Category Archives: Of Interest

This Is A Concern for EVERYONE!

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French Doctors Speak Out Against New Contact Tracing As Attack on Right to Medical Privacy

May 10, 2020 Pam Barker GOVERNMENT, HEALTH 0

French Doctors Speak Out Against New Contact Tracing

Pam Barker | Director of TLB Europe Reloaded Project

A somewhat emotional video from a young practicing physician on Youtube, republished below, alerted us to this topic of medical snooping by the French government in order to allegedly stop / control / monitor the chain of infection (and us). Overall, this practice may become the next reason why we shouldn’t be visiting our family doctor or the local hospital starting from tomorrow, May 11, when our two-month(!) lockdown officially ends.

An MSM report of the French situation may be found here, but below are two actual doctors giving their feedback, one on video and one anonymously in writing. Readers may also be interested in this US article by Daisy Luther via Zerohedge on the rollout of contact tracing titled “Contact Tracer” And “Disease Investigator” Jobs Spring Up Across The Country.

So from tomorrow, the French family doctor (and the hospital doctor) will be the initiating person to identify a patient supposedly with covid, ask for the names and contact numbers of those people the patient has been in contact with (both within and without the immediate family), enter the information given into a centralized database, and do (unreliable) testing on the patient. At which point the non-medical staff of the French health insurance system will take over and send teams of people to test those contacts, hoping to find patient zero along the way. The initiating doctors themselves will get 55 euros instead of the regular fee of around 25 euros, plus 2 (or 4) extra euros for each contact name with a phone number.

The infection has likely been in France since at least October/November; confirmed cases were predicted to be going down around the time lockdowns were enforced in France (March 16) and the UK (March 23); Public Health England downgraded the severity of the disease on March 19. So is this all a case of a system and government justifying themselves to the public when, originally, they did absolutely nothing, telling us via the media that it was a Chinese problem? Likely the infection has been doing the rounds here for a while although it remains to be seen what kind of spike in cases will happen post-lockdown. Some government heads are expected to roll following the resumption of ‘normal’ life, so they must be anxious to be seen to be doing something. As well as finding a reason to implement Big Data surveillance systems on us.

The anonymous doctor below raises concerns about doctors being motivated to participate with a fee incentive; the reliability of the diagnostic tests (presumably the PCR test); confidentiality of a patient’s medical data by administrative, i.e. non-medical, staff; use and security of patient data entered in the system once it’s all finished; retaliation by people named as contacts who may be subject to confinement. And overall, the ethical problem of doctors turning in their patients to a bigger, data-driven system outside the normal bounds of doctor-patient relationship, as well as turning in names of people to the government who are not even their patients.

The doctor in the very short video below raises some additional points:

  1. Covid is a notifiable disease so reporting these cases in and of itself isn’t a problem. (ER: It is in the UK, too, but should it be? Should covid, with a death rate comparable to ‘flu and mild or no symptoms in the majority of the population, be put in the class of diseases like cholera and TB?)
  2. Yet a government bill is in the pipeline to create a new system of health data in the context of this crisis, without our input. Patient health information cannot be kept for more than a year, but it is likely to become a permanent system.
  3. The national platform of patient data will be kept on Microsoft servers; the data will be drawn from hospitals, pharmacies, and patient files.
  4. Will this result in health insurance costs going up for people? Will banks refuse loans to people? Will employers not re-hire people because their health data is accessible?

The young guy’s overall point below is – I’m a doctor, not a cop.

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Philippe Jandrok’s Blog, 7 May 2020

Message from a Doctor Who Wishes to Remain Anonymous

ATTENTION! … TO BE WIDELY DISTRIBUTED! NEW DRAMATIC DIRECTION IN THE ONGOING MADNESS!…
The total compromise of the SS in this so-called state of emergency, totally falsified and allowing all the most Orwellian excesses!

What I am reporting here is taken from a communication from the CGT Union of social security funds following a meeting with the national director of the fund, Mr. Nicola Revel, dated May 5, 2020.

It concerns the plan to mobilize the fund’s administrative employees (and not the fund’s medical personnel, who are supposed to be trained and protect the notion of medical secrecy!) to supposedly limit the spread of the post-lockdown virus.

It consists of the creation of a “brigade” (sic!) in the form of a telephone platform of 6,500 people at the national level, which they cynically call the “Guardian Angel Brigade” BAD (… Really, what a sense of humour!) supposed to carry out large-scale epidemic detection of the famous “contact cases,” identified by family doctors on the declaration of their Covid patients.

In order not to get rid of the increasingly invasive anglicisms, it is called “contact tracing”!

These agents will be employed 7 days a week, this by freezing their collective agreement, and with compulsory overtime, but not eligible for the scheme in question from 8am to 7pm .

I remind us all once again (we can never hammer it home enough) that the covid tests have no validity, with a positive predictive value between 30 and 50%, which means that one can be a carrier of the virus and negative on the test, just as one can be declared positive even without having contracted the virus!! It is, however, on this basis that the policing will be carried out with an insane stigmatization of anyone!

But in high places, it causes no remorse!

The “contact tracing,” in fact, is old-fashioned: the family doctor diagnoses an infected patient. He tests him with a virological test, takes care of him and organizes his confinement as well as that of his close entourage. 3,000 to 5,000 cases will be expected per day starting May 11th according to Santé Publique France.

The doctor registers his patient in Ameli Pro, with his consent within 24 hours. (ER: Ameli.fr is the website portal for all health insurers in France.)

He receives 55 €, plus 2 € per individual name (4 € with a phone number) entered in Ameli Pro, with whom the patient has been in contact, outside the rules of physical distance and protection.

(ER: From another report, the 55 euros includes the normal 25 euro family doctor consultation fee.)

Mr Revel considers that the professional secrecy to which the employees of the Sécu are bound is sufficient to guarantee data protection. No details are given on what will happen to the data collected on Ameli Pro after the crisis is over.

On the other hand, it is confirmed that its twin, the SITEP tool (operated by DGS/AP-HP/Santé Publique France) will (together with the results of serological tests carried out in laboratories) make it possible to carry out epidemiological studies under cover of anonymity. As the CNIL has not given its opinion on the nature of the files created, it will arrive after the battle. So much the worse, when it comes to health data, as well as labour law – it is a matter of urgency!

Behind Ameli Pro, the agents will take over from the doctor to contact the “contact cases” by telephone. Their mission will be to convince everyone to get masks from the pharmacy, do a laboratory test and go into isolation while waiting for the results, with a work stoppage as backup.

In addition to the research and the relationship with the “contact cases”, the colleagues will also issue work stoppages.

Unanticipated risks to patients zero :

Patients (“patient zero”) who are the source of the trace will have the right to have their identity withheld from individuals who will be identified and quarantined. But only if they ask their doctor not to check the “does not wish to be identified” box in Ameli Pro. There is a risk there.

If claiming to be a known person (ER: an ‘infected’ person?) can make it easier to quarantine a third party, it could lead to retaliatory measures. There are environments where “snitching” is a serious thing. You have to be aware of this reality when you’re doing population tracing.

I’ll stop here. It’s edifying enough for anyone who still has their common sense. Not to mention that if medical ethics still had any meaning that was not misused, all doctors would have to resist and oppose the implementation of such a nightmare. But hey, most of them have seen their incomes drastically reduced during this epidemic! Yes, they have! It’s strictly attested to! And so… A big increase in income after a famine, it can be tempting!!…

Original article in French

from:    https://www.europereloaded.com/french-doctors-speak-out-against-new-contact-tracing-as-attack-on-right-to-medical-privacy/

Are You Following the Money or the Hype?

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Snyder: It’s Much Worse Than You Are Being Told

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

For a long time I warned that our economic bubble would burst and that we would plunge into a nightmarish economic collapse.  Now it has happened, and it turns out that fear of COVID-19 was the “black swan event” that triggered the collapse.  The ironic thing is that COVID-19 is not even close to the worst thing that is going to happen to us.  But it was more than enough to topple our incredibly fragile economic system, and now tens of millions of Americans are deeply suffering.  On Friday, the April jobs report was released, and it was the worst jobs report in U.S. history by a very, very wide margin.  According to the official numbers, 20.5 million Americans lost their jobs during the month, and the unemployment rate shot up to 14.7 percent.  During the last recession, the unemployment rate peaked at about 10 percent, and we have already left that number in the dust.

The figures that we are seeing now are truly, truly horrifying, and what is even more frightening is that they aren’t even that accurate.

But don’t take my word for it.

On Friday, the U.S. Labor Department publicly admitted that the true unemployment rate in April was closer to 20 percent…

Millions of U.S. residents were counted as employed in April despite having no job, suggesting April’s true unemployment rate was closer to 20%, much higher than the official 14.7% reported, the Labor Department said Friday.

The jobless rate should have included people on temporary unpaid leave, furloughed because of the coronavirus pandemic, the government said.

I applaud the Labor Department for trying to be honest.  In the report, they openly admitted that an “additional 7.5 million workers” should have been classified as unemployed…

But responses to the survey by which the data was collected show 11.5 million people were categorized as employed but absent from work because of vacation, parental leave or other reasons, but including 8.1 million absent for “unspecified” reasons, a group that usually numbers about 620,000.

“One assumption might be that these additional 7.5 million workers …should have been classified as unemployed on temporary layoff,” a note attached to the government’s jobs report Friday said.

If those workers had been correctly classified, the official unemployment rate would have been about 19.5 percent, and that would have put us solidly in Great Depression territory.

But others have looked at the numbers and calculated that the true rate of unemployment should be even higher than that.

For example, Standard Chartered has calculated that the true rate of unemployment could be as high as 27.5 percent…

While it is true that what the BLS reported that the April unemployment rate (UR) was less than expected (14.7% versus consensus of 16.0%) and the drop in payroll employment of 20.5 million was also less than the 22.0 million expected, Standard Chartered bank has calculated that adjustments to the headline unemployment rate push the effective number of unemployed to 42 million and the effective UR rate to 25.5%, higher even than the U-6 underemployment rate of 22.8%. Worse, if one treats underemployed in line with the U-6 methodology, the true April unemployment number would rise to an mindblowing 27.5%.

So how did Standard Chartered arrive at those numbers?  The following is how Zero Hedge explained it…

How does one get these numbers? As the bank’s chief FX strategist Steve Englander explains, start with the 23.1 million unemployed as published by BLS. To this add 8.1mn people who have dropped out of the labor force since February (previously the labor force had been growing steadily, so these are likely unemployed).

Add back 7.5MM workers classified as ‘employed but not at work for other reasons’ – BLS states that these workers are likely misclassified as employed, when they are in fact unemployed. Involuntary part-time work for economic reasons has gone up by 6.6MM and we treat these as half-unemployed (i.e., a contribution of 3.3MM).

This totals almost 42 Million effectively unemployed.

And Standard Chartered is not the only one that has come up with such a high figure.

In fact, John Williams of shadowstats.com says that if honest numbers were being used that the U.S. unemployment rate would now be an eye-popping 35.4 percent.

Wow.

Of course everyone admits that things are really, really bad and that the numbers for next month are likely to be even worse.

If you can believe it, even White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett is admitting that the official unemployment rate is likely to surge above 20 percent in “May or June”…

White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett believes the unemployment rate could rise above 20% and the worst job losses would come in “May or June” because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

When asked Sunday what the “bottom” of the country’s unemployment pain would be, Hassett, who advises the Trump administration on economic policy and is the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, told CBS’s “Face the Nation,” “to get unemployment rates like the ones that we’re about to see … which I think will climb up toward 20% by next month, you have to really go back to the Great Depression to see that.”

And even once this pandemic fades, many of those jobs won’t be coming back.

Initially, many employers had anticipated that they would be bringing all of their employees back following a short, severe crisis.  But at this point reality is beginning to set in for many of them.

For example, a restaurant owner in Kentucky named Britney Ruby Miller has had to lower her expectations as this pandemic has dragged on…

In late March, Britney Ruby Miller, co-owner of a small chain of steakhouse restaurants, confidently proclaimed that once the viral outbreak had subsided, her company planned to recall all its laid-off workers.

Now? Miller would be thrilled to restore, by year’s end, three-quarters of the roughly 600 workers her company had to let go.

Yes, the state of Kentucky is starting to “reopen for business”, but for now her restaurants will “be limited to 33% of capacity” and there will be all sorts of other new expenses that Miller will be forced to deal with…

Yet business won’t be returning to what it was before. In Kentucky, the restaurants will be limited to 33% of capacity. They are putting six feet between tables in all their restaurants, thereby limiting seating. Miller estimates that the company’s revenue will plunge by half to three-quarters this year.

And expenses are rising because the company must buy face masks and other equipment for the workers it does recall and restock its food, drink, and equipment supplies.

There are very, very few restaurants that can be profitable under such circumstances.

Unless the state of Kentucky lifts those ridiculous restrictions, Miller may soon lose all of her restaurants and all of her employees may soon be permanently out of jobs.

Of course more layoff announcements just keep rolling in from all over America with each passing day.  The following examples come from the Wall Street Journal…

This past week, General Electric Co., Uber Technologies Inc. UBER 6.01% and Airbnb Inc. said they would lay off thousands of workers. MGM Resorts International MGM 4.42% warned that some of the 63,000 employees it has furloughed may be let go permanently starting in August. Aerospace supplier Raytheon Technologies Corp., RTX 2.91%  job-listings site Glassdoor and United Airlines Holdings Inc. UAL 11.74% also said in the past week that they had reduced jobs or planned to do so.

This is what an economic depression looks like, and it is going to be so incredibly painful.

And it is critical to understand that what we have experienced so far is just a warm-up act for the next chapters.

If you remember how bitter the last recession was, that should motivate you to take action to prepare for what is ahead, because this economic downturn is already even worse.

Yes, the months in front of us will be exceptionally challenging, but you can get through this.  Things may look really bleak, but for now you just need to keep hanging in there.

There will be life on the other side, but your future may end up looking far different than you originally anticipated.

from:    https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/snyder-its-much-worse-you-are-being-told

PA Just Says NO – Isn’t This America?

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Pennsylvania Sheriffs Say They Won’t Enforce Business Shutdown

May 11, 2020

By Daniel Taylor

Cumberland County Sheriff Ronny Anderson says “I have no intentions of turning local business owners into criminals.”

Resistance is growing against unconstitutional orders from Democrat governors around the country.

Pennsylvania Sheriffs are denouncing Governor Tom Wolf’s orders to turn business owners into criminals.

Local media reports:

Two local sheriffs say they won’t enforce the Pennsylvania governor’s COVID-19 mitigation measures. Sheriff John Zechman of Snyder County and Ernie Ritter of Union County say they won’t help the governor turn business owners into criminals.

Cumberland County Sheriff Ronny Anderson made a popular Facebook post that assured citizens that the Sheriff office would not enforce any order that violates the Constitution.

Sheriff Anderson said in part:

Our office will stand with the citizens in defense of all our Constitutional Rights! I have no intentions of turning local business owners into criminals.

The Perry County Sheriff’s office made a similar post:

Resistance to tyranny starts at the local level. America will not be conquered without a fight.

from:    https://www.activistpost.com/2020/05/pennsylvania-sheriffs-say-they-wont-enforce-business-shutdown.html

5G — Bad Idea

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“What If the Pentagon Skipped 5G?” The Dep’t of Defense Doesn’t Want It and They Aren’t Alone

May 11, 2020

By B.N. Frank

An increasing number of Americans including doctors, scientists, engineers, public advocates, and elected officials oppose 5G (see 1. 2, 3, 4).  The Department of Defense also opposes it because they say it really-really-really threatens national security (see 1, 2, 3, 4).  They’ve actually been saying that since last year.  Did you know?  So why on Earth would Americans want to deliberately threaten our national security?  Recently, some Congress members finally stepped in about DoD opposition and there was a hearing.

Thanks to Defense One for publishing an article that asks “What if the Pentagon Skipped 5G?”

The answer to the headaches and security risks of next-generation mobile communications just might be a technological leap past them.

It’s round one of a WWE-equivalent policy fight, and the Federal Communications Commission has beat the Pentagon. Against DoD objections, the FCC approved a license modification for Ligado Networks to establish a new 5G communications service last month. And while some Trump administration senior officials hailed this as a boon to U.S. firms vying to build the world’s 5G networks, others rightly argue that it imperils national security.

[…]

The solution — next-gen networking without Huawei and without undermining GPS  — may lie in yet another nascent technology. O-RAN, a software-driven network protocol that promises even faster and more secure mobile communications, is attracting private and Congressional interest. But if the Pentagon wants to hasten O-RAN’s arrival, and head off disruption, it needs to act, and fast.

Read full article

The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) is supposed to protect the public by regulating the telecom industry.  They were considered to be a corrupt and “captured” agency before Trump was elected.  They have become much scarier and opportunistic during his administration.  Despite opposition and warnings, they are using the pandemic as an excuse to speed up 5G installation (see 1, 2. 3, 4, 5).  This includes launching tens of thousands of satellites with millions of antennas to blast 5G and WiFi at us from space (see 1, 2, 3)!

Lawsuits have been filed against them for NOT protecting Americans from unsafe levels of radiation (see 1, 2) and of course, 5G (see 1, 2, 3).

5G opposition in the U.S. and worldwide continues to grow because of risks to biological health (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), cybersecurity (see 1, 2), environmental health (see 1, 2, 3, 4), privacy (see 1, 2), and more.  Many cities and countries have taken action against it including banning it, issuing moratoriums, passing ordinances, etc. (see 1, 2).

A long list of highly respected people and organizations – including the Department of Defense – continues to say 5G isn’t worth it.  The FCC continues to ignore them.  What’s wrong with this picture?

Activist Post reports regularly about 5G and other unsafe technology.  For more information, visit our archives and the following websites:

from:   https://www.activistpost.com/2020/05/what-if-the-pentagon-skipped-5g-the-dept-of-defense-doesnt-want-it-and-they-arent-alone.html

What Do The Experts Know?

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LISTEN: CBC Radio Cuts Off Expert When He Questions Covid19 Narrative

March 20, 2020 TLB Staff GOVERNMENT, HEALTH, MEDIA, Spotlight, WORLD 0

ER Editor: How the Globalist Media Do It. In this case, Canadian.

Dr. Joel Kettner (pictured), a Manitoba doctor, professor and top health administrator and veteran of 30 years and 30 pandemics, expresses a number of concerns not only with the puzzling position taken by WHO, but also the deleterious social, psychological and economic consequences for the public currently underway. And provides some statistics from Hubei Province in China, which completely undercuts the whole fear-panic narrative. He is finally cut off by CBC interviewer Duncan McCue, who then completely changes tack by talking about … Trump.

Note that one of the invited doctors onto this radio broadcast is pushing for more ‘flu vaccines, as is the public health agency of Canada, which are correlating with higher rates of the very disease that they’re supposed to PREVENT. This doctor is also ‘terrified’ of COVID. That seems to be the narrative we’re supposed to accept everywhere: immense fear and Big Pharma solutions. It is certainly the case here in France.

The relevant part of the radio program runs for about 6 or so minutes (linked to below), and is worth listening to. A transcription is provided.

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LISTEN: CBC Radio cuts off expert when he questions Covid19 narrative

OFF-GUARDIAN

A phone interview with a respected physician appears to have been cut short by CBC Radio when the Doctor went off-script

Dr Joel Kettner phoned into the March 15th episode of CBC’s Cross Country Checkup podcast to discuss the Canadian (and international) reaction to the Covid19 pandemic. He was in the middle of making a point about statistics when the host abruptly cut him off.

While the two invited guests were very much taking the governmental line on the threat of Covid19, Dr Kettner was striking a different tone.

To be clear, Dr Kettner is not a fringe or controversial character. He is professor of Community Health Sciences and Surgery at Manitoba University, former Chief Public Health Officer for Manitoba province and Medical Director of the International Centre for Infectious Diseases.

He was interviewed on Global News in January, when the pandemic was first hitting the news.

His comments are informative and interesting, but the host’s reaction perhaps more so. Listen below (starting at around 1 hour 12 minutes in), or we have transcribed them for you.

LISTEN TO PODCAST HERE

CBC Radio – Cross Country Checkup, March 15 2020

Duncan McCue (DM, Host): Dr Joel Kettner is on the line from Manitoba. Hi, Dr Kettner welcome to Checkup. You teach at the University of Manitoba and are former Chief Medical Officer of Manitoba, I understand. So what do you think of how we are coping right now?

Dr Joel Kettner (JK): Well I don’t know what to think, frankly, but I’ll tell you what I do think. First, I wanna say that in 30 years of public health medicine I have never seen anything like this, anything anywhere near like this. I’m not talking about the pandemic, because I’ve seen 30 of them, one every year. It is called influenza. And other respiratory illness viruses, we don’t always know what they are. But I’ve never seen this reaction, and I’m trying to understand why. I have to say that I really feel for my colleagues that are in public health practice. it is easy for me to sit in the armchair of my office and look at this and observe it, and be critical and have ideas. But I really feel for them for three reasons.

One is that the data they are getting is incomplete to really make sense of the size of the threat. We are getting very crude numbers of cases and deaths, very little information about testing rates, contagious analysis, severity rates, who is being hospitalised, who is in intensive care, who is dying, what are the definitions to decide if someone died of the coronavirus or just died with the coronavirus.

There is so much important data that is very hard to get to guide the decisions on how serious a threat this is.

The other part is we actually do not have that much good evidence for the social distancing methods. It was just a couple of reviews in the CDC emerging infectious disease journal, which showed that although some of them might work, we really don’t know to what degree and the evidence is pretty weak.

The third part is the pressure that is being put on public health doctors and public health leaders. And that pressure is coming from various places. The first place it came from was the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) when he said “This is a grave threat and a public enemy number one”. I have never heard a Director-General of WHO use terms like that.

Then when he announced the pandemic, he said he was doing it “because of a grave alarming quick spread of the disease and an alarming amount of inaction around the world” that puts a huge pressure on public health doctors and leaders and advisors and huge pressure on governments, and then you get this what seems like a cascade of decision making that really puts pressure on the countries and governments – provincial, state – to sort of…to keep up with this action that Dr Hoffman [an earlier guest on the programme] said that we are trying to avoid, or should avoid, which is an overreaction. I don’t know what is an appropriate reaction, but I do know that I am having trouble trying to figure this out and I…

[INTERRUPTED BY HOST]

DM: …So I’m sure that your medical colleagues across the country are probably nodding their heads when you say they don’t have enough data, that they lack data. I suspect health professionals around the world wish they had more data, whether it is testing rates, severity rates, all that kind of thing. So it’s probably a valid concern. But you mentioned that you are not confident with some of the literature with regard to social distancing and its effectiveness […] What is the basis of your concern then? If social distancing is debatable in your mind, what do you worry about then?

JK: I worry about the consequences of social distancing. I worry about people who are losing their jobs. I worry about interruptions with the healthcare system itself. There are many doctors in Manitoba in quarantine right now, because they have returned from other countries. I worry about the message to the public, about the fear of coming into contact with people, being in the same space as people, shaking their hands, having meetings with people. I worry about many, many consequences related to that.

If you look at the data for what we are actually dealing with, I want to give this example. In Hubei, in the province of Hubei, where there has been the most cases and deaths by far, the actual number of cases reported is 1 per 1,000 people and the actual rate of deaths reported is 1 per 20,000. So maybe that would help to put things into perspective, as to the actual rate and risks of this condition, because it is a lot lower in any other part of the world, including Italy, and certainly in Canada and the United States…

[INTERRUPTED BY HOST AGAIN, INTERVIEW OVER]

Many thanks to Cory Morningstar for bringing this to our attention. She is doing great work collating dissident voices on the coronavirus, follow her on twitter if you don’t already.
Correction 18/03/20 – The original version of this article incorrectly suggested Kettner was an invited guest of the programme, when in reality he phoned in of his own volition.

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Original article

Published to The Liberty Beacon from EuropeReloaded.com

from:    https://www.thelibertybeacon.com/listen-cbc-radio-cuts-off-expert-when-he-questions-covid19-narrative/

Fudging the Numbers, Fueling the Fears

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How Does COVID-19 Compare to the Spanish Flu?

Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola
Fact Checked
May 02, 2020

Story at-a-glance

  • While COVID-19 meets the technical definition of a pandemic, the death toll is nowhere near that of earlier serious pandemics that would legitimately justify the extraordinary measures being deployed by the U.S. government
  • An estimated 75 million to 200 million people in Eurasia and as much as 60% of the European population in rural areas were wiped out by the Black Death (bubonic plague) between 1347 and 1351
  • The Spanish flu (swine flu), which hit during World War I in 1918, infected 500 million people worldwide, killing an estimated 50 million, or 2.7% of the global population
  • Using the higher of two prominent COVID-19 trackers, 238,950 people had died, globally, from COVID-19 as of the afternoon on May 2, 2020. Based on a global population of 7.8 billion, 238,950 deaths amount to 0.003% of the global population
  • Mid-March predictions said COVID-19 would kill 2.2 million Americans if allowed to run its course. April 8, 2020, the Murray Model downgraded the threat to 60,000 dead by August, which is lower than the death toll for the seasonal flu of 2017/2018

While COVID-19 meets the technical definition1 of a pandemic (i.e., “an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people”), the death toll is nowhere near that of earlier serious pandemics2 that would legitimately justify the extraordinary measures being deployed by the U.S. government and others around the globe.

The Black Death

For comparison, the “Black Death,” which swept through Europe between 1347 and 1351 and kept resurfacing at intervals for the next 300 years, decimated up to one-third of the population with each recurrence.3,4

While the Black Death was long thought to be the same as the bubonic plague, in more recent years, researchers have questioned this assumption,5 and at least some of the evidence suggests they were not the same disease.

Either way, the plague killed 75 million to 200 million people in Eurasia, with deaths peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351.6 As much as 60% of the European population in rural areas were wiped out by the Black Death in the first four-year-long pandemic wave. People died within days of having symptoms.7 This horrific lethality is typically what people think of when they hear the word “pandemic.”

The Spanish Flu

Similarly, the Spanish flu (aka, swine flu), which hit during World War I in 1918, infected 500 million people worldwide, killing an estimated 50 million, or 2.7% of the global population.8

It killed 675,000 in the U.S. alone — more than died in combat during World War I, World War II, the Korean, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined, according to the historical documentary above.

Like the bubonic plague, the Spanish flu was a very rapid killer, causing death in as little as 12 hours. Like the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the virus also spread very easily and rapidly. Unlike COVID-19, however, people between the ages of 20 and 40 were most susceptible to the infection.

With COVID-19, it’s the elderly and immune compromised that are at greatest risk, but even in these high-risk groups, the mortality rate is nowhere near that of the Spanish flu.

COVID-19

Data points vary, and mortality statistics differ widely depending on the country and area you’re looking at, but using the higher of two prominent COVID-19 trackers — Worldometer,9 opposed to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center10 — 238,950 people had died, globally, from COVID-19 as of the afternoon on May 2, 2020.

Based on a global population of 7.8 billion,11 238,950 deaths amount to 0.003% of the global population. Even if this tally is off by hundreds of thousands, we’re still only looking at a fraction of a percent of the global population succumbing to COVID-19 in three and a half months.

April 15, there were also 1,403,420 active cases, 96% of which were mild and only 4% of which were serious or critical,12 so clearly, a vast majority of people who are infected make it through and end up having antibodies that will confer long-term immunity.

I for one could see shutting down the global economy for a true plague or something much like the Spanish flu, but COVID-19 simply doesn’t warrant the draconian elimination of personal freedom and liberty we’re currently seeing. Nor is it serious enough to warrant the kinds of long-term surveillance strategies suggested by Bill Gates

Understand What’s Happening Right Now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmHRYzF0dyQ&feature=emb_logo

The Corbett Report above is well worth listening to if you’re still on the fence and think the way we’re going is a good idea to safeguard the vulnerable. Remember, infectious diseases have been with us since the dawn of mankind, and are not going to stop. Ever.

Right now, we’re being told that we have to forgo our civil liberties because we might spread a virus to a potentially vulnerable individual, and if that happens, we’re culpable in their death. So, to prevent “mass homicide” from occurring by people moving about freely, we’re told we have to isolate ourselves and stop living.

Yet every single flu season throughout history, people have moved about, spreading the infection around. Undoubtedly, most people who have ever left their house with a cold, stomach bug or other influenza at any point in the past has unwittingly spread the infection to others, some of which may have ended up with a serious case of illness and some of which may ultimately have died from it.

There is simply no way to prevent such a chain of events in perpetuity. Giving up our civil liberties in an effort to prevent all future deaths from infectious disease is profoundly misguided, and ultimately will not work anyway.

From my perspective, the only mitigating factor in this analysis is that there appears to be solid, well-documented evidence that this is an engineered virus, one that was constructed in biosafety level 3 and 4 labs that are focused on offensive biological weapons research. This may result in unprecedented adverse biological adaptions that impair innate immunity. But at this time, I seriously doubt it.

Mortality Predictions Fall Apart

Mid-March predictions said COVID-19 would kill 2.2 million Americans if allowed to run its course.13 By the end of March, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, downgraded the projected death toll, saying we were probably looking at 100,000 to 240,000 Americans dying.14

April 8, 2020, a new model referred to as the Murray Model15 downgraded the threat further, predicting COVID-19 will kill 60,000 in the U.S. by August16 — a number that is still 20,000 lower than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s death toll numbers attributed to the seasonal flu the winter of 2017/2018.17

In the Liberty Report video above, Dr. Ron Paul, former GOP congressman, also points out that Fauci’s “doom and gloom predictions” have completely collapsed, “with the new official prediction coming in under the normal flu numbers for 2018.”

If COVID-19 is not causing any greater death toll than the regular flu season two years ago, why are we now asked to end society as we know it well into the foreseeable future? There’s no doubt in my mind that there will be far more deaths attributable to the financial collapse and isolation than there will be from the actual infection.

H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic Response Was a Gift to Big Pharma

The H1N1 swine flu of 2009 was the most recent pandemic of note, and considering Fauci and Gates are both saying we won’t be able (read, allowed) to go back to any semblance of normalcy until or unless we have a vaccine and enforce mandatory vaccination of the global population, it’s worth remembering what happened during the 2009 swine flu pandemic.

The CDC estimates that from April 12, 2009, to April 10, 2010, there were 60.8 million cases of H1N1 infection, 274,000 hospitalizations, and 12,469 deaths (0.02% infection fatality rate/mortality rate) in the United States.

June 11, 2009, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic of novel influenza A (H1N1).18 A vaccine was rapidly unveiled, and within months, cases of disability and death from the H1N1 vaccine were reported in various parts of the world.

In the aftermath, the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) questioned the WHO’s handling of the pandemic. In June 2010, PACE concluded “the handling of the pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), EU health agencies and national governments led to a ‘waste of large sums of public money, and unjustified scares and fears about the health risks faced by the European public.’”19

Specifically, PACE concluded there was “overwhelming evidence that the seriousness of the pandemic was vastly overrated by WHO,” and that the drug industry had influenced the organization’s decision-making.20 As reported by the Natural Society in 2014:21

“… a joint investigation by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) has uncovered some serious conflicts of interest between the World Health Organization (WHO), who proposed … heavy vaccinations, and the pharmaceutical companies which created them.

The joint-investigation’s report explains that the WHO profited immensely22 from the scare tactics they utilized to promote the use of a swine flu vaccine.

Creating mass hysteria was the WHO’s emergency advisory committee’s goal … The WHO told the world that up to 7 million people could die without the vaccines they were pushing … The advisory panel was choked with individuals highly connected to the pharmaceutical companies with vested interests in both antiviral and influenza vaccines.

An over $4 billion stake was invested in developing these vaccines, and without a pandemic there would be no use for them. Utilizing propaganda and fear, the drugs were pushed on unsuspecting people, and the money was made.”

Disturbingly, while the WHO was found to have had serious conflicts of interest with the drug industry, nothing has actually changed since then, which makes one wonder whether the WHO’s COVID-19 pandemic response can actually be trusted.

White House Halts Funding to WHO

To Read the rest of the article and get links that may not have been included, go to:    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/05/02/how-does-covid-19-compare-to-the-spanish-flu.aspx

Teaching Kids Nothing

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AMAIRIKUHN EDGYKAYSHUN: THE FAUCI VIRUS AND ONLINE
Rotten to the Core

AMAIRIKUHN EDGYKAYSHUN: THE FAUCI VIRUS AND ONLINE …

May 7, 2020 By Joseph P. Farrell

As the propatainment media hysteria over the Lieber-Wuhan-Fauci (rhymes with Grouchy) virus continues, and as everyone throws in their two cents on what they think is going on and what “they” hope to accomplish with all of this, I’ve been hearing from teachers. I have a few friends who are teachers, and there are a few members of this site who are teachers. And I can assure the regular readers of my blogs, that without exception, none of them were in favor of the Common Core curriculum and agenda being promoted by Darth Hillary, Jeb What’s-his-Name, and Billious Hates.

Most of their criticism of the whole miserable thing was its reliance on computer standardized tests that were “adaptive”, i.e., that in addition to the normal multiple guess questions on standardized tests composed by “experts”, the tests would be adapted to individual students by computer algorithms, algorithms again prepared by “experts.” The problem with standardized tests, as I and so many others have so often pointed out, is that multiple guess questions do not require reasoning, nor that one shows one’s reasoning. They are tailor-made to present narratives, and this particularly so in the so-called “soft” disciplines like history. Consider the following hypothetical question on a standardized test for, say, late elementary school or middle school: “Who killed President John Kennedy?” You know that the establishment edugarchy – a word we’ll return to in a moment – will push the narrative of the Warren Report. Answer: “Lee Harvey Oswald.” Never mind all the vast amounts of research that has been done since that event that have raised serious questions about that event.

But as my co-author Gary Lawrence and I pointed out in our book about Common Core, Rotten to the (Common) Core, the standardized tests had massive problems even in their presentations of questions and answers for the so-called hard sciences. In the book, we pointed out a controversy in the late 1950s and early 1960s between mathematician Banesh Hoffman – a friend of Albert Einstein – and the Educational Testing Service over some questions about physics where the Educational Testing Service’s “correct answer” to a question was manifestly and seriously flawed. Hoffman wrote articles about the controversy at the time which ran in various national magazines and newspapers. All to no avail. The Educational Testing Service’s explanations of their “reasoning” for insisting a wrong answer was correct, only dug themselves into further difficulties (and please note, they were allowed to explain their process of reasoning for insisting a wrong answer was in fact correct, while their test subjects were not allowed to do so). We call this attitude and the people behind it the “edugarchy.”

And all of this before Common Core’s “adaptive” tests.

So what’s the goal? Get everyone addicted to “computer books” and the easy sound-bite of a google search, and call that “research”, just so long as you agree with the promoted narrative (and with Google designing the search algorithms, how could it be anything but?). And along the way, reduce teachers to classroom proctors for standardized tests, break the teachers’ unions, and gain total control of a curriculum in a one-size-fits-all federal monster, which, incidentally, tracks you throughout your entire “academic” career.

So as this propatainment media hysteria over the Fauci-Lieber-Wuhan virus has taken down schools, and forced teachers into “distance learning” and “online classrooms,” I’ve been wondering whether or not that may have been one of the operational objectives of this whole plandemic. Just a few weeks ago, the pushback from parents and teachers against Common Core – not to mention its disastrous results as I’ve blogged about recently – were in, and Common Core was in trouble.

Not so any more, as one of our regular readers, N.S., caught this tweet from Andrew Cuomo, New York’s infanticide-approving governor:

Yes, what a great idea: let’s turn our edgykayshun system over to the man whose vaccines have allegedly killed people in India (which has banned him), who has invested in 3d printed “meat,” who has made his fortune by designing the world’s worst and most-virus ridden operating software and who wants to tell everyone how to deal with real viruses, and who was a major backer of the Common Core fiasco.

Funny how all this has worked out to his benefit, isn’t it?

See you on the flip side…

from:    https://gizadeathstar.com/2020/05/amairikuhn-edgykayshun-the-other-agenda-of-the-fauci-virus-online-schooling/

Whitley Streiber in Pine Ridge

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 A New World

It is our privilege and pleasure to welcome the world-renowned author Whitley Strieber as our featured author for May.

Whitley has dedicated many decades of his life to investigating the paranormal and detailing his profound supernatural experiences for the world to read. In this excerpt from his book ‘A New World’ Whitley explores his extraordinary encounter with a hidden landscape during his stay on the Lakota Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota; and the messages he received about the nature of the universe and the mysterious visitors that interact with our world.

Chapter Four, The Fields of Asphodel

During the weekend of July 19–22, 2019, I went to a place of great human suffering and incredible power. While there, I had extended, days-long access to another world, an experience that went far beyond anything else that has happened in this lifetime of strange and extraordinary experiences. I think that what happened offers a major clue about the origin of the visitors, and possibly also of their enigmatic human allies.

I had been invited to a small conference at the All Nations Gathering Center on the Lakota Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where I was to give a talk about The Afterlife Revolution. It was hosted by Dallas Chief Eagle and his wife Becky and organized by Mia Feroleto, publisher of New Observations Magazine.

Before going, I had learned some of the reservation’s history, but it had offered no clue about what was actually going to happen to me there. Like most people outside of American Indian culture, my awareness of the spiritual power of their religions was very limited. Being a Texas German, I was aware that my ancestors had a high opinion of their religion and spiritual development. Why, I did not know. I do now.

I also knew that Pine Ridge was the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre and the Wounded Knee occupation of 1973. On December 29, 1890, the US Army had opened fire on a group of 300 Lakota Sioux, killing 90 men and 200 women and children. In 1973, Wounded Knee was occupied by 200 Oglala Lakota and members of the American Indian Movement in protest over corruption in the tribe’s government. This led to a siege that lasted two months that left two Lakota killed and fourteen wounded and two federal officers injured. I also learned that Oglala Lakota County was the poorest county in the United States, with an average annual income per person of just over $8,000. Officially, the average life expectancy on the Pine Ridge reservation is 66.81 years, but statistics attributed to the Pine Ridge hospital cite a life expectancy among women of 55 years and men 47 years. Suicide rates are high, especially among teens, driven by the sense of hopelessness that infects their lives like a virus. During the winter of 2015–2016, one 12-year-old girl killed herself because her family could not afford heat, and she could no longer bear the cold. Alcoholism affects 85% of the population. Drug abuse and crime are rampant, and living conditions are dreadful beyond anything I have ever seen in my life.

None of this is an accident or due to laziness or any such issue. It is because of the location. During the 19th century American Indian wars, the Lakota Sioux were intentionally confined to this place because it is so lacking in resources. Distances are long, so work off the reservation isn’t economical for most residents. Because of its isolation, lack of good farmland and general scarcity of exploitable resources, there are few jobs on it, contributing to a chronically high unemployment rate.

While I found an oppressed people there, I also found that it was a place of great human spiritual power, in fact, power beyond anything I have ever known anywhere. I have some idea of what this power is, which I will discuss in depth in a later chapter. I had not been on the reservation for more than a few hours before I began to feel it. And when I say feel, I am not talking about something vague—some sense of unusual energies. Far from it.

On my first morning there, when I happened to close my eyes during a drive of half an hour or so, I saw movement behind my closed lids—what looked like shadowy trees and rolling hills, but not the ones we were passing. Surprised, I opened them immediately. I couldn’t understand why I’d been seeing anything at all. When I closed them again, what I saw simply took my breath away. I sat there watching an entire second landscape flow past the car. Although it seemed to be twilit rather than sunny, the effect was so vivid it was like wearing a virtual reality headset.

I was flooded with strong, poignant and yet contradictory emotions. There was at once a sense of homecoming and homesickness. It wasn’t as if I was in two places at once, but rather looking out the windows of my heart into two worlds that have been locked forever in a secret embrace and seeing that wonderful, sweet thing for the first time.

As we drove along, I sang out the different features I was seeing. “There’s a creek over there, we’re passing under an arbor of trees, there are long hills on the horizon. Oops, the road’s gone off down the hill.” Among those in the car who heard me doing this was our very kind driver, Kevin Briggs, who unfortunately could not close his eyes and look as the others did. Conferees Alan Steinfeld, Ananda Bosman, Mia Feroleto and others did close their eyes. Some saw it vaguely, others not at all. Only Ananda and I saw it clearly.

Even though the image was shadowy, it was extremely detailed. I could pick out individual trees, fields, even a narrower version of the road we were on.

After a few moments, I realized that I was watching not another world altogether, but another version of the landscape we were passing through. It was a bit more rough, with occasional gorges and generally wider streams. The other road was not only narrower, it wasn’t graded. The result of this was that it sometimes wound off down a hill while we continued along the graded version in our world. This would leave me with the uncanny sensation that the car had taken flight.

The vision didn’t go on for just a few minutes, but for the entire time I was on the reservation. It continued whether I was riding in a car, walking, sitting or standing. For those three days, I was living in two landscapes at once. After I closed my eyes, it would take about thirty seconds for the other world to appear, but it did so reliably. When I was standing somewhere, I could look down and see grass and gravel that was not present in this world. I could bend down and look closely, even to the point of being able to count the number of petals on flowers and observe the details of grasses and the discolorations on stones. I could touch and smell nothing of the other world. In this sense, it was very much like out of body travel, which detaches you from those senses. I was not physical in that world, and I have to wonder if that might not be how our visitors experience this one. I tried using the sensing exercise as a tool for physically moving into the other world, but it didn’t work. Nevertheless, it is my strong sense that what we think of as technology is not what enables things like this to happen. I think that it’s something to do with attention, concentration and the brain, and possibly also requires the cooperation of an outside energy that is itself conscious. My thought is that my lifetime of doing the sensing exercise and the changes in my brain that have resulted have made me more able to see this other universe and, to a limited extent (so far), interact with it.

PD0

The changes I am referring to involve a brain area called the dorsal striatum. It contains two regions, the caudate and the putamen, which are connected by an area of white matter called the internal capsule. There is a study under way that suggests that the density of the white matter region may govern the degree to which an individual possesses intuitive sensitivities.

To read the rest of the article, go to:    https://grahamhancock.com/strieberw1/

The Dangers of Research

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VIRUS RESEARCHER MURDERED
Call it Conspiracy

VIRUS RESEARCHER MURDERED…

May 6, 2020 By Joseph P. Farrell

Well, I suspect that we all suspected that sooner or later this would happen.

Sooner or later, someone involved in researching the Fauci-Lieber-Wuhan virus, was going to end up yet another victim of those strange “health care deaths” that we have blogged about from time to time. Well, it has happened, according to this article shared by C.S.:

Coronavirus In Pittsburgh: Researcher Killed In Apparent Murder-Suicide Was Close To ‘Making Very Significant Findings’ Related To COVID-19, Pitt Says

And you can color me really skeptical here. Note the following:

A researcher killed in an apparent murder-suicide was close to “making very significant findings” related to the coronavirus, his department said.

Two shootings that happened over the weekend in Ross Township appear to be a murder-suicide, according to police.

On May 2, police said 37-year-old Bing Liu was found dead in his home on Elm Court from apparent gunshot wounds to his head, neck and torso. Investigators say they now believe his death is a homicide.

Liu was a research assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, his department said on Monday.

“Bing was on the verge of making very significant findings toward understanding the cellular mechanisms that underlie SARS-CoV-2 infection and the cellular basis of the following complications. We will make an effort to complete what he started in an effort to pay homage to his scientific excellence,” the department said on its website. (Emphasis added)

So we have: (1) a Chinese-American, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburg, who is (2) researching corona viruses and particularly (2a) the mechanisms of how they infect people and (2B) the cellular structures or bases of the complications following. Or to put that country simple, Professor Bing Liu’s research might have cracked the mystery as to why some people become horribly ill, and why some remain asymptomatic, or at best, suffer a cold.

Ahhh… but you can relax, because his apparent murderer was found in a car, the victim of an apparent suicide:

A second man was also found dead in his car on Charlemagne Circle, near Elm Court. Police say it appears he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

According to police, the two victims knew each other. Investigators say they believe the male found in his car shot and killed the man in the Elm Court home before coming back to his car and taking his own life.

There you go, Professor Bing Liu and the other man knew each other. It must have been all a friends’ squabble gone horribly wrong. Nothing to see here, move along. But we can relax because Professor Liu’s research will be continued:

“Bing was on the verge of making very significant findings toward understanding the cellular mechanisms that underlie SARS-CoV-2 infection and the cellular basis of the following complications. We will make an effort to complete what he started in an effort to pay homage to his scientific excellence,” the department said on its website. (Emphasis added)

Who wants to lay odds that we’ll never hear any more about Liu’s research?

Of course, there’s not a shred of data, or information, that can support my hypothesis that the unfortunate Professor Liu’s murder was anything more than a friends’ dispute gone wrong. But since virtually everything else about the Fauci-Lieber-Wuhan virus story stinks, not the least malodorous thing about it being the connections between Fauci (rhymes with Grouchy) and Billious Hates, I feel entirely justified in indulging in some high octane speculation. So yes, I would not be honest if I did not admit that my suspicion meter is in the red zone on this one. Somebody wanted this virus out and circulating, and somebody certainly is driving the propatainment media hysteria about the story, and somebody is willing to trash the global economy, and that means that whatever the motivations behind their actions, those motivations are important enough to trash the global economy and to take the risks associated with that action.

And that means in turn that they would do almost anything to anyone threatening whatever their agenda is, like, murdering a medical college professor investigating their virus… why, he might uncover evidence of its bio-engineered nature, and “whodunnit”, or might discover a very simple cure that doesn’t need big pharma. And would “they” make his murder look entirely innocent, like a quarrel between friends gone wrong? Yes. Would “they” plan it so that friend’s gun was used? Yes. Would “they” then turn that friend’s gun on that friend himself, and carefully place the gun in his hand to make it look like suicide (think Vince Foster here)? Yes. Indeed, might these two murders have occurred somewhere else, and the crime scenes staged? Yes. Would “they” be capable of that? Yes.

See you on the flip side…

from:    https://gizadeathstar.com/2020/05/virus-researcher-dead/

Summer of Love & A Pandemic

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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/