Open letter: Challenging coerced medication at GIBS
Open letter: Challenging coerced medication at GIBS
For academic freedom and more
Open letter from Ian Macleod to GIBS: Challenging coerced medication
It is a narrative arc almost as old as storytelling itself. Sensei teaches student everything he knows. Years later, Sensei joins the forces of evil. The former student is called to action. He resists it at first. Nobody wants to fight his erstwhile teacher. But this thing is too important. So student answers the call and squares up to the Sensei in a great battle. An epic clash ensues. Eventually, student defeats teacher with a final, perfect execution of the ageing master’s own signature move.
My Master’s degree at GIBS (2016-2017) involved many senseis. Economists and finance hotshots, captains of industry and lifetime academics. One commonality was the integrity of the underlying process. Formulate propositions, evaluate them with the strongest evidence you can find, and then craft answers and solutions. Defend those, but test yourself. Hunt for chinks in your model. Be brave enough to concede when you’re wrong.
They taught me well. I’m now in the not-cool position of so many blockbuster and straight-to-television karate kids. I believe my teacher has faltered. That my sensei has followed a bad path. I resisted the call to action for a while. Now I’m answering it. By formulating a proposition, evaluating it with quality data, and defending a conclusion.
The Gordon Institute of Business Science, GIBS, recently announced a vaccine passport regime. They demand one of two things to gain access to the Illovo, Johannesburg campus. First, proof you’ve been vaccinated against Covid. Alternatively, a negative Covid test, repeated weekly, at one’s own cost.
The latter strikes me as a non-option. Cynical, even. Dozens of tests a year is financially unmanageable for many GIBS employees, students and contractors. The logistics alone will get arduous. That said, it is at least logically connected to the goal. If you test negative, you likely don’t have the virus. So you can’t spread it.
Here I focus on proof of vaccination. Vaccine passports don’t meet that basic standard of a cogent connection to a goal. And they are costly in many ways. Here goes.
Dear GIBS leadership
I contend that demanding proof of vaccination is not only ineffective, but violates human rights. That these policies ought to be scrapped and never revived.
Let me be clear on what I am not opposed to. I have no problem with vaccines. I do contest whether the diversion of vast resources to their production and distribution has been sensible - what has been the opportunity cost? I have no problem with anyone choosing to take any vaccine. Really, I have zero interest in knowing. Just like I have no interest in any other part of anyone’s medical history. It is never on my mind.
I also make no comment on my own vaccination status. Nobody should care, as I’ll demonstrate below.
My opposition is to forced disclosure of vaccination status (with an unacceptable alternative “option”). More pithily, to coercion to take a drug. That only.
I have previously made the argument against vaccine passports as imposed by governments and corporates. Those objections all apply to GIBS. But there’s an additional gorilla when a university does this.
GIBS is inhibiting academic freedom. With the stroke of a pen, they are excluding groups of people who have reached a particular conclusion, regardless of how they got there. This makes mandates in educational institutions especially dangerous. It lights an extra fire in my opposition to mandates. It hits close to home.
Thesis statement
One argument is sufficient to exclude vaccine passports from the realm of valid responses to Covid. Here’s the framing:
Part 1: Covid vaccines do not reliably limit spread;
Part 2: If vaccines do not reliably limit the spread of the virus, taking one must be exclusively a personal choice.
Add 1 and 2, and I suggest there is only one legitimate response: Drop all measures that pressurise anyone to take a vaccine.
Part 1: Covid vaccines do not reliably limit spread
Vaccinated or not, we have similar viral loads in the back of the snoot when infected. In an interview regarding the Delta variant, Anthony Fauci says, “when you look at the level of virus in the nasopharynx of people who are vaccinated who get breakthrough infections, it’s quite high and equivalent to the level of virus in the nasopharynx of unvaccinated people who get infected”. He concludes, “So we know now that vaccinated people who get breakthrough infections can spread the virus to other people”.
I’d suggest even “breakthrough infection” is a misleading term in this light. It suggests that vaccinated people who get the virus are outliers.
I’d also not rely on The Fauci. He is imprecise in his wording during interviews. His claims change without any change in the data. So here’s some better evidence.
An American study from 2021 found that “individuals with vaccine breakthrough infections frequently test positive with viral loads consistent with the ability to shed infectious viruses.”
For months, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA, formerly Public Health England) has found a higher case rate among vaccinated than unvaccinated people in England among many age groups. Here is the report for the last couple of weeks in 2021. During this spell, every age group above 18 contracted Covid at a higher rate if vaccinated.
Here is the visual. Note how the ages covering the majority of people who use GIBS are getting Covid at much higher rates if vaccinated.
Here’s the tabulated data from the most recent report. For ages 18 upwards, boosted people are getting the virus at a higher rate than those who have had zero jabs. That is staggering.
This is a large sample, taken from an official government body for public health in the UK, and has been fairly consistent for months on end, only varying at the margins. Here is the full set of historical reports over time.
*For now I’ll ignore the reason for this. Be it behavioural or biological, that is for another time. And fascinating.
Canada too, ey
Canadian data also demonstrates the lack of reliable effectiveness of vaccines at preventing spread. Fully vaccinated people are getting Covid at a higher rate than anyone else. Partially vaccinated people are getting the virus at a higher rate than the unvaccinated.
US-Eina
America’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) data show that higher vaccination rates by state do not result in lower case rates.
The chart below is constructed from CDC data. Mapping the proportion of population double vaccinated against case rates produces a shotgun scatter. On an eyeball test, a line of best fit might even slant upwards.
Harvard, obvs.
Harvard is Mecca for business schools. One study out of those hallowed halls reflects the above. This was across a sample of 68 countries and nearly 2,947 US counties. Higher population vaccination rates do not correspond with lower case rates. In their words, “There also appears to be no significant signalling of COVID-19 cases decreasing with higher percentages of population fully vaccinated”.
Here the trend line does slope upwards. The authors don’t say this is statistically significant. The eyeball test says it might just be. I have just emailed the lead author to ask.
The “smartest guys in the room”
McKinsey and Co. (another revered thing at b-schools) find something similar. This time vaccination rates are on the Y-axis and cases on the X-axis. It doesn’t make much difference to the chart – it still resembles the accuracy of my sniping the last time I played paintball war games.
“Tae think again…”
In Scotland, the nation’s public health body has announced that a higher proportion of fully vaccinated people (two jabs) in age group 40 to 49 are getting Covid than are unvaccinated. That finding also applies comparing those with one jab to those with zero jabs in the age group 30 to 49.
Triple threat
The below chart is based on 18th Dec 2021 to Jan 15th 2022. This data was derived from this data source to get recent cases and the % vaccinated.
I argue these sources defeat the argument that vaccines can reliably be deemed to limit spread of Covid at all. In fact, they beg the proposition that they increase case rates (however that may work).
GIBS leaders, do you agree on part 1?
Part 2: If vaccines don’t reliably limit spread, taking one must be exclusively a personal choice
To start, the relationship between GIBS and students, staff, and anyone else who wants to visit campus is not one that encompasses any right to advise or enforce any medical treatment. It is not familial. Not doctor-patient. Just contractual. It implies no superiority on either party. It is a willing exchange of money for work.
If vaccines only limit symptoms and likelihood of death (which the Covid ones do briefly), but not spread, it is my risk to take. And yours. Individually.
To reduce it to absurdity, imagine the following. Karen in accounting races motorcycles to skydiving lessons every weekend, smokes a pack a day (Marlboro), eats McDonald’s, volunteers at a TB clinic, tweaks the nose hairs of Hell’s Angels at every opportunity, and tries WWE wrestling moves at home, against the express warnings of Hulk Hogan.
What is your right or obligation to limit this lifestyle? I’d suggest zero.
I’d also suggest you could do more to limit this unlikely accountant’s risk of death and injury by addressing this hair-raising lifestyle than you could do using vaccine mandates to limit Covid risks. You could enforce a healthier diet, ban wrestling moves in Karen’s lounge and suspend her until she quits smoking and loses weight. [In fact, forcing her to lose weight might have a stronger protective impact against Covid than vaccines.] You could force feed her salad. Having crashed a motorcycle in my youth, I guarantee from personal experience that banning that terrible thrill removes a serious chance of getting mangled.
Why don’t you? I submit it is entirely outside of your contractual relationship. Sure, if your adventurous bean counter’s parachute fails to open or a People’s Elbow goes wrong, it may impact you. You’ll miss her exhilarating tales at the water cooler and have to rehire. But that is immaterial to the present issue. These are her choices.
Same goes for Covid. If Karen gets sick, it is a cost to you. A vaccine may well limit the time and degree of illness, and the likelihood of death. But we might be talking a 70% reduction of a likelihood of death in the region of 0.09% in the case of many staff. And only briefly. The vaccines only limit symptoms for a matter of months (see Qatar study below). Most of us feel fluey for two to three days with Omicron. And surviving it gives us fantastic natural immunity (see Israel study below).
The evidence currently cannot support a claim that vaccines limit spread of Covid. Unlike testing, they are therefore a nonsensical thing to mandate for the purpose of limiting spread.
Given that forced vaccination limits (I’d say infringes) rights to bodily integrity, privacy, free movement and more, mandates are impermissible. Bad. Wrong. History will rightly take a dim view of those who impose them.
Do you agree with part 2 and my use of it alongside part 1?
If so, the irresistible conclusion is that vaccine passports must be halted. If not, why not?
While I have you…
Adding 1 and 2 is enough, here I nevertheless present additional arguments that militate against vaccine passports. *You’ll not find much of this on CNN.
a. Burden of proof
The burden is on the party imposing the mandate. I won’t elaborate much on this. We have long accepted that, outside of established exceptions, we are free to choose our medical treatments based on informed consent.
This burden persists. One would have to keep showing mandates are right.
This alone doesn’t rule out the permissibility of vaccine mandates. It simply allocates the onus. It’s on you.
b. Natural immunity
Natural immunity beats vaccines in every way. It is stronger on limiting spread, symptoms and chances of death. And it lasts longer.
Picking just one good proof point on this, a study from Israel shows natural immunity is many times better than vaccines.
This study finds that “natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 [Pfizer-BioNTech] two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.”
This should surprise nobody. Charlotte Thålin, a physician and immunology researcher at Sweden’s Danderyd Hospital and the Karolinska Institute who studies the immune responses to SARS-CoV-2, reviewed this paper and concluded, according to Science, “It’s a textbook example of how natural immunity is really better than vaccination”.
A February 2022 piece out of Hopkins published in JAMA found that Covid antibodies persisted for nearly 2 years after infection. Moreover, 99.3% of unvaccinated people who had Covid (confirmed with a + Covid test) had circulating antibodies. Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff recommends the following in response: “Instead of referring to the "vaccinated and unvaccinated," a more medical (sic) precise lexicon is the "immune and non-immune".
Here’s an intriguing and worrying take on the need to vaccinate on top of prior infection from The Fauci:
“America’s Doctor” doesn’t really have a “firm answer”. https://news.yahoo.com/fauci-lacks-firm-answer-covid-200300992.html
The splendidly Brooklyn-accented Fauci probably hasn’t read enough on this. There is evidence in a Danish study that “Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.” So there is an upside to vaccination on top of prior immunity. But we’re talking percentages on tiny fractions.
“The orange line corresponds to people who’ve been previously infected but not vaccinated; the yellow line to those who’ve been previously infected and vaccinated; and the green line to those who’ve been vaccinated but not previously infected,” according to a translation.
This simultaneously supports the case that natural immunity beats vaccine-induced immunity.
But everything has a cost. Vaccines are more dangerous to people who have already have Covid. A study from The Lancet shows this added risk. Research from three groups shows those with natural immunity get worse side effects from the vaccine.
In sum, if you’ve had Covid, getting the vaccine adds almost nothing good, but puts you at risk of side effects.
This begs the question: Why do you not, at a very minimum, allow access to campus to people who can demonstrate they have recovered from Covid? This can easily be established. I’d oppose this, too. But the simple fact that natural immunity is not one of your criteria is damaging to the credibility of your policy.
c. Informed consent
I think we can agree that informed consent is established as a principle of good healthcare. Of course, as with everything, there are reasonable limitations. We might section a dangerous schizophrenic. Parents might just bloody well demand their kids get their polio jab.
I agree it is theoretically possible to justify some sort of vaccine mandate imposed by an organisation on adults. Maybe for a universally deadly virus that we can reliably stop spreading and for which vaccines have long been shown to be safe. Maybe! But as argued above, there isn’t even sufficient reason to believe Covid vaccine passports achieve their goal. So they fail at the first hurdle.
These vaccines are also still being tested. I suggest that nobody can give informed consent to a drug that has not been fully tested. We can’t be informed. It is partially informed consent.
My mind goes to the Thalidomide tragedy. All of the experts were confident enough to give this drug to mothers with small children. We are prone to this sort of hubris. To making monumental mistakes. Pascal hit on this when he declared that, “all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber”.
Sometimes we do less damage sitting quietly, doing nothing. I’m in no doubt this applies to lockdowns. As per a recent study out of Hopkins – where House M.D. went! – in the journal Studies in Applied Economics, “We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality.” We should have done almost nothing.
Here’s a good discussion of informed consent from the SA Orthopaedic Journal from way, way back in 2012. I’ll highlight just one of their sentences: “Consent is not valid if the process is adversely influenced by persuasion, manipulation, coercion or reward in any form.”
d. Doctors only
Doctors bring with them a particular expertise. Their duty of care is not only socially acknowledged, but formally established and policed. There are legal and regulatory means of recourse where a doctor fails to discharge the appropriate level of care. This is chiefly the domain of the Health Professions Act, 56 of 1974 and Health Professions Council of South Africa.
A business school is not covered by this and lacks any capacity or mandate to provide medical advice. They are not appropriate entities to evaluate and grant exemptions, either. Therefore they are not appropriately constituted to demand any medical treatment.
e. Covid’s just not that into us
The UK Office of National Statistics data show what I’d call negligible deaths for youngsters over the course of a year in England and Wales. Look at the “Under 65” column. Almost everyone who walks onto the GIBS campus is under 65.
Covid is not the biggest killer we face. I suggest the burden is on you to demonstrate, at a minimum and before addressing Covid, that you could not do more good by targeting other ailments. That is without conceding that you have any duty or right to address public health issues.
Look at America’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) data:
In May of 2021, to pick a date when the figures were very different, Covid was the 24th leading cause of death in England. The top ten are in the chart below. Flu and pneumonia were far bigger killers. Why are these not on your radar? Why the focus only on one virus?
A 2022 study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health (Fauci’s fiefdom), published by the Centers for Disease Control, found not a single healthy person under 65 in their large population had a severe case of Covid that needed treatment in an ICU.
Further, “Not a single one of these nearly 700,000 people died, and the risk was miniscule for most older people, too. Among vaccinated people over 65 without an underlying medical condition, only one person died.” With Omicron, we are talking about a respiratory ailment with severity in line with that of seasonal flu.
f. Doesn’t heal all wounds
In Waning of BNT162b2 vaccine protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection in Qatar, researchers conclude, “[Pfizer-BioNTech-induced] protection against infection appears to wane rapidly after its peak right after the second dose, but it persists at a robust level against hospitalization and death for at least six months following the second dose.”
Effectiveness against infection “reached its peak at 72.1%... in the first five weeks after the second dose. Effectiveness declined gradually thereafter, with the decline accelerating ≥15 weeks after the second dose, reaching diminished levels of protection by the 20th week.”
So, I reckon vaccinating people with Pfizer-BioNTech needs to come with a warning that for the next two weeks the vaccine will do the square root of zilch to prevent infection. Then it gradually builds to about 72% as second dose arrives on the scene.
But what about after we hit 20 weeks? What is your long-term plan? Vaccines every few months in perpetuity?
g. Hospitals are fine
There is no “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. There is no public health imperative to enforce vaccines in order to prevent hospitals being overrun. They aren’t.
Here I’ll quote Dr. Oliver Robinson, Associate Professor of Psychology in the School of Human Sciences at the University of Greenwich: “In the U.K., at the peak of the Omicron wave, 14% of hospital beds (19,000 of 140,000) in the U.K. were taken up by COVID-19 patients (and the U.K. has fewer hospital beds per capita than most other developed countries). The proportion of those being admitted as hospital inpatients over the age of 18 that were unvaccinated was 29% according to the U.K. Vaccine Surveillance Report from the period of peak cases (January 13th). So at the peak of the Omicron wave, 4% of total hospital beds were being occupied by the unvaccinated.”
Countries vary on this. But around the world, we can safely say that unvaccinated Covid patients are not clogging up hospitals.
Even if vaccine mandates could be justified on grounds of preventing hospitals being overrun, the data show this is not a risk.
h. All over, bar the panic
Covid is no longer a public health issue. It was when there were spikes and the virus was causing excess mortality. Again I’ll rely on some UK data.
All cause mortality in England and Wales was below average for the week ending 28 January 2022, according to the Office for National Statistics.
This is why the likes of Denmark and Florida have removed all Covid restrictions and are no longer treating it as an issue for public health. It’s over. We are not in a pandemic.
i. And it is panic.
An academic institution should be a bulwark against public misconceptions. I fear that mandating vaccines at universities exacerbates the problem.
People have a disfigured view of the risks Covid poses to them. Consider these findings from a Franklin Templeton survey, July 2020.
Americans, on average, reckon Covid deaths among people 24 and younger make up 8% of the total. It is more like 0.1%-0.2%.
More broadly, as per the chart below, people overestimate how many young people die from Covid; and underestimate how many older adults die from Covid. In short, they think the young die vastly more than they do. The dividing line is around 65 – the approximate retirement age for many.
Political leanings have a role to play. In the US, 41% of Republicans think flu has caused more deaths than Covid-19, compared to 13% of Democrats. Interestingly, both groups display the age-based bias shown above.
Asked, “What percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalised?”, 34% of adults say that at least half of infected people need hospitalisation. The actual number seems to vary between about 1% and 5%.
“For people aged 18–24, the share of those worried about serious health consequences is 400 times higher than the share of total COVID deaths; for those age 25–34, it is 90 times higher.” See the chart below. Note again that retirement age is a watershed moment in the data.
The misunderstanding cuts both ways. Here are results out of King’s College London regarding the British population. “One in seven (15%) still think people are more likely to die from seasonal flu than coronavirus, while the large majority of scientific estimates suggest that the latter is more deadly.”
Extraordinarily, there is evidence that the vaccinated are more frightened of Covid than the unvaccinated. This lends credence to my view that Covid is primarily a pandemic of narrative. The New York Times presents the findings below.
A high-profile institution like GIBS mandating vaccines perpetuates misconceptions about the virus and the vaccines.
j. Safe-ish
The U.K. the government Yellow Card system counts approximately 1,900 deaths due to adverse reaction to the vaccine. America’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) lists 19,000 deaths following a vaccine adverse reaction.
There are some valid concerns about how these deaths are recorded. I don’t want to delve into that now. I only want to show that there are some risks with these vaccines. As with just about every strong medication out there.
Here’s Robinson again: “When a medical procedure comes with risk of harm, as is the case with the COVID-19 vaccine, it must be left to the informed consent of the individual. Japan is an exceptional model in this regard. Japan’s Ministry of Health of health website encourages citizens to receive the vaccine, but stresses it is not mandatory. Those taking it in Japan are required to be informed of the factual risk of side-effects such as myocarditis before they give their informed consent to be injected.”
Based on this, I argue vaccines cannot be called “safe”. They’re safe-ish.
k. Unintended consequences
A paper out at the start of February 2022 considers vaccine mandates and more from the perspectives of behavioural psychology, politics, law, socioeconomics, and the integrity of science and public health.
They conclude, “that current COVID-19 vaccine policies should be re-evaluated in light of negative consequences that may outweigh benefits.” But I recommend reading it in full.
l. Trust
Harvard Medical School Professor Martin Kulldorff argues in his Twelve Forgotten Principles of Public Health that this area should be bedded in trust, not demands or coercion. As the expert in infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety puts it, “Public health is about trust. To gain the trust of the public, public health officials and the media must be honest and trust the public. Shaming and fear should never be used in a pandemic.”
I reckon Kulldorff would add corporates and the academy to public health officials and the media where they make health policies. I’d extend “shaming and fear” to include threats of losing your job. These things certainly overlap.
m. Part of the problem?
Vaccine mandates are backfiring in some populations.
I’ll let this study speak for itself:
“Our findings suggest that control measures, such as domestic vaccine passports, may have detrimental effects on people’s autonomy, motivation, and willingness to get vaccinated. Policies should strive to achieve a highly vaccinated population by supporting individuals’ autonomous motivation to get vaccinated and using messages of autonomy and relatedness, rather than applying pressure and external controls.”
“If it’s so good, why are they forcing me to take it,” seems to be a common take. Understandably. Likewise a general push-back to governments forcing any behaviour.
Have you factored in the likelihood that mandating vaccines will contribute to vaccine hesitancy, and even, dare I suggest it, “antivax” sentiment? Everything has a cost.
n. If the NHS can do it…
NHS England recently rescinded its order that all frontline healthcare staff get vaccinated. Tens of thousands of doctors, nurses and other frontline health professionals refused to get the jab.
Are you prepared to be in the awkward position where doctors in England freely treat sick people without vaccine passports, but nobody can enter GIBS without showing their medical history?
So:
GIBS leaders, have my Parts 1 and 2 above made my case?
Are vaccine passports impermissible?
I also wonder, who will be in the room when you have to get rid of a member of staff who refuses to take the vaccine and can’t afford to take a test every week?
My request is that you rescind the vaccine mandate. You’ll reap the rewards of leadership.
In the alternative, I request an explanation of why my argument outlined above does not move you. That is, I invite your hypothesis, evaluation of evidence, and considered conclusion. Like you taught me to do.
I can mostly carry out my contractual obligations remotely. “Mostly” is not enough. Part of my challenge is for staff who don’t want the vaccine, but may not be in a position to oppose the mandate. They deserve answers, too.
Hopefully,
Ian Macleod,
GIBS MBA (2017), GIBS independent contractor, concerned member of the school’s wider community, and accidental activist.
ianmac@investmentnarrative.com
For reference and completeness, here are links to each of my pieces challenging mandates at a corporate level: I, Fool – but not a Fauci, Grave assertions demand grave justifications – an open letter to Ivo Vegter, Mr. Ramaphosa, let’s tear down this lockdown, Flawed Fiat Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7.