With experts in the medical profession including hospital department heads admitting that COVID vaccines offer virtually no protection from infection with the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, many have called for Green Passes to be scrapped, adding that those people who have resisted vaccination until this point are unlikely to be persuaded to change their minds.
Interviewed on UnHerd this week was Prof. Cyrille Cohen, head of Immunology at Bar Ilan University, who admitted that the government had “got things wrong” on its handling of the COVID crisis and also that Green Passes were essentially irrelevant in the current situation. When asked whether he thought vaccination should therefore become an individual decision, however, he suggested that it was not entirely individual, as it “affected other people” in terms of hospital bed occupancy.
Cohen did admit that discriminating against the unvaccinated in terms of hospital treatment could be a slippery slope to discrimination based on other risk factors for serious illness such as obesity and smoking, and stressed that it was not something that he was personally proposing. That has not stopped others, however, from openly calling for the unvaccinated to be discriminated against and even outright denied hospital care.
On Wednesday, radio host Howard Stern was asked by a listener what he thought about “just letting the pandemic run wild and move through the unvaccinated?”
Stern responded by saying: “If it was up to me, anyone unvaccinated would not be admitted to a hospital … In my America, all hospitals would be closed to you. You’re going to go home and die.”
He then mocked what he claimed were the beliefs of those who are unvaccinated, saying, “They think that there’s some conspiracy to turn them into a magnet or something like that. They think they are going to become magnetized if they take the vaccine.”
He also claimed that anyone in doubt could “look at us [the vaccinated] as a sampling where nothing has happened to us. It’s time for you to get it.”
What Stern may not be aware of is that according to the CDC, which established the VAERS vaccine injury reporting system, 11,225 reports of death following COVID vaccination have been logged onto the system in the United States alone. The CDC therefore estimates that the risk of death due to COVID vaccination is around 0.002 percent, a small number to be sure, but not negligible given the number of vaccinations injected around the world.
Furthermore, many serious and potentially long-term and life-altering side effects have been reported and confirmed by studies. A recent study concluded that the rate of heart inflammation following mRNA vaccination was as high as 1 out of 1,862 males in the 18 to 24 age group and 1 out of 2,650 males in the 12 to 17 age group. Broadening the age bracket to 12 to 39 years of age the rate was 1 case for every 5,117 vaccinations.
Interestingly, Stern recently issued a venomous attack against Novak Djokovic, the professional tennis player who was deported from Australia due to his unvaccinated status. At the age of 34, Djokovic would face a significant risk of suffering heart inflammation following vaccination; indeed, the past year has seen dozens of professional sportspeople and athletes die of heart failure or forced to retire from the profession due to heart issues following vaccination.