We were told, and are being told, that the only way to prevent mass premature death from COVID-19 is to hunker down in our homes and wait to be vaccinated. Two weeks to “flatten the curve” has become, a year later, a never ending event. Even when we are all vaccinated, we may need to accept a “new normal” without cheering crowds in sporting stadiums, loud music in crowded bars, or actors performing live in local theaters; and generalized and compulsory mask wearing everywhere and indefinitely.
What if all this is a lie? What if, to put it more scientifically, these claims are empirically much weaker than those made by qualified experts—equal in academic qualifications to the leaders of the NIH and CDC–which say that most of us should resume normal life, the world over, do it NOW, and that LESS PEOPLE WILL DIE if we do so?
As stated in a previous email, qualified experts from Stanford, Harvard and Cambridge Universities, in the Great Barrington Declaration (easily searched) have claimed precisely this—that those at low risk of death should go back to normal living RIGHT NOW—and that the bulk of evidence is that those at higher risk can rejoin us in a few months, particularly after having been vaccinated. Grandmothers who are dying now of loneliness and heart break can see their grandchildren again soon. All of us can and should raise a toast in a crowded bar to the end of the lockdowns, school closings, and mask wearing, and do so by July 4thAT THE LATEST.
In this email I want to make 3 claims:
1) It is plausible and very empirically defensible to claim even now that the absolute death rate from COVID-19 is around that of the flu, and among the young even lower.
2) We need to wage a national campaign to eliminate what I term “Nutritional Immunodeficiency”, which will CERTAINLY reduce deaths from most infectious diseases, including COVID-19.
3) Nations with death rates orders of magnitudes lower than our own, which have not and cannot do most of the supposedly “necessary” things we have done, NEED TO BE NOTED, DISCUSSED, AND STUDIED.
The author is an intelligent layperson, more or less collating publicly available facts, and THINKING about them. I am not an expert by any means, but it seems obvious that even though MANY EXPERTS DISAGREE WITH THE POLICIES WE ARE BEING TOLD TO FOLLOW, they are being silenced. They get no media time, and in many cases, as with “America’s Frontline Doctors”, they are being censored to the point where they cannot post on any social media, and their videos are pulled from YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and others.
In discussing death, the first obvious fact is that, not only do all of us die, about 2.8 million Americans are EXPECTED to die each year. If it is true that 500,000 of us have died of COVID-19—I don’t believe it is, but let’s suppose—then 2.3 million people have died of SOMETHING ELSE in the past year, most of them in effect of old age and poor health.
Adding nothing, put this way, it seems to me the ridiculousness of what we are doing is obvious.
But we have all read the terrible stories of people struggling to breath, of the long term organ damage, the smiling youths with bright futures stricken down in their primes, of the HUGE number of deaths we are avoiding with all this, so some more attention may help enlighten the matter.
Death rates, as normally calculated, are the number of known cases divided by the number of known deaths. It is a ratio, however, which grows larger quickly when you increase the deaths and decrease the infections. It likewise shrinks quickly when you do the opposite, as I believe we should.
It appears BOTH that deaths are being overreported, and it seems very clear–certainly at a minimum both plausible and empirically defensible—that many more people are exposed to this virus, and fight it off without trouble, than ever test positive for it.
Without getting deeply into methods, it is CLEAR that the CDC itself issued guidelines which made overreporting likely, by asking that all cases where COVID-19’s involvement was suspected be reported as COVID-19 deaths. “Cancer with COVID” deaths are being reported as COVID deaths. Heart attacks. Stroke deaths. Even motor vehicle deaths. A 5% at most COVID/95% something else death becomes a 100% COVID death in the statistics, even if the disease only shaved a week off of someone’s life, if that.
While it is true that an acute illness—any acute illness, including COVID-19—could be the one factor that causes death proximately, in the otherwise sickly, adding all those numbers to the totals makes it difficult or impossible to gauge how much of a danger this disease represents to the otherwise healthy.
The flu pushes tens of thousands of our elderly over the edge every year, and has for many years, but few pay it any notice, because it is not relevant to THEM. The young and healthy, in general, need not fear death from the flu (even if it does happen, rarely).
And most hospitals and medical centers have had enormous financial stress put on them by all this. They can’t see most of the patients they would have seen in a normal year, so financial stress alone is enough to stimulate overreporting—effectively, to be clear, overbilling with tacit permission–and indeed some doctors have stated publicly that they were under pressure to “code everything COVID”. Hospitals get vastly more money for COVID deaths than for, say, run of the mill heart attacks.
How exaggerated are the numbers? I don’t think anyone can say for sure. But it is conceivable they could be a tenth of what we are being told. How much more common is exposure to COVID than reported? It could be ten times what we are being told. Roughly speaking, numbers in that range have been found in several studies, studies which were done last summer, and ignored completely by most of the media and Establishment Experts (when they were not attacked bitterly.)
So obviously if we divide the deaths by ten (or 2 or 5), then multiply the number of people who have been exposed by ten (or 2 or 5), we get MUCH smaller numbers than are being reported. I am not saying we should do that—I don’t know—but my point is that neither does Anthony Fauci. He cannot know all the details. No one does. We have to guess how many people would be alive now but for COVID-19, and how many have inhaled the SARS-CoV-2 virus, developed an immune response, and never noticed or known.
Corrections of some sort in the down direction are clearly needed, though, in my view.
And we know, and have known for many years, that deficiencies in Vitamin D and zinc make most infectious illnesses more easily spread and more dangerous. Adequate levels of both are needed for optimal immune function. Precise numbers are impossible to come by, but best estimates are that on average about 1 in 5 Americans are Vitamin D deficient (this number is presumably higher in the winter, and lower in the summer, since the skin makes D on sun exposure), and about 12% are zinc deficient, or were supposed to be in the most recent study I could find from about 10 years ago.
Both of these percentages are much higher in the elderly. Zinc deficiency may run as high as 40% in those over 65 or so.
Further, D deficiency is also more common in the obese. D is a fat soluble vitamin, and the more body fat carried, the more diluted it becomes.
And most of the people dying are the elderly, and the obese. Generally speaking, if you hear of a younger person dying of this disease, they were likely moderately to severely overweight. Not invariably, but it is a good guess.
And we KNOW that low levels of zinc are highly correlated with poor outcomes in those infected by COVID-19. I would suggest you search “Zinc Covid-19”.
And while it is true that taking more zinc or Vitamin D will do little or nothing if you are not deficient, there is every reason to think that among those who ARE deficient, they can and will in many if not most or even all cases make the difference between life and death if they get infected.
In my personal view, almost no one who is not D and zinc deficient will ever become SERIOUSLY ill. I have known about 30 people who have had COVID (I have not: I am sure I’ve been exposed, but never had a days symptoms), and not one had breathing issues or anything worse than a bad flu. Most of the people I know, though, are educated enough to take multivitamins, and that may be enough to stave off deficiency.
And reducing national Nutritional Immunodeficiency to a rate of ZERO—nobody anywhere lacking in the basic vitamins to ensure optimal immune functioning—would almost certainly not just reduce death rates from SARS-CoV-2 exposure, but from nearly ALL infectious diseases, including flu, which seems in part to be a seasonal illness since Vitamin D deficiency is a seasonal illness. This is an empirically defensible claim, in any event.
Finally, I wanted to point out that India, with a population of about 1.3 billion, much or most of it in severely overcrowded, unsanitary living conditions, has only lost about 150,000 people to COVID-19. America, with a population of 330 million or so—about a third that of India—has lost more than 3x more people. We have about 9x more death than a nation unable to do most of the things Anthony Fauci said were necessary. No doubt some wealthier areas shut down, but overall doing “social distancing” and lockdowns, and closings of various sorts just were not possible for them.
And their pandemic appears nearly over. As mentioned in a previous email, Farr’s Law stipulates that epidemics come in Bell Curves. When you see a Bell Curve, and deaths dropping, then you can safely assume that wave, at least, is reaching its end.
If you do a search on this, you will see the usual suspects of “contact tracing” and the like mentioned, but how could such a thing work when India has some of the most crowded slums on the planet, like Dharavi? If inclined, please search “COVID Dharavi American thinker” for an interesting article from many months ago. How and why are they so much more successful than, say, the UK, which is in a much better position to enforce all measures?
That their death is so much less it requires another explanation entirely should, in my view, be obvious to all.
And in central Africa, the numbers are yet another order of magnitude lower.
Uganda, with a population of 46 million, reports 328 deaths from COVID-19 as of mid-February, 2021. That is one person in 140,000. America, to be clear, is, at the 500,000 supposed deaths mark, at 1 death per 660 Americans. Our death rate is 212 times higher.
Ghana, with a population of 31 million, reports 505 deaths.
The DRC, with a population of 91 million, reports 690 deaths.
To be clear, the disease APPEARED. It showed up. But very few people died, even though most experts expected the disease to run through their crowded cities like wildfire. Yes, the governments banned most mass gatherings, restricted travel, did “awareness” campaigns, but none of this was exceptional, and most of these people are very poor, and unable to stay home and wait indefinitely. We can assume most of them were out and about continuously through all of this. The lockdowns and waiting at home are options only possible in extremely wealthy (compared to most of the world) nations.
So, if you don’t know this, WHY don’t you know this? Is this not a reasonable question?
A big part of the answer appears to be the use of anti-malarial and anti-parasitic drugs, specifically Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine. You may have opinions on the latter, but if you are unfamiliar with the details of the Surgisphere/Lancet scandal, what you think you know is probably inaccurate, or at least severely incomplete.
I will discuss those in a future email.
I will note that India has made zinc supplementation a key part of its response as well. This is an OBVIOUS remedy, and as I say it is inexplicable that we are keeping children out of school, isolating further already isolated elderly, and in many cases effectively putting people on house arrest, all without making even a token effort to issue guidance on obvious and safe palliatives.
If 20% of Americans are Vitamin D deficient, then that is about 66 million of us. If 12% of us are zinc deficient, that is about 28 million of us. That is a lot of people to suffer from an easily corrected problem in the middle of a global pandemic. Pills are cheap. People just need to know to take them. If they were pushed with the diligence of mask wearing, compliance would be very good.
So please ponder all this, and please forward this email to anyone you feel may read and consider its contents. By all means research all the claims made here, and form your own independent and nuanced conclusions.