It Was All Wrong: Covidian Codswallop
Updated: May 23, 2021
Originally published in Medium on April 15, 2021 before being censored
I have to confess that while not being particularly prone to any demonstrated violent tendencies, I do feel a brief surge of aggression when “COVID obliviousness” is thrust upon me. Every time somebody intones ‘be safe’ I have to wonder what possible value this injunction is to anyone aspiring to live a normal life inevitably fraught with exhilaration more heady, I trust, than the alleged “kamikaze excess” of heading out in public without a Chinese face diaper on?
Let us delve into the hysteric, histrionic absurdity of the lacuna-riddled saga that has soiled our recent discourse. In a recent article entitled Gibberish, I collated the various appellations of aforesaid gibberish. It has occurred to me we are somehow “waiting” for someone to call this nonsense off.
Yet that person, or rather those people, are to be found not outside the window, but dauntingly, though, definitely in the mirror.
Everything we’ve been told was essentially all wrong!
We were ‘flattening the curve’
Since nobody knows how long this so-called ‘novel’ coronavirus has been around, but we have evidence of it as early as September 2019 and certainly December 2019, which curve were we flattening?
In other words, we were likely several curves in by the time our panic fiesta began in March 2020. And that means we should have already known or certainly knew relatively soon thereafter in hindsight that the planet wasn’t going to be engulfed in viral Armageddon.
All around us, life meandered along, beatifically normal. People crossed borders, hopped on airplanes, embraced loved ones, attended concerts and plays, and filled restaurants and bars. A stockpile of corpses did not ensue. Anyway, as “curves” go, over a year after our ‘March madness’ the curvature of our gullibility has been expanding exponentially.
Our Tests are Lucid and Credible
For reasons never explained, PCR tests, which were originally created for manufacturing processes, meant to detect via amplification, never to diagnose by eliminating other hypotheses, much less confirming ‘live’ viral strands, were shoved through a faux peer-review process that led to a protocol that the overseers of this editorial sham directly commercially benefitted by.
If not familiar with this, take a quick swig of the Corman-Drosten Review Report. This non-diagnostic test which did not even have the actual Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in a purified form and used the genomic markers of its predecessor (SARS) was not only rife with false positives but then was wantonly set around the world at amplification settings that had fruit and water samples testing positive for the virus.
Only in January after the “dread” Trump was excised from the political equation, did WHO finally clarify the below 30 amplification (Ct) settings that should have always applied and that same month, far too early for any actual or even hallucinogenic benefit from vaccines, COVID cases (positive tests) in the US and UK fell off a cliff and plummeted.
Lockdown is Sane as a Policy
Lockdown was a tardy Chinese panic spasm to contain, we take it, the Wuhan outbreak. It is only mildly sane as a short, sharp intervention. It is a penal concept unprecedented in public health prescriptions essentially from the Middle Ages until last year. It suffers from only a “few” quintessential issues.
We locked up the sick with the most vulnerable in health care facilities creating super-spreader environments that led to roughly 45% of the ascribed C-19 fatalities globally.
Most of the other transmission happened indoors in home environments precisely where we had locked people down.
Locking people down only delays the eventual experience of future transmission and allows the virus time to mutate.
When it became clear this virus is only really lethal above 65 and for people with very serious preconditions, we redefined insanity by ignoring everything we knew about immunity, virology, epidemiology, transmissibility, public health, by not allowing the “not at risk” and young in particular (close to zero risk) to develop natural immunity and bring the pandemic to endemic manageability.
There are virtually no credible instances of outdoor transmission. Vitamin D enriched sunshine kills viruses and oxygen-rich air is germicidal.
More than 30 studies have demonstrated on actual statistics no positive mortality benefit between regimes that did or did not lockdown. In fact, the Oxford Stringency Index found an inverse relationship between how zealously lockdown was inflicted and recovery and health benefit.
Yet despite all this shriekingly self-evident insight, we pathetically and manically keep locking down, continuing to destroy societies, economies, livelihoods, and lives with appalling, fact-free disregard.
Infection Fatality Rate (IFR)
The relevant measure of lethality is the ‘Infection Fatality Rate’ or IFR. When seroprevalence studies worldwide demonstrated that many more people had been infected than we realized, based on the presence of antibodies and other indicators, then we knew IFR was somewhere between 0.3% to 0.12% (much more likely in the neighborhood of the latter). Possibly even less because we are unsure of how long this has been circulating and how far and wide it has rampaged because most people don’t even know they have been infected (global recovery rate ranges from 99% below 70 years of age, 95% above 70 with preexisting conditions) and the symptoms are, anyway, indistinguishable from other respiratory illnesses.
When that band of IFR was clarified and repeatedly demonstrated, the whole carnival should have been called off because that is not far off from seasonal flu in a bad year. Similar IFR findings from Stanford have reemerged just recently, adding insult to injury to our indoctrinated docility.
It’s an Emergency!
You cannot have a multi-year “emergency” in the sense that legal doctrine has ever provided for as a way to supersede debate and deliberation or to suspend rights indefinitely. Emergency suggests something “emerging” perhaps not yet known or understood. But past that point, we pivot. No such invasion or intrusion into personal autonomy was even approximated during World Wars, or post crippling acts of terrorism.
Societies still flourished in the midst of the truly catastrophic Spanish Flu and made impressive strides when navigating the at least comparable challenges of the Asian and Hong Kong Flus (far less populous planet and those pathogens did not track normal mortality as the current one does but also attacked the young).
There is nothing new or particularly “emerging” re COVID and no aspect of it merits the parade of fascistic authoritarianism so disgustingly on display in too many parts of the globe.
When did we ever conclude that ‘free societies’ should cease being free because our courage and human values are somehow secondary to bloviating about a viral strain that had a less than 3% effect on global mortality in 2020 even if you allowed for all the statistical froth from evidently “incentivized” C-19 recording regimes and therefore a legion of dubious death certificates?
Asymptomatic Spread
More tommyrot. While there have been some spurious studies claiming this, they all either were found to be vapid, untrue, or unable to produce this “asymptomatic” person.
We are all asymptomatically warehousing all kinds of viral and bacterial interlopers. So what? We have immune systems for this purpose.
Delving a little deeper, on April 8th, even the NY Times confessed that the CDC confessed what scientists have been saying for some time, the chances of catching C-19 off a contaminated surface are nil to none (a less than one in 10,000 chance).
Okay, so these asymptomatic zombies can’t get us that way. How else? Well, other than the timeless airborne route which has nothing directly to do with them, they have to be in close proximity, hack on you, be in sustained contact. And if they do? Well, you have a 95% to 99.6% chance of recovery (for the vast majority, the latter), even if you manage to get so infected from human contact. So, keep a little distance?
But without symptoms, it’s a fantasy anyway, so say numerous studies, so said Fauci himself before being bedeviled by the intoxicants of unaccountable fame. But if it still weren’t, my gosh, we “might” if hugging someone who hacked on us for several sustained minutes, play temporary host to something we have a 95% (above 75) to 99.6% chance of recovering from. To avoid that “possibility”, however incredulous you have to be to entertain it, we concluded it was clearly far more feasible, sane, humane, and measured to stop life as we know it, indefinitely?
Oh yes, follow the “science!”
There comes a point where Obi-Wan Kenobi’s question seems more apt,
“Who is the greater fool, the fool or the fool who follows him?”
Self-Serving Public Health vs Evolution
We humans have “evolved” (though our rational performance over the last year does throw “evolution” into serious question) with viruses and bacteria for billions of years, our immune systems engage with them, viral strains become milder so we can survive, and they can perpetuate. We produce antibodies that can, by and large, keep pace with their mutations… unless… Unless some mendacious morons decide their medical sophistry should hold sway, and trump cycles of demonstrated naturally acquired immunity, bolstered by vaccination (proper vaccines, properly tested) when needed.
If you are told suddenly, “absence of symptoms” still means you should be manically tested and retested by tests that are not diagnostic or accurate, and based on that life should grind to a halt, because some “expert class” from jurisdictions that are either sealed off police states (New Zealand and numerous parts of Australia) or have the worst COVID results on the planet (the US and Europe), believes they know more than what nature, medicine, and historical experience consistently testify to, what might a “natural” reaction be?
Yes, there truly are more things on heaven and earth than these quacks know of.
Decide which way to vote with your intentions and actions. Vote with the overwhelming consensus from Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and everywhere on the planet historically until 2020, including from WHO, or capitulate to those now gorging on the public purse, where opinions track funding like heat-seeking missiles, and where with no new science or studies, new “realities” are just sanctimoniously ordained.
Masquerade
Apparently, if you are on a panel with a sitting Governor who is enjoying a free society in their State and impressive C-19 results — far more so than the doctrinaire poster children on the coasts — and you are yourself one of the world’s leading medical experts, but you simply state, “children don’t need to wear masks,” as a subset of the medical conclusion that no one really needs to (but children are acutely at no risk, and demonstrably don’t pass on the virus to any appreciable degree), YouTube takes it upon itself to “save” the world from your medical opinion because “someone” has decided “the truth?” And that’s somehow not beyond Orwellian?
Dentists still exist. They have been working on open-mouthed patients throughout. There must surely be an outbreak spike in that profession worldwide? How about post-Super Bowl? How about after New Year in Wuhan? How about after religious festivals in Asia? How about in Africa, period? Why is Sweden not an open grave compared to the rest of Europe? Or Texas compared to Michigan? That they aren’t, simply and unambiguously means masks don’t work. We’re just fetishizing a pagan religion.
And we know they don’t work in that surgeons say they would never be allowed to operate having a virus even with a surgical mask. The particles are too small, the non-respiratory masks have openings to the face, the eyes are exposed, they get quickly damp, they collect all kinds of contaminants, they impair airflow, and when you have idiots alone in their car wearing them, or romping on a beach choking off their air supply and casting malevolent glares at sane people breathing deeply, we can see we are not nearly as far removed from superstition and incantations and witch’s brews as we would like to think.
And this is clung to, desperately, anti-science and anti-clear data as it is, because it is a tangible tether, a derivative of the garbage evangel, that final desperate, clutching to the means by which consent is manufactured and gullibility manipulated, and perpetual fear contrived.
Casedemic and “Excess Deaths”
One of the silliest distractions of this unspooling tragedy has been the addiction to “cases” (really “positive tests” posing as “cases”) and yelping every time there is an uptick, without consulting the mortality figures, which are all that matter.
And, as indicated, even mortality numbers can be misleading. Just yesterday, the UK official mortality figures conceded that roughly a quarter of UK COVID linked deaths were not “from COVID” as a primary cause of death, but just with a positive test listed on the death certificate.
India is a prime example of huge numbers of so-called “cases” (positive tests) and one of the mildest mortality stats in the world. Therefore, why does everyone, including the Indian government, keep hyperventilating as if there were an actual “crisis?”
Around 27,000 people die in India from all causes every day. So, if you have 800 “ascribed” deaths (with who knows how many contributing comorbidities), then as one commentator said,
“people reporting on COVID deaths in the media have forgotten that in the arithmetic of fractions there is a thing called the denominator which exists for a reason: to provide a sense of context.”
Spewing panic because C-19 “may” be part of 3% of daily deaths on one of the largest “surge” days is silly.
With 150,000 COVID ascribed deaths in India in 2020, that’s about six days of additional deaths or 1.5%. Far from a raging pandemic in a country in which air pollution and diarrhea kill more. It’s unfortunate, but this is nothing close to the 20 million lost in India over the Spanish Flu when the population was also much less.
Beyond that, one billion people get infected with flu each year on the planet, 1 in 8 of those in India. On that basis, even the so-called “cases” wouldn’t cause much consternation.
The “panic” and disproportionate, life-destroying over-reactions, bringing people to the literal extremity of their options, that’s the crisis, the tragedy, certainly not this middling “pandemic.” Age-adjusted and population-adjusted mortality reveals the last time we had such excess deaths in the US takes us to around 2003, and in the UK, to around 2008…hardly “once in a century”, certainly nowhere near “unprecedented” and if the planet was paralyzed in either of those years, it was a paralysis of such ravishing grace and subtlety, that it evaded all our perceptions.
And a la the “casedemic” the mutants seem to spread faster, yet have no real effect on mortality, evidenced clearly from where they emanate and the results there. So, yet again, we have more mindless rending of garments detached from any meaningful impact.
The frigging planet cannot revolve around “breaking news” of an influenza strain and its family developments just because we’ve got a terrifying logo and have repeated the name so it “strikes terror.”
“I survived an earthquake, no problem. We rebuilt our town, we recovered. But no… not… the flu! Not “COVID”! Asked, “What’s so special about that?”
Consternation and disbelief,
“Are you crazy? It’s….COVID!”
And round and round we go, a merry go round of asserted imbecilities
Miseducation
European school systems are reporting that not much learning went on through “remote learning.” What a shock! Locked up in a domestic penitentiary, children know how to “game” a virtual learning environment. No interaction, accountability, standards, surges in depression, opioid use, mental and emotional confusion, life as a social disability, no capacity to communicate, no will to adventure.
And for what? All the jurisdictions that have kept schools open found they did not contribute to a surge, the children were not at risk, teachers were less at risk than in virtually any other work environment, so closures are completely “against the science.”
And by withholding education from societies, where it’s often school or marriage, or child labor, we have retarded life prospects and the potential for dignity and mobility in the most grotesque and inhuman way possible. If these are not “crimes against humanity,” I don’t know what are.
And where there are “functioning” schools, it is an outrage to have children physically separated, masked, confused, bewildered, perceiving everyone as a threat… over a chimera, over purely manufactured “optical” inducements for inflicting what is tantamount to emotional, cognitive and even physical abuse.
And every desperate search to justify this “abuse,” for some ratifying data, has floundered, flopped, and failed. And we are left with the debris. A wasteland of potential.
And what will even so-called “developed societies” do when these children are next up to exercise leadership or to govern, or to contribute, and instead only want to sit cowering before flashing screens, withdrawing more and more into this baffling private space, numb, insensate, unable to connect to anything that might energize or enliven them, or allow them to express the richness of their potential?
And who loses? Probably not the owners of Walmart and Amazon, but humanity does, we all do, anyone who wants more than box stores and take-out to be the pinnacle of their experience with civilization.
This is a sheer travesty and it is hard to overstate how our sniveling, terrified, desire to preserve our carcasses from a non-threat in relative terms, has completely abandoned the field and let down our children and our futures.
Buy them all the baubles, gift them with every gadget, whirl them around every theme park if you’re among those who can afford to, and you will still see underneath the frantic “amusement” the desolation and the inner void where aptitudes and capabilities and a Promethean spark once were. It can all be rekindled, but not by autopilot and not by lying to them about the horror and hubris they’ve lived through.
How Shall We Count the Ways?
It stops when we stop it. When we get up and say “Enough, this garbage is over.” We can’t possibly believe this is credible. A further quick litany:
Collateral damage and deaths will multiply as we march. By deferring so many treatments and so much healthcare, we decided which lives matter and whose illnesses get attended, and those with truly serious health needs were just largely out of luck.
Businesses destroyed and economies laid to waste, because data-free, governments are entitled to tell you which business is “essential” and who gets to earn a living and how, including where and when they can worship, interact and congregate.
Vaccine passports, apartheid, segregation, over experimental treatments that are still only on “emergency” (there’s the word again) “authorization” which means they are not tested, which means we are part of “human trials” because of what terrifying emergency? Wait for it again. Oh, that flu that 99%+ recover from! Definitely worth experimenting on ourselves for that. But it’s okay because we call it a “vaccine” when it’s a prophylactic drug treatment that only “tested” symptom suppression.
Compare highly “vaccinated” countries and those that have minimal “jabs” and you’ll see they do at least as well, and in some cases, if using Ivermectin and other successful, cheap treatments, far better. And we don’t know the symptom suppression even lasts, so we’ll have to keep doing it. A few more variants and another “experimental” treatment will be needed. And we are already seeing people getting reinfected and adverse effects galore. Yeah! We did it! The apex of science.
As Dr. Carvallo from Argentina summed up so compellingly:
“Ivermectin is not approved because you cannot buy a yacht with its dividends.”
So, not the apex of science at all, actually that was the “unsexy” but definite progress we made in eradicating things that could be, like polio, or at least substantially routed, like TB.
We Blew it Again
Peter Hitchens bemoaned what we lost as 1914 and its ethos slipped away into the degrading and arguably unnecessary destruction of World War I. He channels architecture, celebrating the Central Station of Antwerp with its opulent grandeur and inescapable charm; the mansions of Moscow which as he says make you
“weep at a world so irrecoverably lost amid Soviet new barbarism and Oligarch’s Baroque.”
He salutes Catalan geniuses like Gaudi and Montaner, wondering what a century we might have had if their vision had endured and generated its successors? Well, these ancient, well-ordered cities had nestled within them statesmen who planned war, and in that came the unraveling of the very civilization they served.
And if we hadn’t turned to that war, and thereby planted the seeds for National Socialism and the Soviet Union, and the secular worship of material progress — aesthetic and art be damned — how might we have unfurled, how might the balance of the 20th century have unfolded?
And looking back at this current mad, sad inflection point, people will wonder. What happened? What imploded? What paradigmatic cul-de-sac did we arrive at? Did it all become so meaningless that uber-wealthy, emotional adolescents, played a witless, vain game with global consequences?
Was the game to create a precedent of terror, that if we could hook the “climate crisis” or something else to it subsequently, the wounds from COVID would have us give our “masters” the wherewithal to reorder society accordingly? We can but conjecture. All asserted mass utopias become despotic. Whatever the reason, we have again committed suicide.
At least after World War I there were still thriving train stations and not only Antwerp but Grand Central and more could allow for a flow of ideas and hopes and people. If now, our spineless fascination with “non-death,” with biologically adding a few more constricted years past lifespan (which is the only really vulnerable population for COVID), is our end in mind, is worth throwing it all away for, then we will have another extended shriveling of civilization.
And the only war we will have failed to wage and win this time, is for human minds and hearts, in service to liberty, rallying to defend and advance grander aims than “non-death.”
We either embolden those hearts and minds and galvanize them, and focus them on both our heritage and future, and the joy and consequence of being alive and present, or else our half-assed and anti-human “pandemic response” will have pulled off what no “pandemic” possibly could.