The BBC tries to explain why Japan's Covid "success" turned to failure

The main reason I started this blog was to present a corrective to the overwhelmingly fawning coverage Japan’s Covid response had been given by the western mainstream media up to then. But now that Japan’s Covid numbers aren’t as enviable, it’s worth looking at how MSM coverage has evolved. Three good examples come from my home country’s public propaganda provider, the BBC. The first article is from July 2020.

The mystery is that Japan had few deaths without the fast, proactive, or stringent response advocated by all the so-called experts the BBC usually interviews.

At the height of the outbreak in Wuhan in February, when the city's hospitals were overwhelmed and the world put up walls to Chinese travellers, Japan kept borders open.

…

Then there is Japan's refusal to heed the advice of the World Health Organization (WHO) to "test, test, test". Even now, total PCR tests stand at just 348,000, or 0.27% of Japan's population.

Nor has Japan had a lockdown on the scale or severity of Europe. In early April, the government ordered a state of emergency. But the stay-at-home request was voluntary. Non-essential businesses were asked to close, but there was no legal penalty for refusing.

…

Yet, five months after the first Covid case was reported here, Japan has fewer than 20,000 confirmed cases and fewer than 1,000 deaths. The state of emergency has been lifted, and life is rapidly returning to normal.

Japan was indeed comparatively “normal” in mid 2020. Schools and businesses were open, and the government even ran a large-scale domestic tourism campaign. But the abnormal Covid cosplay of masks and partitions was everywhere and still is.

Unusually for the MSM, the article mentions the hypothesis that an immunological Factor X may have played a role.

Tokyo University professor Tatsuhiko Kodama - who studies how Japanese patients react to the virus - believes Japan may have had Covid before. Not Covid-19, but something similar that could have left behind "historical immunity".

This is how he explains it: When a virus enters the human body, the immune system produces antibodies that attack the invading pathogen.

There are two types of antibody - IGM and IGG. How they respond can show whether someone has been exposed to the virus before, or something similar.

"In a primary (novel) viral infection the IGM response usually comes first," he tells me. "Then the IGG response appears later. But in secondary cases (previous exposure) the lymphocyte already has memory, and so only the IGG response increases rapidly."

So, what happened with his patients?

"When we looked at the tests we were astonished... in all patients the IGG response came quickly, and the IGM response was later and weak. It looked like they had been previously exposed to a very similar virus."

But inevitably, the article dismisses this to credit compliance with the government’s requests for Japan’s low fatality numbers.

There is no "Factor X" - like everywhere else it has depended on the same thing - breaking the chain of transmission. In Japan, though, the government can count on the public to comply.

The article neglects to mention that this compliance was achieved by the media and government generating intense peer-pressure and paranoia by hyping Hiroshi Nishiura’s predictions of 850,000 people needing mechanical ventilation and 420,000 of them dying if people didn’t stay home.

Next, we move on to late 2021, when the BBC detailed Japan’s “vaccine success” during Tokyo’s Olympic year.

With just seven weeks to go until the Olympics, only 3.5% of Japan's population had been fully vaccinated. While friends in the UK were merrily posting vaccine selfies on social media, here in the capital Tokyo, we were joking we might not see a needle till Christmas.

With the Olympics about to open, it seemed astonishing the Japanese government had bungled the vaccine rollout so badly.

Six months later, it couldn't be more different.

Not only has Japan succeeded in overcoming the early chaos, it's managed to get a higher percentage of its population vaccinated than almost anywhere else on Earth. Some 76% of Japanese are now fully immunised.

Hooray! And how was this success achieved?

The Olympics was key.

Remember, back in July, the large street protests demanding the games be cancelled? There was real anger and fear the games would turn in to a super-spreader event.

Horrified that their big event might be ruined, the politicians finally got their act together.

The army was called in and by the beginning of July, a million shots were being given each day.

Yes, while people in other countries were protesting Covid restrictions and mandates, people in Japan were protesting against allowing people to watch female weightlifting. The population’s irrational fears were stoked once again by Nishiura, who predicted up to 10,000 severe cases in Tokyo alone if the games went ahead with spectators and without enough people getting vaccinated. In the end, nobody went to the games, but most people went to the vaccination centres. I’ll give credit where it’s due: Japan’s marketing strategy was superb.

Japan has a long history of vaccine hesitancy. In January, a survey showed a large majority were sceptical about the newly developed Covid vaccines.

So what happened?

Some experts think the early chaos actually helped.

"Early on, there was a real shortage of vaccine available," says Prof Kenji Shibuya, research director at the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research. "That led to a kind of scarcity mentality prevailing, especially among the elderly."

Scarcity! Japan procured 882 million shots.

Prof Shibuya thinks fear drove the extremely high uptake rate, especially among the elderly. They saw how old people in other countries were dying, and scrambled to get vaccinated, before supplies ran low.

More accurately, they believed TV’s exaggerations about old people dying in other countries. At the time, hardly anyone in Japan knew anybody who’d been seriously sick with Covid. For most people, Covid existed mainly on TV.

The slow start also meant younger people had to wait, and watch, as hundreds of millions of people in other countries got shots, without dramatic side effects. That reassured them the vaccines were safe.

More accurately, the complete media blackout of the jabs’ side effects made them mistakenly assume the jabs were safe.

Needless to say, no western MSM article from 2021 would be complete without praise for Japan’s Covid cosplay.

Here, everyone wears a mask - at the park, even on the beach. Even lone car drivers can be seen wearing them as they speed past.

And then, there's the hand sanitiser. It's everywhere: at convenience stores, public toilets, train stations, restaurants and cafes; everywhere you go, you are expected to sanitise your hands before touching anyone or anything.

It can feel a little oppressive and at times illogical. But there is little doubt that it works.

Fast-forward to February 2023, and the masks and hand sanitiser appear to have stopped working.

“Low immunity”? But I thought most of the population had been “fully immunised” in 2021. And let’s not forget the three booster campaigns in 2022. What happened?

Low immunity against Covid-19 and a growing population of frail elderly is driving a surge in coronavirus deaths in Japan which had, for a long time, upheld some of the strictest pandemic restrictions.

Japan had lots of frail elderly in 2020 and 2021 too. And Japan’s restrictions are basically the same as in July 2020, when life was “rapidly returning to normal”, and in November 2021, when there was “little doubt” that masks and hand sanitiser had kept deaths low. So what is the Beeb on about?

Japan was largely closed to foreign visitors from 2020 till mid-June last year. It opened its borders cautiously - at first, travellers had to be part of a package tour, buy medical insurance, and be masked in all public places.

Some schoolchildren had meals in silence for over two years as schools imposed bans on lunchtime conversations.

As restrictions are eased, however, the population's low Covid immunity may be causing infections to spike, local health experts told the BBC.

“As restrictions are eased”? Silent lunches and mask mania are still the norm in Japanese schools. Anyone visiting a Japanese school or business in July 2020 and February 2023 wouldn’t be able tell the difference.

The BBC’s own graphic below shows that Japan’s border reopening in October can’t explain much either (the North Korean-style chaperoned tours from June to September don’t count because hardly anyone took them). For one thing, the two previous Omicron waves occurred while the borders were shut. For another thing, since South Korea (the nearest thing to a control group) fully reopened to tourists in June 2022, it has had fewer Covid deaths than Japan in both waves and fewer deaths than when entry was tightly restricted.

Put simply, the restrictions don’t explain anything and never have. So who is dying?

Most of the latest Covid fatalities are elderly people with underlying medical conditions, experts said. This contrasts with the initial spate of deaths that were due to pneumonia and were often treated in intensive care.

"It is also difficult to prevent these deaths by treatment," says Hitoshi Oshitani, one of Japan's leading virologists, adding that Covid was only the trigger.

Like everywhere else, most of Japan’s Covid fatalities have always been elderly people with underlying medical conditions. The question is why are they dying in larger numbers now even while masks and sanitiser are still ubiquitous. Most of them have had 4 or 5 jabs after all.

"Due to the emergence of immune-escaping variants and sub-variants and the waning of immunity, it is getting more difficult to prevent infections," [Oshitani] says.

"Immune escape" is when the human host's immune system becomes incapable of responding against an infectious agent. New versions of the Omicron variant are known to be masters of immune evasion.

In other words, the vaccines are obsolete.

Yasuharu Tokuda, a physician at the Health and Global Policy Institute, noted that the Japanese population's natural immunity - acquired through infection - had been low before the middle of last year.

He says natural immunity is stronger than that obtained from vaccination - and so low infection rates have led to low immunity in Japan, which in turn is causing more deaths.

It’s nice that the BBC is now willing to let someone admit that natural immunity is stronger than vaccination-acquired immunity. But the BBC still hasn’t convincingly explained why Covid deaths were so much lower in 2020, when most experts assured us that the Japanese had no immunity, than in 2023 after 380 million jabs have been administered.

It couldn’t be that the jabs have messed with the immunological advantages the Japanese had in 2020, could it? No, it can’t be that. If it were, the experts would’ve definitely mentioned it. I guess we’ll just never know.

(Hat-tip to Andreas Oehler.)