Author: White Whale

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” H.L. Mencken.

Here is an interesting statistic: if the United States had the same death rate from COVID-19 as that reported in India—about 1 person in 8,666—then the death toll from this pandemic would now stand at about 38,000, which is an average flu year, rather than the 550,000 or so it stands at right now.

Our death rate is well more than TEN TIMES that of a nation characterized by mass poverty, extreme population density nearly everywhere, and an utter inability to properly do most of the things Anthony Fauci says are necessary without mass starvation.

Whose response, based on the numbers, do you think is more intelligent?

Assume for a moment they are underreporting by HALF. We can be quite sure, since they are not stacking bodies in the streets–something we would be reading about, believe me–that there is no mass death, and it is quite reasonable to assume their rate is much lower than ours, even if precise numbers are impossible to come by.

The country is filled with malnourished, crowded slums lacking basic sanitation. Why is their rate not twice our own? We are rich and well fed, with mostly uncrowded homes and plenty of space.

This same pattern holds in a number of similar countries, such as neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh.

You may reasonably ask “what are they doing differently”? The answer is I’m not sure, but most likely the liberal and early use of zinc and Vitamin D supplementation—which were known a year ago to be key determinants in outcomes—as well as the medicines Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. India makes about 70% of the world’s supply of the former. Some there also claim that their much higher intake of vegetables plays a role, particularly cabbage and cucumber.

Here is one article that is relevant and in my view useful: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/what_made_asias_largest_slum_a_success_model_for_treating_covid19_comments.html

What is CERTAIN is that we are not learning anything from them, or trying to.  These gaps in death are not being reported or remarked on.  All of our lives have been slowed down or even put on hold.  Why is the media not looking for solutions, rather than reasons to continue all this abusive tyranny?

They seem to be doing a lot of experimenting and sticking to what works. If you look up Ivermectin studies, for example, they were most likely done by Indian or Bangladeshi doctors. Ivermectin seemingly makes short work of SARS-CoV-2 viruses in a Petri dish. We think we know this much.

Put another way, they are deploying FREEDOM to fight this pandemic responsively, intelligently, locally and effectively. In the “land of the free, and the home of the brave”, meanwhile, we have become compliant, frightened creatures attached to hitching posts of dogmatism, inflexibility, and obviously very bad policy, some specifics of which I would like to explicate.

The author is an intelligent, frustrated person attempting quixotically to play the role of Sunday afternoon quarterback from the sidelines.

The key elements of the response in the United States, and much of the world, which in no small measure looked to us for leadership, have more or less been a focus on 1) delay (another word might be prolongation), and 2) vaccines.

Do you remember the role masks played in the “two weeks to flatten the curve?” Can you remember back that far, in this past benighted year?

Masks were going to protect our medical capacity, and buy time to get more ventilators into our hospitals.  As you no doubt know by now, other than perhaps a few boroughs in New York for a few weeks–following Cuomo’s indefensible readmission of known COVID cases to nursing homes, which amounted to mass murder–no hospital chain in America was EVER taxed beyond its capacity.  No one I read about died for lack of a hospital bed, although a lot of people died both with and without being put on ventilators.

We never became Italy for the simple reason that we are not Italy.  We have a much better medical system in all respects, and self evidently a year later the risk of overwhelming hospitals is non-existent.

But somehow the two weeks became two months, and for all the “experts” can say, may become two years. Many Americans, having numbed themselves to being told what to do, meekly accept whatever the “latest” is.

The point in all this is that masks are meant to delay the illness, to slow it, but that nothing that SLOWS can ever be argued to END anything. On the contrary, obviously, delaying means dragging out, and that is precisely what has happened.

And masks themselves are not without negative health consequences. One is that a generation of children is losing the ability to interact with other open faces–even when in school, which many of them are not. The social and developmental cost of this is unknown and unknowable, but perhaps very high. Certainly, fear is burrowing deeply into many of them.

And many of us adults miss seeing smiles. I have met a number of people whose actual faces are a mystery to me. There is a psychological cost to this. It is a bit depressing. It increases the already abundant sense of social isolation. We are not meant to live like that, in my view.

And in terms of physical health consequences, masks seem to induce mouth breathing in many people, and mouth breathing creates dry mouths, and dry mouths create cavities and other dental problems, which in turn increase overall mortality, sometimes sharply.  They also reportedly increase oral yeast infections, acne, and cold sores.

And most of these consequences seem unnecessary: if we had the same death rate as Sweden—which never mandated masks in most public places, and where mask wearing compliance was, I read, quite low—then we would have about 400,000 deaths, as of mid-March, 2021, which is around 25% less than what we in fact have, according to the official numbers. 

Few masks, and better outcomes.

And it is worth noting that it has been known for nearly 200 years that pandemics come in demographic waves that look like Bell Curves. 1 case becomes 2 cases becomes 3, then 5, then 3, then 2 then 1 then it is gone. All pandemics end. This is called Farr’s Law.

Sweden has seemingly traversed its latest curve, and shows every sign of having ended the second wave of this pandemic naturally. They had almost no death in August, September and October, and I expect that death rate to go close to zero for some time in the future (look up “COVID Dashboard WHO Sweden”, then scroll to the death graph to see what Farr’s Law sorts of Bell Curves look like.)

The best explanation—no doubt among some competing ideas—is that pandemics end when we achieve that much discussed condition “Herd Immunity”.

The Big Idea in America, as it has evolved, is that of course we need Herd Immunity, but that doing so naturally, by letting the disease run its course, would involve catastrophic amounts of death, so we need to delay with lockdowns and masks, then create what I call Induced Herd Immunity through mass vaccination.

This is not illogical on the face of it, but ignores two LARGE problems: 1) Lockdowns kill people; and 2) vaccines are not necessary for most people, and there is some unknown but non-zero chance that the vaccines may be more dangerous than the disease over the long term, especially among the young.

With respect to the first point, Stanford Professor of Medicine Jay Bhattacharya recently told Newsweek that the lockdowns were and remain the “biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made…The harm to people is catastrophic.” (Look up Bhattacharya Newsweek and perhaps COVID)

Stress kills, and it is plausible and empirically consistent with past findings to suppose that overall mortality rates spike sharply when unemployment goes up. One number cited in the movie “The Big Short”, and more or less later validated as at least likely in the neighborhood of correct, and certainly defensible, by the BBC, says that in the United States 40,000 more people die a year for every ONE POINT increase in unemployment. A five point increase, then, is 200,000 people a year, for as many years as that increase holds. A three year, 5 point increase would, using this math, kill more people than have thus far died of COVID.

DECREASING unemployment, conversely, LOWERS the death rates, which were presumably relatively low last February, when we had a record economy.

And in poorer countries, hunger and even starvation have become present realities. We are not being told—and I cannot find statistics related to—how many people are dying of hunger in the developing world right now, but I will recall for you that the Nobel Prize last fall went to the UN World Food Programs.

The list of consequences is long, but includes missed vaccinations, missed cancer screenings, and all mental health related illnesses and deaths, including drug overdose (up by a third) and suicide.

Lockdowns create misery, at least among the poor who lose their ability to earn a living. 

This point is not debatable.

And the point being discussed is that of saving lives. It can and has been claimed by qualified people that the true death rate among those exposed to this disease is .05%, or 2 deaths out of two thousand people exposed, among those under 70 (look up “just 0.05% of healthy daily mail”).

And the death rate is not a law of physics. It is affected by public health policy. As noted, the death rate in India is reportedly a tenth of our own. Effective mitigating measures exist. Good medicines exist which have past histories of safety.

And I have been arguing for some time that there is NO REASON that in a country as wealthy as the United States, with as robust an “information distribution” system as we have, that ONE PERSON in the country should suffer from what I call “nutritional immunodeficiency”, which is to say a lack in, at least, Vitamin D or zinc. Deficiencies in both were known A YEAR AGO to lead to worse health outcomes. It can even be argued that almost no one who is sufficient in both will wind up in the hospital.

Yet both deficiencies are relatively common. One or the other likely affects at least 1 in 5 of us, or some 66 million Americans, and are particularly common among the elderly.

The campaign would be simple: “take two pills a day, no more, no less, and do your part to get America healthy again”. If people can be talked into double masking—or for that matter single masking–they can take two pills. And that campaign would reduce ALL deaths from infectious diseases, and no doubt result in a lot less sick days. And some economist could put a number to it.

And this leads directly to the role of vaccines. I am not, to use the current term used to denigrate those asking reasonable questions, an “anti-vaxxer”. Vaccines clearly play a role in public health. The elimination globally of smallpox was one of the great public health triumphs of the modern era, as have been the near total elimination in the United States of diseases like Mumps, Measles and Rubella, among others.

But logically, THERE IS NO WAY TO KNOW THE TWO YEAR EFFECT OF A VACCINE WHICH HAS ONLY BEEN IN EXISTENCE SIX MONTHS.

Prior to being deployed on a large scale—and outside of childhood vaccinations, nothing on the scale of these COVID vaccines has ever been attempted—all vaccines historically have been tested AT A MINIMUM for two years. That is my understanding. We can’t know what we don’t know. All medical interventions can cause unpredictable effects, and everyone knows this.

Has there been testing? Of course. Has there been as much testing as possible, given the time constraints? I have no reason to doubt it.

Is there a way to compress two years into six months? No. Definitely not.

I am not old enough to remember the Thalidomide babies, but I have read about them. Look this up. Billy Joel mentions them in his song “We didn’t start the fire”. The issue was that these sleeping and morning sickness pills were not sufficiently tested. There were no Thalidomide babies in the United States because the FDA blocked this drug from importation.

It is absolutely, 100% possible that these vaccines are completely safe. This is one of the possible outcomes.

Yet, the whole thing amounts to a global Beta test, to use the term used in software engineering. What testing could be done has been done, but there is considerable uncertainty, necessarily, and no honest person can deny it.

And by law pharmaceutical companies cannot be sued for adverse vaccine effects, or so I understand. Many years ago they talked Congress into exempting them from direct lawsuits. This makes some sense: there is a public health interest in general vaccine use, and there is little profit in manufacturing them. Given a large enough population some bad effects are inevitable, and if the companies then have to answer financially for effects they cannot predict or prevent, then they will stop making the vaccines. Even the most cynical among us can find some logic in this.

But the flip side is that it eliminates the financial need for utmost caution and care. You can sue for damages, but you have to go to a special vaccine court, and the damages paid are paid by the United States government, which is to say the taxpayers. That is my understanding, and this arrangement applies to all vaccines.

And the reality is that according to the WHO’s own statistics, as I read them a year or two ago, about one child in a million dies or suffers permanent injury from most of the major mandatory vaccines. That is not much, but it is not zero. Vaccinations often cause temporary inflammation, and sometimes—not often–it does a lot of damage.

[Interestingly, I just looked it up and that page is currently missing from their website. Perhaps you can find those numbers, if interested. In the meantime, feel free to doubt my claim, which is based on memory. I was a bit surprised even then to find anyone putting harm numbers to vaccines, and am not shocked to find them seemingly scrubbed now. They are non-zero, and no honest or legally liable person can or will claim otherwise in any court, in my view.]

In my understanding, Messenger RNA is also a technology relatively new to this purpose. At least one Pfizer executive was quoted as stating that infertility in women was a possible effect of these vaccines. If you look up “snopes vaccine pfizer” (as of March 13, 2021) you will find an article stating that no, he didn’t say it would CERTAINLY cause infertility, but that it COULD, and that he was not head of research, but rather was at one time Vice President and Chief Scientist for Allergy and Respiratory.

Form your own conclusions from this.

But if the death rate is 1) low; 2) affected strongly by simple and relatively safe medical interventions; and 3) the long term effects of these vaccines are unknown and unknowable—why would we place our whole reliance on them? And how could any morally sane person make them MANDATORY?

Please look up the Great Barrington Declaration. It was written by three people at least as qualified as Anthony Fauci, who are professors in relevant fields at Oxford (I mistakenly said Cambridge in past emails), Harvard and Stanford. It calls for full reopening, now, while focusing on the protection of the elderly.

In my understanding they are not anti-vaccine, but for the reasons I have articulated here, I believe they also would argue that mass mandatory vaccination is neither necessary nor desirable, and that decisions should optimally be age dependent. Vaccines by far make the most sense for the elderly, who are most vulnerable. Vaccination would be a logical part of what they term Focused Protection.

We live in an extraordinarily odd time. The United States should be a leader in innovation and effectiveness. Instead, we seem to have led most of the world down a rabbit hole of untested crackpot theories whose essential fatuousness and failure have been obvious for most of the past year to anyone paying attention.

That is my view, at any rate, and I am entitled to it. That is a form of entitlement which our military has fought and died to defend. For the time being, anyway, this is a free country, and my right to dissent—to offer alternative opinions to those being pushed, making the world more diverse in what I hope is a useful way–is legally protected.

Please consider what is said here carefully. Please do your own research—I am passionate about all this, but am ultimately merely an intelligent amateur and I do make mistakes (like everyone, and I mean everyone, else)—and please forward this email to anyone you feel may read and benefit from it.

I would like to offer my take, having just watched last weekend the Lawrence Olivier version, reading along–and a bit further than their treatment permitted, as it left out a lot of dialogue, and all of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern.

If people “know” nothing else about Hamlet, they have heard he is indecisive.  He can’t make up his mind.  He spends a lot of time hand-wringing.

I disagree strongly with this.  He showed his courage when he was willing to fight his comrades to follow the King’s ghost.  And he is obviously very, very intelligent.  His dialogue makes this extremely obvious.

What I would like to suggest–and I suspect this must have been said by someone somewhere, as commented on as this play has been for hundreds of years–is that this is a sort of Prodigal Son story, one in which Hamlet leaves the world he had known, but eventually comes back.

I don’t think the issue is that he fears to kill his uncle, or that he fears his own death, particularly.  Obviously, he contemplates suicide at the outset, and again in the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy.

I think his issue is an Existential crisis, in which he doubts everything and everyone.  Revenging his father only makes sense within a world which makes sense.  It is only justice in a world where justice is the rule.  It only makes a difference if the world as it should be is protected, or the world as it ought not to be is corrected.

But what if nobody deserves justice?  What if the world is fallen, and everything and everyone a cruel lie?  Why participate in this farce?  His mother betrayed him, Ophelia lacks his wit and his trust, and even his old friends R&C are playing games with him, dimwittedly.

And there is some pretty clear misogyny here.  In the film version, he attacks both his mother and Ophelia, and of course utters the famous line “frailty thy name is woman.”

And it has no doubt been often remarked on–I am utterly unfamiliar with Shakespearan scholarship–that there are parallel stories between Hamlet and Ophelia.  Both lose their fathers to murder.  But Hamlet feigns madness and only contemplates suicide.  Ophelia genuinely does go mad and does in fact commit suicide.  Such, we might suppose, was Shakespeare’s view on the differences between men and women.

I think it Horatio alone who–in his honesty, steadfastness, and loyalty–brings him back “into the world” as it were.  He brings the one who was a stranger back home.  He brings back some sense that moral sanity is possible and desirable.  That is why when Hamlet finally resolves to kill the king, he does not do so when he is at prayer.  His new world–which is his old world, with greater sad wisdom–has rules.

And remember that Horatio tries to kill himself when Hamlet is poisoned, and is prevented from doing so by Hamlet, who tells him his job is to tell his story.  Telling his story only makes sense in a morally unpoisoned world.

And Horatio of course treats Hamlet as the brief king, and honorable heir to the throne of Denmark that he was.  He died as part of lineage, as part of a social system, as part of a place and time and cultural ethos.

And at the risk of being politically fashionable, given the situation, it would not be hard to see Hamlet and Horatio as lovers, particularly given how betrayed by women (particularly by The Woman in most reasonable psychologies) Hamlet felt.

My two cents.  Don’t spend it all in one place.

I try and capture the essence of Communism from time to time in definitions I hope are vaguely Bierce-ish.

Communism is a creed designed to create permanent inequalities of wealth and power in the name of eliminating inequalities of wealth and power.

If you look at the HISTORY, that is quite accurate.  You know who has created a LOT of new billionaires in this whole COVID SNAFU?  China.  The largest nation on Earth supposedly dedicated to the elimination of private wealth.

We become addicted to things which never give us what we need.

I think this is a generally true statement.

The background is a conversation I had with a young woman in a bar the other night.  She said she had been with 300 men (give or take: I don’t think she keeps a logbook, so that may be on the low side) and has only had an orgasm ONCE (with a South African she remembered well).  It took her three months to have an orgasm with her current boyfriend, even though at first they were having sex 4x a day.

It’s all about attention, and the power of control–for a moment–through sexual attraction.

But at a minimum we all want an orgasm out of sex, and as an ideal emotional intimacy.

And drinking never gives me what I want.  Not really.  It always seems like it should, as does food, to which I also have a mild addiction, but it doesn’t.  I’m the same me, with the same feelings, and with a lethargy and sometimes mild nausea the next day.  Nothing changes.  I don’t grow.  The pain does not go away.

She shared her life story, and her behavior made sense to me.  Her life has been one of continual disappointment and betrayal.  So she likes the approximation of intimacy without the emotional risk.  “One and done”, she kept saying.   I get that.  I am wired a lot like that myself.

My work continues.  I am getting more flashes of something better.  They remain rare, but for most of my life there has been nothing but intellect and an abstract hope kept alive by force of will.

I have really been feeling the evil in the world today.  And it is becoming obvious to me that the evil, per se, is not new.  As one obvious example, I supported our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, even though we committed much evil.  We simply lie to ourselves about it.

And that is not a dig at our troops: they did what they were asked to do.  But if you REALLY ponder it, it is is a very strange thing that heavily armed men backed with unbelievable technology have been on the other side of the planet murdering men, women and children, the latter two by accident, but they are no less dead.

I could go on–I’m just trying to use ideas to give words to feelings– but what I am sitting here realizing is that the path to goodness lies through evil.  What I mean by this, is that anyone who allows an unconscious or semi-conscious blindness to endure in them MUST build perceptual walls around it, and those walls make them rigid.  Those walls have to be repaired, reinforced, and this breeds the habit of divided consciousness, and divided consciousness by its very nature can never perceive wholes and wholeness.

The feeling of wholeness, I think, is that of attack, when one is divided.  Being split apart is something unpleasant we understand readily, but the inverse holds true: coming together means feeling a split which HAD been unconscious.

But Goodness is existing in God.  God is an ocean of energy and feeling which is not and cannot be divided.  We live as thin fogs in the much thicker, more real fog and water of Life, writ large.

And evil exists.  This world is evil.  It depends on murder.  All life depends on murder.  Cows eat grass, and wolves eat cows.  Bacteria eat us, eventually.

To find your way home, you have to pass through this realization.

The more I think about this, the more absurd this whole vaccine thing seems to me.  It’s a global Beta test.  Yes, like software developers, they have done some testing, and ironed out some obvious problems.  But you cannot substitute time in this process.  The worst effects may take two years to START showing up, at which point it will be much much too late.

If this were the ONLY way to get out of all this, then the risk may be worth it.  But consider that every evidence is that if we eliminated zinc and Vitamin D deficiency this disease would also likely stop killing people, and we could reopen normally without overtly terrifying the many millions of cowards among us.  The dying would stop, then we reopen.  They can’t ask for more.

And compared the cost of the development, manufacture, distribution and end purchase of these vaccines, we could get 5 years worth of zinc and Vitamin D in the hands of every man, woman and child in America, and likely most of the planet.

Why then are we taking a risky, expensive approach without trying a very safe, very economical approach, particularly when the risky, expensive approach only works with one disease, and the safe, cheap approach works with ALL infectious diseases, as well–in the case of D–depression, osteoporosis, and other disorders.

Pick your conspiracy.  You can choose more than one.  But do not be a fool and attempt to rationalize this.  The best possible, least cynical, explanation is simple incompetence and thoughtlessness, and those are bad enough.

If you think about it, propaganda is a form of demagoguery.  It is abusing the sentiments and minds of ignorant people, in order to manipulate them towards selfish ends.

And this is not lessened by the fact of the patent self deception practiced so assiduously by so many acolytes of the left wing cult.  Those at the core are near-conscious, and I think in their ranks are many cynics who are open to their own corruption.

It’s an ugly mess, as I say in various ways on various days.

And I will add that right now the social propaganda being foisted on those who have lost all other sense of purpose is serving to undermine their sanity yet further, distance them yet further from the shores of their own culture and history; and drown yet more thoroughly their capacity for reason and principle, or return to anything approaching mental and emotional health.  All this, towards hellish ends.

I will comment that I listened to Hamlet last night.  My prose always gets a bit, oh, let’s call it lyrical, or dramatic, or overwrought, or perhaps vaguely comical in excess, when I listen to Shakespeare.  He warrants many readings.

I have ideas on Hamlet I may share soon.  I think I understand his dilemma quite well.

Texas and Mississippi recently reopened fully.  I think this is long overdue, but welcome.  Obviously, it is reasonable to suppose both cases and deaths will go up, perhaps by a lot, in the short term, but that the long term history of epidemics indicates that the numbers will drop reasonably quickly, and a stable condition achieved in which deaths drop rapidly, and largely end.  This is the prediction of Farr’s Law, which was described long before vaccines had been made reasonably reliable and generally available.

Here is the interesting thing: a think a LOT of people are afraid not that it will not work–that all the catastrophes Fauci keeps warning us about will happen–but rather that IT WILL WORK.

What sane person would not want a return to prosperity and normality?  The answer, obviously, is in the question.  None: that is the answer.

What I would like to propose is that what this pandemic has done is make a de facto virtue out of cowardice, and the cowards of the world HATE the idea that they might have to go back to freedom, to a larger palette of choices, and that the rest of us will not be stuck at home like them, like they CHOSE to do long before any of this happened.

And I think it goes even deeper than that.  This is a focal fear, a fear around which many fears cluster.  It is the fear which drives out other fears, and one which is manageable by very simple measures: you just wear your mask, socially distance, and yell at anyone who fails in doing these things.  Do those things and the world becomes safe, sane, manageable.

But this is ludicrous, is it not?  But ponder the background.  We are seeing already AI deployed for common uses.  We are seeing increasingly intelligent and capable robots.  We have it drilled into our head that there is a “climate crisis”, even though none of the predictions made have been accurate, and even though the science was never very good.  We have social division and collapse.  Our public culture is decaying–rather, faltering under relentless, maniacal and obsessive attack.

Everywhere you look, the thoughtful person sees danger and uncertainty.  It is hard to manage emotionally.  What I want to propose is that this pandemic makes this fear much easier for weak minded people to deal with.

And perhaps I should not even say weak minded.  This stuff really is objectively scary.  None of us can really know where all this is going, or feel much faith in the people who have secretly (really, not so secretly any more) appointed themselves our guardians and the custodians of our future.  Most of them seem to be amoral psychopaths who are quite willing to do unto us, but not themselves be affected in any way by the same things they are imposing.

And the longer you hide, the harder true awakening becomes.  You are behind, and the whole thing, taken as a single dose, is utterly overwhelming.  Part of the reason I write so much is to try and process all of this.

(I have, by the way, dozens of posts stored up, which I will make at some point; my own anxiety drives me to continual though).

But here is the question: WHEN we reopen, what then?  What will be left?  How can people who have suffered so much terror daily for a year now ever hope to return to the relative innocence of last year?

We have to do it, though.  Sometimes you have to tear the bandage off.  Each will deal with it in their own way.

I wonder every day if my destiny is to be murdered.  That may be the case.  And that frightens me.  But as I have no doubt said often, losing my soul frightens me much more.  I don’t really have a choice.  If I am to live the life God made for me, I have to do my best to be bold.

About one year ago this month, the music stopped.

This is more or less literally true: most music halls and concert venues closed, and have remained closed.  As Van Morrison and Eric Clapton, among others, have pointed out, a lasting and deep wound has been inflicted on those whose business is providing live music for cheering crowds.

Playgrounds became silent.  Parents were told their children could not play outside—that it was dangerous–and schools—being shuttered—had no screaming and laughing kids outside at recess any more.  This is no longer universally true, but all too accurate in far too many places.

Many museums in much of the world remain mothballed, and many will not have the resources to reopen, if and when allowed to.

We were told then, and are being told now, that it HAS to be this way.  There is no other option.  We are being told by the public face of this Big Idea, Anthony Fauci, that things may NEVER return to how they were in March, 2020.  We will never enjoy the same freedom again; never return to the high levels of optimism and prosperity we had then.

I ask: why?  Why not?  The fear of mass death?  I would like to explore that idea a bit more, and talk specifically in this email about two medicines in use pretty everywhere BUT the richest nations of the world.  I think the statistics show pretty clearly that none of this is necessary.  I will deal with vaccines and masks in a future email, but for now I would like to discuss Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine.

This email is sent by an intelligent person very concerned about current events, and very eager to return to the old normal as quickly as possible, something that is in my view easily in the realm of the possible at this very moment.  I am a student of history, and very concerned that whether this email is understood and acted on or not, that it is vital for the future history of this time that we describe it, NOW, as accurately as possible.  In the era of smart phones, the memory of most seems to not extent back much more than a couple of news cycles.

Here is a question: if I told you five years ago that in 2020 a highly infectious, dangerous disease was going to affect nearly every nation in the world, where would you assume the most mass death would be?  I would have guessed the slums in the largest, most densely populated cities of the world, places like Karachi, Dhaka, and Cairo.

Karachi has a population density of just over 24,000 people per square kilometer; Cairo about 19,000.; Dhaka 23,000.  Dharavi, a locality in Mumbai, India crams 277,000 people into each square kilometer of its area.  New York City, by comparison, is 27,000 per square kilometer, and is the most densely populated city we have.

The United States has one of the most advanced, best funded, and best organized healthcare systems in the world.  And we are very wealthy compared to India, Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Who should have more death?  Is it not obvious?

Here is the problem: NEW YORK CITY ALONE HAS MORE DEATHS THAN THE NATIONS OF PAKISTAN AND BANGLADESH PUT TOGETHER.  New York, on their official website, reports, as of March 1^st, 24,350 deaths with positive COVID-19 tests, and another 5,058 probable but not tested, for 29,408 total.

According to the WHO official COVID Dashboard (search WHO COVID Dashboard and input the country you are interested in) 8,408 people have died of COVID total in Bangladesh, and 12,860 in Pakistan.  Egypt reports 10,688.

New York City has a population of about 8 million.  If I divide that by 25,000 I get 320.  1 New Yorker out of every 320 has died of COVID.

Pakistan has a population of about 225 million.  Bangladesh 165 million.  Egypt 103 million.  493 million total.  Total deaths attributed to COVID-19 are about 32,000.  Divided out I get 15,406.  1 person out of every 15,406 in these nations has died of this “terrible” disease.  New York—one of the most prosperous cities on Earth—has a death rate fully 48 times that of poor nations which contain large slums which in many cases lack basic sanitation, clean water, and any ability to “social distance” whatever.

Is it possible the numbers are severely underreported?  Of course.  But by that much?  And if this disease were really the quasi-plague it has been made out to be, should they not be stacking bodies in the streets by now?  Do you really think that would go unreported, unremarked upon?

I cannot of course say for sure what is making the difference, but it is PLAUSIBLE and empirically defensible to say that some or much of the difference has to do with the different protocols these nations are using, specifically the early and liberal use of Hydroxychloroquine, and/or Ivermectin, often in tandem with zinc supplementation.

Without getting too far into the weeds, all these nations clearly made HCQ a key part of their responses.

And if you look up c19study dot com you will find a resource listing all of the studies and metanalyses showing that when given early and in reasonable doses HCQ appears to be very effective in combating COVID-19.  It is NOT effective when given late, which is to say when someone is already having trouble breathing to the point they enter the medical system.  Yet, this is the scenario which was used for nearly all the criticisms of this drug.

The data clearly seems to show that by the time someone NEEDS a doctor it may be too late for HCQ.    But if everyone takes HCQ when they know they have been exposed, or at first onset of symptoms, it seems to perform very well.

Now, if you have followed the media, you will likely be familiar with the claim—one repeated by Anthony Fauci—that HCQ causes heart arrhythmias.  This is, in my understanding, (do your own research) empirically unsupported, when this drug is used the way the data suggests it should be to deal with COVID-19.

This drug is an anti-malarial drug.  It is an improved version of quinine that was rolled out in 1955—66 years ago.  It is literally related to the tonic in tonic water.  Tonic water contains quinine and was a way for the British—particularly, in my understanding—to get their quinine while imbibing their nightly gin in the malaria ridden regions of their Empire.

In my understanding—and I am repeating what I read—HCQ has always been available by prescription only in the United States, because we don’t have malaria, and the other more or less off-label uses—arthritis and lupus—both benefit from the direct participation of a doctor.

But it is THOSE people—those taking HCQ regularly for years, under medical supervision—who suffered from the heart arrhythmias, or so I understand.  In most of the world HCQ is available over the counter, and is somewhere between vitamins and cold medicine in terms of how it is treated.  People in malarial regions make it a routine part of the lives, and have for many decades.  It has no doubt saved millions of lives over the years.

And here is what should make your jaw drop: right when COVID-19 hit, and Donald Trump was touting HCQ, and right when groups all around the world were beginning trials, a FAKE STUDY was pushed on the Lancet—before this scandal the most prestigious medical journal in the world, or so I am told—which caused most or all existing studies to be stopped, and the WHO to recommend against HCQ use.

Who would do such a thing?  Who would push fake data regarding a potentially potent cure or at least palliative, when doing so would cause much needless death, if a valid remedy could in fact have saved a great deal of life?

I will leave you to answer that question in your own way.  The company with the fake data—or perhaps to be more precise, the “unverifiable” data–was called Surgisphere.  I don’t think the obvious questions have been answered, or ever will be.

But is it not REASONABLE to assume that Egypt and Bangladesh and Pakistan and India (mentioned in a previous email), are doing something smart?  Looking at the numbers, you would assume they are the smart, efficient ones, and we are the bumbling clowns.

I will also mention another seemingly very good medicine, called Ivermectin.  It seems to directly short-circuit one of the mechanisms the virus uses to increase its ability to replicate, by preventing the virus from entering the cells.  So I read on Drugs dot com.

Please look this medicine up.  You will see little bad about it and much promise.

Here is my final point: when you have a medicine with few side effects and little danger, and a strong potential for good, as reported by licensed and credible doctors treating actual patients, there is every reason to try it, and no good, ethically defensible reason not to.  That is not a call for a two year double blind study.  It is a call for IMMEDIATE and WIDESPREAD use.  This point is obvious to all but the morally deranged.

Please consider what I have said, and forward this email as you see fit.  Most people don’t know most of this—it just occurred to me myself today to look up the nations around India, as well as Egypt—and THEY SHOULD.

I want music and live theater back, specifically, the sooner the better.  I am also tired of seeing the sad looks in all the servers I see when I go out for a meal or a drink.  They are suffering.  Billions of people are suffering, in their own ways, from all of this.

Please do your own digging.  Question all my claims.  Spend an hour validating or attempting to disprove everything claimed here.  I am not claiming to be an expert, merely a very concerned spectator watching what in my view is a completely unnecessary global calamity.