old guy

Paul Kirkham, Professor of cell Biology and Head of Respiratory Disease Research Group at Wolverhampton University Dr Mike Yeadon, former CSO and VP, Allergy and Respiratory Research Head with Pfizer Global R&D and co-Founder of Ziarco Pharma Ltd Barry Thomas, Epidemiologist These obviously qualified people have just published a paper. In the quote below they support what I have posted about the PCR test. However they also say much more. https://lockdownsceptics.org/addressing-the-cv19-second-wave/ The key takeaway: Under present parameters, even accepting an unlikely 0.1% False Positive rate and a prevalence of 0.1%, more than half of the positives are likely to be false, potentially all of them. It is the opinion of the authors that the false positive rate is higher and the prevalence lower than this. Consequently, it is impossible for the positives to be much other than false. The PCR Test The PCR test for the virus is good enough to confirm infection in someone with symptoms. “Is it flu or is it COVID-19?” is a question easily answered. What it is very poor at, however, is what is being asked of it now, namely estimating the percentage of people who are currently infectious in the community. We do not know exactly what the false positive rate is, but it is widely believed to be greater than the actual, remaining prevalence of the virus (Heneghan, 2020), which is around 1:2000, or 0.05%. (ONS prevalence survey Aug 14th 2020). The result of continuing to use this test alone on a massive widescale screening program is inevitably to generate a high proportion of false positives. The problem of using any assay to conduct surveillance on a low prevalence virus with a PCR test has been widely discussed (Heneghan, 2020). Under present parameters, even accepting an unlikely 0.1% False Positive rate and a prevalence of 0.1%, more than half of the positives are likely to be false, potentially all of them. It is the opinion of the authors that the false positive rate is higher and the prevalence lower than this. Consequently, it is impossible for the positives to be much other than false. A recent letter to the British Medical Journal (Healy, 2020) exemplifies the extent of harm that actually arose in a setting in which all but one of the positives ended up being false positives. This resulted not only in considerable time and money wasted by surgeries, but also other medical issues being delayed. It is not rational and may even be dangerous to use these results to drive policy. Note that recent so-called ’spikes’ were never accompanied or followed by people getting ill, going to hospital and dying in elevated numbers. Consequently, it is possible that most of the positives from mass testing are either false positives or ‘cold positives’ (fragments of real virus which are not intact and incapable of replication or of causing disease or infecting others) and therefore begs the question of whether mass testing of patients without symptoms is in fact helpful or misleading? It may be of relevance to note that, on August 24th the US CDC changed its guidance on when PCR testing is appropriate. They now recommend not testing people with no symptoms who are not contacts in a contact-tracing activity.

I have been around long enough and learned enough about human nature that I don't expect to change any hardcore mindsets. Facts, evidence and logic never do. When presented with these, people with dedicated arbitrary beliefs just harden them even more. Many people impassioned by false beliefs have plunged into battle on their behalf to the point of very actually dying for them. That's the nature of the beast. The most impassioned people are usually those whose motivations are evidence free or involve selectively weaving together bits of evidence--people inclined to an emotional understanding of things. People who like to gather the facts and understand them in their totality are by nature more sober types and less given over to passion. Goebbels, the German NAZI propaganda minister talked about how to get people to believe ridiculous things. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” In the above quote replace the word "State" with the word establishment for our present day context. And once people believe something strongly, powerful psychological and ego defence mechanisms come into play to protect the belief at all costs. Something else! There is a name for some of the people I have encountered here. I won't mention it because I don't want to be gratuitously insulting. It refers to people who feel they have a right to never be unsettled by what someone else may say. They want to be left completely unchallenged and secure in their worldview and preconceptions. They have no problem insisting that others conform to their demands but since they know they are right they deserve to be totally undisturbed in their own intellectual and emotional comfort zone. And if they are somehow unsettled they become instantly outraged and feel thoroughly justified in being so.

Children aged under ten will be allowed to hug and visit their grandparents again, under new social distancing guidance in Switzerland. The country’s Federal Department of Public Health said youngsters pose “no risk” to elderly people because they do not have the “receptors” vulnerable to the coronavirus. Dr Daniel Koch, the head of the office’s infectious diseases unit, said: "Children are very rarely infected and do not pass on the virus. That is why small children pose no risk to high-risk patients or grandparents." COVID-19 Transmission and Children: The Child Is Not to Blame ......Almost 6 months into the pandemic, accumulating evidence and collective experience argue that children, particularly school-aged children, are far less important drivers of SARS-CoV-2 transmission than adults. Therefore, serious consideration should be paid toward strategies that allow schools to remain open, even during periods of COVID-19 spread. In doing so, we could minimize the potentially profound adverse social, developmental, and health costs that our children will continue to suffer until an effective treatment or vaccine can be developed and distributed or, failing that, until we reach herd immunity.16,17 https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/146/2/e2020004879

The people on this thread have created a little bubble for themselves. They reinforce each other by agreeing with each other and think that represents validity. There are other forums I go to that elicit hundreds of comments a day from very educated people and on this topic over 90% are in agreement with the sentiments I have expressed which shows that not the whole world thinks as the folks on this forum do. By being in their bubble they have a distorted sense of what the broader sentiment is. Yes, there are many that have bought the narrative but I think there are more who haven't. Within this closed echo- chamber that reality eludes them.

OK! I get it Your mind is closed. Daylight not allowed entrance. Any contrary information unwelcome. No discussion allowed.

What you don't get is that empirical evidence seems to show that kids who are positive don't appear to infect others. In fact it appears that adults who are positive but not actually ill don't infect others either. The fear mongers have really messed with people's minds.

That has been the case for every serious cold and flu outbreak in the past and will be for every one in the future. For thousands of years humans have forged ahead with their lives while viruses and pathogens circulate all around us. Thousands of people die in car accidents every year. We don't ban driving. You don't seem to understand the deleterious effects associated with the anti-human mandates and how they will accumulate over time. You don't apprehend the economic consequences and the effect on human lives that have yet to play out. You should also learn to not just dismiss something in blanket fashion because you consider it to not be a conventional source but develop the ability to assess information presented based on its own merits and its inherent validity and logic. Otherwise you will always allow other people to shape your thoughts and beliefs.

Yes, and A child tested positive. If you test children some will show positive. That doesn't mean they will die or even get ill. Almost no children in the whole world have become ill from covid-19. In every past flu outbreak legions of children became ill and an occasional one died. All indications to date are that Covid-19 is not a serious threat to children. That has been well documented. The media and governments have drummed-up so many emotions and so much fear. Are we now going to suspend normal life and children's educations for every cold or flu virus that comes along in the future? It appears the fear has been instilled and the precedent set. In fact, covid-19 is not a serious threat to almost anyone except older people with morbidities. Why is that so hard for some people here to understand? The fear mongers have done a great job. They have people afraid to just live life without cowering in irrational fear.

The following outtakes from an article touch on so many points that could be expanded into their own article. It also provides a slant of which people in the conventional narrative thought bubble appear to be unaware. As in “no one could have known” that by shutting down life as we know it to focus obsessively on a virus mostly affecting what is still a relatively small number of people at the end of their lives (yes, oh squeamish ones we must summon the courage to talk about Quality Adjusted Life Years when making public policy) we probably would: 1. Cause economic devastation and hence excess deaths, suicides, divorces depressions in much larger numbers than those killed by the virus. 2. Provide an already monopolistic and predatory online retailing establishment with competitive advantages in terms of capital reserves and market share that will make it virtually impossible at any time in the near or medium future for the country’s and the world’s small and even medium-sized businesses to ever catch up to them. And that this will plunge huge sectors of the world-wide economy into serf-like ruin, with all that this portends in terms of additional death and human suffering. 3. Cause greatly increased misery and countless additional deaths in the so-called Global South where many people, rightly or wrongly, depend on the consumption patterns of us relatively fortunate sit-at-homers to make it through the week. 4. Destroy much of what was attractive about urban life as we know it and lead to a real estate collapse of extraordinary proportions, turning even our few remaining showplace cities into crime-ridden reserves of ever more desperate people. 5. Force state and local governments, already struggling before the crisis, and unable to print at money at will like the Feds, to cut their already insufficient budgets at a time when their broke and stressed constituents need those services more than ever. 6. Push “smart” monitoring of our lives, already intolerable for anyone still clinging to memories of freedom in the pre-September 11th world, to the point where most people will no longer understand what people used to know as privacy, intimacy or the simple dignity of being left alone. 7. Train of a generation of children to be fearful and distrustful of others from day one, and to view bending to diktats “to keep them safe”, (no matter how empirically dubious the actual threat to them might be), rather than the courageous pursuit of joy and human fullness, as the key goal in life. We will also no doubt be told that no one could have imagined or known at the time: That governments often make policy on the basis of information they know to be largely unsubstantiated or flat-out false. Because they know (Karl Rove spilled the beans in his famous interview with Ron Susskind) that by the time the few conscientious researchers out there get around looking past the hype to debunk their initial storylines, the structures favorable to them put into place on the basis of the false narrative will have been normalized, and thus be in no danger of being dismantled. That Sweden and other countries developed much more proportionate, culture-saving and dignity-saving ways to live safely and much more fully with the virus. That Anthony Fauci has a well-documented tendency to see every health problem as being amenable to expensive pharmaceutical solutions (some might even call it corruption), even when other less intrusive, less expensive, and equally effective therapies are available. That the recent history of using vaccines to fight respiratory infections has been ineffective when not grotesquely counterproductive. That during the first half of the 20th century the infectious disease of polio was a constant danger, culminating in 1952 with a devastating toll of 3,145 deaths and 21,269 cases of paralysis in a US population of 162,000,000, almost all of the victims being children and young adults. The danger then to the under-24 population (some 34 million) of being infected (.169%) paralyzed (.044%) or killed (.0092%) far outstripped in percentages and, obviously, severity anything COVID is doing to the same age group. And yet there was no talk of blanket school closures, cancelled high school, college and pro sports or, needless to say, lockdowns or masking for the entire society. That the world lost some 1.1 million people in the 1957-58 Asian flu epidemic (more than the present COVID number of 760,000), with some 116,000 in the US (.064% of the population) and the world similarly did not stop. That the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69 killed between 1 and 4 million worldwide and some 100,000 in the US (.048% of population killed) and that life similarly was not stopped. Indeed, Woodstock took place in the middle of it. That the decisions to get on with life in all of these cases were probably not the result, as some today might be tempted suggest, of a lack of scientific knowledge or lesser concern for the value of life, but rather a keener understanding in the more historically-minded heads of that time that risk is always part of life and that aggressive attempts to eliminate this most ubiquitous human reality can often lead to severe unwanted consequences. That there were many prestigious scientists, including Nobel prize winners, who told us as early as March that this virus, while new, would in greater or lesser measure behave much like all viruses before it and fade away. And, therefore, the best way to deal with it was to let it run its course while protecting the most vulnerable people in society and letting everyone else live their lives. That significant information platforms banned or sidelined the views of these high-prestige scientists, while aggressively circulating the words of jokers like Neil Ferguson at Imperial College, whose stupid and alarmist predictions of COVID mortality (the latest in a career full of stupid and alarmist, but not coincidentally, pharmaceutical-industry-friendly predictions), gave politicians the pretext for setting in motion perhaps the most aggressive experiment in social engineering in the history of the world. That just as the levels of mortality from the virus were diminishing rapidly in the late spring and early summer of 2020, thus raising hope for a much-needed return to normality, there was seamless bait and switch in the major media from a discourse centering on the logical and laudable goal of “flattening the curve” to one centered on the absurdly utopian (and not coincidentally vaccine-oriented) goal of eliminating new “cases”. That having the news media focus narrowly and obsessively on the growth of “cases” when 99%+ of them are completely non-life-threatening was journalistic malpractice of the highest order, comparable to, if not exceeding in its sinister effect that which was generated by the media’s wholly unsubstantiated talk of mushroom clouds and WMD two decades ago, talk that led (so sorry brown people) to the deaths of millions and the destruction of entire civilizations in the Middle East. That government and corporate power holders, having successfully habituated people to engage in major solidarity-destroying social changes through the repetition of the largely meaningless term “case“, will surely come to rely on it and other breathlessly repeated, albeit largely empty, signifiers to paralyze society at will, especially at those times when the people appear to be waking up and coming together to demand a change In the existing balance of social power. That suggesting world-class professional athletes in their 20s and 30s, or even their less talented and less fit high school and college counterparts, were running a risk of mortal consequences in even minimal numbers by playing in the midst of the COVID spread was, in light of known age-related numbers on the disease’s lethality, at best ridiculous and, at worst, a very cynical fear-mongering ploy. Repeat after me, “no one could have possibly known these things” and then check your screen to see, as citizens of Oceania, whether you are supposed to be worried this week about the threat from Eurasia or Eastasia. And, of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you to mask up real tight, especially in light of the CDC numbers — you’ll have to forgive here for breaking with the rich tradition of pure panic-driven narrative and moving to the realm of empirical figures — which tell us that up until this point in our “everything must change” crisis: 0.011% of the US population under 65 have died of COVID 0.005% of the US population under 55 have died of COVID 0.0009% of the US population under 35 have died of COVID 0.0002% of the US population under 25 have died of COVID 0.00008% of the US population under 15 have died of COVID And as for the most “high risk” people? 0.23% of the US population over 65 have died of COVID Though they’ve tried to sell it otherwise, this thing has very little, if anything, to do with great-grandma’s Spanish flu of 1918. Indeed, it not even completely clear if it is cumulatively worse in terms of loss of life than the influenzas outbreaks of 1957-58 or 1968-69 that most everyone slept through. But, I guess that doesn’t matter when there’s a narrative to keep. Might it be time to ask if there might be something else afoot with all this? https://www.anti-empire.com/are-you-ready-for-the-no-one-could-have-known-routine/

Wow! A case already. It means someone tested positive. Who could have known?

Apart from the fact that the virus is not what it was purported to be and the fact there has been a lot of number fudging to justify the earlier scare predictions and government reactions, there was never any valid basis for business and activity lock-downs, social distancing and mask mandates. No science, no evidence, no studies or prior knowledge. It was from the beginning an ad hoc and knee-jerk reaction involving strained reasoning given what is known about viruses and the natural course of viral outbreaks and how they are ultimately self limiting. It was the product of dubious advice from conflicted individuals such as Dr. Fauci and the preposterous predictions of disease modellers such as Neil Ferguson of Imperial College whose predictions in previous epidemics were failures of epic proportions to the point of being a joke. But governments ran with it and in the process made people very fearful. It was all an exercise in futility as passage of time is now revealing little difference between mortality numbers between jurisdictions with severe lock-downs and mandates, milder lock-downs, or no lock-downs or mandates. In fact, it is turning out that the severe lock-down with strict mandate jurisdictions had on average somewhat worse results. But it was actually much worse than an exercise in futility given all the economic and social and emotional damage that has been done. What is infuriating is that some governments are now doubling down on failed and destructive policy based on the asserted increase in new infections. Most of these new infections are almost certainly a result of increased testing as well as the very imperfect nature of the test which gives a substantial number of false positives and also as tags people as new infections when they may have had the infection in the past but still carry some virus fragments. Even contact with other cold viruses can result in a positive test as these viruses can have segments of similar RNA. Many people who test positive cannot infect anyone else and the vast majority will have no illness or only very mild illness. Yet it is irrationally driving continued fear. Governments relapsing into socially and economically destructive behaviour won't alter the virus dynamics or the outcomes. It still has no basis in science or evidence.

Just as bad or worse as in the quote below is happening in New Zealand and parts of Australia. We are truly ruled by fools and idiots-- elected leaders who are now revealing their stupidity, ignorance and totally skewed capacity for sound judgement within a context of scientific illiteracy, aided and abetted by tyrannical instincts and natural inclinations to force their views on others. Some of these elected leaders should be locked in an institution. "A video out of Spain shows citizens preventing police from arresting a woman for not wearing a face mask. The clip shows officers attempting to pull the older woman away from the crowd, but they manage to wrestle her away from the cops. As we highlighted yesterday, Spanish authorities are using low-flying helicopters fitted with loudspeakers to enforce COVID-19 curfew rules on beaches. We also previously reported on the case of two women in Spain who were beaten by police for not properly wearing their masks. A protest in Madrid against Spain’s coronavirus laws, which require people to wear face masks everywhere, both inside and outside, drew thousands of demonstrators on Saturday." Amy Mek @AmyMek Global Uprising - Spain Fights Back! Thousands Rally in Madrid against their corrupt Socialist Govt's tyrannical Corona restrictions. Same pictures everywhere - bludgeoning peaceful people demonstrating against restrictions that infringe on their rights & harm their economy.

Deb, this one is for you. When multiple experts from around the world, including a Nobel prize winning biophysicist and two of the most highly cited and respected scientists alive, go on record stating that these lockdowns could prove to be more dangerous and deadly than the COVID-19 virus itself, it’s time for us to respectfully listen. For many of you reading this, these claims may seem absurd or even ridiculous — which is more a reflection of the limited narrative provided to us by the media than actual reality itself — but please try not to be dismissive, and remember that these are very well respected scientists and researchers, all of which are not only very knowledgeable about this particular topic but have obviously earned the right to express their views without the unprofessional imposition of censorship silencing them. Among this list of high profile figures, includes the likes of Professor Michael Levitt, winner of the 2013 Nobel prize in chemistry; Professor Yoram Lass, the former Director General of Israel’s Health Ministry; Professor Jay Bhattacharya of Medicine at Stanford University; Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, recognized as one of the most highly cited research scientists in Germany, and then Professor John Ioannidis, one of the most highly cited research scientists of all time, best known for his paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings are False” which, according to Stanford University, is “the most-accessed article in the history of Public Library of Science”. Despite their impressive credentials, however, I’m guessing many of you have probably never even heard these experts express these views through a major media platform before, which one can’t help but interpret as being somewhat biased on part of the establishment media......... https://thefreethoughtproject.com/multiple-experts-including-nobel-laureate-claim-lockdown-is-more-dangerous-than-covid-19/

The latest on Sweden. For months, Sweden was the punching bag of the world’s [dishonest and self-intersted] media and politicians. For foregoing a lockdown, Sweden was declared a “cautionary tale” by The New York Times. “Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lockdown,” President Trump tweeted. “They are leading us to catastrophe,” said The Guardian in March, quoting a virus immunology researcher. Experts and media around the world all seemed to agree, with a few notable exceptions, that lockdowns were the sound approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s been much less talk about Sweden of late. The reason, it would seem, is that Sweden’s strategy appears to have tamed the virus. While countries around the world are experiencing a resurgence of COVID-19 outbreaks, Sweden’s COVID-19 deaths have slowed to a crawl. As a result, many nations are catching up to Sweden in per capita deaths, and some are passing it. Italy recently popped back ahead of Sweden. Chile passed the Swedes next. Then came Brazil, which surpassed Sweden in per capita deaths on Wednesday. Finally, on Thursday, the United States joined the group. The United States currently has 578 COVID-19 deaths per million compared to Sweden’s 577 per million, according to the global statistics web site Worldometers.......... https://fee.org/articles/sweden-now-has-a-lower-covid-19-death-rate-than-the-us-here-s-why-it-matters/

I can tell people commenting haven't watched the video. It presents the very latest and best research. If you watched it you would never go near the seed oils again in your life unless you didn't care about your health.