The Real Revelation From Dr. Varma

It's being called "Varmagate" but most people are missing the most important point.

This past week, a hidden video rocked the world news. It was a discussion between an unnamed woman and Dr. Jay Varma, who ran the COVID response in New York City in 2020 and 2021. He did morning briefings on television. He was also the major influence on the policy that closed public accommodations to those who refused the injection.

This policy shut down restaurants, theaters, museums, bars, concerts, and libraries to those who refused the vaccine. Between August 2021 and March 2022, places of gathering in the city were shut to those who would not get the shot. This was enforced with a vaccine passport, later pulled from the market, plus police checks on bars and other places.

This new policy of vaccine segregation spread to Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, New Orleans, Seattle, and other places around the country. There was a period in late 2021 and early 2022 when large parts of the major population centers in the United States were closed to a vast swath of the population.

How well I recall! It was strange to walk along city streets but then be denied entry even to grab a slice of pizza or a beer. It was street food or nothing. Nor were the shows open. Sometimes even the churches and other houses of worship were closed or segregated.

To be sure, the businesses did only cursory checks, enough to confirm that the requirements have been satisfied just in case there was a sweep of the place by the police. Those did come, often without warning. Any non-compliant establishment was heavily fined and risked getting shut down.

To be sure, many of the paper vaccine cards were forged. There is no way to know how many but anecdotally it was quite a few. Doing this came with its own risks and no one knew for sure how much risk was being undertaken. To be fully compliant with legitimate credentials was certainly the safe route.

It was during this very period when showing up at the emergency room without a vaccination card meant being put last in line for medical services. It was routinely called a "pandemic of the unvaccinated" though many later studies demonstrated that the shots increase the risk of multiple infections.

Back to the tape of Dr. Varma. The woman says: "I know people that, like, won't have sex with someone that didn't get the COVOD vaccine."

Dr. Varma laughs and shakes his head: "Sorry, that's, like, a weird, like—I think it's a weird, like, belief that somehow like their body is different. It doesn't make any difference at all! Everybody's been exposed to the virus, whether you're exposed to the virus because it's breathed on you or because you got it injected into you. It's the same immune response."

He is correct about this of course. What is astonishing is to hear him admit it.

Exposure to a respiratory pathogen works like a natural vaccine without the risk of side effects. There was simply no dispute about this. Everyone with even rudimentary training in virology, including middle school students of several generations ago, knew that exposure trains the immune system to resist a more serious infection.

This point about exposure and risk has been known since the ancient world. Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War," notes that those who recovered from the plague seemed to gain immunity. He mentions that survivors could nurse the sick without contracting the disease again. Even when General George Washington wanted his troops inoculated for smallpox he exempted those who had previously had the disease including himself.

The original understanding of vaccines is that they provide sterilizing immunity. If you get the shot, you do not get the disease. It was also widely understood that no such hacking the immune system was possible for a fast-spreading respiratory virus. This is because the virus mutates too quickly and the vaccine cannot be adapted in time. This is why, as I was taught when I was young, there is not and never could be a vaccine for the common cold, many of which are coronaviruses.

This is a welcome admission of what I thought everyone knew before COVID-19 came along. Anyone in the industry or in medicine already knew in advance that the shot, even if based on a new technology, could not protect against infection or transmission. In that case, they cannot on their own contribute to herd immunity. That's another way of saying that while they might, under specialized conditions, provide a temporary personal benefit, they do not provide a public-health benefit.

Again, all of this was known even by non-specialists long before the pandemic came along. In the understood dynamics of viral epidemics, exposure to the live virus will always provide broader and more durable protection against disease than any vaccine. This is why the nurses who treated COVID patients should never have been subject to vaccine mandates; they were the most likely to possess natural immunity.

This is also why finding the immunity levels of the population should have been a priority from the earliest months of discovery, which were likely all the way from October 2019. Had such studies been done, we might have had a better fix on the infection fatality rates of the virus, which were more along the lines of a severe flu, rather than panicking the population into believing that fatalities rates were 3 to 4 percent, as the World Health Organization claimed in the early days.

The number of errors that unfolded from 2020–2023 were astonishing in their scope and the degree to which the measures stood in extreme contradiction to the established principles of public health. Among them were the widespread masking mandates, even imposed on children.

And yet there we were, looking at millions of kids all over the country with their faces covered. This happened as cities shut down, travel was restricted, business enterprise was forced into half-capacity, and government spending to make up the difference soared to the heavens.

It might have been possible to chalk all of this up to human fallibility but this Dr. Varma interview shakes that presumption to the core. In this interview, he flat out admits that there was no difference between the vaccinated and unvaccinated and that exposure is as good as the shot (of course it turned out to be better).

Let there be no mystery about the loss of trust in public health. Authorities have squandered their credibility, at immense cost to the social order and to health in general.

Views expressed in this are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.