On April 27th, the Daily Mail reported that COVID-19 may be up to 8 times deadlier than people think.
And that would mean a fatality rate of 0.85% in Italy and 0.5% in New York, and so on.
Official mortality in Italy is 13% – according to the same Daily Mail. Official mortality in China is 5.5%.
The official mortality rate announced by WHO was 3.4%.
Professor Nyal Ferguson, on the basis of whose predictions the UK turned its policy 180 degrees and switched from the Swedish version to the most severe quarantine and drones watching dog lovers in the wasteland, predicted 500 thousand corpses in the UK and 2 million corpses in the USA.
After, based on all these terrifying predictions and expert assessments, the whole West, not counting Sweden, plunged into a lockdown, antibody tests appeared. And then it became clear how many people actually got sick and what real mortality was.
Based on tests, the mortality rate in the county of Santa Clara, California sits between 0.12-0.2%.
In the county of Los Angeles, also in California – 0.18-0.36%.
In Gangelt, Germany – 0.37%.
In the state of New York – 0.58%, and in the city of New York – 0.86%, while 21% of the population there was already ill.
And then the Daily Mail comes along and says that the mortality may be up to 8 times higher, not the 3.4% that the World Health Organization estimates, but the 0.5%.
And reports such as this that give confusing, and unclear information, but to which a large number of people have access is common.
The situation is the same with medication for COVID-19 – on March 19th, US President Donald Trump announced that chloroquine – a well-known, cheap and old cure for malaria – also helps with coronavirus.
Dr. Didier Raoult, the famous French infectious disease specialist, creator and director of the Mediterranean University-Clinical Institute of Infectious Diseases, used it for treatment.
The results of Dr. Raoult and his institute were outstanding: by the end of March, only 10 of the 2,400 people who received treatment at his institute had died.
But, as soon as Trump said it would work, the medication suddenly became worthless and unusable.
Nevada Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak immediately banned the use of chloroquine for treating COVID-19 with his order, while Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer threatened doctors who used the medication with administrative sanctions.
As for Dr. Raoult – he was immediately accused of quackery, totalitarianism, and sexual harassment. But to be fair, he said that universal testing was needed and that both choloroquine and azithromycin should be used in the early stages of the disease, and then it was useless to apply them later on.
As such, Raoult may have not found the be-all end-all of COVID-19 treatments, but rather found that’s needed – proper testing.
Then, the above-mentioned governor’s orders were immediately supported by other studies, claiming that the medication shouldn’t be used.
A group of scientists analyzed the medical history of COVID-19 patients in a hospital for American veterans and published a terrifying preprint. 28% of those who received chloroquine died, and among those who did not, only 11% died. And then, the medication from not-very-effective in the later stages, turned into something that kills patients.
The thing is that no information was given about the study that’s being propagated, at least Raoult provided some evidence.
An additional adverse effect of this study was that chloroquine has been consumed for over 80 years. This is the oldest and well-proven cure for malaria. It is produced in tons. Its wholesale price for Africa is 4 (in words – four) cents. It is included in the WHO list of essential medicines, which includes only the safest and most needed medicines. And it claimed that it kills people.
For 80 years, chloroquine has been a cheap, common, safe generic. And only when it turned out that the medicine was priced at 4 cents, it was established that it couldn’t cure COVID-19 because it would potentially be too cheap and accessible.
Another promising drug was Remdesivir, an Ebola drug developed by Gilead Sciences. And what? On April 23rd, WHO “accidentally” posted on its website test results that showed that Remdesivir was no good.
The tests were carried out so incorrectly that WHO had to immediately remove the article from the site and even claim that it got there “by mistake”.
But the deed was done. Gilead shares crashed. Explanations by its scientists that the WHO-provided clinical trials were incorrect, did not interest anyone.
Media informed the whole world that the drug did not work in the “gold standard” trials, and the trials themselves had to be interrupted due to side effects.
The trick of all these stories is that trials by all medical rules – double blind randomized – cannot be done at all in an epidemic. And to conduct them is immoral. During the epidemic, the doctor will not leave a whole group of patients without a medicine that, he thinks, can help them, only to check if this medicine works.
At the same time, the epidemic removed barriers to the quality of information – and articles and preprints began to appear on professional websites that would never have been reviewed.
It’s a Catch-22 situation: any positive news wouldn’t be taken into account because didn’t pass the “double-blind randomized test” while negative news would be immediately shared, because in an epidemic you want to get to the most audience, and it’s easier to believe fearmongering, since the climate itself facilitates it.
And it is possible that the vaccine testing would undergo the same treatment.
Many “live” vaccines tend to stimulate the innate immune system and thereby protect not only from the disease from which the vaccine works, but also from a wide range of infections in general.
The stimulation mechanism is sufficiently proven and studied.
Especially remarkable in this sense is not even the BCG vaccine, but the live polio vaccine, which has been used for a long time in developing countries, where it not only protected against poliomyelitis, but also reduced infant mortality from other infections by 30%.
In the USSR, the same vaccine reduced the incidence of influenza by 75%.
This live vaccine, perhaps, could serve as a serious defense throughout, for example, the year and a half, during which the vaccine itself against the virus is being developed. The vaccine costs 10 cents.
The famous virologist and founder of the Global Virus Network, Dr. Robert Gallo, best known for his discovery of HIV, announced the start of clinical trials of the polio vaccine against COVID-19.
A vaccine that is already ready, which costs 10 cents, which will radically reduce morbidity and mortality from COVID-19, and there are no side effects from it (in children – one case in three million, despite what the anti-vaxxers say).
WHO – rightly – stated that it does not recommend the use of a live polio vaccine against coronavirus.
As the number of antibody tests grew and it became clear that 20-25% of the population was already infected in New York. And there was a danger, of people returning to the streets.
And on April 24th, the WHO stated that it is categorically against lifting quarantine for those who have been ill, because it has “no data” that all people develop stable immunity. In some patients, WHO warns, antibody levels are very low, and tests can give a false-positive result. Therefore, even those who have been ill cannot go to work.
So, does that mean that vaccination also doesn’t work? If, according to WHO, even after an illness there is no guarantee that antibodies will be produced, how will they be produced after vaccination?
That is, the recommendation by WHO is translated like this: There is no cure for this disease.
That is, the WHO, of course, did not check, but there are a couple of preprints saying that there’s no cure, and it cannot ignore such important evidence.
Basically, people should sit at home and, more importantly, generally keep quiet.
If people want to work so as not to starve to death, just call them a fascist.
If they raise the question that people without work will get drunk, get on drugs, commit suicide, just call them a fascist, covidiot.
If they attempt to timidly stutter that closed hospitals will lead to a monstrous increase in mortality from cancer, from cardiovascular diseases, from diseases of the kidneys, liver, once again, just call them a fascist and covidiot.
This isn’t to say that COVID-19 is not a serious pandemic. It is an astounding test of the strength healthcare systems, as seen in France and Italy, which occupy the 1st and 2nd position in the WHO ranking, and of the US, which occupies the 37th position.
And Italy and France appear to be passing the test, while the US seems to be failing entirely.
All of the listed above paints a very stark picture.