For several days now, I’ve wanted to write something about the confusion surrounding the coronavirus pandemic. But each time I begin to write, the situation just gets more confusing, and alarming.
I’ll just say upfront that I’ve dreaded, from the time the coronavirus began spreading in China in December and January, that it was for real. I’ve been monitoring it closely via the Johns Hopkins data site since, and I’ve become more of a believer, even as various skeptics saw the warnings about a pandemic as something other than what it has turned out to be—for example, the hidden dangers of 5G networks, a virus created by Chinese bioweapons researchers, a conspiracy to usher in martial law, just a variation on the regular flu.
I can’t disprove any of these theories, except to point out that rulers in China, Europe, and the U.S., stand to lose much more than they ever could potentially gain from the economic devastation and loss of trust resulting from the shutdown of daily life and the commerce that results. In the U.S., the stock market last week made clear that the Trump administration’s efforts to politicize and minimize the danger was a terrible miscalculation.
Probably the most vivid example of politicization is the infuriating shortage of test kits, which prevent public health professionals from obtaining essential data on how widespread the disease is, so containment actions can be taken.
The credible journalistic investigations I’ve seen (like this from Politico and this from The New York Times, indicate the U.S. didn’t want to deal with the World Health Organization (WHO) and wanted to produce its own kits. A convincing case can be made that the real intent was to delay the introduction of test kits to somehow keep the numbers of cases low, keep Trump’s personal “score” down to avoid political blame.
Whatever the background stories, American politicians have effectively sidelined the public health community, failed to take its warnings seriously. As the politicians point fingers and public health professionals do a slow burn, America sits practically grounded in every significant way, with ordinary citizens running around to stock up on toilet paper and worry if they can even get a COVID-19 test and diagnosis if they show signs of illness. How could such a sorry situation have been allowed to occur?
For regular readers of this blog, all this politicization shouldn’t be a big surprise. For more than a decade, readers here have watched American public health professionals disparage and scapegoat raw dairy producers and consumers, even as the real dangers decreased and benefits were demonstrated by real research.
We’ve also seen America’s mainstream media join in almost as flag waving proponents for the public health assault on raw dairy. Last week, it happened yet again, as NPR’s Morning Edition aired a report with the title, “Why Raw Milk Is More Dangerous and Costs More Than Pasteurized Milk.” Mary Childs, the reporter, said we’ve seen “a raw milk revival in recent years, fueled by growing distrust in big food companies and things like GMOs, also the general rise in demand for organic food. Raw milk advocates point to studies that they say shows some benefits of drinking raw milk. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention adamantly disagrees.”
Childs noted that the CDC “says those (European) allergy studies don’t really show much, and any potential benefit is not worth the risk. Milk often contains harmful germs, like E. coli, listeria, salmonella. Before pasteurization became the standard a hundred years ago, milk was a huge contributor to infant mortality and linked to diseases like typhoid. And then, in the 1920s, pasteurization made it safer.”
Case closed. After all, what could happen in a mere hundred years since widespread pasteurization that might be relevant today?
We’ve seen the public health and medical communities disparage skeptics on vaccination and on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as well. Not that public health needs to accept what any of these skeptics argue, but its professionals could show more respect and openness to additional research and investigation instead of arrogantly rejecting the skeptics as kooks and weirdos.
Is it a surprise, then, that skepticism of public health abounds from any number of quarters? I feel badly for the public health professionals now trying to talk sense into our president and other pols about the dangers of the coronavirus pandemic. But they should understand better than anyone how politicization of public health can backfire in real life.
David, I for one certainly do not feel badly for the public health professionals who should indeed understand better then anyone that attempts to control the spread of a virus is more or less in vain. Ongoing attempts to quarantine individuals in order to control the spread of novel viruses such as COVID-19 have to date proven to be ineffective… As Dr. Allison McGeer, a Toronto-based infectious disease specialist points out, “The more we learn about it, the greater the possibility is that transmission will not be able to be controlled with public health measure.” Well… irrespective of “public health measures” such as quarantine and isolation, viruses will inevitably prevail and succeed in establishing their presence in the general population where overall immunity will eventually result… PROVIDING, the population is not subjected to nutritionally inferior foods, poor living conditions and unnatural toxic interventions such as GMOs, pesticides, herbicides, the prophylactic overuse of antibiotics and above all else, insidious vaccinations.
Public health professionals and the pharmaceutical industry in conjunction with the media have time and again gone out of their way to whip up a state of angst, fear and frenzy when it comes to illness and disease, not to mention the animosity they stir up against those that do not side with their supercilious point of view…
Fear has proven to be one of humanities most crippling emotions in that it has served to undermine liberty more then anything else in this world… and true to form, the powers that be have for centuries played on that emotion in order to raise the level of hysteria… in essence, weaponizing fear and using it as a tool to control, manipulate and coerce the public into submission like the obedient flock of sheep they expect them to be.
I don’t think anyone is looking to “control the spread of the virus” as much as to reduce the spread, or “flatten the curve,” as they say, so that cases don’t overwhelm the hospital system.
“Research team has isolated the COVID-19 virus”
March 12, 2020
https://sunnybrook.ca/research/media/item.asp?c=2&i=2069&f=covid-19-isolated-2020&fbclid=IwAR0yreL_pED8fWL-K0lU7xu_VUXOHMenrwsa1_j-Jkvk_vQuM39sTAsFNcIDr
Dr. Palevsky states re. the above discovery…
“A test for COVID-19 can only be manufactured based first on the isolation of the COVID-19 virus.
‘If scientists have just now isolated the COVID-19 virus, it would seem there could not yet have been an appropriate test to evaluate who has COVID-19, and who does not.
‘For all these months, what were people getting tested for? What virus was being tested? What were these positive tests really about?
‘We hear about all these positive confirmed tests all over the world, but what was it people were testing positive for, in spite of what has been reported?
‘Only now that scientists have isolated the COVID-19 virus, can an appropriate test be manufactured to realistically check who has COVID-19, and who does not……..so what have we been dealing with up to this point?”
Ken, I didn’t see any information in the Sunnybrook article about just when it was that the team isolated the COVID-19 virus. The article was published on March 12, but that doesn’t necessarily indicate that the discovery happened quite recently.
Unfortunately the article does not elaborate on the exact date or whether this isolation of the virus is in addition to others around the world… That said, if you click on the related link at the bottom of the page to a McMaster University article dated march 12th the article states with respect to the isolation of the virus from the two Canadian patients, “Working at a secure containment facility at the University of Toronto and using samples taken recently from two patients in Canada, the team was able this week to confirm it had isolated and propagated the virus, creating a source of COVID-19 for study as the world races to develop vaccines and treatments, and to build a better understanding of how the virus behaves.” Indeed, as Dr. Arinjay Banerjee one of the researchers involved in isolating the virus states, “You can’t validate anything without a virus”.
My view is that this virus produces no symptoms or a mild cold though apparently a high death rate mainly in old people with serious medical problems (e.g. 24 deaths in a Seattle nursing home). So, with a great increase in testing, the CV positives will increase drastically, so the fear-mongers and media will make the panic worse as well as the quarantines, even though most 90 or 95% will not become sick or have a mild cold (or a bad cold) further disrupting the economy, jobs and supply chains. I think it would be good for half the people are positive as this would provide a natural immunity. There have been zero new deaths the past few days in China. I hope I am correct on this. The deaths from at least a dozen other infectious diseases are much, much greater per capita in most countries I saw in a chart. They now have the propaganda machine will tuned, so expect the next emerging virus response can be worse and more frequent, such that personal freedoms will be diminished greatly, and mass, forced vaccinations would be imposed. As far as the planned release biowarfare, 5G effect or mass arrest/lockups, I don’t believe at all. But I have worked in a public health dept for 5 years, and environmental/air controls for 45 years, and I know how the system works.
The experience in China and Europe goes against what you are saying. This from someone I know who has done a fairly rational assessment of U.S.: “A conservative estimate is 30% of us here in the States contract it, which is about 100,000,000 people. With a conservative fatality rate of 2%, that’s 2,000,000 people dead. Another study showed significant (>30%) loss of lung function in about 1/3 of recovered patients. That’s another 30,000,000 Americans with a likely permanently reduced ability to breathe. Those numbers blow influenza out of the water. People who say ‘it’s no worse than the flu’ are absolutely insane.”
And this compelling account from a doctor in Europe. Says in part: “Put aside statistics. Here is how it looks in practice. Most of my childhood friends are now doctors working in north Italy. In Milan, in Bergamo, in Padua, they are having to choose between intubating a 40-year-old with two kids, a 40-year old who is fit and healthy with no co-morbidities, and a 60-year-old with high blood pressure, because they don’t have enough beds. In the hallway, meanwhile, there are another 15 people waiting who are already hardly breathing and need oxygen. The army is trying to bring some of them to other regions with helicopters but it’s not enough: the flow is just too much, too many people are getting sick at the same time. We are still awaiting the peak of the epidemic in Europe: probably early April for Italy, mid-April for Germany and Switzerland, somewhere around that time for the UK. In the U.S., the infection has only just begun. But until we’re past the peak, the only solution is to impose social restrictions.”
https://www.newsweek.com/young-unafraid-coronavirus-pandemic-good-you-now-stop-killing-people-opinion-1491797?fbclid=IwAR2i9tyvAkeg–1tfZrslhexmfoo5F0aRGn3wGIQoZbHlAzk4Swpd1ansjY
What interests me is that the emphasis is on isolating the virus, so that it can be used in a lab to develop vaccines and drugs. Seems there’s not much investigating of how the disease manifests under different conditions. Those who have died, or who have needed ventilators: what was the trajectory of their disease? What treatments did they receive? There have been some reports I’ve seen that many of the fatalities have been treated with anti-virals like Tamiflu–which is known to have horrible side effects. Someone on the radio this morning said that he was going to go home and take ibuprofin for his fever (in other words, sabotage his body’s ant-viral response). But I’m wondering if any of those treatment elements are even being collected, much less investigated for patterns.
We now know that many of the deaths in the 1918-19 flu pandemic may well have been due to the overprescription of aspirin, a fairly new “wonder” drug of that time. They were giving the equivalent of ten modern doses several times a day! Yet the attitude of the health establishment seems to be that any new drug or vaccine is better than nothing!
Taking aspirin or any drug for that matter in order to suppress the symptoms of a viral infection is a sure fired way of getting pneumonia.
Different strokes for different folks… This seems to me to be the more sensible approach.
“The UK’s chief scientific adviser has said the government wants 60 per cent of the population to catch coronavirus to try and create ‘herd immunity’ to protect against the virus becoming an annual crisis.“
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/herd-immunity-will-the-uks-coronavirus-strategy-work
Thank you for this analysis, David. I’m not sure our public health problem is the arrogance of individual public health experts. Certainly a big contributor to the problem is the arrogance of the current administration in reducing funding and other support for public health advocacy in general. Another problem is the “conventional” approach to public health in all the various meanings of the word.
Shana, agreed that reduced funding is an important part of the problem. The budget cuts began before the current administration, but it has accelerated the de-funding big time.
Shana, Try suggesting to public health experts that a daily consumption of Vitamin C, D3, B12, and raw milk is a person’s best option if they wish to mitigate the effects of a viral infection such as COVID-19, or that attempting to develop a vaccine especially a genetically engineered version is a waste of time and a dangerous endeavor and see what kind of response you get…
Hey David. Long time. I do hope we look back on this moment and analyze all of the elements of paranoia, but I am in the phase of life I call “regret management” and the only play I see is that everyone take shelter. That is also the only play politicians have at this point. It is unfortunate for Trump that he came to this late, but if we look back on this as our paranoid phase, he’ll do well. If not, anyone who took a different strategy will be judged harshly. Hunker down and take in the sunshine if you have it. Manage your future regrets.
The mere fact that the Chinese authorities may have botched everything up and screwed their countrymen in the process does not mean that they didn’t intend to weaponize the virus. They may have just arrogantly believed that they could weaponize it and use it against other countries without harming their own people. Maybe they were planning to vaccinate their whole population against it before they rolled it out. NOTHING is clear. I also wouldn’t rule out the 5G theories. The two cruise ships that were most seriously affected were both in the Princess line, and that cruise line recently installed spiffy new technology they call “Medallion class” communications, which I believe involves 5G communications to and from satellites at 60 GHz. I may be wrong, but this is the info I’ve been able to piece together from a variety of sources. I found it very interesting that Princess decided to shut down its entire fleet for 60 days. I wonder whether they’re pulling out all that technology.
Opdc delivery trucks leaving twice each day for stores. Our best estimate is that deliveries are up several hundred percent. Being local. Being raw and owning our own herd, bottling plant delivery trucks are huge factors in feeding our communities. The very long conventional delivery and processing systems have failed both the farmers and the consumers. They are not resilient or responsive enough. Big box stores have stripped shelves.
Mark, thanks for the feedback. Clearly you are in a great position, from a business perspective, but also from the perspective of modeling a self-contained locally-oriented food system. You are right about how the conventional food system has failed us–it was failing in important ways even before it was so severely tested. However, the food system isn’t alone. This pandemic has put all supply chains to a test, and it’s clear that many are so complex as to be extremely fragile–a shock to one part of the system (China) reverberates globally. I suspect that many large corporations are already deeply into major reassessments. But in the meantime, I think this crisis will be a boon for locally-based food systems.
You got that right, David. Time for us to stop grooming lawns with chemicals and go back to home farming. Maybe I’ll get me a cow or a couple of goats, we don’t need any more guns. Chickens too, we already have plenty of eggs so we won’t die hungry unless the electricity goes out, that could be next. Although for those that don’t have the means or live in inner cities, who knows. Normally there’s a steady flow of cars streaming out my window, now I could count them on one hand.
Mark, sounds to me like you should use some of those million$ you have stashed away and go into the trucking business or make a deal with UPS, whatever.
History, web search to watch this: 1976 60 Minutes Investigates Swine Flu Scare
has the govt. ever lied to you before?
https://www.seleneriverpress.com/the-party-is-over-time-for-americans-to-rebuild-their-health/
Thank you to Stephanie Anderson at Selene Press. She and I have collaborated on a series of articles that speak to the status of our American Immune system and how raw milk powerfully rebuilds it!
The party is over. It just got real.
Mark
Here is an interesting story about the remarkable survival of a NZ dairy farmer.
Vitamin C The Miracle Cure 60 Minutes Living Proof
This is quite a story. And it’s true. It tells us much about the “Semmelweis Effect”.
The establishment is totally biased to change and refuse change even if it means you die.
The same principles apply to raw milk and our mountain of Pubmed peer reviewed studies.
Doctor Semmelweis practiced medicine hundreds of years ago. He suggested washing hands between patients. For that simple suggestion he was ostracized and banned from medicine.
Sound familiar. Watch the video. This NZ dairy farmer was on end stage life support and his family threatened the doctors lives if they didn’t try high dose Vitamin C. He completely recovered quickly. He was in the ICU with Swine Flu. A viral respiratory illness.
Awesome true story. It is also an indictment of modern medical doctors and hospitals
Mark
Semmelweis practiced in the mid 1800s. Not that long ago.
Semmelweis’ experience in the maternity clinic, is what gave him insight into the benefit of washing his hands between patients. Like many pioneers, his colleagues ridiculed him at the time, yet modern medicine now counts him as a genius
Ironically : every one of his colleagues a century + a half ago, was perfectly well-aware that contained in those women patients – mothers – there was another patient, her baby. Yet today, over-educated idiots in positions of power in the medical system, refuse to admit that a child in the womb is a human being. Like unto a guy who posts on this forum, regularly … former paramedic, father and grandfather …who’s UN-able to tell the plain truth that : artificial abortion is murder