Since early on in 2020, particularly since March, the world has been incessantly besieged by politicians, career-bureaucrats, and media personalities who breathlessly frighten us with reports of, as President Trump would routinely refer to it, “the Plague”: SARS-CoV-2, a “novel” corona cold virus believed to be the cause of the disease, COVID-19.
And, of course, because they just as breathlessly, and typically in the very same breath, have been going on about hospitalizations and deaths courtesy of this latest coronavirus, within the public imagination a COVID “case” has become synonymous with COVID sickness and death.
This is fiction. It is fear-porn. If only untold numbers of people who would probably know better in other areas of their lives would just slow down, catch a breath, and think, they just might be able to see this for themselves.
Perspective is sorely needed. It is vitally needed to prevent the country we’ve known from being irretrievably lost to us.
About all of those damn, scary case numbers that we can’t escape hearing about:
It first needs to be noted that in the pre-Virus era, for a person to constitute a case of X meant that the person was sick and required medical attention, namely, hospitalization, for it.
When it comes to this single disease, however, that criteria goes out the window. A COVID case need only be someone who is either presumed to have contracted the virus or who has tested positive for it.
To repeat: A person is a COVID case even if he or she has zero symptoms, is not infectious, and is never tested.
The CDC informs us that there are three types of COVID cases: suspect, probable, and confirmed. The CDC counts only those that are probable and confirmed. There is no “confirmatory laboratory evidence” for a probable case.
So, as long as a medical professional presumes, on the basis of “clinical criteria” and some other considerations, that a patient has COVID, the patient is marked down as having COVID.
Now, consider that the visible symptoms that constitute such clinical criteria on the basis of which a medical authority would presume that a patient has COVID-19 are the following:
Fever or chills;
Cough;
Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing;
Fatigue;
Muscle or body aches;
Headache;
New loss of taste or smell;
Sore throat;
Congestion or runny nose;
Nausea or vomiting;
Diarrhea
These are the symptoms. According to the conventional wisdom on COVID, a person needn’t have all of these symptoms and needn’t even have any of them to be considered a COVID case.
The CDC also informs us that “emergency warning signs” of COVID are:
Trouble breathing;
Persistent pain or pressure in the chest;
New confusion;
Inability to wake or stay awake;
Pale, gray, or blue-colored skin, lips, or nail beds, depending on skin tone.
Okay. Now, let’s take a look at seasonal influenza. What are its symptoms?
Fever or feeling feverish/chills;
Cough;
Sore throat;
Runny or stuffy nose;
Muscle or body aches;
Headaches;
Fatigue (tiredness);
Vomiting and diarrhea;
And the flu, too, like COVID, can cause people to lose their senses of smell and taste.
The “emergency warning signs” of the flu in adults are:
Difficulty breathing or shortness of breath;
Persistent pain or pressure in the chest or abdomen;
Persistent dizziness, confusion, inability to arouse;
Seizures;
Not urinating;
Severe muscle pain;
Severe weakness or unsteadiness;
Fever or cough that improve but then return or worsen;
Worsening of chronic medical conditions;
Note, these are emergency warning signs of the flu for adults. Unlike COVID, for which children remain the least susceptible demographic, the flu does indeed affect children. The emergency warning signs for children are:
Fast breathing or trouble breathing;
Pale, gray, or blue-colored skin, lips, or nail beds, depending on skin tone;
Ribs pulling in with each breath;
Chest pain;
Severe muscle pain (child refuses to walk);
Dehydration (no urine for 8 hours, dry mouth, no tears when crying);
Not alert or interacting when awake;
Seizures;
Fever above 104 degrees Fahrenheit;
In children less than 12 weeks, any fever;
Fever or cough that improve but then return or worsen;
Worsening of chronic medical conditions
The point here is that COVID has no symptoms or emergency warning signs that aren’t present with seasonal influenza. If anything, the flu distinguishes itself from COVID most obviously in that the former affects, i.e. sickens, hospitalizes, and kills children. COVID does none of these things (So, if schools should be closed and kids masked for the sake of arresting the transmission of something that does not impact them, why shouldn’t these measures be taken in regard to something, like the flu, which most definitely does impact them?).
Even the common cold consists of symptoms that overlap with both the flu and COVID. The CDC admits that it is not always, and is sometimes “impossible,” to differentiate between the common cold and the flu in the absence of tests that must be run within the first few days of illness, for while the flu is “generally” more severe than a cold, the two do share symptoms.
Presumably, it is even more difficult, and maybe even “impossible,” to differentiate between the common cold and COVID, for, unlike the flu, COVID is supposedly present even when, as in the vast majority of cases, a person is asymptomatic or mildly or moderately symptomatic. If this wasn’t true, then such reputable organizations as the Mayo Clinic wouldn’t spend its resources supplying information for people to use in determining whether they have a cold, the flu, COVID, or…allergies. As it states from the outset: “COVID-19, the common cold, seasonal allergies and the flu have many similar signs and symptoms” [including, not insignificantly, loss of smell and taste].
Now, let’s take a look at the symptoms of pneumonia. According to the Mayo Clinic, they are:
Chest pain when you breathe or cough;
Confusion or changes in mental awareness (in adults age 65 and older);
Cough, which may produce phlegm;
Fatigue;
Fever, sweating and shaking chills;
Lower than normal body temperature (in adults older than age 65 and people with weak immune systems);
Nausea, vomiting or diarrhea;
Shortness of breath
Ah. These too sound an awful lot like COVID (and flu) symptoms. But, like the flu, pneumonia too is far more hazardous to children than is COVID. While it can affect anyone, the two age groups that are most vulnerable are those over 65 and those two and under.
Yes, so goes the common objection, but there are tests for distinguishing COVID from these other respiratory illnesses, as these very documents that I’m quoting from insist! I’ve already written at length about the, to put it generously, inherent limitations of the RT-PCR (Real Time-Polymerase Chain Reaction) assay that is treated as the gold standard of COVID testing. Let’s briefly revisit this subject here.
First of all, back in early March of 2020, before the Narrative became dogma and open dialogue over all things COVID was shut down, Neel V. Patel wrote an article in The MIT Technology Review titled, “Why the CDC botched its coronavirus testing?” Patel queried into how it was possible for the CDC to have fumbled so dramatically in its rollout of diagnostic tests.
For starters, Patel noted that the PCR “is a very sensitive test.” This means that “the smallest contaminants can ruin it completely” and create a “false positive” (which is what happened when the CDC first attempted to distribute test kits throughout the country).
Continuing, Patel accurately explained that the PCR test takes a sample of DNA and then magnifies or copies it “millions or billions” of times so that clinicians can study it. He also points out that the amplification process “has to be initiated using short strands that are complimentary to the target DNA [.]”
What are “short strands?” Short strands are called “primers.” This is important. Why? Patel quotes Keith Jerome, the head of virology at the University of Washington, who confesses that “primer design is still somewhat of an art, and not fully predictable” (emphases added).
In other words, the primers upon which the PCR depends are computer-generated. They are hypothetical viral sequences that are virtual, i.e. not necessarily real. Patel summarizes the point:
“Even when you have a good database of viral sequences, not all primer sets that look good on a computer will perform well in real life” (emphases added).
Note: Patel and Dr. Jerome, despite their recognition of the fact that the PCR test is hyper-sensitive and dependent upon uncertain viral sequences, nevertheless have faith that the PCR test can diagnose COVID patients.
Karry Mullis, though, who passed away in 2019, would have had no such faith.
And who was Karry Mullis? He was the inventor of the PCR test. For his achievement, he won a Nobel Prize in Science in 1993.
Mullis was clear that his was not a diagnostic, but, rather, a manufacturing device. It qualitatively assessed samples. When Mullis said, “Quantitative PCR is an oxymoron,” what he was saying is that the PCR test cannot detect whether a person was infected or infectious. As Emmy-award winning reporter John Lauritsen, who interviewed the late Dr. Mullis and subsequently summarized his position, put it:
“Although there is a common misimpression that viral load tests actually count the number of viruses in the blood, these tests cannot detect free, infectious viruses at all….The tests can detect genetic sequences of viruses, but not viruses themselves” (emphases added).
When we consider that the CDC has been “recommending” that laboratories run this hyper-sensitive test at a Ct (cycle threshold) of more than 35 cycles, a number that promises to all but guarantee a meaningless result, it becomes clear that the tsunami of positive cases that we are forever hearing about are false-positive cases.
But this is COVID-denial! Conspiracy! Well, maybe so, but only if none other than Anthony Fauci is a “denier” and conspiracy theorist. Only if those at the New York Times and those doctors to whom they have turned are “deniers” and “conspiracy theorists.”
Only if those at the World Health Organization are “deniers” and “conspiracy theorists.”
On January 13, 2021—nearly a year after the political and journalistic elites of the world sparked the COVID craze that overcame the Earth—the WHO made an announcement to users of PCR. Critical phrases are italicized.
“WHO guidance Diagnostic testing for SARS-CoV-2 states that careful interpretation of weak positive results is needed….
“WHO reminds IVD users [test administrators] that…as disease prevalence decreases, the risk of false positive increases. This means that the probability that a person who has a positive result…is truly infected with SARS-CoV-2 decreases as prevalence decreases, irrespective of the claimed specificity.”
In other words, a test that results in positive for a person who either exhibits mild symptoms or no symptoms is increasingly likely to be a false-positive.
That the test cannot determine infection or infectiousness is further underscored, albeit tacitly, by this next line from the WHO:
“Most PCR assays are indicated as an aid for diagnosis, therefore, health care providers must consider any result in combination with timing of sampling, specimen type, assay specifics, clinical observations, patient history, confirmed status of any contacts, and epidemiological information.”
Translation: The PCR test is not itself a diagnostic device (as its inventor and others have said). Unless it is used in conjunction with a variety of other context-specific factors, it is no good for determining whether a person is infected with COVID.
This, however, is not what you hear from the political and media classes when they address the country.
As the New York Times (belatedly) conceded in the fall of 2020, the Ct of the PCR recommended by the CDC rendered the test worthless given that approximately 90% (or more) of positive results were false-positives (some widely regarded researchers found that 100% of such results were false-positives).
Yet matters have been even worse than this. The illusion of an avalanche of endless cases was generated not just by the abuse of the PCR. The CDC had also been conflating PCR results with antibodies test results! Why is this important?
If a person tested positive for the antibodies to what was believed to be SARS-CoV-2, this meant that he or she had been exposed to it in the past and was now immune to being infected again. In other words, the person may have never even been sick or, if he or she had been, the person no longer was.
No infection or infectiousness.
But each time someone tested positive as having had COVID (or some coronavirus) in the past, it was logged down as a present case, thus furthering the lie that another person was infected in the present.
Is this not COVID denial? Well, only if those at The Atlantic are COVID-deniers, for it is among the publications to have called this out for the scandal that it is.
About 95% of all those who are diagnosed with COVID exhibit mild or moderate symptoms requiring no hospitalization. In a pre-COVID era, they wouldn’t have even been considered “cases” at all. But is this not more of the stuff of COVID-denial and conspiracy theory? Perhaps, but only if those at the Washington Post who note that about 40% of all COVID cases are asymptomatic, i.e. show zero symptoms, are “deniers” and “conspiracy theorists.”
And the lethality rate of COVID among the general population remains, by the way, one-tenth to one-half of one percent.
A “positive” COVID diagnosis does not equal a death sentence for the overwhelming majority of people. It doesn’t even equal “seriously sick,” let alone in need of hospitalization, for the overwhelming majority of people.
So why are so many otherwise intelligent people consumed by fear over this one virus alone? There is a longer answer, but the short answer is: the media. The fear-mongering, the sensationalism, the hype on the part of the scribblers and talking heads and the politicians (and favorite bureaucrats) for whom they daily run cover has entranced most of the public into believing that we are in the cataclysmic throes of an historically-unprecedented Plague that promises to consume us all (unless we wear masks, stand six feet apart, and, of course, get vaccinated!).
That this is hypnosis, plain and simple, that it is designed to grossly distort public perception, can be seen easily enough when we consider the following figures from none other than the CDC itself. As you review them, can you honestly imagine the masses responding any differently to any of them than they are now responding to tireless coverage of COVID had it been these other viruses and diseases, rather than COVID, that was getting all of the press?
Pneumonia
United States
Annually, about one million Americans seek hospitalization for pneumonia. One million. In 2017, 1.3 million Americans were hospitalized, and 50,000 people died from it.
Globally
On average, 1.7 million people around the world die from pneumonia per year. In 2017, that number was 2.56 million. And in that same year, 808,694 of those deaths were children under the age of five.
Influenza
United States
Each year, anywhere between nine million and 45 million people get sick—actually sick (not “asymptomatic” or “mildly” or “moderately symptomatic,” but actually sick)—with the flu.
About 140,000-810,000 Americans are hospitalized due to it.
And 12,000-61,000 Americans die from it (Except, it’s worth noting, in 2020, when only 646 Americans are said to have died from the flu!).
Globally
One billion people get sick from the flu every year. One. Billion.
300,000-500,000 people die from seasonal influenza.
Lung Infections
United States
15 million Americans contract these infections each year.
More than 150,000 Americans die from them—each and every year. This amounts to one death every four minutes!
Globally
There are three million Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) deaths annually.
If an alien from another galaxy was to descend upon the Earth and listen to the political and media elites of America and those of other societies, this alien could be forgiven for assuming that SARS-CoV-2 is the only virus from which Earthlings have anything to fear. The alien could be forgiven for thinking that pneumonia, the flu, and the respiratory illnesses of various sorts that have been hospitalizing and killing people en masse from since forever don’t exist.
Conversely, this same alien would have no option but to think that these other illnesses are all that threaten human life and that COVID doesn’t exist if the powers-that-be in the government and in the media focused on them to the extent that they have spent the last year-and-a-half focusing on COVID while deciding to ignore the latter.
Perspective is needed now more than ever.
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