Fudging the Numbers, Fueling the Fears

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

H2N2, Spanish Flu – Time to Reconsider Now

– May 4, 2020

The year was 1957.

Elvis’s new movie “Jailhouse Rock” was packing the theaters. The last episode of “I Love Lucy” aired on television. The show “West Side Story” held tryouts in Washington, D.C., and opened on Broadway in September. Ford’s new car the Edsel rolled off the assembly line. The Cold War with Russia was on and “In God We Trust” appeared on U.S. currency. The first Toys R Us store opened.

Also that year, the so-called Asian Flu killed 116,000 Americans. Here is the full summary from the Centers for Disease Control:

In February 1957, a new influenza A (H2N2) virus emerged in East Asia, triggering a pandemic (“Asian Flu”). This H2N2 virus was comprised of three different genes from an H2N2 virus that originated from an avian influenza A virus, including the H2 hemagglutinin and the N2 neuraminidase genes. It was first reported in Singapore in February 1957, Hong Kong in April 1957, and in coastal cities in the United States in summer 1957. The estimated number of deaths was 1.1 million worldwide and 116,000 in the United States.

Like the current pandemic, there was a demographic pattern to the deaths. It hit the elderly population with heart and lung disease. In a frightening twist, the virus could also be fatal for pregnant women. The infection rate was probably even higher than the Spanish flu of 1918 (675,000 Americans died from this), but this lowered the overall case fatality rate to 0.67%. A vaccine became available in late 1957 but was not widely distributed.

The population of the U.S. at the time was 172 million, which is a little more than half of the current population. Life expectancy was 69 as versus 78 today. It was a much healthier population with negligible obesity. To extrapolate the data to a counterfactual, we can conclude that this virus was more wicked than COVID-19 thus far.

What’s remarkable when we look back at this year, nothing was shut down. Restaurants, schools, theaters, sporting events, travel – everything continued without interruption. Without a 24-hour news cycle with thousands of news agencies and a billion websites hungry for traffic, mostly people paid no attention other than to keep basic hygiene. It was covered in the press as a medical problem. The notion that there was a political solution never occurred to anyone.

Again, this was a very serious flu, and it persisted for 10 years until it mutated to become the Hong Kong flu of 1968.

The New York Times had some but not much coverage. On September 18, 1957, an editorial counseled: “Let us all keep a cool head about Asian influenza as the statistics on the spread and the virulence of the disease begin to accumulate. For one thing, let us be sure that the 1957 type of A influenza virus is innocuous, as early returns show, and that antibiotics can indeed control the complications that may develop.”

The mystery of why today vast numbers of governments around the world (but not all) have crushed economies, locked people under house arrest, wrecked business, spread despair, disregarded basic freedoms and rights will require years if not decades to sort out. Is it the news cycle that is creating mass hysteria? Political ambition and arrogance? A decline in philosophical regard for freedom as the best system for dealing with crises? Most likely, the ultimate answer will look roughly like what historians say about the Great War (WWI): it was a perfect storm that created a calamity that no one intended at the outset.

For staying calm and treating the terrible Asian flu of 1957 as a medical problem to address with medical intelligence, rather than as an excuse to unleash Medieval-style brutality, this first postwar generation deserves our respect and admiration.

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages, most recently The Market Loves You. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. Jeffrey is available for speaking and interviews via his email.

from:    https://www.aier.org/article/elvis-was-king-ike-was-president-and-116000-americans-died-in-a-pandemic/

Resurrecting Ancient Viruses

Why is this a good idea?

Scientists Are About To Resurrect A 30,000-Year-Old Virus “To Discover If It Is Harmful To Humans”

frankenvirusBy Amanda Froelich

A ‘monster’ virus which has lain dormant in the frozen wastelands of northeastern Russia is about to be resurrected by researchers curious of its potential effects.

Scientists anticipate “reanimating” a 30,000-year-old virus to learn more about it and discover if it is harmful to animals or humans. Mollivirus sibericum, which translates to soft Siberian virus, has been dubbed “Frankenvirus” by many who are in opposition of the quest to bring it back to life. 

In contrast to other viruses, the soft Siberian bug is a monster. Not only does it have 523 genetic proteins and measures 0.6 microns, it can also be seen using light microscopy.

As BBC News reports, the Mollivirus sibericum virus is the fourth prehistoric virus to have been discovered since 2003, and experts warn climate change and thawing ice could resurrect similar – and perhaps even more dangerous – pathogens.

The French National Center for Scientific Research made the discovery in the Kolyma lowland region of Russia. The soft Siberian virus is the second of its kind to be found by the team. In 2003, researchers discovered the Minivirus, followed by the Pandoraviruses in 2013, and Pithovirus sibericum which was discovered last year.

Reserachers wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS): 

The saga of giant viruses started in 2003. Two additional types of giant viruses have been discovered [and] we now describe Mollivirus sibericum, a fourth type of giant virus isolated from the same permafrost sample. These four types of giant virus exhibit different structures, sizes, genome length, and replication cycles. Their origin and mode of evolution are the subject of conflicting hypotheses. The fact that two different viruses could be easily revived from prehistoric permafrost should be of concern in a context of global warming.

The regions in which these mega microbes are being discovered are being increasingly exploited for their mineral resources, especially oil. As Upriser shares, the rate at which they are exploited will no doubt increase as the areas become more accessible due to melting ice and climate change.

Said lead researcher Jean-Michel Claverie:

A few viral particles that are still infectious may be enough, in the presence of a vulnerable host, to revive potentially pathogenic viruses. If we are not careful, and we industrialize these areas without putting safeguards in place, we run the risk of one day waking up viruses such as small pox that we thought were eradicated.

That’s definitely concerning. 

In the lab, Professor Claverie and his team will attempt to resurrect the newly discovered virus by placing it with a single-cell amoeba, which will serve as its host. The virus Pithovirus sibericum was revived in March 2014 using similar techniques.

UPDATE:

Research has been carried out, and according to co-author Dr Chantal Abergel, the virus “comes into the cell, multiplies and finally kills the cell. It is able to kill the amoeba – but it won’t infect a human cell.”

Still, a lot of controversy surrounds the scientists plan to “revive” the Mollivirus sibericum virus. Different than most viruses circulating today, these ancient pathogens are not only bigger, they’re far more complex genetically.

The recently discovered virus has more than 500 genes, and the Pandoravirus found in 2003 has 2,500. Compare that to the Influenza A virus which has eight genes.

Of course, a philosophical debate will not deter scientists from doing their work, but a number of pros and cons deserve to be weighed before further research is conducted.

In 2004, United States scientists resurrected the “Spanish flu” virus, which ended up killing tens of millions of people at the start of the 20th century. The revived the virus to understand why the pathogen was so virulent. 

Researchers from the States traveled to Alaska to take frozen lung tissues from a woman who was buried in permafrost, and teased genetic details out of the samples and from autopsy issues stored in formalin. Their work allowed the team to reconstruct the code for the virus’ eight genes – but at what cost? All the work was done in a top-security lab at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), yet still wasn’t contained.

We have to ask ourselves as an informed public – and voice our concerns to those ‘in charge’ – if “reviving” a monster virus and is really in the best interest of the public. 

Scientists Are About To Resurrect A 30,000-Year-Old Virus “To Discover If It Is Harmful To Humans”