Covid vaccinations

IN EARLY 2020, cases of Covid were rare enough that contact tracing worked, driving numbers down to just a handful. Medical advisers were divided on whether to continue to seek elimination, or to let the infection spread through the population so that “herd immunity” could cause it to die out eventually.

In Australia, elimination was winning, while the disease was spreading throughout Britain. Then the vaccines arrived.

With so few cases, health advisers debated whether a one-in-a-million chance of a blood clot would outweigh the risk of catching an infection that almost nobody had.

But concerns such as tourism demanded that everyone should receive protection, so that borders could be reopened. The Doherty report calculated how many would die as infection spread.

Health advisers seemed convinced that vaccination would give immunity to infection, suggesting that the unvaccinated should be banned from mingling in crowded places.

Meanwhile, British infections were out of hand.

In addition to vaccination, free antigen tests were distributed to augment strenuous contact tracing technology. Weekly government reports gave valuable details of vaccine efficacy. They showed clearly that far from giving immunity to infection, vaccination only reduced the risk by about a half. Vaccination status was a long way from a guarantee that you were not carrying the virus. It did, however, reduce your symptoms considerably, with hospitalisation reduced to about a tenth.

In December 2021, infected southerners were allowed to stream into a Queensland that had almost zero cases.

Since then, well over 1000 have died and over one in four have been infected. Five hundred are in hospital.

The simple use of rapid antigen tests at the border might have stemmed the flood, but until only a couple of months earlier they had been deemed illegal. One must wonder why.

There is an illusion that case numbers have fallen, I suspect because few are bothering to test, with the need to purchase a kit.

But still the deaths continue to climb, together with the number of reinfections. These show that the concept of “herd immunity” is completely dead. You can be reinfected within a month of recovering from the virus, maybe by a slightly different variant. Even more alarming is a research report that each reinfection can be more serious than the previous one. We are faced with a future of four boosters a year, relieving the symptoms of a disease that will recur forever.

Why am I bothering to write? My wife and I are at present isolating from an unpleasant bout, contracted from a visiting grandson. In our eighties, we are dreading the next infection.

JOHN BILLINGSLEY, Toowoomba