Non-science

Our leaders here in Sri Lanka are trying to rally a recovery. We should support that with our enterprise and gumption and drive

Vaccinations are afoot. This is somewhat bizarre here, under the circumstances. It is particularly bizarre as WHO just said there is no demonstration they stave off re-infection or transmissibility, and therefore not to create a “Vaccine Passport.” 

The US fickle public health chameleon Fauci said you should still wear masks and avoid indoor dining, post vaccination. So, the vaccines, then do what? Apparently, possibly, suppress symptoms. One day, people will wake up a tad to this dissonance in the official narrative.

“The COVID infected” is currently the umbrella term for people who had a positive “PCR Test,” we have no idea if they are actually a case or recognisably “ill” in any way. PCR assays are not fit for diagnostic purpose. On 22 November, 22 eminent and highly-credentialed scientists submitted a request for retraction of the prevailing Drosten protocol citing numerous fatal design flaws. 

As of today, refusal to retract has been asserted, however no factual rebuttal of any of the claims made by these scientists has been provided. Clearly a Government apparatus in Germany, where they are actually setting up detention camps for those disobeying lockdown orders (how have we let it come appallingly to this over so statistically unremarkable a pathogen?) are counting on that being “boring detail” that a populace so willingly ordered into acquiescence will not bother to consult en route to choosing how to deploy their autonomy.

The coronavirus, actually causing the illness, called COVID-19 is not established as per Koch’s postulates either. Koch’s postulates hail from 150 years back and are designed to prove if a particular microbe is the cause of a specific disease, or just a bystander. Just looking at postulate three, isolating and sequencing the virus and showing it causes the disease in other organisms, remains unfulfilled in this case insofar as any rationally unimpeachable study. Calls for such “proof” to multiple local and national governments, by numerous researchers, have gone unanswered. Such deafening silence is not usually a demonstration of conviction.

Informed consent, required otherwise you are by default verging on committing a war crime by Nuremberg standards, relative to vaccination, requires some indication of how deadly the virus is. This too is hard to peg. As “from” COVID and just “’with” COVID are not distinguished (Sri Lanka’s death certificates are rife with comorbidities galore from liver illnesses to cancer to advanced heart diseases to blood poisoning and kidney failure, clearly the cause of death, yet keeping company with a positive PCR test, they get transmuted by the time they are recorded, into a COVID death). 

Death coding and reporting has changed so profoundly that based on analysis published by IPAK (Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge), the “new guidelines” lead to an over 16 times inflation of death stats for C-19 as supported by CDC data. Using CDC guidelines in the US for 17 years prior to 24 March 2020, then through 23 August, 9,684 COVID deaths would have been recorded in the US vs. the 161,392 deaths actually recorded as per the new protocols!

Though Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) stats based on seroprevalence studies discount T-cell immunity, the general, medically validated IFR is 0.2%, in line with seasonal influenza. Median age of deaths again is 86, exceeding life expectancy in Canada, where 70% of deaths in Ontario took place in care homes, and the mortality rate under 59 is .0017%. US survival rates roughly track global norms from 99.98% for the 29-49, 99.5% for the 50-69, and still 94.6% above 70. Even with the patently inflated COVID deaths cited in Sri Lanka 99.4% recover overall on official numbers.

Make any sense?

India wisely sent Pfizer and its poorly-tested vaccine, rife with side effects, packing. I am worried about local reporting extolling the “real world” efficacy as per the Israeli experience. As of today, positive tests and serious cases are back up in Israel, week over week. The Israeli Government, other than its PR declarations, also stopped releasing raw numbers on the post-vaccination data circa 24 February. Fortunately, Lanka after frontline workers, is aiming to prioritise the above 60 (which makes eminent sense), from what we read, but now also stating, less self-evidently, the above 30 in the most “at risk” locations. 

Even then, we have to wonder why we are in such a rush, in a country with highly suspect death certificates that would do the CDC proud (compared to Singapore’s 60,000 “positive tests” and 29 deaths, in part due to sticking to common sense death certificate attestation), and yet, even so, we still have only 471 “ascribed” deaths from a population of 21 million in over a year? If this is “epidemic,” after being open for many months, celebrations, long weekends, weddings, then our level of squeamishness is more terrifying than the pathogen.

Once more folks, this is a “flu-like,” media-hyped pestilence, which globally has no significant effect on age-adjusted death rates, and the mortality profile of which is virtually identical to the normal mortality profile (unlike the recent respiratory disease resurgence in Australia, far more dangerous to infants and young children, facing immune systems now devastated from being stuck inside for so long at the merest whiff of positive test derangement, that we have to be concerned). 

For some reason, despite these unremarkable overall facts, a massive meltdown in sanity and good governance had the entire planet “locked down”, from which countries like Lanka (whether through sheer economic necessity or a bracing dose of statistical sanity) are happily increasingly emerging. 

Millions globally plunged into desperate poverty over a virus, an unprecedented overreaction due to unsubstantiated and now clearly contradicted modelling. Muzzling people with masks which cannot protect against the size of particles by which the virus is transmitted (yet here in Lanka we claim we are producing “three-layer masks” that can decimate the virus, but read the small print, and the “virus” is all the infectious material left on masks through normal life, not C-19), begins to resemble a Venetian “Carnevale” in terms of dramatic melodrama. Armed goon squads in some global jurisdictions are raiding homes and businesses, and too much of the planet is in a life-annulling totalitarian nightmare. 

And our “rescue” from this media-canonised coronavirus? Coercively vaccinate (happily not in Lanka), or threaten to, everyone with vaccines not adequately tested, based on experimental messenger-RNA that teaches your cells to produce a protein to trigger an immune response. And this invasion into the human immunological ecosystem, whose repercussions we cannot predict, is called “safe” courtesy of “Emergency Use Authorisations” provided for legally indemnified pharmaceutical companies (do no harm?) and backstopped by Facebook “fact checkers” who get to determine what you can read about the situation. 

Even worse, the trials did not include people over 70, and they are only designed to reduce one or more symptoms (that is the “success” they tout in whatever hyperbolic percentage terms), having never tested for “reduction in transmission” or “preventing infection” both of which have been achieved quite readily we know from global data from natural immunity. 

Let’s decode the efficacy, shall we? In both trials (Pfizer and Moderna), once one/two symptoms appeared, it was designated as a “case” or “event” once coupled with a positive PCR test. Once 170 “cases” occurred in the Pfizer/BioNtech trial, and 196 “cases” occurred in the Moderna trial, this data was the baseline used to calculate efficacy. So, quite shockingly, under 200 cases, for a novel therapy to be deployed for millions (if not more) around the world. Nor are people being told the 95% efficacy is based on a useless metric.

So, take Pfizer. 8 “cases” in vaccine group, 162 “cases” in Placebo group (out of just under 40,000).  8/162 = 5%. 100% - 5% = 95%.  

That’s where the “95%” comes from!

Taking the actual “injection group” in Pfizer 8/18,198 = 0.04%. The actual “placebo group” (pretty impressively low out of 18,000), 162/18,325 = 0.88%. Then 0.88- 0.04 gives you 0.84% which is in fact, your absolute risk reduction! In plain English, if you take this vaccine, side effects aside, or unknown longer-term consequences, one person in every 100 infections would see a reduction in at least one of the symptoms based on these “trials”. This is the medical miracle?

Also, five to six symptoms being flagged as “side effects” post-vaccination are the same as COVID symptoms, and if they were actually a sign of COVID, the injected group might actually be sicker than the placebo group!

Given the “not at risk” age profile of those in the trial, the conclusion by The British Medical Journal (BMJ) is not surprising: “Hospital admissions and deaths from COVID-19 are simply too uncommon in the population being studied for an effective vaccine to demonstrate statistically significant differences in a trial of 30,000 people. The same is true of its ability to save lives or prevent transmission: the trials are not designed to find out.” Indeed. Then what were they designed for? To sell jabs?

We keep debunking

This is the latest lunacy we have to confront, and Lanka is not imperilled by skyrocketing “positive tests” (and who really cares there if we were, if we can just finally come out of that unsupported PCR stupor). Nor are we besieged by what really matters, a spike in pure COVID deaths or even deaths overall, and so we can surely keep our collective wits about us. 

We have real issues of debt and economic solvency and dealing with global human rights related diplomatic challenges where judgment, courage and humility have to be carefully brewed together. We have education to restore and global alliances to cement or expand. We haven’t time for this bizarre viral kabuki theatre.

We have to keep rebutting and refuting the inaccuracies of this “pandemic” narrative. We therefore in the past challenged the mania of “suicide by curfew” which never made any extended sense. We succeeded in transitioning past “island wide” restrictions, to much more targeted, limited, zonal, evidence-based interventions, and are all the better for it. 

We are still in the grips of the highly questionable PCR test and excessive default masking and extravagant distancing and thinking we need to  cocoon people away from each other depending on where they land from despite MoH guidelines that were created to provide precisely that protection, and undergoing the economic loss of these strange policies and the economic costs of multiple shifts required by workplaces, and having people without symptoms treating themselves to paid quarantine by saying they were tenuously “exposed” to someone who was “exposed” somewhere, etc. So, we still have a lot of vestigial, unscientific, medically dubious, norms we need to allow to evaporate or fall away. Then the vaccine parade lands, and we have to navigate potential regional or global irrationality as well.

History has been, as Barbara Tuchman, famously put it, at least in large part, “a march of folly.” So, is the C-19 fiasco truly the worst we’ve ever done in terms of planetary madness? Sadly no, not by a long shot.

However, is it perhaps the most unprecedentedly stupid way to blow up a planet’s economic and cultural and social viability much less vitality? Yes.

And there is also certainly a moral crisis here to confront and navigate. First, opposing the “right” of governments to abridge civil liberties indefinitely, unconstitutionally, without debate. Then, taking a relatively mild cause, objectively, of harm, COVID, and brandishing it by policymakers as the towering and overarching malignancy of our times that must be routed at no matter what horrifying opportunity cost, simply by asserting that is the case.

But perhaps, beyond both of those, the real issue is how pathetically little it takes to make a case for destroying ourselves. When past global crises were parlayed by governments to erode liberties or expand their authority, there were at least palpable perils around to use as “justification.” Communism at least, to the societies making the case, was a real threat, and with armed Soviet Russia, an existential one. Islamo-fascism was holding their own societies hostage, causing mass deaths, and we realised our very openness could be deployed against us literally en masse. 

But asserting that a statistically mediocre viral strain, “identified” by made-up tests never corroborated or intended for diagnosis, is a ravaging scourge so lethal, that it justifies turning the world into a penal colony while economic Armageddon and educational apocalypse contend for being the greatest threat, would not have made it past a first reading for a B-grade thriller in the 70s.

How have we so blithely taken seriously the blatantly ludicrous (and I’m not sure we can point to a past precedent where utter indifference to what we actually statistically see to be the case held sway like this)? It would be riotously ironic as a position if it weren’t so devastatingly tragic in outcomes.

So, we must keep debunking. It may be a shout in the hurricane, but we do what we can. In the larger stream of history, such debunking is what gets recorded, is what matters. And we “debunk” by living our lives, and building our businesses, by not becoming lapdogs to silly panic, by supporting heroic public servants, and demanding our schools stay open (as there is no “science” arguing they shouldn’t).  And we stop having handwringingly, monotonous conversations about the “plague” that wasn’t.

We need to continue to amass the philosophical, medical and logical wherewithal to chastise this fevered collective stupidity and chase this mongrel assault on our lives and liberty ever farther from any future public health playbook, on the twin grounds of being both incoherent and malignant

Lanka’s breakthrough

Sweden is often cited, rightly so, for having “light” measures, never a full-scale lockdown, an open economy which has suffered far less than its peers.  It also has one of the lowest rates of excess deaths in the EU, despite being largely mask-less, with schools open, and people at liberty, albeit with some guidelines.

However, Florida keeps being skirted for examination or discussion, and perhaps we need to study that as much as we here in South Asia look to Taiwan or Vietnam. Unlike those case studies, it couldn’t shut its borders, being part of a continent, with travel and flow, and a multitude of policies. 2.2 million deaths were predicted for the US within months if there were no lockdowns, according to the Cassandra like terrors forecasted by the UK agency “SAGE” from whom there may be little accuracy forthcoming, but indeed “all the world’s a stage” for alarmist pontificating.

Adjusting for population size, Florida should have had 143,000 deaths, especially with one of the oldest populations in the US. The current death toll, again “ascribed” to C-19 is less than a quarter of that. Having lifted their restrictions at the onset of autumn, they have outperformed the “stringent” lockdown states in the US, and much of Europe, certainly the UK.

Having asked experts from Harvard and Stanford whether evidence argued for perpetuating these seemingly failed tactics, Governor Santis was told they did not. He “actually” followed the science! Since then, their death rate is 20% lower than the UK, children’s education hasn’t been sacrificed, the economy is thriving relatively (only contracted 2.4% in 2020 compared to 10% in the UK and back to pre-pandemic levels). Civil liberties are fully restored. Florida has an older population than the UK, a similar population density, a more urban population distribution (87% vs 83%), as well as community transmission of the Kent variant since at least December. So, an even better comparison, also given poor metabolic health than Sweden perhaps. These results were also without vaccine.

So, our conclusion has to be clear. Our leaders here in Sri Lanka are trying to rally a recovery. We should support that with our enterprise and gumption and drive. If we wish to passively await salvation, the alternative is likely a totalitarian police state (who would have thought Australia and New Zealand would showcase that mad, sad option?), which leads, as totalitarian remedies always do in time, to economic collapse and impoverishment. 

So, let’s limit the ruinously expensive and evidently flawed PCR tests, avail of antigen tests with PCR tests as backstops (I explained this at length a few columns back). Let’s relax the mask mania, apply it judiciously and not slavishly, allow for more competitive economic arrangements as it’s clear we’re not dealing with a marauding pathogen as opposed to a serious but far from unique periodic surge in our mortality peaks and troughs – and here in Lanka, not even that.

Let us tell our citizens clearly that it is either initiative and leadership, or seasonal lockdowns and perpetual vaccines (more and more of them, encouraged by pharmaceutical companies who want to raid the larder in perpetuity). We want societies that create value, build companies and offer services and grow talents, not wither away producing silly face masks and pointlessly repeatedly “testing” the healthy. Instead of these toxic options, let’s opt for the tonic of rational, grounded, dedication to national health across the entire spectrum of health and not just for this virus, and collective economic and social breakthroughs. 

Let’s leave the nonsense of this “non-science” behind and convert future creating intentions into decisive action.