Comments on: Follow the Science! 1.2 Million COVID deaths edition

By: Ricardo

Ricardo — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 22:55:05 +0000

In reply to Doly.

No, it makes absolutely no sense “to keep some level of restrictions till there is a vaccine”. I guess you haven’t noticed that they’re suppressing all effective treatments (vitamin D, ivermectin, HCQ+zinc, niacin, CDS, NAC…). While pushing useless remdesivir to make it look like we have no effective treatments hence only a vaccine can “save” us.

By: Ricardo

Ricardo — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 22:52:23 +0000

In reply to David Barnett, Ph.D.. Yep, and you can find these fragments in pretty much everybody by merely doing enough cycles. A cycle threshold (Ct) above 33 cycles is already problematic as admitted by the NYT and even the GoF-man pHarma chief himself, Fauci (see for yourself at watch?v=a_Vy6fgaBPE&t=260). Yet, FDA still has it at Ct=40. In fact, it can be easily seen that the Ct value is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to the level of criminality displayed by each government. Most seem to use 40 at most because above that you just start getting absurd amounts of "positives" (which only a dangerous criminal would call "cases"). I hear the UK is using 45 cycles and only because the enzyme (DNA polymerase) breaks, imagine that...

By: Ricardo

Ricardo — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 22:44:01 +0000

In reply to Mark E. Jeftovic.

We could easily end the pandemic by using the known safe & effective treatments: Vitamin D, ivermectin, HCQ+zinc, chlorine dioxide, niacin… But no, let’s mask up, lock down, destroy economies, wait for liability-free experimental vaccines because “hospital capacity might get overwhelmed”… makes sense.

By: Jeff Conrath

Jeff Conrath — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 14:43:02 +0000

I would be interested in seeing total deaths from ALL causes (in numbers; not percentages) year over year to see the true spike in total deaths year over year specifically from Covid. Did you happen to run across that data? Thx!

By: Hudson H Luce

Hudson H Luce — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 20:52:56 +0000

And here’s a real solution that requires neither lockdowns, vaccines, immunity passports, or potentially masking – “FOR PUBLIC-HEALTH PURPOSES, speed and frequency of testing are vastly more important than sensitivity: the best test would actually be less sensitive than a PCR test. As Mina explains, when a person first becomes infected, there will be an incubation period when no test will reveal the infection, because the viral loads are so low. About “three to five days later, the PCR test will turn positive, and once that happens the virus is reproducing exponentially in a very predictable fashion.” At that point, critically, “even if a rapid test is 1,000 times less sensitive than a PCR test,” Mina says, the virus is increasing so rapidly that the test “will probably turn positive within eight to 15 or 24 hours. So the real window of time that we’re discussing here—the difference in sensitivity that makes people uncomfortable”—is so small that public-health officers would be missing very few asymptomatic people taking the test in that narrow window of time. Given that the current testing frequency in most states, using highly sensitive but expensive and delayed PCR tests, is not even once a month, he points out—“Really, it’s never.”
So even though a saliva-based paper test wouldn’t register a positive result for as long as a half or even a full day after the PCR test, it would have great value in identifying pockets of infection that might otherwise be undetected altogether.
The strength of this system is that it would actually abrogate the need for contact tracing, says Mina. “If your goal is not to have a heavy hand over the population” (implementing onerous public-health restrictions on businesses and recreational activity), this is the way to do it, he explains, because it strips away “all of that complexity.” Most people who test positive will have done so before they become infectious, and can easily self-quarantine for the six days or so until they cease being infectious. Even if some people don’t quarantine, and the test cuts off just 90 percent of all the infections that might spread, “you’d immediately bring the population prevalence of the disease to very low numbers, to the point where all of a sudden society would start to look safe again.”
MINA HAS BEEN PREDICTING the advent of more widely available, cheaper tests for months. But those tests have not materialized, largely because of regulatory risk, he says: manufacturers cannot meet Food and Drug Administration (FDA) templates for test sensitivity that use PCR as the standard. The FDA—whose approval process is stringent because it is designed to test the efficacy of clinical diagnostics—has no jurisdiction over public-health testing. But at the moment, there is no alternative regulatory process for tests designed to ensure population-level wellness—such as a certification program that might be run through the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the agency charged with safeguarding the public health.
“It is time to stop allowing diagnostic definitions to get in the way of absolutely essential public-health interventions,” says Mina, for whom explaining the distinction between the two types of test, and the different ways they can be used, has been an uphill battle. But it is one that he desperately hopes to win—and that the country needs him to win—for public-health measures to stand a chance of reining in the outbreak as schools and other institutions move toward reopening this fall.
The U.S. government has spent billions of dollars supporting attempts to develop vaccines and therapeutics. “Developing a good vaccine is very difficult to do,” he points out. “It’s a crapshoot that may or may not work. We’re putting billions more into developing therapeutics [treatments for COVID-19] which is really, really difficult.” With rapid testing, by contrast, “We have solutions, sitting in front of us right now, that are cheaper, would be much quicker to build, and much less risky to actually introduce and roll out. And the only thing standing in the way is that there just doesn’t seem to be the will to bring a public-health tool to market.” https://harvardmagazine.com/2020/08/covid-19-test-for-public-health

By: Reg

Reg — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 20:51:20 +0000

In reply to Robert Fisher.

There is no evidence that the health service was overwhelmed in the majority of western countries, so social lockdown policies was totally ineffective in retaining access to medical care. In the UK, and many other countries access to non Covid 19 issues was reduced when the hospitals were cleared to make room for the non existent rush of Covid 19 patients, while bed occupancy was at historic lows in the UK, and nightingale hospitals were mostly unused, while attendance at A&E for heart attacks was down by half with significant reduction in cancer screening and treatment, and a number of conditions far more serious than Covid 19.

It was the lockdown, not Covid 19 that reduced access to medical care. In reality the lockdowns have killed far more than Covid 19 and will kill people for decades to come from withdrawal of medical treatment to increasing poverty. There is also no reliable evidence that masks are effective in treating airborne respiratory viruses infections, and a considerable body of academic literature suggesting little if any effect. Sweden that didn’t practice significant social distancing did not experience a more significant spike in deaths in comparison to lockdown countries (see our world in data and FT data below), and has the 15th highest per capital Covid 19 deaths in the world, and does not have particularly high overall excess deaths over this period (FT again).

I am sorry about the UK centred nature of this data, but I am more familiar with it, but similar things happened as the UK in many countries, such as New York, Italy and Spain, where hospitals emptied old vulnerable unscreened people into care homes where Covid 19 was hot housed and medical treatment was denied as part of the lockdown strategies.

https://www.hsj.co.uk/acute-care/nhs-hospitals-have-four-times-more-empty-beds-than-normal/7027392.article

https://www.bhf.org.uk/what-we-do/news-from-the-bhf/news-archive/2020/april/drop-in-heart-attack-patients-amidst-coronavirus-outbreak

https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386938

https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=gbr&areas=swe&areas=bel&areas=esp&areas=ita&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usca&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=ustx&byDate=0&cumulative=0&logScale=0&perMillion=1&values=deaths

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores?tab=chart&stackMode=absolute&country=ESP~DEU~NOR~FRA~ITA~NLD~BEL~CHL~SWE~GBR~USA&region=World

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/19/lockdown-may-cost-200k-lives-government-report-shows/

RR619 Evaluating the protection afforded by surgical masks against influenza bioaerosols
https://www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrhtm/rr619.htm

By: Hudson H Luce

Hudson H Luce — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 20:49:01 +0000

In Kansas, USA, they’ve been caught juicing the stats – “The New York Times reported in August that some of the nation’s leading public health officials say the standard COVID tests with cycle thresholds at 40 or higher are “diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.” Virologists and most researchers, including the Centers for Disease Control, agree that it is difficult to find live virus capable of transmission beyond 34 cycles. But the Kansas state lab, which conducts about 24% of all tests in the state, is using a cycle threshold of 42 cycles and likely finding dead virus particles that can’t be transmitted to others.
The Sentinel found private labs are also using cycle thresholds above virus viability. Quest Diagnostics, in Lenexa and Salina, sets their cycle threshold at 40. LabCorp, in Kansas City, KS, Kansas City, MO, Lawrence, Overland Park, Salina, and Wichita, sets their PCR test to a cycle threshold of 38.
Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at both Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health told Harvard Magazine that reporting someone positive on a test with a high cycle threshold is like finding a hair in a room, testing it for DNA, and then saying the person who shed that hair is currently in the room.
“That’s a false positive, but that’s what we’re doing,” he said.” https://sentinelksmo.org/kansas-labs-set-cycle-thresholds-too-high-detect-non-contagious-virus/

and stonewalling about it – “As reported last week by the Sentinel, many labs are setting the cycle threshold on COVID tests above the recommended level, which, according to CDC calculations and many virologists, will produce false positives by detecting non-contagious particles. The Sentinel sent an Open Records request to Johnson County seeking the cycle threshold for every positive result in the county but officials said “the disease reporting system maintained by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, does not contain cycle threshold data.”
In a series of follow-up questions, we asked if health officials, County Manager Penny Postoak-Ferguson, or county commissioners would like to have KDHE provide the cycle threshold information for past and future tests and if such a request will be made. We also asked if they believe the cycle threshold should be set no higher than 34 as suggested by the CDC and many virologists.The emailed response on behalf of the county from Deputy Legal Director Cynthia Dunham said, “We have nothing further to add to our prior response to your KORA request.”
County Commissioner Mike Brown, however, sent his own reply.
“If the testing cycle threshold of Johnson County does not align with CDC guidance, that is wholly unacceptable and must be rectified immediately by Johnson County.”
Each COVID test manufacturer makes its own cycle threshold recommendation, but reporting by the New York Times says setting thresholds too high will detect genetic fragments that are not contagious.
“Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk — akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left, Dr. Mina said.
“Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive, agreed Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California, Riverside. “I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive,” she said.
“A more reasonable cutoff would be 30 to 35, she added. Dr. Mina said he would set the figure at 30, or even less. Those changes would mean the amount of genetic material in a patient’s sample would have to be 100-fold to 1,000-fold that of the current standard for the test to return a positive result — at least, one worth acting on.”
Dr. Michael Mina, quoted above, is an assistant professor of epidemiology at both Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He told Harvard Magazine that reporting people positive on tests with a high cycle threshold are “false positives.” https://sentinelksmo.org/joco-officials-dont-know-how-many-covid-tests-may-be-false-positives/

In other words, they’re manufacturing fake statistics to support a political agenda… so if you want to get rid of the “pandemic” get rid of these people, kick them out of office, and don’t put your trust in their lies. So far as credibility goes, they’re finished and they shouldn’t be in positions of power.

By: Kenan Meyer

Kenan Meyer — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 16:02:33 +0000

In a press conference a couple of weeks ago the WHO said, that 10% of the current world population, i.e. 780 mio are infected. At the same time the WHO death count as of today is 1,155,553. So, anybody could do the simple math and divide the latter number by the first: 0.148 percent! No conspiracy theory required.

By: Donald

Donald — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 15:52:26 +0000

1918 Spanish Flu mortality chart for Toronto-Montreal.
The absolute mortality numbers for the 90+ age group was very low, but how many people were there over 90 years old in 1918 in these cities ? This chart is not very meaningful in absolute numbers, more meaningful would be mortality as a percentage of the total population of each age group.

By: Reg

Reg — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 15:43:57 +0000

In reply to Doly.

That makes absolutely no sense as a vaccine works by using a live or denatured-virus to trigger ones immune response. If it is impossible to develop any long term immunity from natural exposure, then any vaccine will not give any kind of long standing immunity so would also be ineffective.

A good example of this is the flu vaccine, that has to be changed each and every season and is fairly ineffective as flu mutates even more than Covid 19, that is a variant of the common cold virus that too date no one has successfully developed a vaccine for. A vaccine is only useful where exposure to the virus to develop immunity is unsafe, this is not the case with most people with Covid 19, so would be useful only if properly tested for efficacy and safety over a similar long time period as other vaccines in common usage, as such if one existed that was safe it would only be useful for those who cannot be safely exposed such as the old and with pore existing conditions.as an adjunct to naturally acquired immunity to reach herd immunity. A vaccine works only by reaching heard immunity more safely where exposure to the live virus is not safe, such as polio or smallpox, Spanish flu would also be a candidate if it still existed, as it attacks the young and healthy, unlike Covid 19.

I have seen no good evidence for widespread secondary infection, given the poor reliability and unsuitability of PCR testing, that was never designed for diagnostic testing as the number of replication cycles will determine whether you get a positive result, where dead remnants of a Covid 19, long after recovery or similar will test positive.If you have any good reliable information about re infection could you link to it?

Re-positive coronavirus disease 2019 PCR test: could it be a reinfection?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7439804/

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600%2820%2930453-7/fulltext

Testing faults blamed for South Korea coronavirus reinfection results
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/testing-faults-blamed-for-south-korea-coronavirus-reinfection-results/