Daniel Horowitz at the Blaze gave his interpretation of this Indian Survey:
The prevailing narrative from Fauci, Walensky, and company is that Delta is more serious than anything before, and even though vaccines are even less effective against it, its spread proves the need to vaccinate even more people. Unless we do that, we must return to the very effective lockdowns and masks. In reality, India’s experience proves the opposite true; namely:
1. Delta is largely an attenuated version, with a much lower fatality rate, that for most people is akin to a cold.
2. Masks failed to stop the spread there.
3. The country has come close to the herd immunity threshold with just 3% vaccinated.
4. Most people are now getting cold-like symptoms from Delta, but to the extent countries hit by Delta suffered some deaths and serious illness, they could have been avoided not with vaccines and masks, but with early and preventive treatment like ivermectin.
In other words, our government is learning all the wrong lessons from India, and now Israel and the U.K. Let’s unpack what we know occurred in India and now in some of the other countries experiencing a surge in cases of the Indian “Delta” variant.
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) recently conducted a fourth nationwide serological test and found that 67.6% of those over 6 years old in June and July had antibodies, including 85% of health care workers. This is a sharp increase from the 24.1% level detected during the December-January study. What we can conclude definitively is that strict mask-wearing (especially among health care workers) failed to stop the spread one bit.
Yet now they have achieved herd immunity and burned out the virus with just 3% vaccination (now up to 6%) with roughly one-sixth the death rate of the U.S. and the U.K. and less than one-half that of Israel.
Immediately, naysayers will suggest that somehow India is vastly undercounting the deaths because it is a shabby third-world country. However, if we are to suggest that, it would mean that so much of the data from so many other countries we use for studies must be ignored. Also, it’s true that India is poor in some areas, but it is highly developed and has a very strong bureaucracy and administrative state throughout. There might be undercounting, but the notion that it can account for that wide a gap between India and the U.S./U.K. was always unlikely.
However, now that the Delta has spread to other countries like Israel and the U.K., we need not speculate who is right about India’s death rate. The fact that Israel and the U.K. have so many Delta cases yet so few deaths relative to the winter spread of the original strain demonstrates that Delta is likely much weaker and India’s numbers are probably close to accurate.
Remember, most of India’s spread, unlike in the West, occurred with Delta, long after the ancestral strain that hit the West was gone. If it really was the bloodbath some are suggesting (a tenfold undercount of deaths, in their estimation), why is the data from the U.K. showing just the opposite?
The latest data from the U.K. show that the case fatality rate for the Delta is just 0.2%, much less than the others. And we need not speculate with generalized studies. The raw data shows that since May 1, there have been approximately 1,300 deaths in the U.K. out of roughly 1.1 million confirmed cases. But those are confirmed cases.
The likely infection fatality rate is much lower because now more than ever, people are avoiding testing, and the U.K. media has been reporting for weeks that the symptoms of the Delta for most people appear more like a cold.
Well, they are learning the lessons they want to learn, which are: “How can we keep the excess authority we have arrogated to ourselves in operation long enough to bring about the Revolution?” and “How can we continue to exclude actual medical science from the debate long enough so the rubes won’t wake up in time?”