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Sunday, February 28, 2021

What's Up With Covid?

My impression is that all the talk in the mainstream news is, like: Ya gotta get vaxxed! The Variants are gonna getcha! Be very afraid, even after yer vaxxed!

And yet ...

As Zerohedge discusses today, New Covid Cases Are Crashing. What's going on? 

Well, for starters this phenomenon has nothing to do with vaxxing:


Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said the falling case numbers can’t be attributed to the COVID-19 vaccine, because not even a tenth of the population has been vaccinated, according to the CDC.


And it has nothing to do with lockdowns--check out never-locked-down Sweden on this graph:




So what is it, Zerohedge asks? Here's their answer: It's the change in the testing protocol. We're no longer following the casedemic protocol, designed to massively inflate cases and deaths. To illustrate, Zerohedge first notes the date of the change--January 13--and then presents this graph:



The logical conclusion?


Essentially, in two memos the WHO ensured future testing would be less likely to produce false positives and made it much harder to be labelled an “asymptomatic case”.

In short, logic would suggest we’re not in fact seeing a “decline in Covid cases” or a “decrease in Covid deaths” at all.

What we’re seeing is a decline in perfectly healthy people being labelled “covid cases” based on a false positive from an unreliable testing process. And we’re seeing fewer people dying of pneumonia, cancer or other disease have “Covid19” added to their death certificate based on testing criteria designed to inflate the pandemic.


For a cautious, mainstreamish, reaction to these numbers you can read the NYPost editorial today: America is getting closer to normalcy — it’s absurd to paint it any other way. On the other hand, for a more biting analysis of the way the numbers have been cooked for a long time now, Just The News has an article going back to January 1, 2021, that discusses the other Covid related phenomenon that's not getting much hard analysis--Where's the flu? As it happens, that whole question fits together rather closely with the 'suddenly' collapsing Covid numbers:


The missing flu riddle: 'Influenza has been renamed COVID,' maverick epidemiologist says


Actually, the only maverick thing about this epidemiologist--Knut Wittkowski--is that he isn't toeing the official line. After all, I don't think maverick scientists are unlikely to become head of biostatistics, epidemiology and research design at Rockefeller University. You can follow the link for the non-maverick explanations--oh, the flu must have been ousted by Covid, oh it must've been the social distancing, or the masks. But, to paraphrase John Cleese--don't mention the testing! What I'll do is provide Wittkowski's position, and you'll be able to figure out pretty easily which other positions he's criticizing. Two things I was struck by, which confirmed what other scientists have pointed out as well, are that 1) most respiratory viral diseases share very similar symptoms and multiple strains (e.g., 40 common cold coronaviruses alone), and 2) at any given time most people will have traces of various viruses in their respiratory passages. So:


Where have all the flu cases gone?

Epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski thinks he can answer the riddle.

"Influenza has been renamed COVID in large part," said the former head of biostatistics, epidemiology and research design at Rockefeller University.

"There may be quite a number of influenza cases included in the 'presumed COVID' category of people who have COVID symptoms (which Influenza symptoms can be mistaken for), but are not tested for SARS RNA," Wittkowski told Just the News on Thursday. 

Those patients, he argued, "also may have some SARS RNA sitting in their nose while being infected with Influenza, in which case the influenza would be 'confirmed' to be COVID."

...

Numerous experts have pointed to the ongoing COVID-19 mitigation measures — including mask-wearing, physical separation, and other anti-virus tactics — as an explanation for decreased flu levels. 

...

Wittkowski — who has been among the relatively few academics to consistently criticize widespread COVID mitigation measures — counters that there was "no evidence to support" the contention that masks would stop influenza while failing to stop COVID.  

"I think that these viruses are more similar than people want to acknowledge," he continued. "People know everybody is wearing masks and distancing, and so people want to come up with things that are good about it." 

... 

A 2019 World Health Organization study, meanwhile, found "no evidence that [wearing a mask] is effective in reducing transmission" of influenza, potentially suggesting that masks may not be playing much role in the currently reduced influenza levels being seen throughout the world. 

Wittkowski, who has numerous times over the course of the pandemic called for an end to lockdowns, social distancing measures, and mask mandates, dismissed the idea that those policies could ultimately have much effect on the spread of COVID-19. He has argued that herd immunity, either through natural infections or through a vaccine, is the only way to blunt transmission of the virus. "Pandemics end in the same way," he said, "whether we do something or not."


So, again the question from yesterday--why are our rulers so desperate to get us all shot up so quickly, with an untested vax? Is it because they need to beat the collapse of the casedemic?


16 comments:

  1. I've been suspecting this for weeks. Thanks for confirming it.
    Hope this news goes mainstream.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Orange man out, mission accomplished. High positive rates no longer needed.

    Biggest threat to China’s ambitions is sidelined, open window till 2022 elections, so need to reopen the global economy to help China ASAP.

    And Vaccines are big money. HCQ is not.

    Am I being too cynical?

    After Biden’s “What am I doing here? I’m going to lose track here.” in Texas, I wonder if I’m cynical enough.

    ReplyDelete
  3. In the science fiction movie "They Live" (1986), a scientist warned people that:

    “We are living in an artificially-induced state of consciousness … They have created a repressive society, and we are their unwitting accomplices.”

    By coincidence, the scientist in the movie looked very much like Dr. Wittkowski:

    https://the-1000-year-view.com/2020/05/22/lockdown-imitates-art-as-they-live/

    ReplyDelete
  4. Our part of Southern California is dropping significantly. Evidence from the Huntington Hosptal, a major hospital in Pasadena. Pasadena has its own health department (separate from LA County’s) that is also reporting a drop. The local paper is now talking about the scramble to find early treatments after all the focus on the vaccines:

    https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2021/02/28/coronavirus-vaccines-overshadow-furious-effort-to-find-new-treatments/

    ReplyDelete
  5. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/02/huge-update-top-official-caught-video-december-2019-revealing-coronavirus-manipulation-wuhan-lab-pandemic-video/

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/02/huge-exclusive-dr-baric-reviewing-modernas-dr-faucis-coronavirus-vaccine-december-2019-know/

    FWIW...a couple interesting stories posted on TGP yesterday regarding Covid.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Mark, you've actually got the wrong answer on this. It's true that they've lowered the cycle count on the PCR and that this produces fewer positives. But that's not the real reason why covid attributed cases are declining.

    The real reason is that respiratory viral illnesses always peak in January in northern latitudes. See William Briggs weekly series Coronovirus Updates:

    https://wmbriggs.com/post/34705/

    Also see Ivor Cummins YouTube videos, starting with the Sept 8 video:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UvFhIFzaac

    Hope-Simpson popularized the observation that respiratory viruses oscillate between the northern and southern hemispheres in his book The Transmission of Epidemic Influenza.

    https://www.amazon.com/Transmission-Epidemic-Influenza-R-Hope-Simpson/dp/148992387X

    The great crime of the covid hysteria is that the medical establishment conveniently chose to ignore decades of published knowledge on respiratory viruses. After a year of documented covid epidemiology, it's quite clear that covid follows the same oscillatory behavior of influenza between the northern and southern hemispheres.

    The peak shapes of the epidemic curves followed the classic Gompertz function in the northern and southern latitudes because the oscillation, like a sine wave, reverses at the top and bottom of the oscillation. In contrast, in equatorial regions, where the virus crosses the equator twice a year, you get months long wide peaks, or plateaus followed by a peak, or two closely connected peaks, and that is what the peaks shapes looked like for covid around the equator.

    The oscillatory path of covid explains the separate peak shapes of the northeast US (Gompertz asymmetric bell shape) and southern-western US (plateau followed by a peak.)

    The all causes death curve for the US always peaks in January and returns to baseline in the spring and summer. It's a natural phenomenon. All the rest is politics and political crimes.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. While I'm sure there's more to be said on this, I'm skeptical that the peak is typically as sharp as what we're seeing, with the down side as steep. I'm willing to be persuaded, but my belief for now is that testing has had a very significant impact on stats. Also, 14 out of the last 34 years the flu has peaked in the US in mid-February.

      Delete
    2. Covid "cases" are an operational phenomenon. Changing test parameters changes testing related stats that are used to define the phenomenon. It doesn't change the underlying disease reality.

      The phenomenon has been manipulated by the number of tests (around 2 million per day), who gets the tests, what the count number is, how many repeat tests occur, etc. The "case" numbers are being manipulated down, but the reason this has to be done is because the underlying disease is declining, for the reasons I mentioned in my original comment. The fraud becomes increasingly obvious if the "cases" remain high but no one is dying.

      Also, it's important to follow all causes deaths, as Briggs does in his weekly update, because flu, covid, and pneumonia are being conflated into a single category, and the CDC does not distinguish between dying with covid and dying from covid.

      I'm not going to split hairs about the exact date of a population wide biological observation, but generally all causes deaths peak in January. See the the plots in Briggs' updates.

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    3. 2020 peak for influenza was late, March 2020 . Peak of influenza varies from Dec to March from one year to the next. One SUGGESTED reason for winter predilection has been vitamin D levels in sunny times

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  7. C.S. Lewis wrote these words in his book “The Screwtape Letters” nearly 79 years ago. Amazing how this could have been written today:





    ′′One young devil asked the old man:

    "How did you manage to bring so many souls to hell?"



    The old devil answered:

    "I instilled fear in them!"



    Answers the youngster:

    "Great job! And what were they afraid of? Wars? Hunger?"



    Answers the man:

    "No, they were afraid of the disease!"



    For this the youngster asked:

    "Does this mean they didn't get sick? Are they not dead? There was no rescue for them?"



    The old man answered:

    "but no . . . they got sick, died, and the rescue was there."



    The young devil, surprised, answered:

    "Then I don't understand???"



    The old man answered:



    "You know they believed the only thing they have to keep at any cost is their lives. They stopped hugging, greeting each other. They've moved away from each other. They gave up all social contacts and everything that was human!

    Later they ran out of money, lost their jobs, but that was their choice because they were afraid for their lives, that's why they quit their jobs without even having bread.

    They believed blindly everything they heard and read in the papers.

    They gave up their freedoms, they didn't leave their own homes literally anywhere. They stopped visiting family and friends. The world turned into such a concentration camp, without forcing them into captivity.



    They accepted everything!!! Just to live at least one more miserable day . . . And so living, they died every day!!!



    And that's how it was very easy for me to take their miserable souls to hell..... ′′



    C.S. Lewis in 1942 - Old Devil's Letters To Young

    Perhaps THIS is TRUE: Lawyers Promise ‘Nurember Trials’ Against All Behind COVID Scam

    https://principia-scientific.com/lawyers-promise-nurember-trials-against-all-behind-covid-scam/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm not clear who they're suing - is it governments or

      "...the sponsors of the financial oligarchy, Klaus Schwab, the great architect of this gigantic hostage-taking, the politicians at the head of the EU,..."

      Are they suing these people?

      Frank

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    2. This is a paraphrase, not CSL's words.

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    3. I assumed so. But Lewis was getting at a very basic point about modern attitudes that's still relevant.

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    4. Thanks for pointing that out, Dave.

      Delete
    5. Please accept my apologies. You are right, Dave's Daily Day Dream; didn't realize this until after posting and then learning from the original sender ex post facto that it is indeed paraphrase, albeit uncanny.

      It has been "debunked" as false by Snopes and Reuters.

      https://weehingthong.org/2021/02/27/cs-lewis-fake-quote-about-the-pandemic-supposedly-from-the-screw-tape-letters/

      Reuters also employed their team of "fact checkers" who debunked Maria Zach Strollo's affidavit that proved that Italy interfered in the November 3, 2020 election.

      https://www.conservativenewsdaily.net/breaking-news/this-is-not-real-reported-italian-intervention-in-the-2020-election-falls-apart-with-scrutiny/-

      https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-fact-check-debunking-italy-gate-idUSKBN29K2N8

      Delete