Sunday Dec 15, 2024
Sunday Dec 15, 2024
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PCR tests are not reliable, again there are early treatments. We cannot keep “locking up” those who have to keep themselves and all of us solvent. We desperately need national income, exports need to be competitive, we have to have a sane import policy, a less panic-riddled tourism policy, and to let people interact and exchange goods, services, ideas. There will be surges, seasonal respiratory spikes, from this or influenza or something other. Let’s build health and be at the forefront of treatments – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara
I am sad to report there seems a swelling tide of things we don’t know and cannot rely on. This toxic combination renders any attempt at intelligent pandemic response more than questionable.
PCR tests, cases and deaths
It is clear that the PCR test, a mutant adaptation from something designed to “detect” not “diagnose”, just is nowhere close to diagnostically definitive. But national fortunes are hostage to its outputs as if these were definitive read-outs we could and should steer by.
I have repeatedly sought to remind us that overwhelming global consensus may differ on the “exact” cut-off point, beyond which the PCR test is more a breeding ground for false positives rather than detection, but “below 30” is fairly well globally agreed as a standard. Many jurisdictions now use 27 (as the US CDC suggests when testing for post vaccination reinfection) or 25 (as the Chinese do for assessing likely infectiousness), plus 1-2 symptoms. WHO guidance says the PCR test should be used alongside other clinical observations and confirmations.
More than 10 doctors have told me that if there is a national policy, a standard like the above, that is actually audited and enforced, they are unaware of it! And these are substantial professionals, all of them. Instead, there is a “range” and what government labs use versus private hospitals, may not be aligned either I am informed. If true, this is remarkable! It means we don’t know the quality of data on which we are relying to shut down the country, take preventive action, assess recovery, any of it.
The recent surge came in part from testing having gone up four times, plus an actual increase in positivity. But with these dubious testing results, we can’t be sure how much of each. Also I was told there is no auditing or quality control as there is a shortage of professionals. But we spend Rs. 80 million a day on these infernal things, scandalously calling each “positive test” a “case” which is absurd. Until 2020, a “case” meant the presence of symptoms. As it should today. How can we outlay such a sum and not know what we are getting from it?
A recent study out of Germany gives us even more cause for alarm. In a letter to the ‘Journal of Infection,’ scientists from the Universities of Munster and Essen make the case that PCR tests are a poor way of measuring active infection in a population. When used in Germany as a routine test for large numbers of asymptomatic individuals, they say, more than half of all positive tests did not pick up active infections but detected dead viruses from previous infection.
They conclude: “In light of our findings that more than half of individuals with positive PCR test results are unlikely to have been infectious, RT-PCR test positivity should not be taken as an accurate measure of infectious SARS-CoV-2 incidence. Our results confirm the findings of others that the routine use of “positive” RT-PCR test results as the gold standard for assessing and controlling infectiousness fails to reflect the fact “that 50-75% of the time an individual is PCR positive, they are likely to be post-infectious.”’ (Individuals are usually infectious a few days before symptoms become manifest and five days thereafter, PCR tests pick up “viral debris” or “strands” for at least 30 days, and these can linger as harmless “leftovers” for months).
The problem is, they argue, that there is no international standardisation across laboratories as to what Ct value should constitute a ‘positive’ test, with the result that PCR tests have been of limited use as a tool for mass screening of the population.
I needn’t belabour the devastating nature of this and related claims (there are even more damning papers that cut to the core of the efficacy of the test itself), but since we also identify “COVID deaths” on the basis of this, even when someone is teeming with comorbidities, we don’t know how many are actually dying “of” COVID, or where it was just present, as so often influenza or pneumonia are. And many times, we know there is a posthumous test for burial purposes, so there we are padding “death” numbers when there was no indication that the primary cause of death was a respiratory illness (which at least puts in the correct diagnostic zone).
We know someone who had a family member taken to a well-known hospital. They first said it was a heart attack. Then, they shifted to C-19 being likely and took them to IDH. They were then informed she passed away. But the first test for COVID at that point came back negative. Not to be put off, they did a second one. That negative still wasn’t enough, nor could the grieving family have closure. Another test! This time…eureka! It was positive. Was it just what happens when you test over and over? Was the amplification setting adjusted (the higher, the more dubious)? We don’t know. But with the recent debacle of not having correct death numbers, and “101” being flashed to paralyse the country when the real number was “15” deaths as per the President, does the above instil much confidence?
To add insult to injury, every such COVID designation, no matter after how many tests, leads to a roughly Rs. 30,000 fee for burial! I will not suggest the obvious. But incentivising diagnosis financially, and we saw this with US insurance payments paying a far higher amount if a death or even case was classified as COVID, is a precarious way to oversee a pandemic or safeguard public health.
Therefore, we don’t know, as we will not sift those with multiple comorbidities from those clearly dying from COVID. And the number of mortalities in Sri Lanka between ages 30-50, seems so inconsistent with all global data, that “wondering” is not idle fancy, but genuine statistical confusion and caution.
The strange fetish for ignoring facts
There are over 30 studies I’ve cited that track and demonstrate lockdowns don’t work. Two more came out recently, none of these are focused on “modelling,” but actual data. I have provided links to these in past articles, I have quoted from them in past articles. The latest one has economists from the University of Southern California and the RAND Corporation (www.nber.org, ‘The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Policy Responses on Excess Mortality’) examining “shelter in place” (SIP) mandates from 43 countries and all 50 US States. They analysed not only deaths from C-19 but “excess deaths,” a measure that compares overall deaths from all causes to an historical baseline.
Beyond not making a positive difference, these “lockdown” orders had lethal unintended consequences from skyrocketing drug overdoses, worsening mental and emotional health, increased child and overall domestic abuse, deadly delays in non-COVID medical care we seem to readily ignore. So, as they cast their gaze at the real barometer, “excess deaths”, the portrait was not encouraging.
“We fail to find that shelter-in-place policies saved lives,” the authors report. “In the weeks following implementation, excess mortality actually increases, and a one week increase in length of stay-at-home policies corresponds roughly with 2.7 excess deaths per 100,000 people.”
And this is consistent with so many data-based peer reviewed studies, and we know most C-19 spread occurred at home, not out in the world.
And as we’ve pointed out:
And to prove we are not following medicine or science, we are left with no choice, but to come back to Sweden.
Why did we abandon gathered wisdom?
Despite now similar achievements in the open US states, when the whole world was a “lockdown maniac”, this blessed soul Anders Tegnell, Chief Epidemiologist in Sweden decided to focus on the symptomatic, and not believe all prior public health wisdom had been mysteriously annulled. Though their nursing home mistake (similar to elsewhere) contributed to 40% of their ascribed deaths (and while that still had them firmly in the middle of the European results – though with an open society and economy – detractors cackled at how much better the other Nordic countries did), now, the data is in, Sweden was right.
They “suggested” restraint, restaurants and bars were encouraged to shut earlier in the winter wave, but everything has been open, schools stayed open (not a single death), economy has contracted less, and they outperformed the UK and Germany. Comparing them to Finland and Norway (never fully locked down either), where population density and urbanisation is far less, makes no sense. Denmark was the only real comparison. However, Sweden had a very mild 2019 flu season, the other three had a severe one. So, there was more “dry tinder” as the euphemism goes. If you combine 2019-2020, Sweden had lower excess mortality than Denmark! Just 2020, average mortality. 2021 year to date, lower than a 5-year average, no masking, no enforced lockdowns, economy open.
But if you look pre-2020, the “playbook” Sweden followed was not a contrarian experiment, it was mainstream pandemic “best practice,” including WHO, CDC, UK, Australia, and Johns Hopkins. We are to believe, credibly, that a one-month spasm in Wuhan overthrew decades of complementary public health wisdom and experience? And this anyway was a belated short-term panic response when there was exponential viral spread, even if we are to believe the data coming from China, and never meant as an extended, sustained game plan.
October 2019: WHO indicates quarantine, border closures, and contact tracing are NOT recommended. They did a review of the world’s 10 best mask studies, and all concluded masks don’t work! CDC 2017 (last earlier update): No recommendation of restaurant closures, much less business closures, certainly no stay-at-home orders, only “voluntary” isolation of the sick and exposed. Masks, only very sick people in very crowded situations.
“Social distancing” was never in any pandemic guideline before 2007, before a high school science project, was “channelled” through the baffled guile of then President George W. Bush, and then mindlessly put into the suite of possible responses, rather than even assessing first whether it was an airborne virus which renders that moot. (‘The Untold Story of Social Distancing,’ NY Times, 2020).
UK 2011 plan: no masks, no border closings, no real ban on mass gatherings, indicating no real evidence to demonstrate efficacy of any of these. They stated, “It will not be possible to stop the spread of, or to eradicate, the pandemic.” They go on to say we must protect those at risk, seek out treatments, and let those not at risk develop natural immunity. Sound at all familiar?
Australia’s plan was to first and foremost uphold the rights of the individual. Those same rights are currently in a compost heap over there as PCR spasms and utter paranoia hold sway. In that sane plan from not too long ago, among the things “not recommended”: school closures, workplace closures, masks, gatherings. And Western Australia had “COVID-sized” flu (or early undetected C-19) in 2019, huge spike, yet nothing closed, virtually no one noticed, and everyone managed as we’ve always done.
This was back before intemperate, frenzied panic modelling asserted the next Spanish Flu was upon us (for perspective, if it was, by now, 230 million would be dead, more of them young than old, none of them needing “death certificate rigging,” clearly dying “from” an acute respiratory illness). Johns Hopkins cited these interventions have “broad lack of evidence efficacy” (quote from September 2019).
So, the “open” US States, Sweden, Bulgaria, all those like Japan, South Korea, Vietnam who didn’t have protracted severe shutdowns and flourished, were in synch with our accumulated wisdom. The rest of us panicked and decided on extended insanity (long after the two week “flattening the curve” came and went, which was an argument for occasional, short, sharp, circuit breakers, with strategies premised on cost-benefit, not catastrophic, recurring, extended shutdowns).
Time to use the evidence of open jurisdictions, all those studies, and return to our established rather than paranoid, Pavlovian responses.
Those variants!
Professor of Epidemiology at Oxford, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, former Chief Science Officer of Pfizer, Michael Yeadon, despised by mainstream press, but among the most eminent, experienced people in their field, say the same thing about “variants” overall.
Dr. Gupta says a variant is like a hat or a frock put on a body, not an entirely new organism. And if one is more dominant at one moment it does not mean it is remarkably transmissible or virulent, just that it is currently front of the pack. If the overall incidence of COVID, over a sustained basis (and this too being reported by these fickle PCR tests) does not increase, then the fact that one variant is an increasingly greater percentage of that total spread, is not particularly worrying. Viruses mutate, and the new mutation may be understandably more vigorous in the short term.
Also, as per Dr. Yeadon, a variant is at most 0.3% different, from the core and the “original” Wuhan virus is long gone anyway, multiple iterations later. And variants are stoked by our being shut down and our immune systems locked away, and potentially are provoked by vaccines as well. Both Dr. Gupta and Professor Yeadon concur, that both natural immunity and vaccines that work (that is becoming more problematic to assess on the data), can readily handle this small variation. After all, in tests, immune systems can still mount a response to the original SARS, 17 years later, and that is 20% different from SARS-CoV-2.
The initial UK reports of greater virulence of the Delta variant based on household transmissibility came from a paper that has since been defrocked, where the researchers conceded, in comparing with Alpha (which fizzled out in the US with no real impact), they did not adjust for “size” of household!
Ludicrous panic porn from WHO on through cannot change known data to date. Despite the Indian “surge”, deaths per million are still less than 1/7th as I reported of the EU and US. On 18 June, Public Health England published their 16th report on variants, and while Alpha shows clearly a “case” fatality of 1.9%, Delta only displays 0.1%. Even total case numbers (Delta has been dominant since mid-May in the UK), are Alpha 218,332 and Delta 31,132. Those Delta numbers are akin to the flu, and the flu over the last several weeks, along with pneumonia in the UK has been killing far more than C-19. In fact, last week only 1% of ICU beds in the UK were occupied by COVID patients. None of this has infiltrated the foggy craniums of the politicians there, who continue to cringe at reckless, feckless “modelling.”
In fact, as Delta became dominant, hospitalisations plummeted, an inverse relationship. And more to the point, more of the mortality is registered among those vaccinated, as opposed to unvaccinated! This “could be” as more of the unvaccinated are younger and less at risk, which makes the case that vaccine or not, most people aren’t at risk. And those that are, there are truly exceptional early treatments, which I have written about before, and which we are presenting via global clinicians who have evidence, to the leading medical professionals in this country.
So, time to develop a long overdue immunity to panic porn…oh, wait, over the horizon, Delta+!
Surely enough!
So, we are where we were. Stop manically testing the healthy, focus on symptoms, treat the symptoms early, let’s stop economically incentivising tagging deaths as COVID.
AstraZeneca is banned variously in numerous European countries; Australia is phasing it out. We can’t just ignore that and just “vaccinate” as if we don’t have this information. The adverse events and outright deaths re Pfizer and Moderna are staggering, just under 6,000 deaths in the US database, over 12,000 in Europe. The first is more than 9/11, and these are inevitably undercounted by a factor of 1-20% (as they require a doctor to fill out and are onerous). Not to say there is no vaccination value for the vulnerable, but unlike the peddlers of this, we do need to just dispassionately review evidence.
PCR tests are not reliable, again there are early treatments. We cannot keep “locking up” those who have to keep themselves and all of us solvent. We desperately need national income, exports need to be competitive, we have to have a sane import policy, a less panic-riddled tourism policy, and to let people interact and exchange goods, services, ideas. There will be surges, seasonal respiratory spikes, from this or influenza or something other. Let’s build health and be at the forefront of treatments.
We have bigger issues than this viral strain. We really have to move on.
