Friday Apr 26, 2024
Friday Apr 26, 2024
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Sri Lanka’s heroism, will and passion for progress can surely be galvanised again. That is our real vaccine – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara
It seems we are continuing a “facts light” approach to tackling the pandemic.
Virologists have pointed out that global data on transmission confirms it is heightened in homes and an “airborne virus” needs open not closed swimming pools, parks, and encouragement for people to get exercise and enjoy the flow of germicidal air and virus killing UV rays and Vitamin D from the sun.
“Lock up” is so outdated, when we know that personal transmission is not the primary vector except in crowded, congested, indoor areas where extended time is spent. Good ventilation, and indoors is fine too. Otherwise, being penned in, may the very worst thing we can do. Look at all the masked jurisdictions having multiple waves, in and out of Lockdown, and just compare them say to open, flourishing, largely mask free, Florida since September 2020.
The following US States since they removed the following restrictions, cumulatively lodged only this percentage of COVID cases from things we are currently banning.
Activities: Residential building lobby and other congregation, first responder/public safety, health care facilities, hotel accommodation, travel/mass transit, manufacturing/processing environments, office building/office work, personal care service, restaurant/bar, retail (food, essential), retail (nonessential), school K-12 (public and private), sports venues/activities, social gatherings (with limits on totals).
As percentage of cases (cumulatively for the above activities) since opening (reported by ABC News): 4.2% California; 0.62% Washington D.C.; 0.11% Illinois; 0.8% Michigan; 2.39% North Carolina.
Read the list of activities and the C-19 “positive test” percentages soberly and see if this generates enthusiasm for our current, strange, “open and shut” policies.
Minister Cabraal reported that more than Rs. 60 billion was lost to four days of “travel restrictions” (euphemism for lockdown/quasi curfew). That is a horrifying number on top of past losses and impacts. And I urge anyone to look at the number of “positive tests” related to Colombo, the epicentre of Colombo, rather than greater Colombo. They are so nominal, that the body blow to GDP seems completely out of proportion.
The Minister points out that were we to succumb to further economic meltdown by imposing a 10-day “lockdown” (futilely for this airborne virus, in contradiction to all the recommendations, including those published in Sri Lanka, re sunshine, ventilation, being outdoors), we are likely to incur a Rs. 150 billion impact. I would suggest that is not sane, especially as the only ROI is to await the next “scariant”, spike or even a new coronavirus family member, a pathogen of a different pedigree.
Never before in history, was our response to even plagues or pestilences, to “lock people in” unless it was penal. And we need a flourishing society to provide health care, and some life for those who survive, or else why are we fighting so hard, just to achieve “non-death”, with no viable life to then offer?
Misconceptions galore: Variants, PCR tests, surges and dirges
As reported by Dr. Michael Yeadon, former Chief Science Officer of Pfizer, anyone exposed to SARS, the 2003 original virus, then exposed to C-19, has an immune response. The body “recognises” the family ties of the two, even though 17 years have elapsed, and there is a 20% difference between them. Any of the current variants being touted, he points out, are no more than 0.3% different from SARS-CoV-2. Hardly a work-out for the immune system, or even any functioning vaccine, and the “hysterics” of the “Indian variant” are also subsiding in the UK, where flu and pneumonia are currently more dangerous, and even in the few “hotspots” for that variant, even SAGE admits, the line is flattening.
If we could rinse out our mouths and minds from “variant” propaganda, and realise viruses mutate, and the more we stifle and lock them up, the more virologists tell us they are likely to multiply in a way that may outfox our immune system or make it harder to engage them. Viruses need living hosts to perpetuate themselves, and therefore get less virulent, and hence the statement of Farr’s Law of natural declines post temporary spikes.
We want this to become endemic, that’s it. And to do that, we have to live, and interact, and yes be prudent, but not shackle ourselves and infantilise our immune systems.
By the way, now C-19 is only the fourth most prevalent respiratory virus in the US! But no one writes anything about Parainfluenza Virus 3, Coronavirus OC43 and Human Rhinovirus/Enterovirus. No one writes about these, whatever their lethality or influence, because they aren’t part of the panic porn narrative.
PCR tests, as I keep reporting were not designed by their creator (Karl Mullis, Nobel Prize Winning Chemist) as per his own statements for diagnosis. Every test comes with a disclaimer in their packaging, indicating they are not for diagnosis. The WHO even confirmed in January that they are a variable, not definitive, and the amplification (Ct setting) has to be below 30 to detect a viral load associated with infectiousness. There are, on top of the amplification issues, inherent false positives. I do not know what these are for Lanka labs, but 30% had been cited by a Lanka specialist about six months back in the press. Holding a nation’s future and fortunes hostage to the vagaries of this test seems inane as well as mildly insane. Yet it has swept the world for all its inefficiency and inconclusiveness.
The Portuguese High Court ruled against these tests as a basis for limiting autonomy, but Sweden has gone further, indicating they are no longer using PCR tests (reported in Nexus, Newsfeed.com). Essentially they say (as I quoted in full in an earlier article): “The PCR technology…cannot distinguish between viruses capable of infecting cells and viruses that have been neutralised by the immune system and therefore…cannot be used to distinguish whether someone is contagious or not. RNA from viruses can often be detected for weeks (sometimes months) after the illness…” Sweden remember had light restrictions, no enforced masking, open schools (not a single death associated with that), below normal mortality in 2020 and below a 5-year average to date in 2021. They are a living case study (despite nursing home errors), with a relatively mild economic contraction compared to the UK and others, and it cannot behoove us to ignore evidence right before us, or compelling logic grounded in demonstrated science.
As I wrote in my last article, and this follows the same pattern globally, when spooked, we start testing manically. In our case, tests have gone up four-fold since mid-April. Positivity has inched up, about 2% from what we read. But we also know that if we were testing 7,000 a day still, and then had 3,000 “positive cases”, that would be an order of magnitude different than today’s situation, of 28,000 tested for 3,000 positives per day. It would be fascinating to know what percentage are asymptomatic, as it would be ridiculous if they were the majority, and we were so terrorised by what is tantamount to a fiction.
We knew India was going to turn the corner, when Mumbai pointed out that 85% of their “cases” were asymptomatic. By the way, even the US CDC concedes this is flimflam, though surreptitiously. As they are now in the “vaccine selling” game, reports came out that CDC is expressing outrage at clinics, telling them to only call a post-vaccination patient “COVID positive” if they have symptoms! My gosh, surely their fecklessness must shriek at anyone watching these gyrations, when someone dying of poison in the US with a positive PCR test was once being labelled a “COVID death”.
But their proclamations now, clearly demonstrate the truth of the matter, as they would not risk having suppressed data leading to an actual outbreak. But with the “asymptomatic” the only “outbreak” is between our ears.
The “dirge” relates to the weird psychological paralysis on display. You ask anyone relating to ongoing work or commitments undertaken, and they seem shocked, and reply, “We, our nation, are facing this pandemic, nothing else matters.”
So, shutting down your faculties, refusing to strategise for the future, not mobilising a team through crisis, this will send the virus scampering? Or will it rather, inflict another body blow to resilience or ability to rebound? In my 10 years in Sri Lanka, between 1993 and 2003, no one ever told me, “Let’s not think or talk about anything, we have a war on, our nation and our staff are facing terrorists in a civil war.”
I remember doing crisis work for KLM and Ceylinco right after the Central Bank Bombing, working with the World Trade Center team when they established that prize hub, and then when they had to completely reframe perceptions after bombing to make it viable once more. And people rallied, and businesses came back. Sri Lanka has many front-line heroes to be proud of, but the citizens were also there, showing their resilience and mettle and dedication.
How is a virus so much more terrifying? Many more will die from car deaths, cancer, heart disease, hypertension, in some years dengue. And whatever toll it takes, what alternative is there, but to trust to the same immune response that has Asia and Africa’s infection fatality rate at 0.05%, plus treatments and vaccines? Sitting in despair, shows we care? It is not the pandemic we face; it is the overwrought pandemic response! During those years, no one told us to sit home and cower, and flee. We endowed the heroism of our front-line heroes, and Lanka was ready to take-off thereafter. Now we are undermining any such heroism, by being told to shrivel away, and we just keep see sawing between tentative momentum and the false alarm of reducing all of life to one, overhyped variable.
Vaccinations
These are rushed through on emergency authorisation, so none are properly “authorised”. Safety trials won’t be done until 2022 or 2023. For a disease with such a mild fatality, 0.5% or less, perhaps 0.15% taking global seroprevalence studies, the fervour and fever for experimental vaccines is hard to take on. Especially when there are treatments galore with demonstrated results (see below). Of course, the vaccine proponents, seek to suppress those treatments being authorised, lest the vaccine profit gravy train, go off the rails.
So intense is the misguided enthusiasm for these, we have been advised, we may get a vaccination cluster here. That would surely be one irony too far.
A smattering of “vaccine news”:
*C-19 vaccines are to be investigated by the European Medicines Agency for side-effects including face swelling anaphylaxis, blood clots and more.
Treatments
India and Ivermectin (though similar results abound in Mexico, Bangladesh, parts of the US, Zimbabwe and more):
Just three weeks after adding Ivermectin, Delhi now leads India out of the deadly second surge of the COVID pandemic. Cases that had peaked at 28,395 on April 20 plummeted nearly 80% to just 6,430 on 15 May. Deaths peaked 4 May, and now they are also down 25%.
On 10 May, the Indian State of Goa adopted an even more ambitious policy of preemptive Ivermectin for all adults in the state. The Chief Minister of Goa is Dr. Pramod Sawant, a progressive 49-year-old physician persuaded by science. In particular, he read Dr. Pierre Kory's, Dr. Tess Lawrie's and Dr. Andrew Hill's robust meta-analyses. As a direct result, Goa has seen a drop in cases from 3,124 the day after the announcement to 1,314 five days later.
Meanwhile, three other Indian states have followed Goa's lead in adding Ivermectin: Uttarkhand, Karnataka, and Uttar Pradesh. And, as expected, they have seen a drop in new daily cases as well, with Uttar Pradesh down nearly 75% from a peak of 37,944 just four days after they began following the April 20 AIIMS guidance to just 10,505 on 16 May.
The tragic story in all this is that the Indian state of Tamil Nadu installed a new leader on 7 May. He suddenly reversed their state's decision to adopt Ivermectin, opting instead for doses of Remdesivir, a drug that sells for 3,000 dollars per dose. So now Tamil Nadu's cases are rocketing as well. For the doses sought the cost would be $60 million for a developing country in distress, as opposed to mere hundreds of dollars for Ivermectin.
To get a complete picture of the variety of available treatments, please see the complete interview I cited in my last article, with Baylor School of Medicine Cardiologist, researcher and a doctor who in treating C-19 patients since March 2020 has only lost two in his care! He was interviewed by Tucker Carlson, the highest rated cable show in the US, and this has set the “treatment world” on fire, with the FDA just recently having approved, for most health and age categories, the use of anticlonal antibodies, part of the early treatment regimen, with remarkable documented benefits. You can see the full interview at rumble.com/user/jersnav.
All lies
One of the most eminent anti-orthodoxy campaigners is the aforesaid Michael Yeadon, former Chief Science Officer of Pfizer. He proclaims all the narrative points are a fraud.
He writes that while new, C-19 is kin to six other coronaviruses, four of which are endemic, ergo it was never going to kill crazy numbers. The living testimony of Sweden, Belarus, open US States, Asia and Africa proves that. Mostly it afflicts those close to the end of their lives.
Asymptomatic transmission is a total lie he reconfirms.
Masks are not necessary and nor do they work. Cloth stopping microparticles of a respiratory virus transmission if demonstrated, would earn a Nobel Prize.
Lockdown is a flop, almost all transmission globally happened in institutions, indoors is the worst environment for containment, so we smashed the economy and civil society for next to nothing.
PCR testing as done is a joke, with no definition of a false positive rate, too high a number of cycles, a variable number of probe/primer pairs and no normalising for amount of genetic material in samples. Done by inexperienced staff and with rampant cross-contamination.
Variants are almost identical to the original, 0.3% drift in 17 months is irrelevant.
A VaxPass, a shorthand for totalitarian tyranny, ignoring mass poverty, mass deaths, mass ruin, no other variable of concern other than this one middling influenza strain, is a terrifying endgame.
He says, “I’m the only senior ex big pharmaceutical company staffer speaking out anywhere in the world as far as I can tell…”
Here in Lanka, to date, we’ve not gone overboard, we’ve sought to protect our citizens and our society, and we have to listen to these global alarm bells before we undo our progress.
Think of the endgame
Ask anyone to explain it. Another pathogen, another lockdown? How does society develop any momentum, or self-confidence, if we don’t take “shutdown” off the table? This can’t be the playbook. If we need the world to be utterly “safe,” if asserted hobgoblins that are part of life’s biologic cycle can’t be faced, especially when they track normal mortality, especially when there are treatments around, then we doom ourselves to futility and failure.
This country should take a decision, to develop towards a first world nation. We cannot become vassal states of others due to ever mounting debt, delaying the inevitable reckoning. We can debate Port City and the future, but if it finds us hiding under covers from C-19 or C-20 or their next cousin, or the next alarmist scare, why bother? The world wants to visit us, but if we “flee the science” and lock everyone up from each other, have a few cases and shut down a hotel or neighbourhood, rather than trust laws of transmission, the human immune system, stick to the symptomatic, and excel at these wonderful early treatments that can protect most of even the small percentage of risk, we’ll be at the “lonelier” end of our planet.
We’re not facing a pandemic. We’re facing our fear, not so well currently. But we know we can. We must. Sri Lanka’s heroism, will and passion for progress can surely be galvanised again. That is our real vaccine.
