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Hope you all had a great New Year and an enjoyable Christmas!

It is that now traditional rite of passage where I review last year’s predictions and grade myself on how well I did.

Looking back at my post, which you can read here, the thing that struck me was how cautious I was about the prospect that the mass vaccination would return us to a 2019 world without restrictions, lockdowns and public health rules through vaccine induced herd immunity.

As I wrote at the end of my blog post, “So, to summarise, 2021 will probably “feel” more like 2020 than 2019. Lockdowns in many parts of the world till Spring, a semi-normal Summer and the risk of things going terribly wrong again in the war against Covid during the second half of the year.”

Given that, large parts of Europe are in quasi-lockdown, and in the Netherlands case, an actual March 2020 style lockdown, that seems like a remarkably prescient prediction. The prospect of herd immunity once 60%, then 70% and then over 80% of the population were vaccinated faded away as breakthrough cases surged and vaccine resistant variants become dominant across the world by the end of 2021.

Whilst thing have improved substantially, and the vaccines seem to be holding the line, so far, in terms of protecting the vulnerable populations from severe illness or death, in terms of everything else, they have proved a failure. They have failed to achieve the grand hope of herd immunity and therefore even Bill Gates is now talking about the need for 2nd generation vaccines.

The great elephant in the room is vaccine related adverse reactions in 2021. If you wish to read some of the heart breaking stories, you can at this website here.

My own view is that the authorities, the media and the bulk of the population consider a certain degree of vaccine caused injuries and deaths from a fast-tracked vaccine approval process a price worth paying for getting us out of the nightmare of lockdowns, restrictions and overwhelmed health systems. That does not mean they want to acknowledge or know about those who have suffered or died.

The treatment of those and their families who have suffered, in some cases terribly, from the heart attacks, life-changing injuries, accelerated cancers and autoimmune diseases triggered by the DNA/mNRA vaccines has been shocking.

The closest comparison I can make is the treatment by European societies after the Great War of those physically, mentally damaged or disabled by the wars. Just think about those poor young men left physically disabled, disfigured or unable to live normally after the horrific experiences of the trenches. They were effectively left to rot by post-war societies that just wanted to forget the war and enjoy the Swinging Twenties.

BBC

I think the same will happen to those unlucky enough to get injured, permanently sick or die from the mass vaccination programmes of 2021 (a prime example being the tragic case of 12 year old Maddie De Garay, permanently disabled after taking part in the Pfizer trial). So far, the numbers impacted, even based on the figures modelled by the vaccine-hesitant community – e.g., Jessica Rose – are a relatively small fraction of the overall vaccinated population. Although these numbers continue to surge higher and will certainly get even higher in 2022 now that we have had a 3rd booster vaccine programme.

Fox News

In terms of what we can reasonably assume, medically speaking about the DNA/mRNA vaccines, I strongly recommend reading this blog post by a scientifically trained researcher called Mark. It’s a fair assessment, after 1 year, of the vaccine rollout and he does acknowledge for those over-70’s, that it still makes sense to get vaccinated given the risks posed to the elderly of Covid.

I have also covered the issues developing, specifically the bio toxic nature of the spike protein and the growing issues around immune dysfunction among the vaccinated, in my last post here.

What we do not know is how bad it will get in 2022; given that the majority of the vaccinated have now had a 3rd shot of the genetic spike-protein based vaccines over the last few months. I will attempt to forecast this once I get into my 2022 predictions later on in this post.

In terms of my 2021 forecasts, my first prediction was swiftly proven wrong. The Republicans failed to keep their majority in the Senate and the Democratic managed to win on tiny margins in the end. The irony is that in the end this doesn’t seem to have made much difference as the conservative Democratic Jo Manchin has prevented the more radical elements of the Biden Administration agenda from getting through the Senate.

Given how quickly the poll ratings for President Biden are collapsing, there is even less incentive for Manchin and his fellow conservatives to surrender to the increasingly electorally toxic progressive wing of the Democrats.

My second prediction, that an approved Covid-19 vaccine would be withdrawn for safety reasons has been partially proven correct. Many countries partially or fully stopped the usage of the AstraZeneca vaccine due to concerns about rare blood clots. Similar issues bedevilled the US Johnson and Johnson vaccine that uses the same technology as AstraZeneca.

Other countries have more recently restricted or banned the usage of Moderna given the rates of myocarditis among vaccinated younger men. So, overall, I will give myself a win for this prediction.

My final prediction was that ether, the second largest crypto after bitcoin, would soar in 2021 to $1,500. Well, this proved a bullseye as prices actually went far beyond that during the bull market in crypto-assets after their collapse in March 2020 with Ethereum reaching the heights of $4,735. We saw substantial institutional funding going into Ethereum in 2021 and this trend is likely to surge in 2022 as more family offices, hedge funds, private equity, venture capital and HNW individuals start investing in the crypto space.  

coinmarketcap

So, what is my prognosis for 2022? Overall, I think that from a purely Covid pandemic perspective, the worst is probably over now that omicron is sweeping the planet. We appear to be getting closer to herd immunity via waves of natural infections as well as, to a lesser extent, vaccinations.

My first prediction is that countries will start downgrading their public health approaches to treating Covid from an emergency to an endemic approach, similar to how we treat winter flu. That means, in practise, an end to mass testing, mandatory quarantines, domestic vaccine mandates to access bars, restaurants and larger scale events and to a lesser extent a removal of much of the red tape and testing required for international travel. Vaccinations will be voluntary and targeted at the vulnerable e.g., the elderly and immune-compromised.

I suspect the United Kingdom will be the first country to go down this path, and others, particularly those countries that depend upon mass tourism, will follow (like Spain, Turkey and Greece). Not all countries will embrace this libertarian approach to Covid and I’m sure other parts of the world, whether zero-Covid China, Australia and parts of central Europe will deviate from this path.

My second prediction is that President Macron will, just, win the French presidency in April 2022. This has been a hard call to make. If you look at the opinion polls on 2nd round voter preferences, the centre-right President Macron is consistently ahead in the polls. However, he is not overwhelmingly ahead, and is only 10% ahead of Marine Le Pen (MLP), for example. Should MLP get into the second round of the presidential race, she only needs to gain 5% or so of the electorate to just win the election.

Wikipedia

So, whilst my official prediction is that President Macron will win, I do not discount the possibility of a shock loss to either the Republican candidate Pecresse or MLP. The betting odds online have completely given up on MLP winning in 2022, probably due to her implosion in 2017 with her odds being 12 to 1 to win the presidency. Given she is consistently around 45% in the polls, this looks like mispriced odds that a calculated gambler might take advantage. For the record, I have placed a small bet on MLP winning the presidency on betfair exchange, which allows me to sell with a profit should those odds compress in the next few months.

If MLP gets into the 2nd round, and her polling remains in the high 40’s, I’m sure those 12 to 1 odd will dramatically shrink and I can exit with a modest profit, even if she doesn’t end up winning the presidency. Of course, it might be the case that MLP will out-perform the clearly abysmal expectations during the debates, TV interviews and wider campaigning and prove a stronger than expected challenge to President Macron. One to watch is whether MLP will pick up civil liberties vote from the unvaccinated and double jabbed population that refuses to get the booster shot. Should Macron extend the definition of fully vaccinated to include 3 shots to the rest of the population prior to the election, that could exclude a substantial chunk of the population from society.

If enough of those voters, and even those who are triple jabbed but dislike the vaccine mandates, switch or vote for the first time for MLP, that could theoretically push MLP over the 50% line. It’s the wildcard factor that could unexpectedly influence the presidential election and one to watch in the coming months.

My third prediction is the grimmest and one I fervently hope I’m proven wrong. I expect to see rising mortality rates in highly vaccinated populations that have used the DNA/mRNA vaccines on their populations. Cases of cancers, strokes, clots, autoimmune diseases are going to rise among the vaccinated populations and potentially, other viruses or diseases will cause unusual levels of mortality in 2022 should they circulate among the population.

Hopefully the numbers should not be that huge, and I’m sure when it is covered by the mainstream media, it will either be ignored or written off as an impact on the two-year Covid measures that prevented or put of people from going to hospitals. The possibility that it is caused by the vaccines will be ignored by the medical, media and political establishments even if word of the potential negative impact of the immune system will circulate more and more among the population.

If the pressures on healthcare systems are severe enough, there is a risk that burnt out healthcare staff will struggle to cope this winter and countries may face the difficult choice of re-imposing restrictions on society to help buckling healthcare systems.

My fourth prediction revolves around the increasingly dire supply crunch in key raw materials and energies impacting the global economy. It is my long-term assertion that our globalised economy has already peaked in 2020 and we are now in a long-term economic contraction which John Greer calls the Long Descent but can also be considered the Greater Depression.

The financial markets are increasingly cottoning on to the fact that energy shortages are imposing increasingly dire impacts on globalised supply chains and industries. I expect to see oil to surge at some point in 2022 above 100 dollars given these supply constraints. Oil won’t be the only resource to see price spikes and scarcity, but it is the big driver of our industrial civilisation and therefore the one to watch.

So, there you go, those are my predictions for 2022.

I look forward to your feedback and comments.