Tag: lockdowns

Beware The Permanent Pandemic And The Promise Of Vaccines As A Return To Normal

It’s no secret powerful interests have handsomely benefitted from coronavirus lockdowns of the last 14 months, as experimental restrictions implemented under the pledge of “two weeks to slow the spread” morphed into a seemingly endless draconian suspension of life. Now, politicization of the return to normal combined with influential interests invested in lockdown extensions have jeopardized its true return.

Last week, MSNBC’s Joy Reid celebrated wearing two masks while jogging in spite of even the restriction-crazed CDC guidance updated to recommend otherwise.

“I am among the fully vaccinated,” Reid said gleaming in prime time. “I did go jogging today, in the park. This is the mask I wore, with a doctor’s mask under it… There are people who are getting really upset about that.”

Reid can do anything she wants, of course, since engaging in this form of performative theater doesn’t directly hurt anybody but herself. Her on-air grandstanding in contradiction to scientific findings, however, illustrates how masks have become political markers as opposed to effective tools of viral mitigation.

Reid’s self-imposed mask-wearing might be harmless. After all, it’s a personal choice with no consequences to others besides the example of a woman with a large media platform.

Mask-wearing however, a majority of which is compulsive either due to government edict or corporate enforcement, is only the tip of the iceberg in politicized pandemic policies, many of which do infringe on the freedoms of others. Schools remain closed for full in-class instruction at a devastating cost under the orders of the teachers unions, businesses across the nation remain handicapped with capacity limits, beaches in parts of the country will remain closed through the summer, and even playgrounds are off limits despite the low risk to children, let alone outside transmission.

Have plans to send your kids to summer camp? Don’t count on the real experience.

No small part of the population has become comfortable living in a world in lockdown. In fact, many demand it regardless of the cost to their neighbors, motivated by either an act of political expression featuring aggressive virtue signaling or an obsession with living life with zero risk, overestimating danger of the Chinese virus. A survey out last month revealed majorities of Americans across the political spectrum believed the probability of ending up in the hospital if infected by COVID-19 is dramatically higher than the factual reality.

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The WHO Confirms that the Covid-19 PCR Test is Flawed: Estimates of “Positive Cases” are Meaningless. The Lockdown Has No Scientific Basis

The Real Time Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (rRT-PCR) test was adopted by the WHO on January 23, 2020 as a means to detecting the  SARS-COV-2 virus, following the recommendations of  a Virology research group (based at Charité University Hospital, Berlin), supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (For Further details see the Drosten Study)

Exactly one year later on January 20th, 2021, the WHO retracts. They don’t say “We Made a Mistake”. The retraction is carefully formulated. 

While the WHO does not deny the validity of their misleading January 2020 guidelines, they nonetheless recommend “Re-testing” (which everybody knows is an impossibility).

The contentious issue pertains to the number of amplification threshold cycles (Ct). According to Pieter Borger, et al

The number of amplification cycles [should be] less than 35; preferably 25-30 cycles. In case of virus detection, >35 cycles only detects signals which do not correlate with infectious virus as determined by isolation in cell culture…(Critique of Drosten Study)

The World Health Organization (WHO) tacitly admits one year later that ALL PCR tests conducted at a 35 cycle amplification threshold (Ct) or higher are INVALID. But that is what they recommended in January 2020, in consultation with the virology team at Charité Hospital in Berlin.

If the test is conducted at a 35 Ct threshold or above (which was recommended by the WHO), segments of the SARS-CoV-2 virus cannot be detected, which means that ALL the so-called confirmed “positive cases” tabulated in the course of the last 14 months are invalid.

According to Pieter Borger, Bobby Rajesh Malhotra, Michael Yeadon, et al, the Ct > 35 has been the norm “in most laboratories in Europe & the US”.

The WHO’s Mea Culpa

Below is the WHO’s carefully formulated “Retraction”. The full text with link to the original document is in annex:

WHO guidance Diagnostic testing for SARS-CoV-2 states that careful interpretation of weak positive results is needed (1). The cycle threshold (Ct) needed to detect virus is inversely proportional to the patient’s viral load. Where test results do not correspond with the clinical presentation, a new specimen should be taken and retested using the same or different NAT technology. (emphasis added)

WHO reminds IVD users that disease prevalence alters the predictive value of test results; as disease prevalence decreases, the risk of false positive increases (2). This means that the probability that a person who has a positive result (SARS-CoV-2 detected) is truly infected with SARS-CoV-2 decreases as prevalence decreases, irrespective of the claimed specificity.

“Invalid Positives” is the Underlying Concept 

This is not an issue of  “Weak Positives” and “Risk of False Positive Increases”. What is at stake is a “Flawed Methodology” which leads to invalid estimates.

What this admission of the WHO confirms is that the estimate of covid positive from a PCR test (with an amplification threshold of 35 cycles or higher) is invalid. In which case, the WHO recommends retesting:  “a new specimen should be taken and retested…”.

The WHO calls for “Retesting”, which is tantamount to “We Screwed Up”.

That recommendation is pro-forma. It won’t happen. Millions of people Worldwide have already been tested, starting in early February 2020. Nonetheless, we must conclude that unless retested, those estimates (according to the WHO) are invalid.  

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Australia: Minister Refuses to Rule Out Electronic Ankle Bracelets to Enforce Home Quarantine

A senior government minister refused to rule out Australians being forced to wear electronic ankle bracelets, even if they are fully vaccinated, to make sure they are complying with home quarantine orders.

The astounding suggestion was made by journalist David Speers during an interview with Employment Minister Stuart Robert about how authorities would ensure returning travelers stayed at home.

“What sort of ideas would there be for this? Regular visits, inspections to make sure they’re home, ankle bracelets, some sort of monitoring, how do you do it?” Speers asked.

“Mr Robert did not rule out those prospects,” reports NCA NewsWire.

“All of that will need to be worked through before a policy prescription goes live,” said Robert.

The minister also mentioned the authoritarian methods that were already in place to enforce the policy.

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Lockdowns Didn’t Stop COVID-19 But it Did Cause Record Number of Overdose Deaths

With each day that passes, the number of lives lost in COVID-19-related deaths continues to tragically grow. However, in a less noticed but equally important trend, we continue to gain insight into the countless deaths caused by lockdown measures intended to stop the virus’s spread.

The latest entry into this tragic account is a new data set showing drug overdose deaths skyrocketed in 2020 amid the height of pandemic lockdowns.

“New data shows that more Americans died of drug overdoses in the year leading to September 2020 than any 12-month period since the opioid epidemic began,” Axios reports. “The stubborn increase of such ‘deaths of despair’ shows that the opioid epidemic still has room to grow and that some of the social distancing steps we took to rein in the pandemic may have brought deadly side effects.”

Released this week by the Centers for Disease Control, the figures show that at least 87,000 people died from overdoses from October 2019 to September 2020. This amounts to a 29 percent increase from the same period in the previous year.

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We Are Now Entering Full-Blown Tyranny In The Western World

If we accept what they are doing to us now, they are just going to keep pushing the envelope.  Over the past 12 months, authorities throughout the western world have used the pandemic as an excuse to impose Orwellian measures that we never would have accepted during normal times.  They are promising us that these measures are just “temporary”, but the pandemic has already been with us for a year and there are no signs that it is going away any time soon.  If those governing us are willing to go to such ridiculous extremes during a relatively minor pandemic, what are they going to be willing to do once things start getting really crazy?

Watching the events that have unfolded at a church in Edmonton in recent days has been a breaking point for me emotionally.

Last Wednesday, the RCMP received global attention when it put up a three layer fence around GraceLife Church in an attempt to keep people out.

I don’t know why they decided that one fence would not be sufficient.  Apparently having Christians gather together is so dangerous that three fences were needed.

Needless to say, this draconian move made a lot of headlines, and on Sunday approximately 400 Christians gathered to protest at the church.  Most of them were just singing hymns or reading the Bible, but when a few of them started tearing down one of the fences, 200 heavily-armed riot police moved in.

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The hidden death toll of lockdown

Evidence-based medicine might sound like a tautology — what kind of medicine isn’t based on evidence? I’m afraid that you’d be surprised. Massive decisions are often taken on misleading, low-quality evidence. We see this all the time. In the last pandemic, the swine flu outbreak of 2009, I did some work asking why the government spent £500 million on Tamiflu: then hailed as a wonder drug. In fact, it proved to have a very limited effect. The debate then had many of the same cast of characters as today: Jonathan Van-Tam, Neil Ferguson and others. The big difference this time is the influence of social media, whose viciousness is something to behold. It’s easy to see why academics would self-censor and stay away from the debate, especially if it means challenging a consensus. Academics who are tenured, like me, don’t have to worry so much about people pulling strings above us. This is the importance of tenure; it allows academic freedom. In a crisis, when tempers run so high, you need a variety of views more than ever.

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Covid-19 vaccine STILL does not mean you can ‘eat and drink indoors’, Fauci says, prompting Rand Paul to call him a ‘petty tyrant’

White House health adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci is once again facing pushback after advising those who have been vaccinated against Covid-19 to still avoid normal activities, like eating and drinking indoors.

“Fauci continues to ignore 100 years of vaccine science,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) wrote about Fauci – with whom he has feuded before – in a Monday tweet slamming the infectious disease expert as a “petty tyrant.”

The comments came in response to a Sunday evening interview in which Fauci encouraged vaccinated individuals to continue taking precautions and not resuming normal activities just yet.

Asked if eating and drinking inside restaurants and bars is “okay now,” Fauci replied in the negative.

“For the simple reason that the level of infection, the dynamic of infection in the community are still really disturbingly high,” he said. “Like just yesterday there were close to 80,000 new infections and we’ve been hanging around 60, 75,000.”

Even if vaccinated, individuals need to “remember that you still have to be careful and not get involved in crowded situations, particularly indoors where people are not wearing masks,” according to Fauci.

“His only real theme is ‘do what I say’ even when it makes no sense,” Paul, a physician before he entered the Senate, wrote about Fauci. “If you’ve recovered or been vaccinated – go about your life.  Eat, drink, work, open the schools.”

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