COVID-19
In 2009/2010 H1N1 (Swine flu) killed half a million people. And unlike Covid-19, because it killed by causing embolisms, most of its victims were healthy, and 80% of victims were under 65 years of age. So please explain why we had neither media hysteria nor government lockdown in 2009?
Compared with H1N1 Covid-19 is a cream puff virus. It is so feeble it can only push over very old people who are already standing in the ready-to-die-soon queue. 99.8% of it's victims had at least one serious underlying morbidity. Over 74% of it's victims had more than one serious morbidity.
GOVERNMENT'S OWN WEBSITE
How many people know that the government's own scientific advisers downgraded the threat from this virus on the 19th March 2020? This information is actually on the government's own website! Ask yourself why the mainstream media hasn't made us aware of this. Is it because it doesn't fit with their current mission, which is seemingly to scare us all witless? Bizarrely, the day the government's own scientific advisors were downgrading the threat from this virus was the same day the government put us in lockdown.
Among the reasons they downgraded it was because the mortality rate was judged to be "low overall." I have cut and pasted the section in question below, but if you prefer you can visit the government's website HERE.
THE LATEST UK FIGURES
Let me be very clear, I’m not seeking to argue that we are not in the middle of a bad flu season. What I am saying is that, as of now, there is not a shred of evidence that it is significantly worse than any other bad flu season. We have had about seven bad years in the course of the last fifty years.
What tends to happen in a bad flu season is that a few thousand old people with one or more serious underlying health issues die. What you will then find is that once the worst has passed, the monthly death toll will drop significantly for some six months or so.
Take a look at the following chart
I’ve taken six of the worst flu years out of the last fifty years. Because I can’t, of course, give you a total for 2020, I’ve used the total for the twelve months ending the 10 April 2020 as a comparison. As you can see, we are well short of previous bad flu years, particularly 1976. It is of course entirely possible that the graph will go into the stratosphere over the next eight months and make me look a complete twat, but I believe that is highly improbable. Don’t you? My guess is that we will finish up around, or maybe even a little below previous, recent bad flu years.
Take a long look at that graph and tell me how we got into an insane situation where we have chosen to do massive damage to our economy that will seriously harm the poorest in our community possibly for decades; sent drones flying over Derbyshire to criminalise lone dog walkers; organised everyone into North Korean style sky-clapping sessions (during which we don’t have to practice social distancing, because, as everyone knows, you can’t catch the flu while sky-clapping); building a multi-million pound zillion bed hospital that currently has fifteen patients in it (in spite of the fact that there is plenty of space left in regular hospitals); impose wickedly cruel protocols that deny the elderly their right to die in the arms of their loved ones, and even denied the dead a dignified funeral.
I’ll tell you why, it’s because modern governments don’t base policy on common sense, science, experience or live data, they base it on computer models. And to make matters worse, on computer models produced by scientists who have track records of getting things wildly wrong going back decades. And to make it even “worser” many of these scientists have an agenda, they are left-wing activist abusing science for political ends. Nowhere is that more true than the ones regularly prophesying climate Armageddon, not one of the score of whose prophecies have actually come true, not even close. Yet still, like lemmings, people are prepared to follow these charlatans over an economic cliff.
Let’s look at this from another angle. I don’t suppose any caucasian reading this lays awake at night wondering if he may be at risk from sickle cell anaemia. The reason that he does not do so is because he knows (or should know) that this is a blood disease that only affects African and Caribbean people. Similarly, we now know that this flu kills a clearly defined subgroup: The very old (the average age of death is 81) and in 99.2% of cases those with an underlying serious morbidity - such as diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, respiratory issues (often caused by smoking), cardiovascular diseases, terminal cancer and stroke victims) - we even know that in over 74% of cases the victims had more than one serious morbidity issues. Further, we know that 85% of even that small subgroup recover - something you would never guess if you relied on the mainstream media. So why on earth are fit people and especially young fit people working themselves into a panic over this flu outbreak? Isn’t that about as insane as my caucasian lying awake at night worrying if he may have sickle cell anaemia?
EUROPEAN DEATH STATISTICS
A similar absurdity seems to be working out across Europe. According to the media, people are dropping like flies from this virus in Italy, Spain and France, and elsewhere.
I've downloaded the following graph from one of the quangos that publish stats for Europe. The straight line is the seasonally adjusted average weekly death toll across Europe (which, of course, includes Italy, Spain and France). The wiggle line represents the deviation from the average at any given time.
Note: the weekly death toll at the moment is further below par than at any time in the last two years. Note also: the highest it has been in the last four years was when it peeked sharply around January 2017; why was there no press hysteria back then?
NB: If there are any French speakers or Spanish speakers reading this who can track down their own government's stats for weekly total deaths for the last twelve months from all causes, I should be enormously grateful if you would email them to me at graham@cathud.com
MAKING SENSE OF ITALY
The following is based on anecdotal evidence from three Italian mates, and scientific evidence from Dr John Ioannidis Professor of Medicine, of Health Research and Policy and of Biomedical Data Science, at Stanford University School of Medicine and a Professor of Statistics at Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences. He is director of the Stanford Prevention Research Center, and co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS). Note: Dr John Ioannidis has been working with Italian scientists to make sense of the Italian data.
Fact 1: Italy per capita has 1/3 the number of intensive care beds they have in the USA.
Fact 2: The Italian health service melts down in winter regularly, once every two to three years, according to my friends. It just normally doesn’t get this level of media coverage.
Fact 3: Mitigating factors: Italy has the oldest population in Europe. Italy has the highest number of smokers. Northern Italy has the worst air quality of the whole of the EU.
Fact 4: Responding to the media driven hysteria, Italian doctors were putting people with flu symptoms into IC beds even when they were not seriously ill. Consequently when people did start to turn up seriously ill they had prematurely run out of IC beds
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Fact 5: The total number of deaths as of 08/04/20 is 17,127. But the Italian Health Ministry has stated that only 12% of these died from the virus as opposed to with the virus. 12% of 17,127 is 2,055. The first two cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in Rome on 31 January, so it has been "raging" for 98 days, which equate to an average of 21 deaths per day. Compare that to the 1,500 who die every day in the UK, or the 12,000 killed by medical cock-ups in our NHS every year, it doesn't seems like something one should be panicking about to me.
Fact 6: The following table shows the number of Italians dying in the first quarter of the last five years. You will observe that the number of Italians dying this year is significantly lower than the corresponding period for the last four years. This year's total was actually 14% lower than 2017! Does anyone remember the lockdown in 2017? Did I manage to sleep through it?
Fact 7: The average age of people supposedly dying with the Coronavirus in Italy is 81. That is actually older than the average life-expectancy of twenty-six European countries, including Germany!
You need to let that sink in: the average age of an Italian supposedly dying from the Coronavirus is older than the average German can expect to live!
YOUNG PEOPLE DYING
According to the BBC and the mainstream media young people, especially those working in the NHS, are dropping like flies from Covid-19. Indeed, hardly a day goes by without the mainstream media all but salivating over the death of another young person, which, they seemingly delight in telling, proves we are all at risk from this virus.
Yet scientists working with the Italian Health Ministry have categorically stated that they have had zero deaths from Covid-19 in anyone under the age of thirty, and that they had only two deaths under the age of forty, and both of those had serious underlying health issues.
So who then is telling the truth? Take a look at the following graph and decide for yourself.
The following graph shows death from the end of 2019 of those aged under 45. As you can see: deaths in this age group have been lower in the last three weeks than on six previous occasion since 2019.
QUESTIONS THAT NEED ANSWERING
I have another question for you: now that we have at last found an Italian speaker to come up with stats from the Italian government, and we now know that fewer Italians died in the first quarter of this year than in first quarters of the previous four years, and we now know that 14% more Italians died in the first quarter of 2017 than in the first quarter of this year, my question is why was there no hysteria and lock down in 2017?
And why if he hysteria is justified, do we need to manipulate the figures by doing something that we have never done before: like putting someone with long-standing respiratory challenges who has just died from pneumonia into the Covid-19 column, because, post-mortem, they were found to be carrying the virus - notwithstanding the fact that they may well have been symptomless?
Another question: according to the media, over 17,000 Brits have died from Covid-19 so far. However, the government’s stats state that just over 10,00 have died, but note the following extremely cautious, indeed, very odd, wording the government is using: “with Corvid-19 mentioned on the death certificate”. Isn’t that eerily reminiscent of the bizarre statement out of Italy that only about 12% of cases where Covid-19 appeared on their death certificate, was Covid-19 a factor in their death! Isn’t that a bit like a man dying of forth stage cancer and the doctor writing in-growing toenails on his death certificate? Why would a doctor do that for heaven’s sake?
And why has the media gone from (a month ago) taking about people dying from Covid-19, to (a fortnight ago) talking about people dying with Covid-19, to (currently) talking about people dying with coronavirus like symptoms? - which, by the way, are the symptoms shared by every minor illness on the planet. Don’t you find that odd? I certainly do.
My next question is if this whole thing is real, why do the mainstream media need to tell blatant lies to keep the show on the road? 1) Why does the mainstream media air endless stories about young people dying, when anyone with any knowledge of the subject knows that young people don’t die from the flu, never have and never will (not even when you give it a fancy name)? - unless of course they have some very serious underlying health issue such as leukaemia. 2) Why did CNN air footage of supposedly chaos in a New York IC unit, which turned out to be footage of an Italian hospital they had already aired 3-weeks earlier? 3) Why did the BBC air an interview with a nurse fighting back tears because she was concerned that her lack of PPE was putting the lives of her children in danger, when it is now known that the “nurse” in question left her employment in the NHS fifteen months ago?
And why does the mainstream media only give us one side of the debate, when anyone who has followed this debate on the Internet will know there are hundreds, if not thousands, of doctors and nurses questioning the narrative?
And finally given that we now know that the average age of death of a victim of this flu is 81, and the average age of death of those in the UK who don’t have the flu is 81, why the hell are we so wound up about it?
These are not trick questions. If I am wrong in my cynicism and others are right in their decision to embrace group-think and eagerly succumb to mass hysteria, it should be very easy for them to come up quickly with very convincing explanations to these glaring absurdities.
THE LOCKDOWN
The human race has been created by God with the innate ability to survive plagues. Or, if you prefer, the human race has evolved the ability to survive plagues. We do this by acquiring herd immunity. Herd immunity is acquired when around 80% of us have been infected. This normally takes about four weeks.
The rational response to each new “plague” is to protect the vulnerable, mainly the elderly with one or more underlying serious health issues, and leave the rest of us to acquire immunity as soon as possible. Opening up schools, pubs, restaurants, etc. would help us acquire herd immunity as soon as possible.
The lock down, by extending the time it takes for us to acquire herd immunity, is supposed to protect the vulnerable, but how is that supposed to work? How does artificially extending the period the vulnerable will be at risk of infection help the vulnerable survive? Isn’t that a bit like arguing that if we extend the war for a few more years, less soldiers will be shot?
And does the lockdown, apart from leaving the poor poorer still, actually achieve anything? Two thirds of the population are still going to work and presumably infecting one another as we have done back to the cave age. Buses and trains are still running, where those carrying the virus are touching seats, handrails and doors and breathing over one another. The NHS is up and running with over a million employees cross infecting one another. The rest of us are having to go shopping in more stores more frequently because of the shortages artificially created by the mass hysteria engineered by the mainstream media - how does that help?
One of my sons is a postman. He’s deemed an essential worker. He works in a busy sorting office with forty other men. Those infected are touching canteen tables, sorting bays and letters, etc. Infected letters that are then handed to other men, who presumably, in their turn, get infected, and who then drop those same infected letters through our letter boxes.
In my son’s sorting office, three men are currently off supposedly self-isolating owing to Covid-19. My son’s boss made an interesting aside to him, “It’s strange that the three men self-isolating are the three men who have the worst record for swinging sickys before anyone had heard of Covid-19”.
The other excuse for the lockdown is to protect the NHS from being overwhelmed, but does that stand up to scrutiny when according to government figures less people are currently dying than were dying three months ago. The weekly death toll for the week ending the 27th March is 11,141. The toll for the week ending the 10th Jan was 14,058 (nearly 3,000 more). That computes to the NHS coping with over 26% more people back in January than they are currently. I don’t recall any media excitement back then about the NHS being in imminent danger of collapse, apart that is from the usual annual media hype around the NHS.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I have been on the receiving end of numerous insults on the Internet for pointing out the glaring holes in this Covid-19 story. I don't mind that because it is so easy to block people on the Internet. I'm happy to engage in debate with anybody, but life is far too short to engage with people who believe that calling into question the sexual propriety of one's parent actually constitutes a rational argument.
This crowd response is more like what one would expect if one stood in a square in North Korea with a sign saying, "Kim Jong-un sucks", the sort of hostile mob response one expects from people subjected to mass brainwashing, the response one should expect from secularists, who, having an inordinate fear of death (ironic, given that death is the only thing that is certain) have succumbed to mass hysteria. They are certainly not rational or normal responses to someone merely presenting facts or an alternative point of view. It's more akin to the reactions of a Jehovah Witness or a Muslim to one challenging his faith assertions.
GK Chesterton wrote that when men stopped believing in God, they didn't start believing in nothing, they start believing in anything. This Covid-19 hysteria seem to me to be morphing into yet another secular religion, into another of those GKC's "anythings," alongside veganism and global warming. It won't be long before it has it's virgin child saint: a sort of St Covid-19 Thunberg Mk II, who like the Mk I will probably have her scripts written by her Marxist dad, and the media will be hanging on her every word as if she had a direct line to the Holy Ghost. One good thing that may come from all this is that it could prove the final nail in the coffin of the increasingly irrelevant post-Conciliar, Novus Ordo Church. In former times, when real plagues have struck, priests and religious have been the first at the coal face, administering the sacraments, the last-rites, hearing confessions, burying the dead and generally suffering alongside the faithful. The Novus Ordo church seemingly just couldn't wait to withdraw Christ's sacraments from the faithful at the request of the secular authorities without so much as a whimper of protest. "You couldn't see em for dust and small pebbles" as soldiers used to say.
I did recently manage to attend the funeral of a friend, which was conducted by a SSPX priest; God bless him for his holy courage. Had the police turned up at the graveside, we would probably all have been arrested. It is very difficult to practice social distancing around a 2' x 6' hole.
Corvid-19 must be the first plague in history that, in spite of killing 10,000s of people across Europe has simultaneously managed to leave the total number of people dying further below par than any time in the last two years. LET THAT SINK IN
