What does it mean when – just as we’re coming out of the horrors of 2020 lockdowns – scientists in the United Kingdom are questioning whether or not the new vaccines recently developed and approved may not be effective against a possible new strain of COVID-19?

Well, it’s exactly what I was expecting to hear from some scientists, who have no issue discussing hypotheticals publicly without concerning themselves about how their unsubstantiated statements will be implemented into overarching government regulations – like stringent lockdowns and mandatory masks- implemented to mitigate growing fear about a virus they still don’t sufficiently understand.

I wasn’t the only one waiting for the virus mutating story. I remember radio talk show host Buck Sexton, a former CIA analyst and who for full disclosure is a good friend of mine, also said early on it wouldn’t be long before the media started reporting stories questioning whether the vaccines would work against a new strain of Coronavirus.

Our world literally has been turned upside down by a virus we still know very little about. We do know it originated in Wuhan, China. At the same time, we have to shuffle through dozens of news articles and websites with varying information on the virus and frankly, we just don’t know what to believe. Was it developed in a lab, was it a natural occurring virus that was tinkered with, did the virus escape from the Wuhan laboratory or was it naturally occurring in the environment?

I spoke with a former U.S. official who said there is a growing body of evidence that the virus escaped the Wuhan laboratories in China but that there was still enormous amounts of work to understand the implications of how the virus is affecting not only the global economy but the future health of the global population.

“We just don’t have the answers,” the official said. “There’s much about what’s happening that we don’t understand. And governments are implementing more stringent regulations but haven’t given people enough time to ask questions and those that have failed to answer them significantly.”

Scientists, both in the United States and in the United Kingdom are currently testing the vaccines against the new variant strands of the virus, Deputy HHS Secretary Eric Hargan told me in a recent interview on “The Sara Carter Show” podcast. Hargan added that scientists are carefully monitoring any variant changes in the virus and as of now the vaccines are working and ‘it’s something we are watching closely.”

Still, news that COVID-19 is apparently mutating raises enormous concerns that go far beyond health issues. Just look at how our world has changed over the past year and how our global economy has been crushed by lockdowns.

On Monday, UK scientists said the COVID-19 vaccines just approved – the ones that made us breathe a sigh of relief at the end of 2020 – may not be able to protect against a new variant of COVID that is believed to have emerged in South Africa, according to Reuters. The suggestion that the virus is mutating is quite serious because all one has to do is see the results of the actions that have taken place since this year with the lockdowns. Populations all across the world are being vaccinated against COVID, which some scientists allege has killed roughly 1.8 million people around the world.

That variant of the COVID virus has already spread globally, said UK scientists but what does this mean for our nation?

Will President-elect Joe Biden and his Vice President Kamala Harris push for a mandatory masks, shut down more businesses, issue more stringent rules in our country and what does that look like. I’m not joking around because I absolutely believe these stories are setting us up for many more months of lockdowns if we don’t question everything.

Why should we trust what we are hearing? Is this virus more dangerous? Or is the virus just spreading faster but the same? I believe these scientists need to clarify what they mean when they talk about these issues publicly before the panic and bad decision making set in.

What reason has our federal and local government officials, along with the CDC, and scientists, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, given us to trust what they are saying is true? They were wrong at the beginning of this outbreak on so many issues. First and foremost, scientists like Fauci said publicly that masks would do little to protect us. Then without explanation as to why he made such bold statements asked everyone to wear them. Now, we can’t enter a business without a mask on our face, we can’t walk to a table in a restaurant without a mask on our face and we can’t fly without a mask on our face.

In another more recent instance with Fauci, he admits to The New York Times that he lied to the American people about his statistics on herd immunity. He started by saying he believed 60 to 70% of the people in the country needed to be vaccinated to make COVID-19 a disease of the past. Then in the Times, he upped those numbers to a maximum of 90%. He told the Times that he didn’t tell the truth because Americans weren’t ready to hear it. What? He lied because he believed we weren’t ready for the truth. What is the truth?

Here’s an interesting Tweet from Dr. David Samadi, who has been critical of the government’s over reaching response to COVID-19. The CDC compared the number of flu cases from Dec. 28, 2019 to number of recorded flu cases at the same time frame in December, 2020. In 2019, there were over 7,000 and this past Dec. 28, there were only 36.

How are these numbers so drastically different and what happened with the flu?

Remember Professor Neil Ferguson, who led the COVID-19 modeling team at Imperial College in London. He resigned May 5 from his government advisory role when he left his home breaking the lockdown rules based on his failed study. He was the team leader of the Imperial College group that designed a computer model to justify the stay-at-home orders in England. It was the same model used to justify the shutdowns in the United States. The model was completely flawed and used to manipulate policy decisions. The failed model they had used stated that by October 2020 more than 500,000 people in Great Britain and 2 million people in the U.S. would die due to COVID-19. 

And now as the number of deaths is being calculated, some scientists and professors are disputing if the actual cause of these deaths is directly caused by COVID-19 or associated with it.

For working-age people, most of the excess deaths in 2020 were not direct COVID-19 deaths, according to University of Chicago Professor of Economics Casey B. Mulligan, who suggested a variety of data from 2020, actually points to “increased deaths involving drugs, alcohol, and suicide above the already high levels of the recent past,” according to his press release.

“’Deaths of despair’ during COVID-19 rose by up to 60 percent in 2020,” explains Mulligan, whose findings were published in late December in a working paper through the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago.

“Experts were dead wrong when they predicted that ‘a wave of deaths of despair is highly unlikely’ in 2020,” he says. “Unanticipated repercussions from the economic shutdown and widespread job loss by millions was not only demoralizing but lethal.” 

Mulligan press release

Now we’re hearing about the new strain of the virus. Britain and South Africa have detected new, more transmissible variants of the COVID-19-causing virus in recent weeks that have driven a surge in cases, say scientists in a recent Reuters report.

What are we to believe? Does the British Health Secretary Matt Hancock know something about the virus he isn’t making public. He said on Monday he was now very worried about the variant identified in South Africa.

In the recent Reuters article, Simon Clarke, an associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, “said that while both variants had some new features in common, the one found in South Africa ‘has a number additional mutations … which are concerning.’

He said these included more extensive alterations to a key part of the virus known as the spike protein – which the virus uses to infect human cells – and “may make the virus less susceptible to the immune response triggered by the vaccines.”

Lawrence Young, a virologist and professor of molecular oncology at Warwick University, also noted that the South African variant has “multiple spike mutations”.

“The accumulation of more spike mutations in the South African variant are more of a concern and could lead to some escape from immune protection,” he said.

I think we need to be concerned about the increased fear of a new COVID variant virus and what restrictions governments around the world may implement to contain the virus.

We need to be asking more questions and demanding more straight forward answers from our leaders.

We should not be accepting what they are saying at face value because as we have seen they have lied to us many times about the virus and we in general, have been literally left in the dark.

It is our right, particularly in free societies based on Democracy, to ask tough questions from our governments and not be ostracized for doing so. Therefore, please don’t be afraid to ask the tough questions when the government implements tougher and stricter regulations that encroach on our basic freedoms.

If we don’t ask, if we don’t stand up and demand answers, we will only have ourselves to blame when everything as we know it, is gone.

You can follow Sara A. Carter on Parler @SaraCarterOfficial or on Twitter @SaraCarterDC