Per a senior European politician, Adhanom Ghebreyesus the director of the WHO privately admits that the virus causing COVID-19 most likely escaped from a Chinese lab in a "catastrophic accident".
While publicly the group maintains that ‘all hypotheses remain on the table’ about the origins of Covid, the source said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), had recently confided to a senior European politician that the most likely explanation was a catastrophic accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, where infections first spread during late 2019.
The Mail on Sunday first revealed concerns within Western intelligence services about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists were manipulating coronaviruses sampled from bats in caves nearly 1,000 miles away – the same caves where Covid-19 is suspected to have originated – in April 2020. The worldwide death toll from the Covid pandemic is now estimated to have hit more than 18 million.
Birx admits a lot in her book. No data to support lockdowns. Lied to get lockdowns started with every intention they would be indefinite, and that the 15 days to slow the spread was a total lie. Incentives to over-report Covid infections. Knew that the "vaccines" were not going to be effective, not going to stop the spread.
I watched a doctor who analysed her book and he had a rather telling observation, both Birx and Fauci have their roots in AIDS research. He thinks their biases dealing with Covid stem from those origins. They downplayed natural immunity because against AIDS, natural immunity was not possible due to that disease directly affecting immune response.
Follow the science was a total lie. It was do as we tell you because we don't know WTF to actually do.
No data to support lockdows? We held the virus out for 2 years with lockdowns in Australia. Other nations have successfully slowed or stopped outbreaks as well. This "nothing exists outside the US" navel gazing is ridiculous.
Vaccines were effective to stop the spread, and continue to be effective (just less so - currently about 15% reduction for Omicron). Vaccines are extremely effective at preventing serious disease and death.
Following the science saved millions of lives, even if it wasn't, and still isn't, fully understood.
It's not surprising the US response was fatally flawed given the idiots that were in charge of the country at the time and the impossible politics around actually trying to do good science in a fact-denying white house.
Well, I hope we can all appreciate how close to the brink of total societal collapse we are right now. If you don't see it slowly spreading in the world you are just not paying attention. The cost of those lockdowns might very well be the collapse of everything.
I pray I am wrong, but the slide toward the "great reset" has begun. It started with fuel costs and is now moving to food. THe West is mandating massive fertilizer reductions in the name of climate change mitigation. This has the potential for global disaster and economic contraction that could doom us all.
So Dd, I assume you still maintain that Sweeden's approach was wrong then? That somehow they just got lucky? And there is no US-centric "naval gazing" here my friend, it's just that I have more access to what is going on in my own country.
I attribute a lot of the societal problems in the West to the rise of populism, mostly but not all of the right wing variety. A lot of that comes from the general problem that bad news sells and the more fear you can instill in people, the more they'll part with their money in predictable ways.
The cost of lockdowns has been far lower than the cost of people actually getting sick, and getting sick over and over again. That's academic now, as lockdowns were primarily effective to prevent the spread before it became endemic rather than trying to close the gate after the horse bolted. The downside of COVID is that it's not becoming less dangerous as quickly as other similar pandemics of the past, and immunity conferred between different variants seems relatively short lived. I am concerned that there are some reports of repeated infections trending worse, but I've not seen significant results in that area yet.
There's a lot of things coming through for climate change mitigation - we know that it's happening, and that unless we do something the economic contraction and global disaster will be catastrophic, so it's a fairly low bar for any proposal to clear to be "better than that".
And yes, I do maintain that Sweden's approach was objectively horrendous, that they continue to cover up just how catastropic it was compared to other Nordic nations. Anders Tegnell has a lot to answer for.
I have a good friend in Sweden who is actually a trained epidemiologist, and have been listening to his descriptions of the Government's downplaying of how badly their number are. No - the stats aren't wrong, as far as I understand (well, no more wrong than anyone else's), just the messaging from their health officials about how things were going throughout the last couple of years, particularly compared to their close neighbours.
My take: Sweden's general philosophy was to attain herd immunity through transmission in non-risky groups. The problem was they couldn't effectively isolate the at-risk population from the rest, and took a significant toll as a result. This was and is strongly downplayed and denied by the politicians. The Swedish economy isn't substantially different as a result from their neighbours, so lots of death and nothing much to show for it. Failure in my books.
None of this is to say Sweden didn't do as well as some other EU nations that screwed up in many other ways though - if I recall they compare favourably to, say, France and Germany. If you want to argue their lockdowns were ineffective, sure. Shutting the gate after the horse bolted. I think the global learning is that lockdowns are effective while you can effectively track and trace every last case, but once you lose it then they're pointless and more general mitigations are better (masks, vaccines, isolation of symptomatic people, etc.) because the goal switches to managing the health care load.
Well, I think there is enough evidence now to say that lockdowns were worthless and detrimental to both the economy and the long-term health of everyone. Excess deaths have skyrocketed. Pfizer admitted in an EU court that they never even tested their vaccine to see if it prevented viral spread, so "get the shot to protect everyone" was a total lie. Asking people to be vaccinated to travel and restricting travel was worthless since the "vaccine" (actually more of a therapeutic injection) only provides some protection to the person receiving it.
First on vaccines, these have been thoroughly studied and continue to be shown very effective against hospitalisation, death and moderately effective against spread. This effectiveness has been reduced with more recent variants, but still sits around 50-60% increase in protection against hospitalisation. Some of the better studies are from the UK, and are ongoing: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/monitoring- ... accination. Suggesting it's a "therapeutic injection" and not a vaccine is just silly and flies in the face of every definition of the word.
The value of lockdowns effectiveness strongly depends on what value you place on human life. If you take a purely economic equation then sacrificing the few million deaths to avoid economic impacts is absolutely worthwhile, particularly when those deaths were largely the elderly and infirm (and hence negative production). If you value life then the equation is much more complex. I see significant benefits from lockdowns while the initial vaccine rollout took place to get that first layer of protection into society. If you compare the mortality rates in a nation like Australia where lockdowns were effective in containing the virus prior to a broad vaccine deployment there is a markedly lower death rate than other comparable nations where lockdowns were either not used or ineffective:
"Yes, the CDC changed its definition of vaccine from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease” to “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.” The public health agency also changed its definition of “vaccination.” "
NYT admits over 30% of Covid deaths were inflated numbers. I would link directly to their article but of course it is behind a pay wall, so here is a different citation:
“The official number [of Covid-19 deaths] is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had [the] virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death,” the Times article read, explaining that both CDC data and a study in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases support the claim that “almost one third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category.”
