I didn’t want to write about this subject but several of my students have asked me about my view. Austria (where I hope to teach in September next year) is now in the grip of the fourth wave and has introduced new lockdowns and vaccine mandates. The German health minister Jens Spahn a few days ago said, “by the end of [northern hemisphere] winter everybody will be either vaccinated, recovered or dead”. What Spahn meant is that Delta is so infectious that by the end of winter it will have gotten to everybody. There is no place to hide from this extremely infectious virus. It has a reproductive rate of up to 9, that means every infected person will infect nine others on average.
So, let’s look at the option of recovery. I have heard many people say that 99% of infected people will recover from COVID and therefore it was not necessary to take the vaccine. Let’s take that statement apart. The 1% lethality takes into account that you have an excellent health care system at your fingertips. Only one percent die in countries where enough ventilators or ICU beds are available. Depending on study and country, if you get infected you may have a 2-3% chance to be in need of a ventilator. Not a nice thing. You will have to get intubated. Then there is a 4-5% chance to be in need of an intensive care unit place. ICU’s are excellent and they really increase your chance of survival. But the light is on all night long, there are nurses going in and out all night long and machines are beeping. You are unlikely to sleep at all in your ICU time. It is now accepted that patients may leave ICU with post-traumatic stress disorder. How many things in your life do you do in other areas where you take 4-5% chance to end up in such an environment? Even if you don’t need an ICU you may have around an 8-10% chance to require hospitalisation (fluids, monitoring, etc.). Okay, you may say I’m happy to take that chance over vaccination any day.
But the next hurdle then is long COVID. In this Medscape article you will see that 40% of all survivors end up with long-COVID of varying intensity (https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/963268?spon=17&uac=118403PN&impID=3810496&sso=true&faf=1&src=WNL_mdpls_211119_mscpedit_wir). You may end up with chronic fatigue, you could be bed-ridden or end up demented. Dementia in long-COVID can come, for example, from micro-strokes due to blood clots. Remember the blood clots, because of which many didn’t want to take Astra Zeneca? Well blood clots due to COVID are 600 times more likely than due to vaccination. The Medscape article above states that 100 Million people worldwide had or have long-COVID. An unknown percentage of those will have to go on invalid pensions because they don’t get better. These are some numbers hiding behind the statement, “99% recover”.
The reason why we have a fourth wave in many European countries is because not enough people are vaccinated. Consider Delta’s reproductive rate of 9, if only 62% of the total population are vaccinated (as is the case in Austria), that’s still 38% to infect. Delta will rip through those like wildfire. Many of them will end up in overflowing hospitals. Worldwide already 160,000 health care workers died during the pandemic. They died due to viral overload (having been exposed to too many infected patients) or due to exhaustion and suicide (the industry has a work ethos that does not allow you to rest if you can still help your patients). We can avoid most of that if enough people are vaccinated so that we can avoid or curtail a fourth wave.
In this article (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/23/covid-patients-in-icu-now-almost-all-unvaccinated-says-oxford-scientist) Oxford scientist Prof Sir Andrew Pollard says that most patients in ICU today are unvaccinated and that those fully vaccinated, with a few exceptions, will only experience mild symptoms. Pollard calls it “little more than an unpleasant inconvenience”. However, he says, booster shots, mask wearing, will be necessary to avoid an increase in cases in the UK.
I’ll certainly have my booster shot as soon as the recommendation comes out. I’m not keen on vaccines nor on booster shots. But I’m much less keen on being in ICU or being the one that tips one of our comrade healthcare workers into viral overload or suicide. I’m an extremely healthy person with a hyperactive immune system. The great thing about that apart from the occasional allergy (overreacting immune system) is that I have not been sick in decades. This type of immune system, however, does not help with COVID. People like me regularly die in the second week of infection from a so-called cytokine storm. That beautiful term means that your immune system overreacts and turns against itself until it self-destructs.
Now, coming to the chart at the top of this article, I took this screenshot from the Instagram page of the European Commission. It shows the percentage of adult population vaccinated against the 14-day rolling average death rate per 1 Million population. As you can see there is a clear correlation. Second on the list Portugal has 92% of the adult population fully vaccinated and 10 deaths per Million population. Bulgaria has only 29% of the adult population fully vaccinated and 325 deaths per Million. These numbers speak a powerful language.
Finally to my home country Australia. After a shaky start we have gone to over 80% of the population above 16 year of age vaccinated. In this article (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-23/fourth-covid-wave-in-europe-will-australia-follow/100640728) Raina MacIntyre, professor of bio security at UNSW, writes about what Australia has to do to avoid the fourth wave that currently has part of Europe in its grip. I’m a great fan of MacIntyre’s work. Not many scientists have the talent, or they don’t bother, to explain complex problems to the general populace. And politicians often don’t engender the trust that we may want to understand them. MacIntyre writes that a high vaccination rate, booster shots, vaccinating children (which are increasingly the drivers of new outbreaks), continued mask wearing and contract-tracing are all necessary. A vaccination rate of 70% of the population would have been enough to get the original COVID strain under control. But Delta has raised the stakes and makes the vaccination of 5-11 year old children essential. Some vaccines, like the Pfizer, which I had, have a waning immunity that makes a booster after 6 months necessary. Still much better than contributing to a fourth wave.
A few months ago our shire, which had previously been spared from the worst of the pandemic, was plunged into a five-week lockdown by a gentleman who ‘didn’t believe in COVID’. Due to the advances of medicine and public policy we didn’t have a major pandemic in 100 years and pandemics have gone a bit off the radar. But they have played a major role in history. Emperor Vespasian sent several Roman legions down the silk road to enforce taxes. They brought small pox back home. Vespasian himself and about half of the Roman military personnel died. This was half the cause of the fall of the Roman empire. The Black Death, a bubonic plague pandemic in the 14th century, caused up to 200 Million dead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death with half of Europe’s population wiped out.
When the first fleet of colonialists arrived in Botany Bay (today Sydney), they infected the local Aborigines with small pox. Because they didn’t have antibodies up to 80% of them died. The conquistadores used infectious diseases in the Americas with great lethality. A Spanish military expedition through Florida in the 16th century was met with stiff resistance and had to depart without achieving their aims. The conquistadores reported of 30 fortified cities, which they could not invade. 30 years later a second campaign was mounted, which was met with no resistance at all. The first expedition imported the small pox. The local population had no antibodies whatsoever. 90% of the population died.
When we look back at the last 100 years, they may, with their lack of pandemics, appear as a historical aberration. The problem with enjoying such an aberration is that when the first pandemic came around, many of us simply saw it as an inconvenience to their lives imposed through public health measures, as an invasion into privacy and personal freedom, and as a reduction of personal choices.
It’s not about freedom and choice. It’s a pandemic. If we all work together we can get this thing under control. If only two thirds of us work together it can go on for years as every unvaccinated population remains a breeding ground for new variants.
The whole of yoga is built onto the foundation of dharma. That’s a complex term that means somewhere in between ‘doing what is right’ and ‘doing one’s duty’. In the Yoga Yajnavalkya, sage Yajnavalkya says ‘yoga cannot succeed without doing one’s duty towards society’. Dharma in yoga consists of yoga’s first two components yama and niyama, which are duty towards society and duty towards oneself. The first and foremost yama is ahimsa, often translated as non-violence but it means more. It means to do no harm. That’s again a complex concept as sometimes we have to accept a bit of harm now to avoid much harm later on. For example we may have to lock up a perpetrator to avoid more harm to victims later on. That’s a dangerous thing, as the perpetrator may defend themselves and could come to harm. Police officers could easily come to harm in that process.
In case of the pandemic the situation luckily is more clear-cut. By getting vaccinated we are reducing harm to ourselves in the case of infection, and we are reducing the likelihood of infecting others. We are also reducing the likelihood of being a burden to our highly overloaded healthcare system and infecting frontline workers in the process. Finally we are reducing the probability of becoming a breeding ground for new variants. Getting vaccinated is the dharmic thing to do.
Very wise words from a wise man.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Sending love to you
Stefanie
Hello Stefanie,
Sometimes this ‘wise man’ is an expert of making a great fool of himself, too. Hopefully not too often.
Much love to you
Gregor
Does this mean you will require participants of your training to be fully vaccinated in order to be able to attend?
Thank you.
Nena
Hello Nina,
In the state in which we live (NSW) and where our Level 1 and 2 Immersions take place, all restrictions for unvaccinatated people end on the 16th December. Everyone is therefore free to attend our events.
Warm regards
Gregor
Thank you Gregor for putting all this into words and arguments. It is good as this speech is barely audible in the yoga community and this position is nos easy to to hold sometimes
Thanks you for your support, Amina. It wasn’t easy for me. In the community in which I live I sometimes get ostracized for holding pro-vax views.
Thankyou Gregor for your well researched post, I know it isn’t going to change the minds of many pro – freedom campaigning anti vaxxers but I hope it can sway some fence sitters. It is quite horrifying how so much of the yoga community has refused to listen to science and history for the greater good in the name of protecting their own “so reignty”.
Thank you, Deanne. I am dumbfounded that people who not long ago may have called themselves progressive, alternative or hipster, suddenly repeat the slogans of the sovereign citizens, a movement that is part of the alt-right, coming straight from the spiritual neighborhood of the Ku Klux Klan.
Thanks for speaking up ☺️ I agree that it must be a global effort, otherwise this will never stop. We should get vaccinated not only for ourselves but for the others
Thank you for your views and the article Gregor. I have to say I am relieved you aren’t an anti-vaxxer as I have so much respect for you as a practicing yogi and a teacher. It is important for senior teachers to take a stand. I believe no man is an island, we are all connected in what we do. Sometimes too much ‘navel gazing’ in the yoga community.
Hello Tonia,
Thanks for your support. There is currently a cultural problem in the wellness and yoga community. We learn that through meditating and introspection we find spiritual freedom and self-realization. That is correct and good so. We may also find out whether it is appropriate for us to live in one place or another, with whom to mingle and what professional path to take. But many have now taken that to the extreme to use introspection to find our relationship to the larger community and society. Yoga has never stated so. The so-called yamas and niyamas are not to be understood through meditation but, according to yoga, through the study of scripture. And the so-called dharma shastras (scriptures relating to right action) state that we owe pretty much everything, our lives, our bodies, our health and material welfare, to the society around us. Therefore we have to support and serve society whenever necessary. This means that if necessary we have to accept slight demerit for ourselves to prevent harm for others. Yoga is not a hyper-individualistic teaching, which you have aptly expressed with the statement that no man is an island.
Thanks again and hope this finds you well
Gregor
With all due respect Sir, how is our vaccination going to help when only 3% of low-income countries are currently vaccinated?
Vaccines have been sold at premium prices in the west which received 16 times more vaccines per person than pour nations.
The patents for the vaccine have not been lifted even though there are many production facilities with the necessary equipment that could be making vaccines right now but simply can’t because they have no access to the formula.
This lack of vaccination in the global south is now making them a breeding ground for mutations as is the example with the latest Omicron variant.
We simply don’t know how the current vaccines will hold against these mutations!
Big pharma is using the pandemic as their golden goose with not a drop of conscience or awareness of the consequences. And apparently willing to go on with a forever pandemic which is a perfect new add-on to the forever wars.
There are currently virologists refusing to get their booster aware of the irony and immorality of the situation.
But once again the divide and conquer strategy is being implemented where we are blaming each other for what is happening instead of looking at the rich who are laughing their way to the bank.
So for those that don’t understand some of us that are vaccine-hesitant, I point you to big pharmaceutical. They won’t share the data with poor countries to help yet they have immunity from accountability. I don’t trust them and I have no intent to participate in their game.
Hello Nena,
It’s kind of you to address me as sir but please just call me Gregor. That’s good enough for me.
I agree with what you say. I don’t trust Big Pharma a little bit. Because of that the COVID vaccine was my first vaccine in over 35 years. But I had to learn not to let my mistrust of Big Pharma get in the way of seriously looking at scientific data.
The other point is that Big Pharma is probably no worse than Big Anything. How about Big Oil, the food industry, Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, Bitcoin. Are they really any better? For those who are surprised to find these names here all of the above (most of them via data intense streaming) are much more energy intense and greenhouse gas producing than Big Pharma.
What’s at the root of Big Anything? I watched a documentary twenty years ago, called The Corporation. It dealt with the fact that in the 1950’s the US Supreme Court with a 3:2 split decision convened on corporations the status of natural persons. They are now called legal persons and before the law they are like you and me. The documentary then analysed what sort of a person a corporation would be if they were a natural person. The result was that they labelled corporations as psychopaths.
I propose that we withdraw from corporations the right to be legal persons. That means that from then on the CEO’s and other representatives are again personally liable for the harm they cause (and can get sued accordingly).
I propose that we then instead confer the status of legal persons on the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, lakes, mountains and forests, as the indigenous people did that long ago. First steps into that direction have already been taken in places like Uruguay, New Zealand, etc.
Patent law is a really tricky story. With patents the innovator gets to enjoy the fruit of their invention for 50 years, after which the inventions enter the public sphere. The purpose of that is to create an incentive for innovation. BioNTech, the company that developed the Pfizer vaccine, right after the genomic sequence for Omicron came out, stated that it would take them two weeks to run simulations whether their vaccine would hold up to it. If not it would take them another 4 weeks to tweak the vaccine so that it would. In total it would take them three months from genome to scaling up to ship hundreds of Millions of vaccines out into the world. That’s definitely world record speed. You’d have to imagine that for months on end hundreds of people with pharmacy and microbiology PHD’s won’t go to sleep, but will work through the nights on amphetamine to achieve that goal. If we don’t let those smart people go home with a good profit, they will just go to a different industry instead and we won’t get good vaccines.
The Old Testament says, “do not muzzle the oxen that there threshet”. That’s the whole idea of capitalism. Let people who have the urge, improve their lot. I’m not glorifying that. But would I have want to have poured billions into vaccine development, and studied and worked my whole life for it, and suddenly somebody comes and says, “sorry dude, we’ll take it all off you?” If we are going down that avenue we need to completely rethink patent law as otherwise, when changing vaccine patent law only, all great inventors will go into other industries, where that danger does not loom.
Now to the other story you mention: Secretary of State Antony Blinken rightly called the efforts of the South African scientist who noticed Omicron, analysed its code, and posted it online, as “heroic”. I’m deeply embarrassed and ashamed that us white people had nothing better to do than slamming our borders shut to our black sisters and brothers. Colonialism runs deep. I’m stating the obvious when saying that instead we should have loaded planes with vaccines and personnel to help them with their outbreak.
Instead of the vaccine patent waiver let me make another suggestion. There is no point in sending the Pfizer vaccine to Africa. During the entire transport chain it needs to be kept at -20 degrees Celsius. For that reason initially even my home country Australia didn’t want to have it, as we weren’t set up for such a demanding transport chain. The Astra Zeneca vaccine costs about $2 per hit, that’s $4 per double-shot. Africa has about a Billion citizens. That $4 Billion. I’m dumbfounded that nobody wants to come up with $4 Billion to give Africa a hand. Australia recently purchased 8 nuclear powered submarines for a total of $90 Billion. That’s around $11.1 Billion per submarine. For a third of one submarine we could have double-vaccinated everybody in Africa. For the remaining two thirds we could have given everybody clean drinking water, too, and invested the rest in irrigation for fields.
I guess we would have to talk next about the right to patent herbicide-resistant crop hybrids, and the business practices of Monsanto and Bayer, which are keeping farmers in Africa and elsewhere in poverty. Let’s leave that for another day as I’m anyway getting worked up.
All the best to you
Gregor
Thank you, Gregor, for speaking up in a community that sees some developments I really can’t wrap my head around.
I would consider myself a rather rational person. I am doing a PhD in the social sciences (in innovation management, so I admire the clarity of your words around patents) and I tend to accept facts that are provided by science. As someone who is is going through the process of scientific inquiry himself, I also know how limited our understanding is about many things, how much judgment and error is involved in the scientific method. That’s where I see the beauty of Yoga, meditation, and ancient wisdom. There are many things that we don’t fully understand. And yet, they work. We can experience them with more than our thinking mind, if we get subtle enough. I am just at the beginning of this journey (currently with Bernd, who speaks dearly of you), but I see so much beauty and richness in this path. I would love to see how these two worlds learn from one another, in which they enrich and inform one another.
It makes me sad that skepticism and mistrust guide the perception of so many people in the world of Yoga. It makes me sad that the word “freedom” is interpreted as always being able to do anything that you would like to do. Yes, some of this mistrust is certainly appropriate but should that lead us into rejecting everything that the modern world has produced? Yes, we have less personal freedom but isn’t that an opportunity for spiritual practice and growth?
I hope that the worlds of ancient wisdom and modern science will grow closer, guided by mutual respect, not by mistrust and blaming. Thank you, for taking a leap of faith and speaking out for this future.
Much love from Hamburg
Malte
Hello Malte,
Thanks for your comment. Currently there isn’t that much overlap between science on one hand and spiritual enquiry on the other. It is growing but there’s certainly a lot of space for growth.
We certainly need as much high-class information and data that we can get our hands on, if we are to survive the multiple converging crises that we are facing.
The usage of the term ‘freedom’ in the wellness movement seems to have similarities with a smoke screen. ‘Inconvenience’ would be more apt, I would say. While I don’t particularly fancy getting vaccinated and wearing masks, it still surprises me that this would lead people to vilify their political opponents by claiming that they sex-traffic children through underground networks of tunnels and consume babies in milk shakes (claims initially invented by QAnon targeting democrat politicians but were later redirected at Victorian premier Daniel Andrews).
Much love and the same to Bernd when you see him
Gregor
Dear Gregor,
thank you for your post. I have not been on your website for years and literally just dropped in to see if you had ever posted on this topic.
I am glad you mention the mass-killings by the way of epidemics during colonial times. Any opinion saying having the virus were natural to our bodies would state that the deaths which the natives of many countries had suffered were their own (immune systems’) problem.
The attitude against vaccines seems to be based on some belief that there is something that is “natural” and thus “better”. In this story the natural way would be having the virus and our immune system’s response. The vaccination would be “unnatural” and thus “bad”. But this concept of something being natural and other things unnatural is problematic. It can invalidate any human action. And it encourages everyone to define their own version of “natural”, which is the basis for fascism ant the alt-right. So thanks you also pointed to that.
This is also prevalent in yoga classes. There seems to be a higher-than-average scepticism in the yoga scene. Some come to my yoga class and expect to be learning something ancient and “natural”, and therefore good. My reaction is usually to explain that there is nothing natural about standing on your head and that few animals (including humans) would ever do it by themselves.
Nature has given us brains to create tools and to make judgements and decisions. There is nothing unnatural in that. After all, I think yogic texts point us to doing exactly that. Making distinctions and decisions is a core part of yoga to me (I could carefully term this viveka?). And that these are to include our environment is also clear from yogic literature. So let’s be glad that there are actions to take and decisions to make, including taking the vaccine but also educating and discussing with our friends and fellows.
But why am I writing?! I just wanted to thank you and let you know how glad I am that you as a prominent yoga teacher have posted a yogic opinion on this topic.
Kind regards, again from Hamburg
Florian