Doly
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You have written a lot of articles I disagreed with and disliked, but this one has an explanation that is spot on. It’s exactly like it: For some people it’s clear what’s going on, for others it’s all in a fog of every outcome still seems possible. What bothers me is that some in the second group seem to actually believe that they know what’s going on, and they got it all completely wrong.
>See, this is how we know they don’t make their own decisions. Those are made in Brussels and Davos, and then the “leaders” have to carry out the preconceived programs, and they will.
I only disagree with one point here: that Brussels and Davos have “preconceived programs”. Obviously not. An intelligent parasite, capable of preconceived programs, doesn’t kill its host, and clearly the ones in Brussels and Davos are killing the so-called world leaders.
>Obviously, this is all strongly connected to the past 2,5 years of measures and mandates and all. The political class got a taste of power that they did not have before, and got carried away.
The power of the political class hasn’t changed overnight. The ability of political campaigns to brainwash the public didn’t increase all of a sudden. On the other hand, it may well be true that when the political class saw that some people would not take care of their own health on the say-so of some in the political class, it opened all sorts of questions on where the real power is. Certainly not with the ordinary people, that’s for sure. If anybody is still thinking that the concept of “democracy” is still viable, I wonder what they’re on.
We may, however, realistically enquire whether the power is with the political class, or with the masters of the political class (Brussels and Davos), or perhaps even somewhere else (mainstream media? alternative media, that is entirely unregulated?) For the moment, anyone and everyone that has been rallying against taking care of your own health is suspect in my books of being the enemy of the ordinary people. That includes the author of this article. The only reason I say “suspect” and I don’t call for immediate hanging from lamp-posts from all and every such person, is the strange case of Chris Martenson. If there is one person that looks like they’ve been forced against their will, with a gun to their head, to change their tune, it’s him. And if he’s been forced, there could be others. But to be perfectly honest, in case of doubt, I’d hang from lamp-posts the whole lot of anti-maskers and anti-vaxers but Chris Martenson, and maybe, on the outside, also Ugo Bardi, just because I personally met him and he seemed a rather decent guy and his blog looks like he’s under a lot of strain, and let God sort out any innocents among the rest later.
“What it all adds up to so far is that the CDC secretly admits the number people who actually died FROM Covid has been exaggerated by a factor of between 10 and 100%”
I have no idea what you call “dying FROM Covid”. Maybe it’s different from what you’d call “dying from COVID”. Because as you say, a lot has been hanging on people distorting language and being coy about what they mean when they use words.
Let’s take it literally, as most people would. “Dying from covid” for most people would mean that somebody catched covid and died within a month of catching it, that would not otherwise be expected to die during that timeframe.
Well, luckily we have statistics of deaths in most developed countries. So we do in fact know how many excess deaths have been happening during covid waves, and we can compare it with the number of reported covid deaths. And if you do actually check the numbers, you will find that they match pretty well, except that in the USA, especially in the first wave but also afterwards, there is an unexplained number of excess deaths. Eventually the reports should come out with the full causes of mortality, and people can discuss whether covid cases were under or over reported to their heart’s content, but the data we have so far suggests that in any case they appear under-reported.
It’s true that the omicron wave is a lot milder, so excess deaths from now on will probably not have any big new peaks.
There may well be a couple of valid points in this letter. I’m no medical doctor or virologist, so I really don’t know enough to estimate the validity of many of the points.
This said, I do know for sure this one is patently untrue: “Vaccines will do more harm than good.” Vaccination in the UK has reduced significantly the number of deaths and hospitalizations, and I happen to have checked this myself when it comes to my local hospital. I doubt Spartacus has bothered doing something as simple as assuming that the Internet is full of lies, and local people are far less likely to tell lies to another local.
I also know many of the points are contested by medical doctors that have spoken extensively about covid. So they are at the very least suspect.
Ah, and he contradicts himself by first saying that masks are pure theatre and then admitting that they stop sick people from emitting dangerous droplets. Stopping the danger at the source surely is not nothing, is it?
First of all, if you believe all points of any given narrative on a recent event without making a few questions, you probably never made any effort to work out the truth. So anybody that listens to you has also given up on the truth. And if it makes you very happy to be just as ignorant and stupid as your neighbour, you are just a happy idiot.
Second, it just happens that the first narrative is correct on more vital points than the second. When it comes to a disease, one of the main points of interest is how dangerous it is. Well, “Covid 19 kills people but far fewer than the official count” is simply false. You only have to look at the stats of excess deaths in any given country to see that covid has been in some places undercounted, but I can’t find a single country where it appears to have been overcounted.
It may be entirely correct that effective treatments for covid have been ignored. It’s also entirely correct that masks and lockdowns work. The difference here is, anybody can make sure to wear a mask (or make one for themselves) and take other basic prevention measures like avoiding unnecessary contact with other people. But it’s much harder for somebody to demand a treatment from your doctor that may not be available to your doctor. So, again, the counter-narrative is massively unhelpful for an individual trying to stay healthy, even assuming it is correct.
So, if you had to evaluate the two narratives on their usefulness to survival, you’d have to accept that the first one is better, even if it may be incorrect on several points. Ideally, of course, you should accept no narrative and do your own homework.
“As a virus mutates, it becomes more contagious and less lethal. And then eventually it mostly disappears.”
Nope. As a virus mutates, it usually becomes more contagious because that helps it spread.
But being less lethal may or may not help it spread. Let me clarify: for some viruses, becoming less lethal is a good strategy because people become less worried about it spreading and they take less precautions with less lethal variants. For others, like Ebola, becoming more lethal is a good spreading strategy because it spreads through people handling corpses. For the covid virus, the evidence is that it spreads fast enough that lethality simply doesn’t change one way or another its chances of spreading. So far, new variants are as likely as not to be more or less lethal. Some of the faster-spreading mutations, like alpha, have been somewhat more lethal. Some haven’t.
As for viruses eventually disappearing, clearly not. The seasonal flu remains seasonal and there is no reason to think it will ever go away. The same for many viruses that cause childhood diseases, like measles. Some new viruses have eventually disappeared, some, like AIDS, didn’t.
You may not like it, but the fact is, a virus is fought far more effectively with vaccines than with any natural method to strengthen your immune system. Which is why many common viruses (measles, polio, smallpox, etc, etc) are no longer a problem. For centuries, actually, millennia, people knew about healthy diet and exercise, but only when vaccines were invented were those diseases successfully fought.
“I’m more afraid of sticking a genetic USB stick that generates untested genetic material in my body for the rest of my life, than I am of a virus that is unlikely to kill me.”
Since the virus has the very same RNA as that “USB stick”, as you call it, effectively you are saying that you are more afraid of putting a USB stick with unknown code in it, than you are of putting a USB stick with the very exact same unknown code, except that this code is part of a computer virus, so it will not just take over your computer, but any other computer it can get into. Plus, this USB stick, you happen to know exactly how many times this unknown code will run, while the virus will try to run the code as many times as your processor will allow, and if it completely runs your computer to a standstill till it freezes up, so be it.
In other words, you are saying you understand nothing of the science, because you are less afraid of the option that is intuitively obviously more dangerous.
“If you want people to “follow the science”, you need to convince them that this is the right thing to do. You can’t just force them to do it.”
Really? Strange, what I thought 2020 made clear is that to convince people that something is the right thing to do, the best way with massive difference over all others is to force-feed them the information that the right thing to do is X.
There is absolutely no way that you get two big groups of people with totally diverging views about the facts surrounding a fact of life that everybody has been affected by, such as the coronavirus, if rationality on average took over emotion. At least one of those groups has had to be completely emotionally hijacked. And frankly, why believe that only one of them was? The most logical conclusion is that the vast majority of people on Earth have been emotionally hijacked and are, generally speaking, entirely incapable of rational thought when it comes on any of the issues that they have been emotionally hijacked about. That obviously includes trifles like death and love.
In which case, is there any reason to hope that we haven’t emotionally hijacked ourselves out of our own ability to survive as a species? If there is a lesson to 2020, is that humanity is collectively insane. And insanity isn’t good for survival.
“If only 1.5% of COVID deaths happen outside of long term care homes, the “science” doesn’t say close your schools and stores and make everyone wear a mask 24 hours a day, the science says pump massive amounts of resources into those care homes in order to stop the misery there.”
Classic case of failure of understanding the science. If it was as simple as protecting only people in care homes, surely the vast majority of governments would be doing exactly that. It isn’t as if there aren’t any countries that tried that, like Sweden.
The problem is, as soon as the numbers in the community go up enough, it ends up in care homes. In every place that the strategy has been tried. Because people without symptoms can spread it, there is no easy way to stop that, unless the number of cases in the community is low enough. Effectively, to stop deaths in care homes, the only practical way is to stop spread in the community. It’s that simple. Once the numbers in the community reach a certain threshold, it’s proven impossible to protect care homes, in every place where that strategy was tried.
There is another issue that this article conveniently ignores, and that is overwhelming hospitals. Talking about deaths ignores that covid patients take some time to die, and during all this time they are hospitalised. And while they are being attended to, nurses and doctors have a lot less spare time to attend other patients. In other words, high cases of covid in the community endangers the lives of everyone in the community, those infected and those that aren’t, because hospital care degrades during the time of a spike, inevitably.
For all those reasons, letting covid spread is generally a terrible idea. There is no country that let covid spread, either deliberately or by accident, that didn’t end up with hospitals that were at least partially overwhelmed and care homes affected. There is no single example of success at that strategy, and if you are thinking that Sweden is “success”, look at their numbers again and convince yourself that they did exactly as badly as every other country that allowed the spread by accident or design (UK, USA, etc.)
Of course, it’s possible to combine the problems of letting covid spread with the problems of lockdowns. In actual fact, it’s more common to combine the two. Because countries that have done good lockdowns (that is, early and strong) had to do their lockdowns for shorter periods and suffered less problems with the lockdowns as a consequence. Difficult lockdowns and allowing covid to spread are two sides of the same coin.
It’s like credit cards: the best way of avoiding getting sucked into paying lots of credit card debt is to pay it early, and to pay as much as you can in one go. If instead, you want to be bled dry by a credit card, insist on paying the minimum amount every time. Covid spreads exponentially, so it operates exactly the same as interest rates. If you want maximum suffering, then ignore the facts of compounding. Pay the minimum amount in lockdowns every time, and find yourself quagmired in lockdowns forever.
You are making an understandable mistake, since most people don’t really know what is fascism. I started to study fascism four years ago, when I realised that, given the resource issues in our planet, history suggests that the rise of a fascist or fascist-like government in some major Western country or countries was very likely.
I’ll explain: when a society finds that resources are more limited than they’re used to, they mainly have two options: fragmenting or a more authoritarian government. In theory, an enlightened society could realise that they’ll all have to make do with less, and maintain people’s freedoms while scaling down. In practice, this rarely happens, because as long as some people refuse to believe that it’s necessary to reduce their use of resources, there will be problems. The only way around this is a more authoritarian government, where people have to put up with whatever allocation of resources the government chooses, or else. Alternatively, the country may fragment into smaller pieces, and each fragment can deal with the issues separately. This has the advantage of reducing bureaucratic overheads, which in some cases does help.
A fascist government is nothing but a right-wing authoritarian government. Where people get confused is in thinking they are “extreme right”. In actual fact, they usually are just right of centre in economic issues, but willing to apply radical measures with a strong hand if it’s deemed appropriate. Where they are extreme right is on social issues, but that’s mainly because it’s expedient for the purpose of brainwashing people into conformity and obedience. It’s easier to make people to conform when minorities are taken out of the way, if not literally (like Hitler) at least by reducing their status to the point where they’re a lot less visible.
When you understand this, it’s clear that Clinton is not fascist and Trump is. Trump has already demonstrated a willingness to ignore the constitution if it was expedient. He’s said that he expects the situation of his trial on Trump University to change if he becomes elected president, which is to say, the first thing he plans to do when he gets in office is to destroy the independence of judges. He’s also said he’d have a go at freedom of speech, and make it much easier for people to stop journalists from saying things he doesn’t like. And religious discrimination is likely to become policy.
Say what you like about Clinton’s policies, but at least it doesn’t look like she will stop at nothing to force people to put up with them. Trump, on the other hand, promises to be tough and do exactly that.
It’s true that Trump hasn’t started WWIII or killed vast amounts of people. But he hasn’t really had the chance. Hitler hadn’t started WWII or killed masses of Jews when he was running for election. By the time it was obvious what kind of danger he was, it was too late for anyone to try to change it, because he had too strong a hold on power.
