Tag Archives: herd immunity

What’s Going On – Part 3

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This Is The “Sh*t Hitting The Fan” Part Of The Fourth Turning – Part 3

Tyler Durden

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

We are now living in a world where so called “experts” declare the science is settled regarding the spread of Covid, the efficacy of masks, the need for lockdowns to slow the spread, the requirement for a vaccine to cure Covid, the danger of HCQ, the fallacy of herd immunity and the fact we will never return to normal again. If anyone dares to question the approved Covid narrative, they will be attacked by MSM talking heads, de-platformed by Twitter and Facebook, called a murderer by the thousands of Karens patrolling social media, and possibly lose their jobs. When straight talking brilliant doctors, like Dr. Scott Atlas, use facts to blow up the approved narrative, he is attacked by the MSM and social media hyenas. Facts don’t matter when fear is the preferred method of herding a nation of sheep.

Even though 99.7% of those who contract Covid will not die, with most not even knowing they had it, the pandemic promoters (Gates, Big Pharma, Trump haters, Democrats, Left-wing media) continue to exaggerate the threat and scare a country into a Depression. This coordinated charade has been instituted as a cash grab by the ruling oligarchy, a coverup for the Fed rescuing a collapsing financial system, and an effort to dispose of Trump after the failed impeachment coup.

Even though, prior to this engineered pandemic, CDC documentation unequivocally declared masks useless in stopping the spread of viruses and numerous other studies by respected institutions confirmed this conclusion (you know – science), masks (muzzles) are now required to conform to state dictate under penalty of arrest. Even though thousands of scientists and doctors have said lockdowns don’t work, politicians continue to destroy the lives of their citizens by tyrannically closing down their cities and states. For what true purpose?

Even though Hydroxychloroquine plus zinc has proven to drastically reduce the effects of Covid if taken early in the illness, costs only a few dollars per dose, has been used safely for decades in dealing with malaria, and has the support of thousands of doctors, it was declared unsafe by the health agencies controlled by Big Pharma and politically motivated health care hack bureaucrats who care more about defeating Trump than saving lives. Why support a drug that only costs a few bucks when Big Pharma can roll out treatments that cost a few thousand dollars and don’t provide better outcomes than HCQ and zinc? There are profits to be made and stock prices to support. That’s the real science going on here.

The hit job stories from the NYT, Washington Post and other left-wing media about how Sweden would suffer death on a grand scale by not requiring masks, not locking down their country, and not closing schools were being written at a torrential pace in the Spring and Summer. They continue today as they attempt to discredit Dr. Scott Atlas because he is taking a realistic balanced approach to the virus.

Sweden’s death rate was in the middle of the pack in Europe and they achieved herd immunity by the Fall. Their cases are minuscule and deaths virtually nil. Meanwhile, the European lockdown countries are now experiencing a surge of new cases and locking down again. Sweden was right, but the compliant captured press maintains silence about their success, because silence about the truth maintains their Big Lie. If they can convince everyone to believe the lie, it becomes the truth.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.” – George Orwell, 1984

from:    https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/sht-hitting-fan-part-fourth-turning

WHO Opposes Lockdowns

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WHO Flip-Flops: Urges World Leaders To Stop Using Lockdowns To Fight COVID Contagion

In a stunning rebuke of the “science” and the “doctors” and leftist politicians and career bureaucrats in the US and across much of The West, The Epoch Times’ Evan Pentchoukov reports that The World Health Organization’s special envoy on COVID-19 has urged world leaders to stop using lockdowns as the primary control method against the spread of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.

“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” David Nabarro told The Spectator in an interview aired on Oct. 8.

“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”

[ZH: How long before this video is removed by Twitter?]

Nabarro pointed to the collateral damage that lockdowns are having worldwide, especially among poorer populations.

“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry, for example in the Caribbean or in the Pacific, because people aren’t taking their holidays. Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world because their markets have got dented. Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. Seems that we may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition because children are not getting meals at school and their parents, in poor families, are not able to afford it,” Nabarro said.

“This is a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe actually,” he added. “And so we really do appeal to all world leaders: Stop using lockdown as your primary control method, develop better systems for doing it, work together and learn from each other, but remember – lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.”

Nabarro isn’t the only scientist opposing lockdowns.

A number of medical or public health scientists and medical practitioners have signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which states that “current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.”

The signatories include: “Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University and a biostatistician, and epidemiologist with expertise in detecting and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.”

“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk,” the declaration states.

With few exceptions, world leaders followed in the footsteps of the Chinese communist regime when responding to the outbreak of the virus, imposing unprecedented lockdowns. Sweden, which did not impose a lockdown, did not experience an adverse outcome compared to some locales and nations that did.

In the United States, President Donald Trump delegated the decisions on lockdown measures to the governors of individual states, but has pushed for the economy to be reopened, and lockdowns lifted.

As William Anderson recently wrote for The Mises Institute,lockdowns only serve the progressive political class…

We have to understand that the political classes and their media have a vested interest in the lockdown status quo, and that includes regular provision of what only can be called disinformation. The mainstream media this past summer dutifully reported a highly questionable (I use that term charitably) report that the Sturgis Bike Rally in South Dakota led to more than a quarter million covid infections and more than $12 billion of medical costs. It should have been obvious on its face that the report was deeply flawed, yet in their desire to fuel the covid-is-killing-us narrative, journalists took this too-good-to-be-true story and ran with it.

As for politicians, the covid crisis has been a godsend for those governmental executives and bureaucrats who see constitutional restrictions that limit their authority as mere obstacles to be easily swept away. Governors such as Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Andrew Cuomo of New York, Gavin Newsom of California, and Tom Wolfe of Pennsylvania have received adoring coverage in the media for seizing and employing dictatorial powers, Whitmer even unilaterally deciding that the sale of garden seeds in stores was illegal. Cuomo’s decision to force the housing of covid-19 patients in nursing homes led to the deaths of thousands of people, yet his national media coverage is uniformly positive.

Contrast the affirmative news coverage of Cuomo with the barrage of media attacks on Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Noem has emphasized personal responsibility and did not attempt mass closures of schools and businesses in the state, and the mainstream media erupted with fury. That South Dakota has come through this pandemic relatively well does not matter with the media, as the only acceptable action (to mainstream and elite journalists) in response to covid is for governors to single-handedly seize power and lock down their citizens.

Keep in mind that the real losses that Americans suffered because of the heavy-handed governmental response to the covid outbreak are permanent. As Robert Higgs so eloquently pointed out in Crisis and Leviathan, governments often create crises or, at the very least, they manipulate events such as natural disasters and use them as opportunities to expand governmental powers. Even after the crises end, governments keep some of their newly self-granted powers—and most people raise little or no concern even when government has curtailed more of their freedoms.

Presumably, this means Joe Biden will now be pushing for lockdowns to be lifted across all blue states?… because he is “listening to the scientists”?

We wonder how long it will be before WHO also urges the end of mask-wearing?

In the end, as Anderson concluded, the only way that the political classes can “make us safe” is for us to do what is necessary to make ourselves safe, or as relatively safe as possible. When a virus is afoot—as is the case most of the time—we do what we can to avoid it and do what we can to treat it. In other words, we appeal to real medical science, not what the political and media classes have cooked up for us.

from:    https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/who-flip-flops-urges-world-leaders-stop-using-lockdowns-fight-covid-contagion?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter

 

Sweden UnMasked

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September 4, 2020 TLB Staff

ER Editor: Sweden won, hands down. Why is this so hard to accept? Why another fake, non-problem over the wearing of masks?

To recap:

  • REAL CASES of actually sick people were declining BEFORE lockdown in March;
  • the lockdown wasn’t necessary therefore, just massively destructive;
  • there’s been no second wave;
  • new ‘cases’ are just healthy people with trace amounts of coronavirus RNA in their systems. And it’s summer. So now masks must be the new bone of contention. And this isn’t going away.

Today on Twitter we came across this short video clip, probably taken in the north-west of England (Liverpool region) on public transport judging by the accents. The police officer is a member of the British Transport Police. Yet if you live in Wales, apparently masks aren’t compulsory there. What gives???

TWEET FROM SIMON DOLAN

It is noteworthy in the AFP piece cited below that Nordic countries except Sweden changed their mask policy in … MID-SUMMER.

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No mandatory masks in Sweden, yet contamination continues to drop!

LE LIBRE PENSEUR

The question greatly perturbs and disturbs the pro-maskers: why does Sweden, a country of more than 10 million inhabitants, not require the wearing of masks, not lockdown and yet have fewer deaths and a significant drop in contagiousness and new cases? Moreover, how can we blame them since they’ve only followed WHO recommendations!

In reality, this has an important relationship with the principle of herd immunity because they have let the virus circulate, so a large part of the population must be immunized.

The same is true in Germany, where masks are not compulsory in schools either, and yet the country has managed its epidemic much better than France. Some Landers impose it in the corridors but not in the classroom, which demonstrates once again the absurdity of such an approach since the pupils stay very little time in the corridors and whole hours in the classrooms.

One thing is certain, this pandemic has shown us just how crazy our leaders are…

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(ER: This report comes from AFP, which we issue an MSM warning for!)

In a masked Europe, Sweden once again goes it alone. But unlike many European countries that are seeing an upsurge in new cases, such as France, the Netherlands, Germany or Belgium, the data for Sweden has been declining since June.

Sweden, which has attracted attention with its less strict strategy against the coronavirus, finds itself once again isolated in its fight against the epidemic, continuing for the time being to sulk the mask.

While Paris has made it mandatory to wear a mask in all its streets, in Stockholm, few wear it in supermarkets, offices, buses and subways. Only a handful bend to its use.

Instructions for social distancing and regular hand washing

If the Swedish health authorities consider it insufficiently effective, they insist on social distancing and regular handwashing.

“I find it a bit strange. In Sweden, which is a small country, they think they know better than the rest of the world,” says Jenny Ohlsson, manager of an accessory store in the Swedish capital, where you can find all kinds of colorful fabric masks. (ER: Why would AFP, to give a ‘contrary view’, interview a lady, a non-medical person, who makes her living from selling masks? This is extremely poor journalism.)

Unlike the arrangements imposed in the rest of Europe, Sweden has not confined its population and has kept its cafés, bars, restaurants and businesses open, asking everyone to “take responsibility”.

A questionable balance sheet but declining figures

The toll is questionable: with more than 5,800 deaths and 84,000 cases, Sweden is among the most affected countries in relation to its population.

But, unlike many European countries that are experiencing a resurgence of new cases, such as France, the Netherlands, Germany or Belgium, the data for Sweden has been declining since June.

The dangers of the mask?

Faced with this trend, health authorities see no reason to change their strategy, including with regard to masks, for the moment.

Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, the face of this assumed Swedish strategy, considers that its effectiveness remains to be proven. Misused or mishandled, the mask could also contaminate the person wearing it, he defends.

“There are at least three weighty reports, from the World Health Organization, the ECDC (European Health Agency) and The Lancet that the WHO cites, all of which state that the scientific evidence is weak,” explains the researcher.

KK Cheng, an epidemiologist at the Birmingham Institute of Applied Health Research, denounces the logic of the “irresponsible” and “stubborn” approach.

“If those who think like him are wrong, it costs lives. But if I’m wrong, what harm does it do? “pleads this proponent of wearing the mask.

Improvement of conditions in retirement homes

Anders Tegnell prefers to emphasize the decline in numbers since the improvement of conditions in retirement homes, which recorded a large number of deaths at the beginning of the epidemic, combined with increased compliance with recommendations such as teleworking.

“Trying to replace these measures with masks won’t work,” he says. “Several countries that have introduced masks are now experiencing a sharp upsurge,” he told public television in mid-August.

Nordic neighbors turn around

If Sweden’s northern neighbors have long avoided wearing masks, they all changed course in mid-summer. (ER: And the question should be why, since respiratory viruses lose significant power during summer months in mid-latitude countries? Who is pushing this policy on these governments?)

Finland now recommends the wearing of masks in public places, Norway advises it on public transport in its capital Oslo, and Denmark has made it mandatory on public transport and cabs.

In June, some twenty doctors and researchers signed an op-ed piece in the daily newspaper Aftonbladet asking Anders Tegnell and the Swedish Public Health Agency to reconsider health policy on masks.

Faced with this call, which has been regularly repeated since then, the authorities say they are “keeping an eye on” the issue and could introduce the measure if deemed necessary.

It remains to be seen whether the transmission of Covid-19 in Sweden will continue to decrease.

In front of Jenny Ohlsson’s mask store, Gilbert Sylwander, a 69-year-old Stockholmer, contemplates the choice of colors available to him.

The sexagenarian says he has confidence in the strategy led by the Swedish Public Health Agency.

What if he had to wear a mask tomorrow? “Of course I would,” he says, “just to be polite to others.”

from:    https://www.europereloaded.com/no-mandatory-masks-in-sweden-yet-contamination-continues-to-drop/masks mandatory masks

Sweden

Apparently Hydroxychloroquine Works.. But Only for the Elites

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Anonymous D.C. Insider Exposes Ultra-Secret Covid Conspiracy Inside the Beltway

August 2, 2020 TLB Staff H

ER Editor: Of course, these claims cannot be verified given the anonymous nature of the source. Yet, it all has a ring of truth. Trump’s revealed he’s using hydroxychloroquine prophylactically (kudos – was he dropping us a hint?), so why would doctors, such as those hired for an American president no less, not be giving the same advice to other notables? Anything else makes little sense.

Note how this person calls COVID-19 a ‘bioweapon’ in ‘unrelenting launches of the COVID-19 bioweapon’ and ‘coronavirus cluster explosions will be detonated’. We only hope that herd immunity may short-circuit his/her predictions. The hypothesis that ‘Covid-19’ is in fact a bioweapon is something we’ve published on at length.

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Anonymous D.C. Insider Exposes Ultra-Secret Covid Conspiracy Inside the Beltway

STATE OF THE NATION

Submitted by an Anonymous D.C. Insider

Big Pharma and the WHO have known all along about the HCQ cure for COVID-19.

Everyone at the CDC, NIH and FDA knows that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) is the silver bullet for the coronavirus.

They also know that, when combined with azithromycin and zinc, the 3-in-1 protocol provides the magic formula for almost anyone with coronavirus disease.

However, what Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx and Robert Redfield are not telling anyone is that practically every VIP in Washington, D.C. is using HCQ prophylactically.

Everyone knows that Trump has been using it as a preventative as he publicly stated so on multiple occasions.  But no one has revealed that virtually everyone inside the Beltway is also using it.  That’s why they were all shown so often in groups with no masks and not adhering to the recommended social distancing guidelines during the regular coronavirus briefings.  And, they did many of those dog and pony shows right in the middle of the Covid spikes during the first wave.

The real scandal here is that leading politicians, government officials, corporate CEOs and UN administrators all know about the efficacy of HCQ, and yet they have collaborated to deprive the American people of its use.  All the while they, themselves, are secretly taking HCQ prophylactically.

When so many countries around the globe have used Hydroxychloroquine with great success, why is the U.S. fiercely resisting it?

Because the world’s most zealous vaccine salesman — Bill Gates — is determined to bring a COVID-19 vaccine to market.  Word on the street (K Street) is that Gates is also taking HCQ as a preventive.  In fact, he has taken HCQ as a precautionary measure to avoid malaria for many years during his travels to the Third World nations that were subjected to his endless vaccine pitches and vaccination programs.

If Americans knew that India was successfully using HCQ nationwide, how would they react?  New Delhi has even made the decision to make HCQ available as a prophylactic, so inexpensive is it.

“India is estimated to produce 70% of the world’s hydroxychloroquine, with Ipca Labs and Zydus Cadila the two largest producers of the drug in the country.[1]

Well then, why did India send 85 million doses of hydroxychloroquine to 108 Covid-infected countries if it doesn’t work?!

So, what the scandal?

Key government officials, medical authorities and elected representatives throughout the USA are aware of every single fact stated in this exposé.  Nevertheless, they are pushing untested remedies and dangerous protocols that have actually killed many COVID-19 patients in all 50 states.

This situation is completely unacceptable.  Especially when the leaders of the national coronavirus response are taking HCQ and other effective prophylactics to keep the coronavirus at bay.  The same goes for many in the mainstream media; they will never tell anyone either that they’re taking HCQ.  Nor will the Sultans of Silicon Valley or Wall Street banksters or Corporate America moguls ever let on to this “ultra-secret conspiracy”.  Which is why the Hamptons Concert With Goldman CEO, ‘Chainsmokers’ Faces N.Y. Probe.  Goldman Sachs Chairman of the Board David Solomon obviously felt immune to catching Covid even at a concert where he was the star of the show.

But what’s the real scandal here?

The HCQ-Azithromycin-Zinc protocol is being deliberately withheld from the American people so that a mandatory COVID-19 vaccine can be foisted on the country.

And, the proof of such a criminal conspiratorial plot: there will be never-ending seasonal Covid spikes, with each wave being bigger and more intense than the previous one.  When those start to ebb, coronavirus cluster explosions will be detonated in the major metro areas, particularly the sanctuary cities.

Then, when the blue states have had enough, the Democrat governors will collude with their Democrat legislatures to mandate an annual Covid vaccination (just like California recently passed draconian legislation requiring yearly compliance with childhood vaccination schedules).  The unrelenting launches of the COVID-19 bioweapon in conservative territory will eventually compel the Republican governors to do the same in the red states.

— An Anonymous D.C. Insider

SOTN Editor’s Note: The end result of this phase of OPERATION COVID-19 is the undeclared state of medical martial law.  Next will begin the initial stages of the Orwellian takeover scheme COVID-1984, which has been greatly advanced via the staged race riots and growing buzz about an impending race war.  However, only if the American people allow them to will these treasonous plans gain any meaningful traction.

from:    https://www.europereloaded.com/anonymous-d-c-insider-exposes-ultra-secret-covid-conspiracy-inside-the-beltway/

15 Years Old & Setting the Rules

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The ‘Science’ Behind Social Distancing
Written by Jeff Harris
Monday May 25, 2020
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The world has been turned upside down with draconian government orders to “flatten the curve” with what is called Social Distancing. Schools have been closed for months, businesses have been involuntarily shut down and travel restrictions have idled 90 percent of the airlines. The net result is over 36 million American’s are unemployed and the number is rising.

Now we learn the whole social distancing lockdown that has paralyzed the nation comes from a very surprising source. A May 2nd article in the Albuquerque Journal reveals social distancing hysteria is NOT based on scientific evidence or clinical medical trials for that matter.  (Emphasis added)

How would you feel if you learned your normal way of life had been completely upended based on a computer model created by a 15 year old Albuquerque New Mexico High School student named Laura Glass?

Glass, along with her Dad Robert (a government scientist then working at Sandia National

Laboratories) cooked up a home brew computer model for a science and engineering fair in May, 2006. Robert Glass had been working on computer models for the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center at Sandia and often worked from home.

Part of his work entailed computer models showing how people come into contact with each other during everyday life. Laura Glass used that data to project how high school students could possibly transmit infectious diseases. Her “model” suggested high school students could easily infect huge swaths of a population so putting a stop to those contacts would hypothetically “save lives.”

Miss Glass appeared to have no understanding of the benefits of herd immunity. She didn’t seem to know that most healthy people with strong immune systems naturally fight off viruses and build up antibodies against future infections. According to a variety of medical experts herd immunity should be the primary tool to fight off viral infections and only the sick and elderly should be quarantined. But I digress . . .

A call from Homeland Security

Her efforts earned her third place in the Medicine and Health category of the science fair.

That would probably have been the end of it but for Robert Glass’s government connections. While High School sophomore Laura Glass was creating her contagion computer model the George Bush administration was feverishly working on bio-terrorism countermeasures.

Somehow news of Laura Glass’s high school science project wound up in the hands of US Department of Homeland Security. You know those skilled airport security professionals highly trained in the art of patting down wheelchair bound grandmas and creepily fondling their victims’ genitals.

Glass received a call from Homeland Security requesting a brief for Secretary Michael Chertoff. The Bush White House was holding a cabinet level counter bio-terrorism briefing and no idea was too loony to consider. Glass’ briefing suggested that whole segments of society should be shut down based on his daughter’s computer model.

The idea of locking down huge swaths of the nation in the event of a virus outbreak met with considerable push back. But ultimately the Centers for Disease Control made social distancing official policy in February 2007. They call it Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPI) and this is the first time it’s been implemented but will definitely not be the last.

So shutting down the entire nation based on flawed computer models is now official government policy. Robert Glass is now retired and enjoying a generous government pension. He was interviewed for the article by phone while relaxing in his second home in northern Idaho.

Mr. Glass waxed philosophical about the carnage wrought by his and his daughter’s lock down computer model. “Anything new is difficult,” he said. “You have to train people to do this well, without freaking out and calling each other names. . .”

That’s easy to say when you’re pulling down a fat government pension every month. Enjoy a comprehensive health care package, all paid for by the little people freaking out and calling each other names as they struggle to feed their families. Odds are this lockdown is just the beginning of many more power grabs by our increasingly totalitarian overlords – IF we let them.

Contact tracing which is nothing more than constant real time monitoring of citizens every move by government stooges is being implemented right now. Untested, unproven, possibly deadly vaccines are being “warp-speeded” into production. President Trump has assured the nation that he will authorize the military to distribute the vaccine across the land quickly once it becomes available.

Constitutional Lawyer and Jeffrey Epstein guest (who assures us he kept his underwear on during massages on Lolita Island,) Alan Dershowitz, says that the state has full authority to vaccinate any person it deems necessary. This comes from a video interview by Jason Goodman released May 16th on Youtube.

Our inalienable rights of freedom and liberty are under assault by a totalitarian state like never before. The words of Thomas Jefferson come to mind.

When Government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.

Mr. Jefferson also said:

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

The political class has a choice to make. Either honor the oath they all took to uphold the Constitutional rights of the people or face the consequences. I pray they make the right choice for all our sakes.

*  *  *

References:

Social Distancing born in ABQ teen’s science project, Albuquerque Journal May 2nd, 2020

Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza, Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense strategy, Practice and Science. Vol. 4, Number 4 2006

The 2006 Origins Of The “Lockdown” Idea, Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research May, 18, 2020

from:    http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2020/may/25/the-science-behind-social-distancing/

Where’s the Logic For It All? A Bit of History

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Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic

– May 1, 2020

Woman running through the mud at the Woodstock Music Festival, New York, US, 17th August 1969. (Photo by Owen Franken/Corbis via Getty Images))

In my lifetime, there was another deadly flu epidemic in the United States. The flu spread from Hong Kong to the United States, arriving December 1968 and peaking a year later. It ultimately killed 100,000 people in the U.S., mostly over the age of 65, and one million worldwide.

Lifespan in the US in those days was 70 whereas it is 78 today. Population was 200 million as compared with 328 million today. It was also a healthier population with low obesity. If it would be possible to extrapolate the death data based on population and demographics, we might be looking at a quarter million deaths today from this virus. So in terms of lethality, it was as deadly and scary as COVID-19 if not more so, though we shall have to wait to see.

“In 1968,” says Nathaniel L. Moir in National Interest, “the H3N2 pandemic killed more individuals in the U.S. than the combined total number of American fatalities during both the Vietnam and Korean Wars.”

And this happened in the lifetimes of every American over 52 years of age.

I was 5 years old and have no memory of this at all. My mother vaguely remembers being careful and washing surfaces, and encouraging her mom and dad to be careful. Otherwise, it’s mostly forgotten today. Why is that?

Nothing closed. Schools stayed open. All businesses did too. You could go to the movies. You could go to bars and restaurants. John Fund has a friend who reports having attended a Grateful Dead concert. In fact, people have no memory or awareness that the famous Woodstock concert of August 1969 – planned in January during the worse period of death – actually occurred during a deadly American flu pandemic that only peaked globally six months later. There was no thought given to the virus which, like ours today, was dangerous mainly for a non-concert-going demographic.

Stock markets didn’t crash. Congress passed no legislation. The Federal Reserve did nothing. Not a single governor acted to enforce social distancing, curve flattening (even though hundreds of thousands of people were hospitalized), or banning of crowds. No mothers were arrested for taking their kids to other homes. No surfers were arrested. No daycares were shut even though there were more infant deaths with this virus than the one we are experiencing now. There were no suicides, no unemployment, no drug overdoses.

Media covered the pandemic but it never became a big issue.

As Bojan Pancevski in the Wall Street Journal points out, “In 1968-70, news outlets devoted cursory attention to the virus while training their lenses on other events such as the moon landing and the Vietnam War, and the cultural upheaval of the civil-rights movements, student protests and the sexual revolution.”

The only actions governments took was to collect data, watch and wait, encourage testing and vaccines, and so on. The medical community took the primary responsibility for disease mitigation, as one might expect. It was widely assumed that diseases require medical not political responses.

It’s not as if we had governments unwilling to intervene in other matters. We had the Vietnam War, social welfare, public housing, urban renewal, and the rise of Medicare and Medicaid. We had a president swearing to cure all poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Government was as intrusive as it had ever been in history. But for some reason, there was no thought given to shutdowns.

Which raises the question: why was this different? We will be trying to figure this one out for decades.

Was the difference that we have mass media invading our lives with endless notifications blowing up in our pockets? Was there some change in philosophy such that we now think politics is responsible for all existing aspects of life? Was there a political element here in that the media blew this wildly out of proportion as revenge against Trump and his deplorables? Or did our excessive adoration of predictive modelling get out of control to the point that we let a physicist with ridiculous models frighten the world’s governments into violating the human rights of billions of people?

Maybe all of these were factors. Or maybe there is something darker and nefarious at work, as the conspiracy theorists would have it.

Regardless, they all have some explaining to do.

By way of personal recollection, my own mother and father were part of a generation that believed they had developed sophisticated views of viruses. They understood that less vulnerable people getting them not only strengthened immune systems but contributed to disease mitigation by reaching “herd immunity.” They had a whole protocol to make a child feel better about being sick. I got a “sick toy,” unlimited ice cream, Vicks rub on my chest, a humidifier in my room, and so on.

They would constantly congratulate me on building immunity. They did their very best to be happy about my viruses, while doing their best to get me through them.

If we used government lockdowns then like we use them now, Woodstock (which changed music forever and still resonates today) would never have occurred. How much prosperity, culture, tech, etc. are losing in this calamity?

What happened between then and now? Was there some kind of lost knowledge, as happened with scurvy, when we once had sophistication and then the knowledge was lost and had to be re-found? For COVID-19, we reverted to medieval-style understandings and policies, even in the 21st century. It’s all very strange.

The contrast between 1968 and 2020 couldn’t be more striking. They were smart. We are idiots. Or at least our governments are.

[Note an earlier version of this article featured a photo not from Woodstock 1969. This photo from the montage at the Atlantic.]

from:    https://www.aier.org/article/woodstock-occurred-in-the-middle-of-a-pandemic/

Isolation, Herd Immunity, and Confusing Numbers

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The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation

By Dr. Scott W. Atlas, Opinion Contributor — 04/22/20 12:30 PM EDT 10,923

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill

The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase. Tens of thousands of Americans have died, and Americans are now desperate for sensible policymakers who have the courage to ignore the panic and rely on facts. Leaders must examine accumulated data to see what has actually happened, rather than keep emphasizing hypothetical projections; combine that empirical evidence with fundamental principles of biology established for decades; and then thoughtfully restore the country to function.

Five key facts are being ignored by those calling for continuing the near-total lockdown.

Fact 1: The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19.

The recent Stanford University antibody study now estimates that the fatality rate if infected is likely 0.1 to 0.2 percent, a risk far lower than previous World Health Organization estimates that were 20 to 30 times higher and that motivated isolation policies.

In New York City, an epicenter of the pandemic with more than one-third of all U.S. deaths, the rate of death for people 18 to 45 years old is 0.01 percent, or 11 per 100,000 in the population. On the other hand, people aged 75 and over have a death rate 80 times that. For people under 18 years old, the rate of death is zero per 100,000.

Of all fatal cases in New York state, two-thirds were in patients over 70 years of age; more than 95 percent were over 50 years of age; and about 90 percent of all fatal cases had an underlying illness. Of 6,570 confirmed COVID-19 deaths fully investigated for underlying conditions to date, 6,520, or 99.2 percent, had an underlying illness. If you do not already have an underlying chronic condition, your chances of dying are small, regardless of age. And young adults and children in normal health have almost no risk of any serious illness from COVID-19.

Fact 2: Protecting older, at-risk people eliminates hospital overcrowding.

We can learn about hospital utilization from data from New York City, the hotbed of COVID-19 with more than 34,600 hospitalizations to date. For those under 18 years of age, hospitalization from the virus is 0.01 percent per 100,000 people; for those 18 to 44 years old, hospitalization is 0.1 percent per 100,000. Even for people ages 65 to 74, only 1.7 percent were hospitalized. Of 4,103 confirmed COVID-19 patients with symptoms bad enough to seek medical care, Dr. Leora Horwitz of NYU Medical Center concluded “age is far and away the strongest risk factor for hospitalization.” Even early WHO reports noted that 80 percent of all cases were mild, and more recent studies show a far more widespread rate of infection and lower rate of serious illness. Half of all people testing positive for infection have no symptoms at all. The vast majority of younger, otherwise healthy people do not need significant medical care if they catch this infection.

Fact 3: Vital population immunity is prevented by total isolation policies, prolonging the problem.

We know from decades of medical science that infection itself allows people to generate an immune response — antibodies — so that the infection is controlled throughout the population by “herd immunity.” Indeed, that is the main purpose of widespread immunization in other viral diseases — to assist with population immunity. In this virus, we know that medical care is not even necessary for the vast majority of people who are infected. It is so mild that half of infected people are asymptomatic, shown in early data from the Diamond Princess ship, and then in Iceland and Italy. That has been falsely portrayed as a problem requiring mass isolation. In fact, infected people without severe illness are the immediately available vehicle for establishing widespread immunity. By transmitting the virus to others in the low-risk group who then generate antibodies, they block the network of pathways toward the most vulnerable people, ultimately ending the threat. Extending whole-population isolation would directly prevent that widespread immunity from developing.

Fact 4: People are dying because other medical care is not getting done due to hypothetical projections.

Critical health care for millions of Americans is being ignored and people are dying to accommodate “potential” COVID-19 patients and for fear of spreading the disease. Most states and many hospitals abruptly stopped “nonessential” procedures and surgery. That prevented diagnoses of life-threatening diseases, like cancer screening, biopsies of tumors now undiscovered and potentially deadly brain aneurysms. Treatments, including emergency care, for the most serious illnesses were also missed. Cancer patients deferred chemotherapy. An estimated 80 percent of brain surgery cases were skipped. Acute stroke and heart attack patients missed their only chances for treatment, some dying and many now facing permanent disability.

Fact 5: We have a clearly defined population at risk who can be protected with targeted measures.

The overwhelming evidence all over the world consistently shows that a clearly defined group — older people and others with underlying conditions — is more likely to have a serious illness requiring hospitalization and more likely to die from COVID-19. Knowing that, it is a commonsense, achievable goal to target isolation policy to that group, including strictly monitoring those who interact with them. Nursing home residents, the highest risk, should be the most straightforward to systematically protect from infected people, given that they already live in confined places with highly restricted entry.

The appropriate policy, based on fundamental biology and the evidence already in hand, is to institute a more focused strategy like some outlined in the first place: Strictly protect the known vulnerable, self-isolate the mildly sick and open most workplaces and small businesses with some prudent large-group precautions. This would allow the essential socializing to generate immunity among those with minimal risk of serious consequence, while saving lives, preventing overcrowding of hospitals and limiting the enormous harms compounded by continued total isolation. Let’s stop underemphasizing empirical evidence while instead doubling down on hypothetical models. Facts matter.

Scott W. Atlas, MD, is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center.

from:    https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/494034-the-data-are-in-stop-the-panic-and-end-the-total-isolation

No Lockdowns = Quick Herd Immunity – Check Out Sweden

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Weeks Away from Herd Immunity – Epidemiologist Explains Why Sweden Refused a Total Lockdown

April 23, 2020

Phillip Schneider, Staff Writer
Waking Times

Without imposing any lockdowns or draconian restrictions on citizens, Sweden has attained a greater immunity than any other country and is estimated to achieve herd immunity to Covid-19 within three weeks

 

 

Swedish officials have recommended since the outbreak began that residents of the country limit contact with others whenever possible and wash their hands regularly. Since then, the virus has mostly affected nursing homes for the elderly, the population that Swedish officials most want to protect.

“In major parts of Sweden, around Stockholm, we have reached a plateau (in new cases) and we’re already seeing the effect of herd immunity and in a few weeks’ time we’ll see even more of the effects of that. And in the rest of the country, the situation is stable.” – Dr. Anders Tengell, Chief Epidemiologist at Sweden’s Public Health Agency [SOURCE]

Although some restrictions have been placed on Swedish citizens such as a ban on gatherings of more than 50 people, Swedes have mostly relied on the voluntary efforts of others to wash their hands and practice social distancing.

However, death tolls have been higher in Sweden than other nearby countries, such as Finland, Denmark, and Norway. It is unclear if this is because of their loose restrictions, immigration policies, or simply bad luck. Most deaths have occurred in nursing homes and among the recent influx of African and Middle Eastern migrants who in just a few years have become about 25% of the total population.

“The death toll is very closely related to elderly care homes. More than half of the people that have died have lived in elderly care homes… It’s the group we said we needed to protect,” said Tengell.

Professor Johan Giesecke, the senior epidemiologist and advisor to the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Swedish government, who originally hired Anders Tengell, argues that worldwide lockdowns are being implemented without any real evidence that they are effective.

“The Swedish government decided early in January that the measures we take against the pandemic should be evidence-based and when you start looking around for the measures that are being taken now by different countries you find that very few of them have a shred of evidence.” – Johan Giesecke [SOURCE]

Pandemic models for the United States originally predicted as many as several hundred thousand deaths by August, but those numbers have been continuously reduced to only 60,145 as their predicted death counts have not happened.

Because of the harm these failed Center for Disease Control (CDC) and WHO models have done to the US economy, the United States coronavirus task force has recently dropped them in favor of real data and as a result are planning to reopen the country in May and June.

“Models for infectious disease spread are very popular… They are good for teaching, [but] seldom tell you the truth… Which model could have assumed that the outbreak would start in northern Italy? … [Models] are based on assumptions, and those assumptions should by highly criticized.” – Johan Giesecke

The current number of deaths from Covid-19 in Sweden is 1,937, or 192 deaths per million people.

About the Author

Phillip Schneider is a student as well as a staff writer and assistant editor for Waking Times. If you would like to see more of his work, you can visit his website, or follow him on the free speech social network Minds.

This article (Weeks Away from Herd Immunity – Epidemiologist Explains Why Sweden Refused a Total Lockdown) as originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Phillip Schneider and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.

from:    https://www.wakingtimes.com/2020/04/23/weeks-away-from-herd-immunity-epidemiologist-explains-why-sweden-refused-a-total-lockdown/

TIme for UN-LOCKDOWNS!

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EPIDEMIOLOGIST: CORONAVIRUS COULD BE “EXTERMINATED” IF LOCKDOWNS ARE LIFTED

by Mac Slavo of SHTFplan

Finally, we have begun to hear solutions that don’t require the government to enslave the population and people to give up their basic human rights in order to fight COVID-19.  One epidemiologist has now said that if we want to “exterminate” the coronavirus, lockdowns will need to be lifted immediately.

Knut Wittkowski, previously the longtime head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at the Rockefeller University in New York City, said in an interview with the Press and the Public Project that the coronavirus could be “exterminated” people were allowed to lead normal lives, free from the shackles of house arrest politicians have placed on them. We need to shelter only the most vulnerable parts of society until the danger had passed, not lockdown everyone.

When asked about Anthony Fauci, the White House “medical expert” who for weeks has been propagating fear in the public and predicting significant numbers of COVID-19 deaths in America as well as major ongoing disruptions to daily life possibly for years, Wittkowski replied: “Well, I’m not paid by the government, so I’m entitled to actually do science.”

The veteran scholar of epidemiology has warned that the ongoing lockdowns throughout the United States and the rest of the world are almost certainly just prolonging the coronavirus outbreak rather than doing anything to truly mitigate it. On top of that, the government has destroyed the most financially vulnerable people by prohibiting them from making a living.  “Going outdoors is what stops every respiratory disease,” Wittkowski said.

And he isn’t the only doctor who says people need to go outside to get their vitamin D in order to fight off the virus. “[W]hat people are trying to do is flatten the curve. I don’t really know why. But, what happens is if you flatten the curve, you also prolong, to widen it, and it takes more time. And I don’t see a good reason for a respiratory disease to stay in the population longer than necessary,” he said according to a report by The College Fix. 

Many politicians claim flattening the curve prevents hospitals from being overrun.  But few hospitals have had problems keeping up with COVID-19 patients.


“With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity. About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won’t even have recognized that they were infected, or they had very, very mild symptoms, especially if they are children. So, it’s very important to keep the schools open and kids mingling to spread the virus to get herd immunity as fast as possible, and then the elderly people, who should be separated, and the nursing homes should be closed during that time, can come back and meet their children and grandchildren after about 4 weeks when the virus has been exterminated,” he added.

Instead, the mainstream media took to fear-mongering and the government has instituted martial law in parts of the country to lock people in their homes to try and prevent the spread of the coronavirus.  As we have all seen going into a month worth of lockdowns, the only thing we have achieved is a guarantee this virus will come back and millions of people won’t be able to make ends meet for months or possibly even years.  The damage done to society and some people’s livelihoods is irreparable.  This lockdown experiment has been an abject failure and one that should never be repeated again.  If people cared about their basic rights as human beings, they would have never allowed any government official to get away with closing their business and placing them on weeks of house arrest.

Wittkowski stated that the standard cycle of respiratory diseases is a two-week outbreak, including a peak, after which “it’s gone.” He pointed out that even in a regime of “social distancing,” the virus will still find ways to spread, just more slowly:

You cannot stop the spread of a respiratory disease within a family, and you cannot stop it from spreading with neighbors, with people who are delivering, who are physicians—anybody. People are social, and even in times of social distancing, they have contacts, and any of those contacts could spread the disease. It will go slowly, and so it will not build up herd immunity, but it will happen. And it will go on forever unless we let it go. -Dr. Knut Wittkowski

But if the lockdowns are lifted, and the chains removed from humanity, governments will be seen for what they really are: masters willing to use tyranny and destroy lives for profit. Don’t expect any government to relinquish power so willingly.

from:    https://www.silverdoctors.com/headlines/world-news/epidemiologist-coronavirus-could-be-exterminated-if-lockdowns-are-lifted/

Herd Immunity, “Germ Free-dom”, & Vaccines

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Dear America, You Cannot Be Pro-Freedom and Pro-Forced Vaccinations at The Same Time

March 31, 2019

Dear America, You Cannot Be Pro-Freedom and Pro-Forced Vaccinations at The Same Time

Bretigne Shaffer, FEE
Waking Times

It’s hard to think of a more fundamental right than the right to determine what happens to one’s own body. Forcing someone to undergo medical treatment against their will violates this most basic of rights—the right to be free from physical assault. Yet even somelibertarians have jumped on the mandatory vaccination bandwagon, arguing that one person not taking every possible precaution against contracting a disease constitutes an assault against another. But this line of thinking requires some very tortured logic

To begin with, nobody has a “right” to a germ-free environment outside of their own property (and good luck establishing one there). Proponents of vaccine mandates assert this “right” as if it is a long-standing social or legal norm, but it is not. Human beings have been living among each other for millennia, and there has never been a widely asserted right to freedom from any and all pathogens at others’ expense.

There has, historically, been a widely held and asserted expectation of quarantine in the case of exceptionally dangerous illnesses. However, this is not at all what the proponents of mandated vaccines are calling for. Quarantine is simply the demand that those who are already infected with a disease remain isolated in their homes or elsewhere until they are no longer able to infect others.

This is profoundly different from what the pro-mandate crowd demands: that those who are not infected undergo a medical procedure to minimize their chances of becoming infected. This is a much more intrusive demand and a potentially dangerous one.

Furthermore, measles—the scariest thing the mandate pushers can come up with—is not even on the list of federally quarantinable diseases. And rightly so, as it hardly qualifies as an exceptionally dangerous disease in the developed world.

Long before the vaccine was available, the mortality rate had fallen to around 1 in 10,000 cases, and it was widely considered to be a benign childhood illness that nearly everyone contracted.

So what has changed in the last few years? How is it that all of a sudden, measles has gone from a disease not even worthy of mandatory quarantine for the infected to one that has generated near-mass hysteria and demands for the far more intrusive forced medical intervention against those who are not infected?

In 2016, then-Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson announced that he had reversed his position on vaccine mandates and now supported them. The reason? Someone told him about herd immunity:

…I’ve come to find out that without mandatory vaccines, the vaccines that would in fact be issued would not be effective. So … it’s dependent that you have mandatory vaccines so that every child is immune. Otherwise, not all children will be immune even though they receive a vaccine.

Had Johnson looked just a little more deeply, he would have learned that the theory of vaccine-induced herd immunity is not as solid as its proponents would have us believe. The idea was first put forward by A.W. Hedrich in 1933, based on his observation that measles outbreaks were suppressed when 68 percent of children had contracted the measles virus. This observation had nothing to do with vaccination, as the measles vaccine had not even been developed yet.

This is an important distinction for a few reasons. Perhaps most importantly: While the immunity conferred by contracting measles lasts a lifetime, that conferred by vaccination does not. What this means is that a 90 percent vaccination rate does not equate to 90 percent of the population having immunity. As Dr. Russell Blaylock says:

It was not until relatively recently that it was discovered that most of these vaccines lost their effectiveness 2 to 10 years after being given. What this means is that at least half the population, that is the baby boomers, have had no vaccine-induced immunity against any of these diseases for which they had been vaccinated very early in life. In essence, at least 50% or more of the population was unprotected for decades.F

If we listen to present-day wisdom, we are all at risk of resurgent massive epidemics should the vaccination rate fall below 95%. Yet, we have all lived for at least 30 to 40 years with 50% or less of the population having vaccine protection. That is, herd immunity has not existed in this country for many decades and no resurgent epidemics have occurred. Vaccine-induced herd immunity is a lie used to frighten doctors, public-health officials, other medical personnel, and the public into accepting vaccinations.

The larger point, though, is that even if the idea of vaccine-induced herd immunity did hold up to scrutiny, it would at best be a positive externality—not something that anyone has the right to demand from others at gunpoint.

Others have written more comprehensively on the fallacy of using medically fragile people as an excuse for forcing everyone to be vaccinated. So I’ll just say this: Nobody has an obligation to vaccinate themselves or their children in order to protect the most medically vulnerable among us.

My own daughter is intellectually disabled and suffers from seizures. Much of the outside world is a dangerous and scary place where she could easily be badly hurt or worse. Yet I would never dream of using force to compel those around me to make the world safe for my daughter. Keeping her safe is my job and my husband’s job—not everyone else’s.

I doubt that those who promote this line of thinking have really thought through the implications of what they are asking for: requiring everyone to alter their lives and actions in order to accommodate the most medically fragile, at all times and in all spaces. What they are demanding has implications far beyond vaccines.

And if they really do believe that not being vaccinated constitutes a form of aggression against others, then why confine their demands to children?You do not have the right to force a medical procedure on another person.

Why should you and I and the vast majority of all adults in the US be exempt from the requirement to be completely up to date on all of the vaccines the CDC and its pharmaceutical industrycronies have decided we should have? Are we not also committing aggression every day we go out in public, exposing others to diseases we do not yet have but might possibly contract?Of course, if disease transmission is really what the proponents of vaccine mandates are worried about, then they should also demand that those recently vaccinated with live-virus vaccines not be allowed in schools or any public spaces. And if they aren’t demanding this, then one has to wonder whether the transmission of disease really is their primary concern.

The bottom line, though, has nothing to do with the science behind vaccines, nor with herd immunity, nor competing claims about vaccine safety and vaccine harm. Nor does it have to do with how serious diseases like measles are or are not. It is simply this: You do not have the right to force a medical procedure on another person.

This is libertarian thinking 101. You are free to do whatever you wish with what is yours—and other people are not yours. You do not own them, and you do not get to make decisions over their bodies and their lives. You may exclude them from your property if you wish, but you may not force them to undergo medical (or non-medical) procedures against their will. You don’t even have to be a libertarian to understand this. The right to bodily integrity, to be free from assault, is the most fundamental of all human rights. If it is not protected, then no other rights even matter.

About the Author

Bretigne Shaffer was a journalist in Asia for many years. She is now a mom, independent writer, and author of “Urban Yogini: A Superhero Who Can’t Use Violence“, and the upcoming “Annabel Pickering and the Sky Pirates.” She blogs at On the Banks.

from: https://www.wakingtimes.com/2019/03/31/dear-america-you-cannot-be-pro-freedom-and-pro-forced-vaccinations-at-the-same-time/