Along with counting people who actually die from the virus, officials will also count people with the virus as a Covid death but who die from something else. Last month Washington state revised its Covid death numbers downward when it was revealed that anyone who died for any reason who also had coronavirus was listed as a “Covid-19 death,” even if the cause of death had nothing to do with Covid-19. Some hospitals have put Covid-19 on death certificates as the cause of death without a Covid test ever being done. It is a true fact that authorities have overcounted Covid-19 deaths.
One observer, Jim Quinn, puts it this way: “This nasty virus, supposedly let loose from a Wuhan biolab, is less deadly than the annual flu among those under 65 years old and more deadly when purposely introduced into nursing homes by politicians.”
This article is taken from a talk I gave on August 16, 2020 at the 38th Annual Meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness in Las Vegas. I compare the two pandemics and touch upon the ‘Progressive’ Century that separates them. With Covid-19 and its sequelae we live in challenging times that call for disaster preparedness. The text includes some of the slides I used for this talk.
The Covid-19 pandemic has been compared with 1918-1920 ‘Spanish’ flu a century ago. I will address this and compare their respective Mortality, Lockdowns (or lack thereof), Treatment, and subsequent Depressions. And finally, with Covid our Brave New World.
Professionally, I have maintained a long-term interest in viruses, vaccines, HIV-AIDS, and vitamin D and have written articles and given talks on these subjects, including one on HIV-AIDS at the 33rd Doctors for Disaster Preparedness meeting in Ontario, CA. Most are on LewRockwell.com and are grouped by subject on my website DonaldMiller.com.
Mortality
More than 30 million Americans had the ‘Spanish’ Flu in a population of 105 million, and with 675,000 deaths, a 2.3% fatality rate.
“Fast forward” to today. The Director-General of the UN’s World Health Organization, Tedros Ghebreyesus, is an Ethiopian politician and the first non-physician to head this body. He declared early on that Covid-19 has a 3.4% mortality rate. With a rate this high Covid could kill many millions of people worldwide.
This spawned a global panic. The Director-General, however, left out people who became infected with this virus but do not get sick and were not tested. Up to 80% of people who test positive for Covid have no symptoms or only have mild ones imitating a cold. Counting them would make the mortality rate for Covid-19 substantially lower.
1918-20 ‘Spanish’ flu:
The 1918-20 influenza pandemic killed between 15 and 100 million people worldwide, 0.8% to 5.6% in a population of 1.8 billion. Now, with the population 7.8 billion, a pandemic of comparable lethality could kill between 60 to 430 million people.
The “Spanish” flu started in Kansas. It spread in 3 main waves. The first one, from March to June 1918, was relatively mild. Soldiers called it “the 3-day flu.” It was seldom fatal, with a mortality rate near 0.5% (5 deaths in a thousand cases), close to that of seasonal flu. The second wave, from August to December was more lethal. One observer noted, “While the first wave of flu in 1918 was relatively nonlethal, the second made up for it in spades.” Two million American soldiers were shipped to Europe to fight in World War I. More died from the flu than in battle.
The Spanish flu targeted healthy young adults, people between age 20 and 40.
The nations fighting in World War I censored any mention of this influenza pandemic, which laid waste to both sides. Spain stayed neutral and did not censor its newspapers. They reported it and thus came the name “Spanish flu.”
COVID-19:
SARS-CoV-2 (Systemic Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2), the virus that causes Covid-19 is one of some seven coronaviruses that infect humans. Several of them cause the common cold. SARS-CoV[-1] and MERS-CoV (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus) are two that kill people. The 2002 SARS epidemic caused 774 deaths and the 2015 MERS one, 866 deaths. They did not come in waves, and the current coronavirus will likely not have a more severe second wave either.
The best source on accurate and unbiased facts about Covid-19 is the independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit research group Swiss Policy Research. It publishes frequently updated extensive Covid facts in 25 languages.
Elderly people are the high-risk group with Covid-19, especially those with pre-existing conditions like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. The average age of Covid deaths is 82 in the U.S., 86 in Sweden. People under age 50 have a close to zero risk of dying from Covid. Ones between infancy and age 19 have a 10 times greater chance of perishing in a car accident than dying from an infection caused by this coronavirus.
Most healthy older adults without pre-existing medical conditions do well and have immune systems strong enough to handle the virus.
The jury is still out on whether SARS-CoV-2 is bioengineered and if the Biosafety Level 4 laboratory in Wuhan, China did indeed release it, presumably by accident. In any event, it is not lethal enough qualify as a bioweapon.
Migrating water birds spread the Spanish flu virus to humans.
The Diamond Princess and Overall Covid Lethality:
Over the holidays my wife and I took a two-week cruise to Hawaii on the Star Princess, sister ship to the Diamond Princess, from Los Angeles and returning there on January 4. The Diamond Princess finished a roundtrip 15-day tour of Southeast Asia on February 2, from Japan. It had 2,666 passengers (median age 69) and 1,045 crew (with a median age of 36), totaling 3,711 people onboard. Some passengers tested positive for Covid on the cruise, and Japanese authorities quarantined the ship when it docked back at Yokohama—its passengers for up to three weeks and crew, four weeks.
Health workers tested almost everyone on board for Covid in this “ship laboratory” and found that 712 (19%) were infected—567 passengers (21%) and 145 crew members (13.8%). There were 14 deaths (0.4%), only in passengers over age 70.
Swiss Policy Research cites an increasing number of studies showing that the overall lethality of Covid-19 is between 0.1% and 0.4%, considerably lower than initially thought. Likewise, the CDC now estimates that the Covid-19 death rate is 0.2 to 0.4% (2 to 4 deaths in 1,000 people), like the seasonal flu.
And then there is New York City, with a Covid mortality rate averaging 7.6% in its boroughs, substantially higher than Covid fatality rates other cities, like the five largest ones in Texas that average 1.6%.
Along with counting people who actually die from the virus, officials will also count people with the virus as a Covid death but who die from something else. Last month Washington state revised its Covid death numbers downward when it was revealed that anyone who died for any reason who also had coronavirus was listed as a “Covid-19 death,” even if the cause of death had nothing to do with Covid-19. Some hospitals have put Covid-19 on death certificates as the cause of death without a Covid test ever being done. It is a true fact that authorities have overcounted Covid-19 deaths.
Up to 80% of people with Covid remain asymptomatic or have symptoms that mimic a common cold and escape getting tested. Keeping them out of the equation makes the case fatality rate falsely high.
Governors Forcing Covid Patients into Nursing Homes:
One percent of Americans live in nursing homes, but they account for more than 40% of all Covid deaths. In Canada, 80% of Covid deaths have come from nursing homes.
Under an Executive Order that Governor Cuomo signed on March 25, he had 6,300 Covid infected patients shipped to Nursing Homes in NY state. Families were prohibited from visiting their loved ones and checking up on them. On April 23 when nursing homes objected to his plan of prohibiting them from screening for COVID-19, he said that they “don’t have a right to object” and, “That is the rule and that is the regulation and they have to comply with that.” (He rescinded these orders on May 10.) This helps explain why New York City has such a high Covid mortality rate compared with other cities.
Four other governors shown above (all Democrats) also placed Covid-infected patients in nursing homes. Social media has called this a “boomer remover.”
One observer, Jim Quinn, puts it this way: “This nasty virus, supposedly let loose from a Wuhan biolab, is less deadly than the annual flu among those under 65 years old and more deadly when purposely introduced into nursing homes by politicians.”
Lockdown
Computer models in the UK and one funded by Bill Gates at the University of Washington greatly overpredicted the number of deaths Covid-19 would cause, both forecasting that more than two million Americans would die. This prompted government officials across the country (and worldwide) to shut down the economy and order people to stay at home, without considering its ethical and economic implications.
And then there is social distancing. There is no medical or scientific evidence, however, that justifies this.
Adverse consequences on human health and behavior from lockdowns and social isolation include domestic violence, child abuse, suicide, other potentially fatal medical conditions going untreated, deaths from drug overdoses, civil unrest, and a substantial rise in shootings and crimes. These consequences of lockdowns have yet to be fully reckoned with and measured. They will clearly surpass Covid deaths.
In an interview with Dr. Joseph Mercola, Barbara Loe Fisher declares:
“The authoritarian lockdown approach by governments to the coronavirus pandemic has been framed as a choice between safety and liberty … Public health officials have persuaded lawmakers to divide the American people into two classes: those who are considered “essential” and allowed to continue working and those who are considered “nonessential” and barred from earning a living.
Small businesses and services judged to be ‘nonessential’ have been forced to close their doors … while, paradoxically, everyone is free to roam through grocery stores, drug stores and big box stores like Walmart, Target, and Home Depot, owned by big corporations … What we have allowed to be done in the name of public health has no parallel in American history or human history.”
Face Masks:
Face masks do not work for respiratory viruses. SARS-CoV-2 is 0.125 micrometers (microns) in diameter. The openings in N95 masks are 0.3 micrometers in diameter.
Randomized controlled studies show no significant reduction in virus transmission and do not support edicts to wear masks. Plus, face masks are dehumanizing. They represent submission to authority and are a sign of obedience. Masks can impair breathing, cause hypoxia, a lowered oxygen content in the blood, and hypercapnia, increased carbon dioxide levels that can cause headaches and fainting spells.
Hours spent wearing an N95 mask can decrease blood oxygenation by 20% and cause loss of consciousness. A man in New Jersey driving his car while wearing this mask passed out from a lack of oxygen and crashed into a pole.
Even the New England Journal of Medicine admits, “We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection… In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.”
I say this having worn a face mask daily for 40 years in my work as a heart surgeon. A new one each day.
Treatment
Vaccine
There were no vaccines for the Spanish flu, but vaccine companies a century later are working nonstop to develop one for Covid-19.
Human trials to confidently establish a vaccine’s efficacy and safety, however, take time, from 18 months up to 5 years. And 93% of vaccine trials fail.
Vaccines for flu viruses have a checkered history. Public health officials had to recall the one made for the 1976 Swine flu when it was found to cause Guillain-Barré Syndrome—immune system damage with slowly progressive paralysis.
Vaccine officials promoted the vaccine Pandemix for the 2009 Swine flu and fast-tracked it without the requisite clinical trials. This vaccine caused narcolepsy—difficulty sleeping at night associated with night terrors, hallucination, and mental health problems, mainly in children.
Pharmaceutical Agents:
The Trump-attacking media chastised President Trump for promoting the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19. An increasing number of studies, however, show that hydroxychloroquine does work. The drug must be started early and given at the right dose (400mg a day), not when the disease is far advanced and using doses 5x normal (2,000 mg), as studies that show no benefit do.
Remdesivir, given intravenously, provides only a marginal benefit and is not worth its $3,000 cost. Sixty 200 mg tablets of hydroxychloroquine cost $20.
Natural Remedies:
One technique for dealing with the Spanish flu a century ago, little known today, is fresh air. Medics then found that severely ill flu patients nursed outdoors recovered better that those treated indoors.
It turns out that outdoor air contains antimicrobial hydroxyl radicals generated from the interaction of sunlight with ozone in the air that are a natural disinfectant.
Sunlight itself is germicidal. Its UV rays kill viruses in the air, and its UVB rays synthesize vitamin D in the skin. Heat, >80.6º F, also kills coronaviruses.
Vitamin D:
See the rest here
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