COVID-19 and Sri Lanka: Time to wake up

Two utterly misleading headlines hit the press. One was bemoaning how we are ‘testing’ less people, back down to 14,000 per day. The suggestion was we therefore don’t know the state of COVID spread. Frankly, I have to say, and all rational people should be saying, “So what?”

Positive tests via flawed, fickle, imprecise tests, replete with lab contamination, false positives, unknown amplification settings, inherent issues of picking up ‘residue’ and ‘viral debris’ for 30 days, therefore skewing even what is detected, are not ‘cases’ unless symptomatic. We are spending money that is desperately needed elsewhere. The relevant metric is ‘mortality’ and really ‘excess deaths.’ 

Even mortality as I explained in the last article ‘from’ or ‘with’ COVID is unknown, one because of all the confounding comorbidities, and also again due to the above tests, with all of their uncertainties.

But there is no reported ‘excess mortality’ of which I’m aware. If so, and we are at 40-45 daily deaths ‘ascribed’ to COVID, and that’s fairly consistent at present for some time, the level of testing doesn’t really matter, unless that were to sustainably surge.

We thought there was a ‘surge’ when we suddenly tested four times as many, and if we tested forty times as many, as a percentage, we would get still more. There is a percentage of the total population that are ‘infected.’ But larger than that number are false positive riddled ‘positive tests.’ And symptoms and mortality are what we have to anchor our responses to.

The next bit of fear mongering comes from saying we must beware lest the feared ‘Delta’ variant become dominant. Where does our immunity to facts come from?

The UK has had mushrooming cases, and ICU and deaths have stayed extremely tame, flatlining on many days. 17 recent deaths in a day, Delta having dominated there since May, case fatality rate of 0.3% average compared to Alpha when dominant of 2.0%. So, again, ‘positive tests’ don’t matter on their own. 

Two of the world’s top specialists are Dr. Risch, Yale Epidemiologist and Dr. McCullough who presented to Lanka policymakers for us here and is the world’s most published cardiologist, and also an epidemiologist and COVID early treatment pioneer. Both recently concurred that the variant was one of the mildest they’d seen, highly amenable to early treatment, with a very low impact on mortality everywhere it’s materialised to date. 

And this is exactly in line with expectations, viruses mutate, they become more transmissible and less virulent, as they need living hosts to perpetuate themselves. Even when ‘Alpha’ was striking terror, due to increasing natural immunity and the efficacy of early treatments in the US through pioneers like Dr. McCullough, the US COVID numbers plummeted precisely as Alpha was the dominant strain there. Again, this is not conjecture, but straight data and facts.

In fact, in the UK, among the unvaccinated, Delta-wise, there are roughly 44 ascribed deaths from 53,822, giving us .08% case fatality rate, and lower if we knew the ‘infection fatality rate’. Therefore, we must stop this nonsense of breathlessly cataloguing variants of a viral strain as if the world revolved around this. It doesn’t, except through our own mania.

‘Pandemic’ literally suggests ‘extra deaths everywhere.’ By this definition, in 2021 there isn’t a ‘pandemic’, and this is increasingly seasonal and ‘endemic’ with occasional mutations, and if we weren’t locked up, our immune systems and the virus could arrive at a natural evolutionary compromise. The global IFR remember, from hosts of global studies, reported by Stanford, ‘buried’ but still present on the WHO website, is 0.15%. 

Censoring run amok

One of the most astute, credible, versed and impressive critics of the ‘new world order’ is former Chief Science Officer of Pfizer, Michael Yeadon. Reuters did a ‘fact checker’ article claiming his statements were ‘misinformation.’ As is standard for this type of ‘hit piece’, that Reuters article itself, says Professor Yeadon is ‘a mixture of straw men and sheer invention.’

The usual compendium of misinformation is present. 

There is the attempt to assert that ‘symptom free’ people can drive spread. We cannot find any substantive corroboration. Dr. Fauci in the US indicated unequivocally the symptomatic drive epidemics…before he about-faced, on the basis of no new evidence or data of which we’re aware. WHO has even said it is ‘extremely rare’, and clarified they have seen no evidence of it, only modelling extrapolations. Numerous peer reviewed articles, referenced in my earlier articles reconfirm domestic transmission is effectively zero. And all of this marries with clearly established biologic logic.

Variants again don’t merit the frenzy. Numerous studies clearly show T-cells from a convalescent person or an immunised person each recognise all the then-available variants, again, precisely as anticipated by the fundamentals of immunology. Antibodies can indeed fade, but that is not the source of the immunity. There is an immunological ‘memory’ that is long lasting, and while there is a small chance you might get ‘reinfected,’ it is milder, recovery is swifter, as there is a natural response playbook by then encoded into our systems.

Vaccine safety is an issue, another area that we keep skirting, and Professor Yeadon highlights. There are unprecedented numbers of deaths and adverse effects (more than all the other vaccines we have recorded cumulatively) in the US VAERS, UK Yellow Card, and European EMA monitoring – publicly available data. We have jurisdictions where EMA was warned of blood clots, and those vaccines were withdrawn.

There are clear issues with pregnancy/fertility, and we are mad to be sanguine on that front, as reproductive toxicity testing says Professor Yeadon, is clearly incomplete.

And the spike proteins are potentially lethal, and it seems once injected, they don’t stay localised and ‘leak.’ 

Of course, this all happens, as best we currently know, in a minority of cases, but such thresholds require discussion not camouflage, and ‘informed consent’ requires full disclosure of potential neurological and other risks.

Shocking discovery of data literacy and critical thinking!

MIT decided to go underground, deep into the bowels of the opposition, the ‘sceptical underground.’ Their paper investigated, by sending infiltrators into various organisations that purport to challenge the alarmist orthodoxy, how ‘orthodox data practices are used to promote unorthodox science online.’

They noted, “The groups we studied believed science is a process not an institution.” Doesn’t everyone? I suppose not. We think it is CDC, or WHO, or a Ministry. We forget these are meant to be institutionalised custodians, not dispensers of ultimate verity.

“Anti-maskers value unmediated access to information and privilege personal research…over ‘expert’ interpretations.” Yes, when choking on a cloth rag, that clearly cannot keep nano particles out, becomes itself a petri dish of contagion, which chokes off your oxygen supply, and clearly does nothing to stop successive waves of COVID outbreaks, we want some evidence or demonstration of benefit, rather than mulishly going along with being ‘muzzled.’

“They are highly reflexive about the inherently biased nature of any analysis and resent what they view as the arrogant self-righteousness of scientific elites.” Not quite. Those of us in the camp of sane inquiry, following our godfathers like Francis Bacon and Galileo, realise human bias is not something to enshrine or venerate, no matter how many ‘elitist’ oafs shout from highly suspect pulpits. Ideas are sacred, not their propounders.

“We argue that anti-maskers’ deep story draws from similar wells of resentment but adds a particular emphasis on the usurpation of scientific knowledge by a paternalistic, condescending elite that expects intellectual subservience rather than critical thinking from the public.” I don’t think many care for the condescension, nor frankly care about it. But no independent-minded person I know is inclined to suspend the distinction that all true education is about – namely not ‘what’ to think but ‘how’ to think.

They were surprised that ‘experts’ within this community that disdains official dogma, valued direct access to sources and analysis, and were very happy to help others interpret graphs with multiple forms of clarification, ‘by helping people find the original sources so they can replicate analysis themselves by referencing other reputable studies.’ This is a critique? 

The allegation is, ‘data literacy is a quintessential criterion for membership within the community they have created.’ Not quite. But respect for data, and both the humility and the acuity to learn its lessons, is paramount.

Here is the crowning sentiment: “The sceptical impulse that the ‘science simply isn’t settled’ prompting people to simply ‘think for themselves’ to horrifying ends.” Horrifying? Oh, the horrors of independence and autonomy! 

So, here in Lanka, where do we wish to be? ‘Pandemic management’ is dispensed by institutions without transparency or scrutiny, or as a process of open conjecture, learning from experience and healthy criticism? High time, citizens and leaders made that decision.

Are we here to ‘follow the superstition’ posing as science of failed, alarmist policies or demand coherence, scrutiny and modelling what works in successfully open jurisdictions where COVID has been contained, without converting the society into a walled off prison camp.

Are we to repeat unsustainable talking points by acclamation with no debate allowed, or cherish debate, and dedication to common aims, operating in concert as being the only means of progress?

The quality of our future hangs in the balance.

Suppressing alternatives

Dr. Peter McCullough, referenced before indicates of the early treatment protocols he and other medical leaders have championed and demonstrated the impact of, based on clinical results, with actual COVID patients, “Our early ambulatory treatment regimen was associated with estimated 87.6% and 74.9% reductions in hospitalisation and death respectively.” This refers to the three key phases of treatment: anti-viral, anti-inflammatory and anti-coagulant.

Much of the anti-suppression campaign is being mounted against what has been called the ‘penicillin’ of COVID treatment, the anti-parasitic ‘essential’ WHO, Nobel prize winning drug, Ivermectin, which has scored such remarkable turnarounds, particularly when given early, but even in ICU, recently cleared for use by Indonesia and Zimbabwe, having been such a major factor in Mexico’s turnaround and indeed India’s. However, as pointed out, even beyond Ivermectin, there are multiple treatments and protocols for the three phases of this ‘biphasic’ disease and acting as if doctors don’t have treatment choices for viruses, inflammation and thrombosis is asinine.

The alternative are vaccines whose safety trials aren’t done and penal lockdown. The Eastern European countries went for mega lockdown and masking in 2021 and got utterly hammered with another wave regardless. The US States that disdained these irrelevant remedies, have flourished. That this is even ‘possible’ deserves study.

When triggered, by season, or variant, there is ubiquitous spread, inexorable penetration for a while. And if you protect the vulnerable and realise most are not at risk (a thousand-fold difference in risk profile, something remarkable in epidemiology), and let community immunity develop, you create a smaller and smaller pool of those susceptible. A demonstration of this globally is the grocery workers who were the opposite of locked down. For 8-10 hours a day with no masks in many jurisdictions, indoors with people coming in, there were no undue surges or spikes in that population. But with everyone locked down, there was disaster in care homes, where the sick met the vulnerable, and almost 40-50% of global fatalities took place there.

Looking back, looking forward

At the end of December 2019, 27 cases of pneumonia were reported to WHO (from a population of over 1.4 billion) in China. By 7 January 2020, a ‘novel’ coronavirus was indicated as the cause.

By 21 January, Professor Christian Drosten, submits a paper for a PCR test, accepted in one day, by a journal he is on the editorial board of. Lawsuits are now underway. A week earlier, WHO had already listed this highly suspect test as the global diagnostic gold standard! 22 leading medical experts and scientists have challenged it, and empowered the legal system to hopefully demand an overdue accounting

Mass censorship hit the world’s leading scientists, unlike the 2009 Swine Flu scam that leading epidemiologists and pneumologists helped avert. Giants like Professor Ioannidis of Stanford and Professor Sucharit Bhakdi were emphatically shunned. And Dr. Thomas Binder of Switzerland, recently recounting much of this, recalls he was libelled, arrested by an anti-terrorist unit at his practice, and when they realised he had threatened no one, except the world view of insane people, he had to endure a closed psychiatric ward for six days on the charges of ‘self-endangerment while in COVID insanity.’ 

Let us remind ourselves of the following:

SARS-CoV-2 was circulating already in 2019, in the US and Italy and elsewhere. 

There has been a persistent global lack of excess mortality when corrected for demographics. 2020 was not in global terms a year with exceptional excess deaths, adjusted for population and age, 2017 competes quite readily.

Testing not only critically ill hospitalised patients with a need for a specific antiviral therapy, in a surveillance and study cohort, but ‘asymptomatic’ (formerly called ‘healthy’) people, and testing for one respiratory virus rather than in a differential diagnosis of respiratory infections, is medically insane we are told.

The PCR test is riddled with errors already alluded to, cross-reaction with other coronaviruses, and far too high cycle thresholds (Ct value) detached from clinical symptoms. 

The symptoms anyway are difficult to distinguish from diseases caused by other respiratory viruses.

There is no epidemiologically relevant asymptomatic transmission as Professor Yeadon said. The ‘asymptomatic contact’ referenced to by Drosten in his Letter to the Editor end January 2020 was revealed to be very much symptomatic: the patient had suppressed her symptoms with medication. Another scam thinly veiled.

No instance of asymptomatic transmission has been clearly demonstrated.

This is not a mass murderer as per even ‘ascribed deaths’ compared to all cause mortality, and if we stop doctoring death certificates and go for instances where C-19 is the primary cause, unmediated by other comorbidities, the IFR (infection fatality rate) seems to be below even seasonal influenza.

There is effective prophylaxis: healthy lifestyle, fresh air, exercise, Vitamin D3, ivermectin, keeping one’s immune system flexed.

There is effective, well-tolerated, low-cost therapy, topical budesonide, HCQ, Ivermectin, Zinc and more. Various protocols have been developed and successfully deployed for various stages of illness, assuming we focus on the ‘symptomatic’ and stop manically testing the healthy.

There are numerous vaccine safety issues that deserve dispassionate study.

This is not an alien, but a newly discovered member of the beta coronavirus family. It occurs seasonally from November to April overall and mutates such that it becomes more contagious and less dangerous. Due to basic and cross-immunity, only a fraction of the population becomes ill. They can be treated. The disease leaves long lasting immunity, possibly for life, and unlike influenza is not dangerous for children.

Back to the facts

Again, Lanka mortality rate to date is unchanged. Growth over last year (to date) is 1.500%, same as the growth from 2019 to 2020, and the growth in 2019 was in fact higher, 1.53%.

Yet we read a committee of health specialists has been appointed to study the so-called ‘sudden’ increase in COVID deaths. But we have some issues on the face of it.

First, until recently we were ‘aggregating’ multiple weeks into a single day and that was the ‘recorded’ death on the day. Is that what this tally is referring to? If not, and ‘actual’ number per day, then the issue is that with the slew of comorbidities indicated, it could be restated as ‘more people dying tested positive’ than before.

That finding certainly can be consistent with more ‘transmissible’ but clearly not more lethal variants. If more lethal, we would have seen an undue spike in overall mortality, not just ‘reclassification.’ This is further affirmed by the simply implausible number of deaths being ascribed daily below 60. It is inconsistent with the age profile globally. Globally, 90-93% of the deaths are above 70, about 5-10% 50-69, and truly nominal below that, in both wave one and two. These are high income countries, and it may not be as stark here, but this needs real study.

We are doing ourselves no analytical favours though calling someone with a ‘positive PCR test’ with all its vagaries and distortions, a ‘COVID death.’

It is truly time to have transparent data, stop spending an unaffordable monthly fortune on the unreliable PCR, or to keep using these ‘numbers’ to terrify us into recurringly destroying the economy and ways of life.

Singapore is the latest country indicating that mass testing will end, they will focus on the symptomatic and C-19 will become endemic like every other virus, that life cannot continue to be filtered through this one, unremarkable variable. And even insofar as health, there are bigger killers like heart disease and cancer, and auto deaths, and smoking related deaths, or deaths from past diseases for which we have truly effective vaccines getting deferred. And we are simply destroying our children, who have never been at risk, and we continue fact-free, destroying their education and with it, aptitudes, capabilities, future prospects.

If other countries wish to keep playing silly games with this middling influenza strain, leaping under the covers as each new ‘scariant’ is anointed, ignoring how natural this is, aiming for mass vaccination when safety trials are far from complete and where clotting and myocarditis keep asserting themselves, when the largest part of the population is not at risk, and keep ignoring the slew of effective early treatment protocols that can keep the bulk of those at risk safe, let them.

For Lanka, there is a future to pave, challenges to transcend, an economy to repair, children to galvanise, businesses to render competitive once more, tourism to resuscitate, and an entire national value proposition that requires and deserves the passion, creativity, will and commitment, that COVID does not. Yet again, we now know it is ‘mildly lethal’ and ‘highly treatable.’ After all the uncertainty and grief and loss, what better news could there be?