Five months ago, The New York Times told us that it appears that the COVID vaccines can help to protect people from “long COVID,” or symptoms which persist long after infection:

As the pandemic enters its third year, long Covid has emerged as an increasingly important concern. And many people are wondering whether getting a Covid shot can reduce their chances of developing long-term symptoms.

The jury is still out, but a growing number of studies suggest that getting a Covid vaccine can reduce — though not eliminate — the risk of longer-term symptoms.

The United Kingdom’s Health Security Agency conducted an analysis of eight studies that had been published on the topic before mid-January. It reported that six of the studies found that vaccinated people who became infected with the coronavirus were less likely than unvaccinated patients to develop symptoms of long Covid. The remaining two studies found that vaccination did not appear to conclusively reduce the chances of developing long Covid.

Some study results suggest substantial protection, while others find only a slight benefit.

One large study of electronic records of patients in the U.S. Veterans Health Administration found that vaccinated Covid patients had only a 13 percent lower risk than unvaccinated patients of having symptoms six months later.

That was then, and this is now. From Time magazine, not exactly an evil reich-wing or anti-vaxxer source:

You Can Still Get Long COVID If You’re Vaccinated and Boosted

By Jamie Ducharme | September 8, 2022 | 1:46 PM EDT

COVID-19 vaccines were designed primarily to prevent severe disease and death—two purposes for which they continue to work very well. But when the shots first rolled out, many people also hoped they would block or even reverse symptoms of Long COVID, such as fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, chronic pain, and neurological issues.

By now, it’s clear that even people who are fully vaccinated and boosted can get Long COVID, and recent research suggests that vaccines aren’t the Long COVID shields people wished for.

Studies have come to very different estimates about the degree of protection vaccines offer against Long COVID. But some of the latest findings point to fairly disappointing protection. In one July report from the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics, more than 4% of vaccinated and boosted adults in the U.K. who were infected by Delta, Omicron BA.1, or BA.2 still had symptoms at least 12 weeks later. A preprint posted online on Sept. 6 (which has not yet been peer-reviewed) suggests the situation isn’t any better in the U.S. Researchers surveyed people from June into July, as the BA.5 variant was taking over. Among those who said they’d had COVID-19 at least a month earlier, roughly 20% had symptoms that lasted at least four weeks, with little difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.

There’s more at the original, and while Time has a paywall, your first couple of articles are free.

People “really do not trust (the COVID experts) that much anymore,” William Teach wrote. At a certain point, it has to be asked: has anything that the “experts” have told the American people turned out to be true?

Mr Teach pointed me to this article, from Market Watch:

Data show just 4.4 million Americans have had the new COVID booster, but experts expect accelerating demand in the coming weeks

Japan and Hong Kong announce easing of travel restrictions; Denmark ends its ban on mink farming

by Ciara Linnane | Last Updated: Sept. 24, 2022 at 8:30 a.m. ET | First Published: Sept. 23, 2022 at 10:26 a.m. ET

The first tallies for the new bivalent booster are out, with some 4.4 million people in the U.S. having received the updated shot, according to health officials. Meanwhile, public health experts continue to fret about President Joe Biden’s recent remark that “the pandemic is over.”

Health experts said it is too early to predict whether demand would match up with the 171 million doses of the new booster that the U.S. ordered for the fall, the Associated Press reported. The new shot targets the most common omicron strains as well as the original virus strain.

Does the author mean the new vaccine which was never tested on humans?

The government did such a bang-up job in instilling fear, in creating an absolute panic, about COVID-19, that the public were largely willing to take a vaccine which underwent some very abbreviated trials in humans, and was authorized under an emergency order to get it out to the public, even though the vaccines had not undergone the normal path for FDA authorization. Now, the government are pushing a vaccine that didn’t even have that much testing.

“No one would go looking at our flu shot uptake at this point and be like, ‘Oh, what a disaster,’” David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the AP. “If we start to see a large uptick in cases, I think we’re going to see a lot of people getting the [new COVID] vaccine.”

Yup, that’s right: if fear can be instilled again, more people will take it.

“I do expect this to pick up in the weeks ahead,” said White House COVID-19 coordinator Ashish Jha. “We’ve been thinking and talking about this as an annual vaccine like the flu vaccine. Flu vaccine season picks up in late September and early October. We’re just getting our education campaign going. So we expect to see, despite the fact that this was a strong start, we actually expect this to ramp up stronger.”

Biden, meanwhile, has acknowledged criticism of his remark about the pandemic being over and clarified that the pandemic is “not where it was.”

The issue isn’t that the pandemic is over, it’s that the panicdemic has passed.

On Thursday, Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical advisor, said that half of vaccinated Americans have not yet had their first booster dose. “We have a vulnerability in our population that will continue to have us in a mode of potential disruption of our social order,” Fauci said. “I think that we have to do better as a nation.”

I thought that Dr Fauxi had retired! When will his 15 minutes of fame be over?

The vaccines first became available to the general public in March of 2021, but people weren’t considered to be ‘fully vaccinated’ until 14 days after they had received their second shot of the two dose Pfizer or Moderna vaccines; the Pfizer vaccine second dose was to be taken 21 days after the first, while the waiting period was 28 days with the Moderna variant. Thus, there were not a lot of people who could be considered fully vaccinated until the middle of April, at the earliest.

As we reported, by July, the Fayette County Health Department were reporting significant numbers of “breakthrough” cases. The Health Department tell us that, in one of the few charts accompanying the graphs, that in August there were a total of 5337 cases, 3775 of which were among the non-vaccinated and 1562 are ‘breakthrough’ cases among the vaccinated, 29.27%.

But when you eliminate the roughly 220^[1]Even enlarged, the charts are difficult to read; I have done my best in looking at the charts to get the right number, but could be off by a few. cases among the 0 to 4 year old group, none of whom are vaccinated, and half of the cases of the 5 to 17 year old group, to get the 5 to 11 year old group, none of which are eligible to be vaccinated, from total cases, we’re down to 4680 total cases among the vaccine eligible. All of a sudden 1562 ‘breakthrough’ cases among a total of 4680 eligible to have been vaccinated, we see a ‘breakthrough’ case rate of 33.37%.

In other words, one out of three is the actual breakthrough rate in Fayette County.

The breakthrough cases were the things which destroyed the narrative that the vaccines would prevent you from contracting the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and we were quickly told that, well, maybe vaccination won’t stop everyone from becoming infected, but if you do catch COVID-19, your symptoms would be far less serious.

We noted, last December, that the most physically fit men on the planet, the players in the National Basketball Association:

were experiencing a wave of COVID-19 positive tests, even though 97% of them were fully vaccinated, and that the National Football League, 96% of the players are vaccinated, but the Philadelphia Eagles are having their Sunday game postponed until Tuesday, because their scheduled opponent, the Washington Redskins Football Team,^[2]I abhor the decisions to rename the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians, but even “Washington Football team” was better than the new “Washington Commanders.”

has had an outbreak of positive tests.

It’s become very clear: the vaccines simply do not prevent a person from contracting the virus. Denmark and Norway have just reported positive cases for the Xi Omicron variant among the fully vaccinated are almost the same as the percentage of the population who are fully vaccinated.

By January, even Dr Fauxi admitted, as did Dr Janet Woodcock, the acting head of the Food and Drug Administration, and others, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus would infect almost everyone.

If you’re under age 50 and healthy, then a bout of COVID-19 offers good protection against severe disease if you were to be infected again in a future surge, says epidemiologist Laith Abu-Raddad, at Weill-Cornell Medical-Qatar. “That’s really important because eventually, every one of us will get infected,” he says. “But if reinfections prove to be more mild, in general, it will allow us to live with this pandemic in a much easier way.”

Then we learned that the Omicron variants produced far less serious illnesses in those infected.

It seems that virtually everything that the purported ‘experts’ have told us about COVID-19 has had to be changed, altered, massaged.

For the most part, the COVID-19 vaccines seem to do no harm, though there have been a not insubstantial number of people who have had seriously negative reactions to the medication. That is something which is true of every medication; even something as widespread as aspirin can cause Reye’s Syndrome. But the public have been misled so very many times that it is no surprise that many are not only done with the panic part, but simply don’t trust what they have been told. The continual lies about Monkeypox have only reinforced that.