You may be wondering when I ever was awarded a medical degree entitling me to comment on the doctors' area of expertise.Â
You may be wondering when I ever was awarded a medical degree entitling me to comment on the doctors' area of expertise. On the other hand closing down society is not a decision the medical profession or the state is entitled or, apparently, remotely qualified to take.
I will let people who have medically related qualifications speak for me on the idea that corona-virus, whilst serious as an illness that facilitates lethal pneumonia in immune compromised people, isn't of itself a major killer, in the two Lew Rockwell links below. (Lew Rockwell is associated with the Libertarian Mises Institute in the States and sends a daily free email with non Mainstream Media (MSM) information. If interested see; www.lewrockwell.com.)
I have been asked whether I think this virus is some kind of bio-weapon or a release of a natural virus from a Deep State installation in China or the States. I imagine there are enough psychopaths, sociopaths and plain idiots in either superpower's Deep State, and indeed in our own, who might contemplate, or fail to prevent, such a thing. A fierce propaganda war has indeed started up on this subject. But I am going with the assumption that people like Bill Gates, CDC, Big Pharma, WHO and elected and unelected would be power grabbers worldwide are opportunisticly piggybacking on a natural outbreak, working with the MSM to panic the population into accepting their dystopian agendas. Those agendas are wholly inconsistent with human flourishing, which is mostly what I care about (and, no, I don't know why I that is so).Â
Bill Gates let the cat out of the bag in a TED talk comment, which has subsequently been edited out. He wants a world where you can't basically have a life unless you have a certificate from the powers that be that you have a politically correct disease status, possibly a compulsory vaccination. (And why stop there, why not add other conditions to your permit to have a life?) However profitable for the pharmaceutical industry component of the Healthcare State, such vaccinations could well be worse than useless. Corona virus of itself kills so few that more people would be maimed or killed by the inevitable side effects of vaccination, especially with hastily introduced, compulsory vaccines. Corona virus basically kills immune-compromised people. Vaccinations work by stimulating the body's immune system to be prepared for the eventual real infection. I understand that immune compromised people therefore cannot react to vaccinations properly and may be killed by them.
Couple more points. I have put my intellectual eggs in the basket of this being a manufactured mass hysteria about an admittedly serious illness which puts great stress on healthcare services but doesn't of itself kill many people. I am assuming (a key assumption which many do not share, yet) that the toll in terms of suffering, economic loss and death caused by compulsory house arrest and worklessness will be much greater than that from the latest corona virus variant within a very few months. The traditional approach of protecting the vulnerable and letting life go on interrupted would surely have been better.
Now let's assume that I am wrong and corona virus is a serious threat to a significant percentage of the healthy population. What then? Well the lock-down would still be the wrong solution because however long it lasted, the virus would come back anyway. Governments could try repeated lock-downs, but that would rather resemble Einstein's definition of insanity - doing stuff that didn't work last time again. Just like insane money printing - a topic for another post. Or they could admit the original lock-down was a mistake?
This panic has been fuelled using classic propaganda techniques. Instead of real information - actual numbers, who is dying, of what, and why - anecdotal appeals to emotion are used, and repeated assertions of falsehoods or false implications made. As the story matures and people realise healthy people are not in danger, public panic and support for ill conceived coercive measures weakens. So you get stories about how (a very few) apparently young healthy people are also dying, just to keep public anxiety and interest high. Obviously it is sad. But often background information, almost never provided by the MSM shows that some of the dead had other conditions - severe anorexia, clinical obesity, in the case recent immigrants in New York and Italy latent TB kick started by corona virus. In others sheer exhaustion, or critical dietary deficiencies, especially zinc (corona virus symptoms being, I understand, pretty similar to zinc deficiency) may be involved.
Now on to the Italians and the linked video from Bergamo. The following information I think appears in the linked articles (if not I read it somewhere else, mea culpa): Italy has the fifth oldest population in the world. The median age of so called corona virus dead is around eighty years old. Just 1% of people believed to have died from it appeared to have had no other medical conditions (not counting 'old age'). Half of them had three or more other medical conditions. At least until recently, just 12% of Italians who are supposed to have died of corona virus actually had that on the death as the cause of death so maybe these people died with corona virus but not from it. (Indeed how do we know they had the virus anyway - many were never tested?) I don't know when the Bergamo video dates from but until recently (mid March) in Italy and Britain overall deaths in the year to date were no higher than usual - even though the disease has been building, perhaps from as early as Christmas.  According to the models it should have generated far more cases globally than reported. Presumably nearly all cases were relatively benign and so unnoticed - or the models are wrong. Italy also has a substantial population of recent darker skinned migrants. They cannot make enough vitamin D for their immune systems and may have latent TB which has been reintroduced from poorer countries. Such people account for many of the younger dead in Italy and - and especially when working in healthcare - may do so in the States, especially New York, and in Britain.Â
Lastly Italy and Britain have very centralised health systems, compared to Germany's for example which is decentralised, often privately operated and (therefore?) coping better. Their systems seem to be characterised by over-centralised decision making, lower levels of crisis capacity, for example shortages of ventilators (despite ample warning), and a continuing failure to use generalised testing properly to understand the true extent of the problem.   Â
So what do we see in the Bergamo video ? By the way when an American TV network wanted to depict the seriousness of the situation in New York they showed a video from Italy, possibly this one, which is somewhat cavalier to say the least. Well we see lots of clearly motivated, overworked and upset medics in a hospital right in the middle of the most affected area of Italy. That the people in the film are in fact all suffering from corona virus, and are dying from it, is implied, I think. We are not told whether hospitals in Italy in general are ever swamped by other illnesses. We are told this is the most modern hospital in the area. Are they being sent all the worst cases? The assertion is made that cases are going to ramp up to a terrifying degree.Â
If this is a recent video then it was followed quite quickly by a marked slowing not an explosive rise. If the video is several weeks old then the original question about why overall Italian death rates overall were then unchanged from last year is relevant. We are told that half the people admitted recover and half die. I am sure the poor doctor did not mean to imply a Case Fatality Rate (CFR) of 50% but one could understand both the journalist and the public panicking. The assertion is made that there is no cure. To the virus maybe not, but to bacterial pneumonia it seems to trigger I understand there are. Are the doctors in the video employing them to treat these poor people?