Covid Elephants in the Room

How things have changed! The Covid “room” was once filled with white coats and blue suits, all advocating for stringent measures to fight a novel coronavirus: compulsory masks, social distancing, house arrest, punitive fines, devastating lockdowns and mandatory vaccines to eliminate the perceived threat of mass infection. And there was always space for more politicians, medical officers, presumed “experts” and media personnel to convene, often unmasked and in close proximity to one another. No longer.

The Covid “room” now seems to have shrunk, having become almost too small to accommodate a growing herd of elephants. An elephant in the room is often sufficient to damage a consensus. But by my count, there are at least eight elephants in the room trumpeting their inconvenient truths, all jostling for space, gradually crowding the previous occupants into the corners.

Elephant 1: According to the World Health Organization, no friend of skeptics, the mean Covid infection fatality rate (IFR) seems close to statistically insignificant, rounding to a figure of 0.20 percent. As the paper concludes, “Most locations probably have an infection fatality rate less than 0.20 percent.” The figure is confirmed by the Yale BMJ survey, which concludes: “The IFR of Covid-19 in community-dwelling elderly people is lower than previously reported. Very low IFRs were confirmed in the youngest populations.” Indeed, “younger age strata had low IFR values (median 0.0027 percent).” Similar values have been reported on many other sites and exposés, demolishing the Big Lie marshalled to terrify a population into submission to the administrative state.

Covid-free, we think.

Elephant 2: It turns out that domestic pets, mainly cats and dogs—though I have met domesticated ferrets on leashes or poking their noses out of jacket pockets—are virus shedders. Over the last few years my wife and I have lived in different parts of Vancouver, which by my lights may be the most animal friendly city in the world. On our many walks and outings, we have met innumerable masked people strolling with their unmasked dogs—some wheeling their cats in baby carriages—exploding the fable they have been living by.

Admittedly, the consensus is that animals were first infected by humans and then transmitted the virus back, though the trajectory seems on the face of it rather hard to prove. Denmark slaughtered 17 million infected minks; should cat and dog lovers do the same to their cherished pets? Or should animals be masked and social-distanced? I suspect that would be a bridge too far for pet owners who have no compunction applying the same regime to themselves and their fellow humans. As my U.K. research colleague Martin Parker (to whom I owe the impetus for this article) points out, the animal reservoir alone puts paid to the fantasy of Covid-zero.

Elephant 3: Israel, which many regard as the vanguard and petri dish of escalating Covid policy. Over 80 percent and rising of the population have received the staple two shots and over half the population have received the third booster; yet Israel is experiencing a dramatic surge in cases and deaths. Many excuses have been offered for this failure: easing restrictions too early, insufficient interest among the Haredim and Muslim communities, not enough booster shots—the list goes on. But there is no doubt that vaccine effectiveness wanes within months (always assuming that the vaccines were truly effective to begin with). Indeed, the majority of internet sites and official venues do not even trouble themselves with alibis but herald a magnificent success. The vaccines work, even if they don’t.

Elephant 4: Sweden. The country did not lock down, did not require masking, did not close the schools, and allowed most businesses to remain open. Vaccines are available on a voluntary basis. Despite the lies and dire predictions of Sweden’s virtual destruction, the country has prospered relative to others; even the BBC has had to admit, grudgingly, that Sweden has fared better than other countries. As Jeffrey Tucker shows in Liberty or Lockdown, Sweden’s  comparatively favorable results came about “because it refused to violate human rights.” 

Looking for a way out.

Elephant 5: It is now known that natural immunity is a better option than vaccine immunity. Vaccinated people may pose as great or greater a risk to society via transmission as do the unvaccinated. A Johns Hopkins University study of July 31, 2021 states: Vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals have similar viral loads in communities with a high prevalence of the SARS-CoV-2 delta variant. Owing to robust natural immunity, people who recover from Covid are significantly less likely to transmit the virus than those who have submitted to the jab. The Lancet finds “no correlation between vaccine-induced neutralizing antibody levels and viral loads or the development of symptoms.” As Grant Brown explains in an important C2C essay, we cannot inject our way out of this pandemic.

Elephant 6: Vaccine Adverse Events. There is growing anxiety among accredited health professionals and ordinary people that the vaccines generate serious side-effects that equal or outweigh their putative benefits. Passive reporting sites like VAERS in the U.S. and Yellow Card in the U.K. do not tell the whole story, recording only a small fraction, perhaps as little as 1 percent, of vaccine-caused infirmities and deaths. The real count is much disputed but appears to be unacceptably high. An encyclopedic volume by Peter and Ginger Breggin, Covid-19 and the Global Predators, presents a list of official government and medical sources attesting to the hazard, which can be dismissed only at our peril.

Elephant 7: Social collapse. The virtual destruction of the global economy; the disruption of supply chains; the casting of untold millions into poverty and solitude; the irruption of stagflation; the dismantling of the middle class and the annihilation of small business, throwing hundreds of thousands into bankruptcy, accompanied by “the greatest upward wealth transfer in modern history”; the demolition of Charter and Constitution, including the suspension of due process, the right of assembly and freedom of worship; the censorship of information; the establishment of a health cartel determining what is permitted and what is forbidden; the shuttering of schools and sequestering of children, depriving them of their pivotal formative years and blighting their future development; the mounting number of “excess deaths” owing to stress, depression, suicide and prolonged deferment of critical medical procedures, arguably eclipsing the Covid morbidity rate—all such factors lead to the stark conclusion that the orchestrated response to the virus was likely degrees of magnitude worse than the disease itself.

Ready or not, here they come!

Elephant 8: Vaxxports, the political mammoth of the herd. The Canadian edition of The Epoch Times observes that “Vaccine passports mandated by governments will create a highly intrusive surveillance system” that can force citizens “to reveal their health information but can also track their whereabouts.” Dr. Ann Cavoukian, former Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner and currently executive director of the Global Privacy and Security by Design Centre, worries that an individual’s driver’s licence, phone number and other personal information will be on record, establishing a “global infrastructure of surveillance,” in effect, the Covid State.

Of course, this is not just a Canadian instance of surveillance monitoring, but applies across the board to all Vaxxport nations. Similarly, The Sociable warns that “Covid passport mandates are fueling authoritarian social credit systems, digital identity schemes,” on the Chinese model—what is known as “corporate communism.” When one’s privacy is invaded, one’s most valuable “property” is compromised: one’s selfhood. Creating a system of medical apartheid and political oppression, the vaccine passport is the ticket to a totalitarian state.

It is true that elephants are an endangered species, no less so in the savannas of progressivist ideology and medical demagoguery. But when elephants congregate in the room, they claim a lot of space, carry considerable weight and do not consort agreeably with their adversaries. Admittedly, one must avoid the ingestion of hopium, an opioid that can enfeeble the will to act and ride the elephant. But things do change, and when the elephants finally emerge from the room, it may be triumphally and with much trumpeting.

Regarding the Vaccines: Exercise Extreme Prudence

In a measured presentation on the subject of vaccines delivered this February, Dr. Byram Bridle, a viral immunologist at Guelph University in Canada, expressed skepticism about these presumed vehicles of salvation. “I would probably prefer to have natural immunity,” he said. Confirming Bridle’s skepticism, a recent study from the Washington University School of Medicine finds there to be lifelong immunity after Covid, owing to natural antibody-producing cells rather than synthetic infusions.

 As Global Research explains, a major issue involved in rejecting the vaccines is that they are forms of gene therapy deputizing for vaccines and are potentially hazardous, “exotic creatures… that actively hijack your genes and reprogram them.” In other words, the vaccines are not really vaccines as commonly understood but genomic substances responding to what is likely a digital virus. 

Moreover, a new study by British professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen, soon to be published in the Quarterly Reviews of Biophysics, claims that it is “now beyond a reasonable doubt…that unique fingerprints in SARS-CoV-2 [are] indicative of purposive manipulation," concluding that “SARS-Coronavirus-2 has no credible natural ancestor.” Indeed, after initial denials across the media for over a year, opinion now seems to be shifting toward a laboratory origin for the virus. A synthetic antidote to a manufactured virus would seem to belong in Frankenstein’s lab, not in the natural world.

No, really, I feel fine. Why do you ask?

Dr. Peter McCullough, a prominent cardiologist, believes that with increasing reports of adverse effects, it's too risky for people who have a more than 99 percent survival rate to receive one of the experimental vaccines. “Based on the safety data now, I can no longer recommend it," he said in an interview with journalist and author John Leake, which was predictably scrubbed on YouTube. Too many people die “on days one, two and three after the vaccine.” 

McCullough has been attacked as a right-wing crank by the usual swarm of dubious “factcheckers” populating the Net. McCullough has 600 peer-reviewed publications to his name, many of which have appeared in top-tier journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet. He is also the president of the Cardiorenal Society of America, co-editor of Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine and associate editor of the American Journal of Cardiology and Cardiorenal Medicine. His credentials are impeccable and he should be taken seriously. Left-wing cranks should not.

Furthermore, the recent controversy surrounding prominent French virologist and Nobel Laureate Luc Montagnier needs to be put in context. He did not say that all who had been vaccinated would die within two years, as was widely reported. What he did say was that the vaccines and viral variants go hand in hand, owing to a condition called antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), a phenomenon in which virus-specific antibodies enhance the entry of the virus and may also cause viral replication. Variants will continue to proliferate as a direct result of the vaccines themselves: in each country, he says, “the curve of vaccination is followed by the curve of deaths.” Because of the vaccines, “the virus is forced to find another solution, or die,” thus creating vaccine-resistant variants. 

Naturally, Montagnier has been mocked, slandered, “factchecked,” refuted and misreported in a veritable Netblitz. Nonetheless, that one lockdown insensibly succeeds another, that new viral variants continue to appear irrespective of counter-measures, and that top-off injections will likely be administered at regular intervals add weight to his argument. (The French video interview between Montagnier and journalist Pierre Barnérias has been rendered exceedingly difficult to find, but the effort is worth it.)

What could possibly go wrong?

Corroborating Montagnier’s analysis, an international team of virologists and microbiologists writing for the quality journal Vaccine has released a study exposing the vaccine fiasco foisted upon a fearful and credulous public. They describe more than 20 possible long-term healing complications, including severe pneumonia from cross reactivity; this means that the vaccine could potentially cause a “covid spike.” Vaccines, they fear, could “exacerbate[e] rather than attenuat[e] viral infections.” The efficacy of the vaccines, they claim, has been vastly overstated...intentionally. The skeptics appear to have been right all along. 

The debate has raged far and wide among those who swear by the necessity of the vaccines and those who remain doubtful or condemnatory. Official sites such as the British MHRA (Medicines & Healthcare Regulatory products Agency) require a considerable amount of data dredging in order to arrive at reliable conclusions. Reconnoitering the terrain of what is nothing less than a species of fractal embedding is an arduous process; one feels a bit like Joshua’s spies sent out to probe the defenses of Jericho. But the results are startling. The number of adverse reactions is enough to cause a pandemic of vaccine hesitancy. 

By May 19 in the U.K. alone, there have been at least 245,276 adverse reports and counting. The alarming incidence of adverse effects such as blindness, impaired vision and other eye disorders, nervous system disorders, brain damage, facial paralysis, strokes, capillary leak syndrome, cardiac issues, blood disorders and gastrointestinal disorders cannot be taken lightly.

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The total number of deaths as of May 19 is 1,192 in the U.K. alone. These are government-authorized figures. Of course, statistical taxonomies appear to reduce the significance of adverse results; tell that to the growing number of vaccine recipients who have suffered the consequences. And we must remember that the reporting scheme, which is passive and voluntary, is significantly underused. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) found that less than one percent of side-effects following vaccination are in fact reported. 

It is consoling to remark that, as of April 16, six American states have banned the use of vaccine passports. According to NewsNation, for April 27, the count is even higher: at least 40 states “are advancing legislation to ban COVID-19 vaccine requirements for businesses and schools.” Becker’s Health IT for May 6 reports that several other states are considering legislation to the same effect. Hospital workers in Houston are suing to block mandatory vaccinations. It’s a running total.

It is also comforting to note that now-beleaguered medical guru Anthony Fauci, whom Jon Sanders writing in the American Institute for Economic Research called “that ubiquitous font of fatuous guidance,” admitted that asymptomatic spread of the virus, despite the dire media and official narrative as well as his own whiffling, was extremely rare. In a February 2020 email, Fauci wrote, “Error in my statement to you. I meant to say that “……most transmissions occur from someone who is symptomatic — not asymptomatic.”

"Error in my statement."

Our national governments and affiliated medical institutions will be fighting these developments tooth and nail. The Biden administration, we learn, may be considering the introduction of vaccine passports for international travel, as well as incentivizing employers to require vaccinations. The alliance of government funding and medical ideology is a powerful force for compliance. And for the most part, all we hear from the corporate media are crickets when we should be hearing kettle drums. 

Former Pfizer Vice President and chief scientific researcher Michael Yeadon believes that these vaccines, as they “go from the computer screens… into the arms of millions of people,” may contain “characteristics which could be harmful and could even be lethal.” The scale of the menace we are facing, he says, not from COVID but from the oligarchs, politicians, media types and technocrats who have exploited it and the billionaire companies that manufacture the vaccines, may be unprecedented. Like practically all vaccine skeptics, he will be “factchecked” to death by the usual suspects who have skin in the game.

But the menace is real. The aforementioned Professor Bridle has admitted that “We made a big mistake. We didn’t realize it until now… we never knew the spike protein itself was a toxin and was a pathogenic protein. So by vaccinating people we are inadvertently inoculating them with a toxin.” Bridle reprises a Japanese study showing how the synthetic mRNA spike protein circulates in the bloodstream and accumulates in tissues such as the liver, the adrenal glands, the spleen and the ovaries, likely causing extreme pathogenic reactions.

Similarly, pediatric rheumatologist J. Patrick Whelan has warned that the spike protein may cause microvascular damage to the liver, heart, and brain in “ways that were not assessed in the safety trials.” Whelan worries that hundreds of millions of people might “suffer long-lasting or even permanent damage to their brain or heart microvasculature as a result of failing to appreciate in the short-term an unintended effect of full-length spike protein-based vaccines on other organs.”

The news from Israel is as distressing as it is revelatory. The country launched one of the strictest vaccine programs in the world, creating two classes of citizens: the vaccinated who retained their social privileges, the unvaccinated who were stripped of them. A report just released by two Israeli researchers, Drs. Haim Yativ and Hervé Seligman, relying on tables provided by the Israel Ministry of Health, reveals that most COVID deaths during a five-week-long vaccination period “are for vaccinated people.”

The numbers show that “the vaccines, for the elderly… killed about 40 times more people than the disease itself would have killed, and about 260 times more people than the disease among the younger age class.” Additionally, confirming Luc Montagnier’s predictions, the researchers state that “in a few months we expect to face mid-and long-term adverse effects of the vaccination as ADE (Antibody-dependent Enhancement) and the vaccination-resistant mutants selected by the vaccines.” The Internet archive has, and no doubt will continue to suppress these numbers. There is far too much money, power and reputation involved to admit error.

People need to understand that such warnings are not conspiracy theories. They reflect the knowledge and apprehensions of reputable professionals who are not beholden to government funding and the big pharmaceutical companies. The accelerated quasi-vaccines may well have been the greatest mistake that our political, medical and media orthodoxies have ever committed. It makes good sense to act and think independently, to attend to and examine the official instruments with due diligence, and to exercise prudence when considering taking the jab. As counterintuitive as it may seem in the midst of an orchestrated panic, this is nothing less than a responsibility one owes oneself and one’s family.

Lies, Damned Lies, and the Media

As the saying goes, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. There’s also a corollary: properly used, statistics don’t lie. But when selectively abused, statistics are meaningless.  The kerfuffle that followed President Trump’s interview with Jonathan Swan which aired on HBO earlier this week is yet another example of the phenomenon.

Actress Julia Louis-Dreyfuss was among those who weighed in on the interview. Dutifully following the “orange-man bad” narrative, a Dreyfuss Tweet seemed to imply a belief that Swan had a masterful command of meaningful pandemic statistics, while President Trump was basically clueless:

What made the president a fool and Swan a genius? Trump highlighted the statistical fact that the United States has been more effective in curing, aka reducing the death rate, among Americans who are diagnosed with COVID-19 than most of the rest of the world. This is clearly a testament to the effectiveness of our overall health care system in treating infectious and potentially fatal diseases.

Swan highlighted the statistical fact that more Americans have died of COVID-19 exposure per capita than have died as a percentage of population when compared to nations like Germany and South Korea. Though he didn’t directly say so, Swan clearly implied that this statistic was far more important than the statistic President Trump had mentioned.

Trump disagreed with Swan’s analysis: “You can’t do that,” he said.

“Why can’t I do that?” Swan responded, rudely.

At this point, neither party to this discussion displayed any sort of expertise about how to properly interpret statistics. Trump was stumbling, but so would every other President at this level of detail, going back to at least Eisenhower. American presidents are not masters of detail. Moreover, can anyone honestly believe that Joe Biden could get to that part of so nuanced of a discussion without his head exploding or threatening to punch somebody?

I believe the point Trump was attempting to make was that it is unsound scientifically to use the per capita death rate as the metric with which to judge the effectiveness of the administration’s response to the pandemic. If that is indeed the correct interpretation of “you can’t do that,” then the President’s point is valid.

If the death rate per person infected is relatively low, but the death rate per capita is higher, then the infection rate is the driver. Consider an example: Both Group A and Group B consist of one million individuals each, each demographically similar to the other. In Group A 100,000 get infected, while 20,000 of the infected sub-group die. The mortality rate per capita is 2%, while the mortality rate per infection is 20%. In Group B 50,000 people get infected, while 15,000 of the infected die. The mortality rate per capita is 1.5% and the mortality rate per infection is 30%. Infections are more prevalent in Group A, but treatment of the infection is much better in Group A than in Group B.

Or, let’s look at the following real-world analogy. In many developing countries the motor vehicle fatality rate per capita is far lower than it is in the United States. Does that mean it’s safer to drive in those nations? No, it means they have fewer cars. When you look at a meaningful statistic – deaths per motor vehicle – the fatality rate in most of the very same developing countries far exceeds that of the United States. As anyone who's ever driven in the Third World knows.

Per capita statistics are thus rarely useful analytical tools when considered in a vacuum. One must understand the underlying causes and how those causes may or may not be influenced before citing a per capita stat. In the case of COVID-19 there are at least two important underlying variables that should factor into any analysis: infection rate and treatment effectiveness.

Clearly, infection rates vary by state because the individual states have been driving different isolation and protection policies at varying speeds and implementing different “get back to normal” recovery programs as well. If Swan believes that the Administration could have and should have done something to implement a national isolation policy and national recovery policy, he should have said so.

Could the Trump administration have done something like that? I don’t see how. The states would scream bloody murder if he tried to interfere with them. The President can’t even get blue states to disperse riotous mobs occupying the streets of major American cities. Any attempt by this administration to impose rigid standards involving public gatherings and personal interactions would have been denounced as a violation of federalism and widely ignored.

It’s clear that stemming the spread of COVID-19 is about isolation and protective gear. The highest rate of new infections is now among the 20-29 year old demographic, many of whom ignore such restrictions. That’s understandable. They are at relatively low risk of dying even if they do catch it, and most of us who remember our twenties will recall that following rules – even rules meant to protect you – are not a high priority at that time of life. But this development emphasizes the simple fact that the infection rate part of the per capita mortality rate equation is about personal behavior, not national policy.

Among the parts of the equation that the administration could and did address was providing care for the sick and protection for health care workers. From getting Ford to produce ventilators, to ensuring there was an equitable distribution of face masks among the states in the early days of the pandemic, the Trump administration focused on those things it could do to facilitate research, to ensure that health care facilities were not overwhelmed, and to save as many lives of the infected as possible. Certainly the states and numerous organizations both public and private played a huge role in the success of that effort, but it’s petty partisanship at its worst to pretend that the president’s actions were unimportant or somehow misguided.

Sadly, Jonathan Swan’s abuse of statistics is business as usual for the legacy media these days. He focused on a statistic over which the Trump had no practical control, presumably because it made the president look bad, while ignoring the stat that demonstrated how effective the administration has been in helping to address those parts of the pandemic it actually could influence.