Isle of Man Covid Strategy: Mitigation or Herd Immunity by Mass infection?

My article in today's Manx Independent

Our immunosuppressed & children are guinea pigs in government's "dangerous experiment".

Word version👇

The UK’s plan to ditch restrictions, including mandatory face masks and social distancing, exposing citizens to mass infection, was described by the WHO’s Dr Mike Ryan as “moral emptiness and epidemiological stupidity”.

Over 1,000 internationally renowned scientists published a letter in The Lancet admonishing the policy as “A dangerous unethical experiment”. Ireland’s Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, commented, "I certainly don't want to be presiding over something that says it's okay for young people to get Covid, it's not actually”.

On Tuesday, per head of population, IOM reported two thirds as many new Covid cases as the UK and three times as many as Ireland. In response to my article in Saturday’s Irish Independent, incredulous readers commented, “How did the Isle of Man go from safe haven to plague island so quickly”?

I’ve been reporting on International responses to the pandemic for 16 months. No jurisdiction, except the Isle of Man, has ever knowingly imported Covid in order for its citizens to “learn to live with it”. It’s all the more incomprehensible given the island had survived most of the pandemic living without Covid and all the restrictions necessitated by an infectious disease ripping through communities.

Just as the vaccination programme was gaining momentum, in an act of inexplicable self-harm, instead of waiting a few weeks, the Manx government imported the delta variant, jeopardising lives and livelihoods just as vaccines may be waning in our vulnerable.

Not only was Covid actively imported on island by the government, it did so without putting sufficient public health measures in place to protect the vulnerable and unvaccinated population. Unsurprisingly, delta now has the island in its grip. The educational and business disruptions, the cancelled operations, lost incomes and Long Covid that will ensue were not inevitable. They, and any resulting deaths, were entirely avoidable.

On 7 June, I wrote to Education Minister, Dr Allinson, asking“ Do you not think that deferring border opening until children break up for the summer is the safest  way of ensuring our children  are not unnecessarily exposed to harm associated with getting Covid and Long Covid in the high risk classroom environment? He did not reply to that. I removed my child from school informing Dr Allinson that I do not consent to him being subject to an “unethical, dangerous experiment” involving infection at school.

 The government claims to have a mitigation strategy which implies the existence of masks, distancing and work from home directions, for example. Not only are these not mandated, they are not encouraged and there’s no apparent role modelling of these behaviours amongst political leaders.

The government’s messaging/catchphrases, such as “Numbers don’t matter” and “we must live with Covid,” without mitigations and financial isolation support says, this is not serious, it’s safe to carry on as normal sending children to school, socialising indoors. If it wasn’t safe, the government would put mitigations in place, right? By saying “live with it” and “numbers don’t matter”, the government is lulling citizens into a false sense of security, implying that getting infected is fine. It’s not.

 Numbers DO matter because as more people get infected, hospitalisations will follow and with that, as we’ve seen elsewhere, the likelihood of deaths. How many avoidable deaths does the Chief Minister deem acceptable?  Increased infections also provide fertile ground for the emergence of new, potentially more dangerous, vaccine escaping variants, which would be catastrophic.

On Monday, BMJ columnists, Dr Helen Salisbury, explained the difference between achieving herd immunity by infection (unsafe, unethical, unscientific) and by population vaccination (safe, ethical, scientific). She described the UK’s plan of herd immunity through infection as “criminal”.

If herd immunity by mass infection is not the IOM government’s intent, in order to credibly claim a strategy of mitigation, it needs to urgently introduce actual mitigations, not least to protect the immunosuppressed and children from the now raging spread of what the WHO describes as a “deadly disease”. Basic public health mitigations include (but not limited to): Mandatory masks in indoor spaces and public transport, social distancing, financial support for isolating workers, work from home orders, installing ventilation in workplaces and schools, vaccinating children 12-16 years (as is already happening elsewhere in the world).

The government’s downplaying of the threat posed by Long Covid to the nation’s health and economy is concerning, particularly given children are particularly at risk. “This is not a benign virus,” Professor Stephen Griffin, a virologist at Univeristy of Leeds said. “We know that around eight or nine percent of hospitalisations are children at the moment.” We do not fully understand the long term implications of severe disease in children or the impacts of Long Covid and there have already been reports of neurological damage and damage to the heart and lungs, even in very mild cases.

10pc to 20pc of young people with Covid experience Long Covid, lasting many months. The UK’s Office for National Statistics reported that at least 13,000 children aged two to 11 and 20,000 aged 12 to 16 have suffered Long Covid. Contrary to Dr Ewarts astonishing claim recently that the risks posed by Covid to children were “vanishingly” low, the evidence raises sufficient doubts about longer term effects on children to NOT say the risks to them are extremely low.

 

Having imported a highly infectious disease, the IOM government has abdicated all responsibility by instructing us to “learn to live with it”. Failing to put mitigations in place to protect the most vulnerable, the government then came up with another catchphrase: “personal responsibility”. Public-health is about preventing sickness in entire populations. Infectious diseases are always collective problems because they are…infectious. An individual’s choice not to wear masks or distance, has widespread implications. One infected person can seed an entire continent of cases. The odds of any of us becoming ill depend on the choices of those around us.

The immunosuppressed, unvaccinated children and essential workers rely on the government to ensure our schools, workplaces and public transport are safe. Anything short of that constitutes moral emptiness and epidemiological stupidity.