A Diseased Narrative
A Diseased Narrative
COVID and the undermining of life
Weare living through a bizarre brew of ignominy… fact-free, “science ascribed” panic peddling, usurping of civil liberties, mandated bankruptcies and deferred care, a resurgence of once under control diseases, mass poverty inflicted on populations, educational catastrophe with all kinds of local and global social ripple effects.
This is a “prescription” never applied to any contagion in living memory, not to wars, to acts of terrorism, or natural disasters, in any sustained way.
It has required overturning public health wisdom that had been institutionalized for decades if not centuries in some cases, and the asserting of the right of the executive authority to invade the private realm with no legislative debate or justification. And so let’s just follow the bread crumbs of this weird narrative, which would have been considered implausible as a B-reel Hollywood disaster script, much less the horrifying reality of our current status quo, hence the focus of my last article on Magical Thinking.
Some Weird Facts
No one is quite sure how sure we are about the distinctiveness of this virus. The sheer range of asserted mutations gives pause. Claims it was circulating from October 2019 has one wondering, if an unremarkable coronavirus got somehow intertwined with the alarmist Wuhan narrative, producing more of a factual pandemic.
We are told that SARS, the predecessor, was actually the genome basis for the PCR test that was rushed through, “validated” via a now missing “peer review” at the magazine Eurosurveillance, whose editorial board curiously includes authors of this now hotly contested paper, and with these same people also having commercial interests at stake in terms of producing versions of these tests. This, even though the creator of the PCR test, toting his Nobel Prize in Chemistry, had said they were never intended for “diagnosis” but for “detection” via amplification.
How does that not reek to high heaven, particularly in an allegedly ethically meticulous jurisdiction like Germany? This is currently being litigated through various lawsuits including a “cease and desist” to one of the prime architects, class action suits, and more. Yet all this rushed rubber stamping happened in the waning days of January 2020! There was no global crisis then, but the basis for these tests was being manically pushed through. Why? Who knew what? Or WHO knew what perhaps?
When the Wuhan death videos, almost certainly “doctored” in retrospect, having seen no equivalent situation anywhere in the world, looking almost absurdly surreal today, relating to this alleged scourge, went viral, and well before there was any factual basis for existential panic (nor has any been forthcoming since), the world geared up to shut down. It was well before any surges, and it was exacerbated by the manic, fevered modeling fervor of SAGE and its persistently, consistently, inaccurate prognosticator, Neil Ferguson, who almost never fails to demonstrate that “accuracy” is clearly not a criterion for legitimacy in UK government circles.
Models can be terrifying, and indeed some “milestones” or “markers” could have been established with Plan A, B, and C, ready to go. Instead “blow up the planet” was opted for, on the basis of conjecture. And competing models or analyses coming out of Stanford, or indeed approaches like Total Harm Minimization coming out Yale, were all sidelined if not swatted away. Why? What was the motivation for being so mindlessly alarmist?
Cruise Ships and Curve Flattening
When the Diamond Princess Cruise ship essentially provided a living case study and was analyzed by Professor John Ioannidis of Stanford, showing the age stratification of risk, the relatively mild lethality outside that demographic, and frankly the less than epidemic lethality even within that demographic, and later when further such environments reconfirmed these same observations, why was this not fast-tracked for assessment and consideration and wide-scale exploration, given the devastating opportunity cost of the alternative assumptions? And these were “facts” not models. Were they anomalies or as we’ve learned, were they a microcosm of what has been learned since? Why was economic, social, educational, medical (for virtually every other disease) disaster preferable to looking at this heartening analysis and others allied with it?
Even though they were reciting uncontroversial medical facts, when virologists suggested that being “locked up” is the last thing you do with a virus (to date outside a few key superspreader events we have no demonstration of any outdoor transmission), that it needs exposure to sunlight (Vitamin D) and germicidal air, why were they lampooned and excoriated, told they were not “real” epidemiologists for pointing out essentially incontrovertible medical insight?
One cannot believe that public health was the driver. One can always follow the old saw that says we should not ascribe to malice what we can explain through stupidity, but there is stupidity that verges on such wanton obliviousness, that you almost can’t help looking for motives.
And the way this was “slipped in” was via a deceptive concept called “flattening the curve,” after Europe showed people could be panicked into being docile, and subservient, in a way Ferguson and his ideological cronies thought only authoritarian states could pull off (who knew Australia and New Zealand in their panic would “outdo China” in terms of human rights nullifying absolutism with no demonstrated basis of unprecedented danger?).
The idea was, we were going to keep health systems from being over-run, mobilize our resources, spread out the course of the infection, and then in the vernacular of “hammer and dance,” relax, and then tighten, having a continuum of strategies, each with their own cost-benefit calculus. How absurdly rational that sounds now,
when tragically “hammer, hammer, hammer, and when the edifice crumbles all around you, hammer some more,” became the way forward.
Somehow, the idea of managing the onslaught (such that it was, and again this was sheer extrapolation) in waves, became, “eradicate the virus.” This was peculiar, as epidemics become endemic, and immune systems “manage” and then properly tested vaccines bolster them. So, history tells us. But what is history next to our grandiose capacity for extrapolatory derangement?
As noted before, only one pathogen that had made a host of the human body has ever really been eradicated that we know of, and that’s smallpox, and this took centuries.
Next up, Asymptomatic Spread, Cases vs Deaths, and “Mask Up”
Again, we are left wondering why? Never in medical history was there a precedent for repeatedly testing the healthy. Never was a “case” defined as being symptom-free. But to create global panic, this was necessary, in addition to unremitting flashing of COVID stats from a media base that capitulated, kowtowed, and became advocates for the panic porn, underwriters of the orthodoxy.
As I write, there is still no evidence, beyond the anecdotal, that asymptomatic people infect others, or are a source of widescale transmission. That remains, despite some rhetorical tap dancing to placate the modelers, the WHO position as well, by the way.
Multiple recent studies, from Wuhan, from Florida, from assessments published by the British Medical Journal (“Mass testing for COVID-19 is an unevaluated, under-designed and costly mess” and “Screening the healthy population for COVID-19 is of unknown value but is being introduced nationwide”), confirm this. Why is that not front and center in every discussion?
Again, we don’t know. How stupid does stupid get, or indeed did stupidity and vested interests need to mate to create this frenzied confection of medical voodoo and hokum?
For if the asymptomatic religion is exposed for a charade, the masks go out the window for most. Can’t have that. If so, the now sexed-up billion-dollar PCR testing industry (replete with false positives and amplification settings so high that water and papaya fruit can test positive), only now being reined in by updated WHO guidelines, comes to a halt in large part. Can’t have that.
Surely what we want to imagine is a society with not only an institutionalized military-industrial complex, but a PCR testing complex and mask production complex, and conduct human trials under the guise of treatment vaccine complex, a reality where larger businesses dominate and consolidate, and more individual, real, granular, enterprise becomes unaffordable and unmanageable with the scepter of “lockdown” never far away.
So asymptomatic concerns are essentially malarkey. Next up, despite false positives going up as prevalence goes down (simple mathematics testifies to this), there being inevitable testing errors from a slew of other factors, and the fact that we haven’t had national mandates re amplification settings (which should be below 30 if actually wanting to identify active viral load versus fragments or debris or viral strands), we have a planet being manacled to these supremely unreliable PCR tests. Despite all these handicaps, every positive test is flashed as a “case” with the suggestion that everyone around you is a source of contagion, is a threat.
It is however the mortality needle that is relevant and should be consulted. And if so, the panic falls away.
99.6% recover, below 60, not having serious pre-existing conditions. The global average age of death from this pathogen is above 80. Every death to be mourned, but a very different proposition than a pathogen that targets the young and cuts many decades of life off.
Here, for a less than overwhelming lethality even past life expectancy (95% recovery even above 75 is a recurring global stat), we are destroying our youth, their education, their prospects, and beyond that, the viable survival of the majority of our population, increasing the ravages of treatable illnesses, and we are undermining the very economy that provides crucially needed medical care.
Case in point, the UK is in the midst of the worst recession in over 300 years and the greatest global economic contraction, while their sputtering PM and his oafish minions flail about incoherently. It is what comes of using an elephant gun if not for a mosquito, at least for a pigeon. Take the John Ioannidis peer-reviewed study, presented to WHO and showcased by them, showing an infection fatality rate globally of 0.05% and 1.7% for those in the “vulnerable” bracket, and you could hardly say otherwise.
Death stats are a disgrace. Death certificates record comorbidities galore, and too many of them still anoint, by virtue of a positive PCR test, anyone testing positive, as “death by COVID.” A canonical COVID death certificate is COVID to pneumonia to respiratory distress to death.
As has been chronicled, but should continue to give us pause, when those were sought, without other serious comorbidities, in the UK in December, the number reported as those dying only “from” COVID was under 400! Even after the disastrous Spring 2020 surge in Italy, their head of public health later reported, only 12% of those who died, had ONLY C-19 on their death certificate, and above 82 was the average age of death, a great percentage of those from nursing homes (natural superspreader environments).
Indeed, the UK predilection of calling anyone who has tested positive in the last 28 days a COVID death is the only way to explain why you are 150 times more likely to die of C-19 in the UK as opposed to Singapore (UK alleges a case fatality rate of 3%, Singapore having 29 deaths from 60,000 “cases” has a CFR of 0.02%). With that variance, no one can assume we’re operating rationally.
In fact, over 40% of these ascribed deaths globally come from this care home pool, in the US as well. And in the UK, a recent study reveals up to 42% of infections actually came from hospitals. And then we have the case of “disappearing” flu and influenza. In a bad year, 500,000 to 700,000 deaths can flow from this. As I’ve asked before, did they do a baton pass to the more aggressive coronavirus, or are they there, somehow “embedded” in the COVID stats?
Either way, and when you then adjust for population and age, we find excess mortality is far from unprecedented, and similar outcomes can be found within two decades of this year, where lockdowns and opioid overdoses, suicides, impact from deferred or ignored care, have doubtless also added to the tally, perhaps more so than the pathogen.
And if we take the silly superstitious masks off, as they neither can repel aerosols and particles of the size by which COVID is supposedly transmitted and actually inhibit breathing and impair quality of oxygen inhaled, and continue to ground ourselves in the reality that virtually no one dies from this outside an identified small but more vulnerable demographic, and ask those in that demographic to exercise care, and perhaps observe a little more distancing (nothing extreme), and let the healthy circulate and become a wall of defense (which has happened throughout history, and so sputtering outrage at the suggestion is beyond absurd), including children who neither get seriously ill from this nor seem to pass it on, we’ll be well on our way to having it contained, sustainably.
Stop the testing, stop flashing the positive tests posing as “cases”, and no one will even know it is here. Instead of that, not only the economics but the rationality of the entire planet is being held hostage.
The Narrative Ends How? and Next Time?
So, we won’t look under the hood. Africa has flat-lined re COVID impact for some time. Yet again, as it truly bears repeating, Asia reports only 380,000 roughly of the claimed 2.3 million or so COVID deaths, China and India included. With Asia’s population, you could not statistically even say “pandemic” in the same breath. Even if not reporting or testing adequately, unless there are mounds of corpses being concealed on these two continents, this is simply not an equal opportunity virus. These are not the places most renowned for masking, contact tracing, or social distancing either. We need to understand why, unromantically, but without denial or self-serving platitudes.
Viruses mutate, it’s not news. And these mutations tend to be more contagious and less lethal. Anyway, everywhere these variants hail from, cases seem to be plummeting, so only our mindless fascination with every COVID aspect, keeps us glued to this nonsense. “The history of the world through its viruses!” will not make for a fascinating historical study.
Here are three paradigmatic breakthroughs needed, or else this narrative doesn’t end, it just keeps hovering in the ether, and like George Lucas’ Empire, it will strike back.
1People asking rational questions are not “COVID deniers.” COVID is not established virological gospel. There are arguments galore about how unique or distinctive it is, its virulence, the sheer range of what is being classified under its canopy. These are not from madcap conspiracy theorists, but sober, eminent, leading scientists, not yet swayed by the narcotic of PR adulation or government sponsorships or pharmaceutical budgetary enticements, etc.
Ergo, those asking questions about whether masking works, whether lockdowns even “work” (30 plus studies show they don’t, and we have Sweden, Florida, much of Asia, Belarus, to also testify to that) or justify the terrifying collateral damage that will be years if not decades in fully reckoning with much less recovering from, are not “COVID deniers.” Covidians who claim all this can be asserted and is the natural, normal response to a virus with an unsubstantiated claim to unprecedented status, are rationality deniers.
They owe us an incorrigible demonstration that a sane response to a virus is stripping us of our civil liberties, ordering people into bankruptcy and essentially taking possession of their property, obliging people to not be able to be with those they love, ordering people to not get medical treatment, subjecting people to poverty or revived killer illnesses demonstrably more lethal than C-19, and stealing the educational prospects and livelihood of children and their ability to serve and prosper while contributing to the development of their nations.
And forget “sanity,” by what right? Who the frigging blazes endowed these folks with these life and death powers with no proper debate, no factual demonstration? And their prescription assumes a secondary caste who delivers food, stocks supplies, maintains order, runs society, so we can cower, guarding our overly sensitive carcasses, over Netflix and Uber Eats deliveries.
So, no more justifying to the life, rationality, and humanity deniers. We can hope more GOP governors will locate their sense and their chutzpah, and more courts like those in Portugal, Germany, and now the Netherlands will come to the fore. And that more citizens will locate a passion for constructive activism…
“we hold these truths to be self-evident” indeed…
2Answer this, what about next time? Can anyone with a straight face and half a wit say this is replicable? We can keep blowing up the world over every cold, influenza strain, viral mutation? Of course not. Human history would have stalled in the Middle Ages, again in the early 20th century, and several times before and since, if that had been a possibility.
And if we cannot afford, literally cannot “afford,” outside the myopia of incessant currency printing, to even conceive of this again, then we had best learn some hard lessons of what we might have rationally and wisely and “sagely” done, and what we, therefore, would consider “best practice” going forward.
BBC challenged WHO re changing its “mask advice.” They conceded it was due to political lobbying. BBC reported it, WHO has never claimed that is not accurate. This cannot be the standard by which public health is conducted, by which a world is governed.
We have to say,
“It was a fiasco, maybe misguided at best, cannot ever happen again.”
We have to say it, we have to understand it, we have to mean it.
3We need to shift to a vision of development. A lot of brush clearing has happened, and the malaise in numerous societies has been exposed, and so national revival, true education, and revivification of enterprise and commitment, values and community, has to be undertaken.
How did a nation uncowed by the Blitz, end up cowering before a contagion demonstrably unremarkable, except in that it has sparked such widescale reality avoidance? New York shrugs off 9/11 and is literally dismantled by the mass stupidity of politicians and feckless acolytes. Decades of advances in childhood health and education, and national prospects along with them, for developing nations, undermined and retarded.
This happens when citizenship becomes a spectator sport, and when we can’t be bothered to be bright enough to hold politicians accountable for the rot in our societies. If COVID can jolt us from that stupor, act as shock therapy to our complacency, to that extent, it might, for all the corrosive hyperbole, at least be a spark for a much-needed Renaissance.
Source: Medium
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