“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.