter on the BBC’s fact-checking team.
After the above video of Dutch MEP, Rob Roos, (explaining that during the Covid hearing, Pfizer admitted the vaccine was never tested on preventing transmission) went viral, Rachel decided to do what she does best, fact-check.
I don’t agree that this was bombshell news, it was always known that they didn’t test for transmission but let’s take a look at her basic facts:
1. The vaccines were tested for whether they reduced people’s chances of catching Covid - they seemed to, giving less chance of the virus being passed on. But they didn’t look specifically at whether they stopped already infected people passing the virus on (transmission);
She’s correct that the trials did not look at whether the vaccines stopped transmission but is wrong when she says they looked at whether they reduced people’s chances of catching Covid.
What the trials actually looked at was whether vaccines reduced people’s chances of getting symptomatic infection. If a trial participant got Covid symptoms, they had a PCR test and if positive, an antibody test. Tal Zaks, chief medical officer at Moderna, said in 2020 “our trial will not demonstrate prevention of transmission because in order to do that you have to swab people twice a week for very long periods and that becomes operationally untenable”.
So the trial only looked at whether the vaccine reduced symptomatic infection, not infection per se, a small but important distinction. This means that the vaccine could have been 100% effective at preventing symptomatic infection but a vaccinated person could still became infected, still became infectious and still transmit the virus to somebody else.
Also, a trial showing that the vaccine “seemed to” prevent infection sounds like more anti-science and certainly not the definitive conclusion people were told about. The one they used to segregate society, remove people’s livelihoods and bring in Covid passports.
2. When the vaccines first became available, public health messaging was clear - we don’t know whether they stop transmission, & people should continue keeping preventative measures. Here’s the FDA … here’s the UK’s DHSC
This is correct…if your definition of ‘clear’ is ‘unclear’ and ‘public health messaging’ doesn’t include messages from people like the CDC director. Here’s a little video for you, Rachel.
At the very least, it was implied that the vaccine prevented infection and transmission but there are countless examples of public health messaging being very clear.
If public health messaging was so clear why were there public health messages saying to get vaccinated to protect others? Why were care home staff sacked because they were supposedly a risk to their patients?
3. Over time, stronger evidence *did* emerge they reduced transmission - of the variant at the time (this was before Delta). I wrote in March 2021 about how authorities were in fact being very cautious about confirming this.
“Stronger evidence” is still not good enough to force/coerce millions, if not billions of people to get vaccinated purely to reduce transmission, to save Granny or for the greater good.
However, in reality, empirical data was suggesting otherwise. In December 2020, in Nature magazine, it said “[no trial] has demonstrated that it prevents infection altogether, or reduces the spread of the virus in a population. This leaves open the chance that those who are vaccinated could remain susceptible to asymptomatic infection - and could transmit that infection to others who remain vulnerable. In the worst-case scenario, you have people walking around feeling fine, but shedding virus everywhere,” says virologist Stephen Griffin at the University of Leeds, UK.”
4. Then, new variants began to change the equation. The vaccines were less good at preventing transmission of Delta and even less good at preventing Omicron. This saw spikes in infections around the world.
It’s not the vaccines, it’s the variants, just don’t say the sacred vaccines didn’t work. It seems, we have come to a new phase in the pandemic…backtracking. The latest catchphrase is “I was correct at the time but the facts changed”.
Facts don’t change. The fact is, the vaccines never prevented infection or transmission. Facts from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) showed you were more likely to get infected if you were vaccinated (and that was pre Omicron when they hastily stopped publishing the data).
Perhaps, Rachel should investigate why mass vaccination may have encouraged new variants.
5. In the UK at least, soon after it became clear vaccinated people could now pass on the virus at similar rates to unvaccinated people, vaccine passports were quickly all but dropped. That’s not to say there aren’t valid discussions about whether they were the right policy in the first place (I wrote about some of the concerns here) - but let’s get the basic facts straight. Was the idea your vaccine protects others based on a lie? No.
All but dropped for care workers who were sacked without any form of compensation. The UKHSA data was clear for months that infection rates were higher in vaccinated people but still they got sacked. The only reason vaccine passports were dropped is that enough people were kicking up a fuss and the NHS was about to lose a massive amount of staff. That and revelations that politicians had been partying during lockdown.
Furthermore, the Dutch MEP wasn’t addressing the UK. All around the world people were discriminated against, lost their jobs, couldn’t travel and couldn’t see their family. In many countries, mandates are still in place.
Was the idea your vaccine protects others based on a lie? 100% it definitely was. If it didn’t prevent infection and transmission, how could it protect others?
Rachel’s words are meant to make you question what you were told for over a year. ‘Get vaccinated to protect others’. Unfortunately, the receipts are there and the people who were guilt tripped into getting vaccinated remember.
BBC fact checking at it’s finest. They should be renamed to the BBC backtracking department or better still the BBC gaslighting department.
One of the most disgusting slogans was about getting jabbed to protect others. Emotional blackmail, nothing more, nothing less. All that clever nudging about wearing a mask to protect others (like your mask had a one way filter or something) morphed into taking an experimental medical product with no long term safety data to somehow protect other people. And any suggestion that vaccines don't work that way was (and still is) met with outrage. And the gentle gliding from "take the jab and you won't catch covid" to "take the jab and you won't be terribly ill with covid" and all the twats merrily agreeing as though the jabs had actually taken their memory away. I know many people who are still convinced the jabs have saved millions of lives, that they personally have saved lives by being jabbed (as they had saved others by being masked), that the jabs have stopped them dying of covid (even though none of them had covid until they started being jabbed and now they are on their 3rd or 4th round of it). And naturally, they believe every word the BBC says!
So, where are the studies showing transmission is different with different strains as she says?
Rachel Schraer is a propagandist. She is not interested in basing the message on the information, but on selecting/fabricating information to help support the pre-determined message.