‘Pseudo-expert’: College dropout billionaire Bill Gates attacks Trump adviser Dr. Scott Atlas over Covid-19 stance
RT | October 26, 2020
Self-styled Covid-19 authority and Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates has weaponized media demands to “trust the science” to tear into Trump adviser (and actual medical doctor) Scott Atlas for not backing stricter Covid policies.
“We now have a pseudo-expert advising the president,” Gates snarled during an interview at Yahoo Finance’s All Markets Summit on Monday, denouncing Atlas – who, unlike the billionaire software tycoon, completed both college and medical school – as an “off the rails” bad influence on the Trump administration.
“The most malign thing is where you start to attack your own experts and suggest that maybe politicians know better than disease experts,” Gates continued. The billionaire is neither a politician nor a medical doctor, despite the vast sums he has spent through his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its affiliates in an effort to vaccinate the developing world. Atlas, on the other hand, has a medical degree from the University of Chicago and has taught healthcare policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute.
While Gates’s words might seem to apply to his own denunciation of Atlas, the billionaire meant them as a condemnation of the Trump administration over its alleged line-by-line tweaks to health guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in May. He has bemoaned the “politicization” of both the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for months, blaming the White House for both their loss of public trust and unspecified yet “very unfortunate” setbacks to the rollout of a Covid-19 vaccine.
However, medical experts have insisted for years that both institutions were co-opted long ago by the pharmaceutical industry, of which Gates is both a significant funder and a well-remunerated beneficiary.
Yahoo (and other media organizations, many of which have received and avoided disclosing funding from Gates’ foundations) have almost universally backed the avuncular software tycoon in his dispute with Atlas, suggesting it is the trained medical expert who stepped out of his place in dissenting from prevailing orthodoxy. Forbes even called Atlas a “bad scientist” for not deferring to Gates’ favorite expert, US corona czar Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Atlas has long been seen as a thorn in the side of Gates and his ideological cheerleaders for his refusal to toe the lockdown line, however. A tweet “falsely” downplaying the effectiveness of masks and an article warning the US’ pandemic-related economic shutdowns will have lasting consequences far worse than the deaths thus far attributed to the virus have been held up as proof Atlas knows not of what he speaks – even as experts in other countries have echoed his economic concerns and the science remains far from settled on masks.
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Gates has been hailed by the media as a venerable expert on viral outbreaks for a 2015 Ted Talk in which he bemoaned the lack of epidemic preparedness among the world’s governments. However, Gates was far from the only person to predict a pandemic (or the societal upheaval it would trigger).
The Rockefeller Foundation, along with the Global Business Network, predicted in a 2010 “scenario” that a devastating viral outbreak would bring about an authoritarian crackdown, devastating entire industries while making totalitarianism palatable to the populations of previously democratic countries. And Fauci himself predicted in 2017 that Trump’s administration would be faced with a deadly pandemic it was unprepared for. The US military and private sector partners have also run several simulations of major pandemics, each time finding (yet never doing much to fix) that the government is woefully unprepared.
How deadly is covid-19?
By Sebastian Rushworth | October 24, 2020
September 2020 was the least deadly month in Swedish history, in terms of number of deaths per 100,000 population. Ever. And I don’t mean the least deadly September, I mean the least deadly month. Ever. To me, this is pretty clear evidence of two things. First, that covid is not a very deadly disease. And second, that Sweden has herd immunity.
When I posted this information on my twitter feed, the response from proponents of further lockdown was that the reason September was such an un-deadly month, was because everyone has already died earlier in the pandemic. To me, that seems like a pretty self-defeating argument. Why?
Because 6,000 people have died of covid in Sweden, a country with a population of 10,000,000 people. 6,000 people is 0,06% of the population. If it is enough for that tiny a fraction of a population to die of a pandemic for the pandemic to peter out so completely that a country can have its least deadly month ever, then the pandemic was never that deadly to begin with.
In August, I wrote an article where I proposed that the mortality for covid is only 0,12%, roughly the same as influenza. That number was based on a back-of-the-envelope calculation. I figured that, since the death rate had dropped continuously for months and was at very low levels, Sweden must have reached a point where it had herd immunity. And I figured that at least 50% of the population must have been infected for herd immunity to have been reached. 50% of Sweden’s population is five million people. 6,000 / 5,000,000 = 0,12%
At the beginning of October, one of the World Health Organisation’s executive directors, Mike Ryan, said that the WHO estimated that 750 million people had so far been infected with covid. At that point, one million people had died of the disease. That gives a death rate for covid of 0,13% . So the WHO said that the death rate is 0,13% . Not too far off my earlier back-of-envelope estimation. This of course begs the question why there are continued lockdowns for a disease that is no worse than the flu.
A short while later, the WHO released an analysis by professor John Ioannidis, with his estimate of the covid death rate. This analysis was based on seroprevalance data, i.e. data on how many people were shown to have antibodies to covid in their bloodstream at different times in different countries, which was correlated with the number of deaths in those countries. Through this analysis, professor Ioannidis reached the conclusion that covid has an overall mortality rate of around 0,23% (in other words, one in 434 infected people die of the disease). For people under the age of seventy, the mortality rate was estimated at 0,05% (in other words, one in 2,000 infected people under the age of 70 die of the disease).
As I’ve discussed before, I don’t think antibody data gives a very complete picture, since there are studies showing that a lot of people don’t produce measurable antibodies in their bloodstreams, but still have immunity, either thanks to a T-cell response, or thanks to local antibody production in the respiratory tract. So I think that the fatality rate is significantly lower than what the analysis by professor Ioannidis found, and more in line with what the WHO stated earlier in October.
But even if the antibody based number is the correct number, then covid still is not a very deadly disease. For comparison, the 1918 flu pandemic is thought to have had an infection fatality rate of 2,5%, i.e. one in forty infected people died. So the 1918 flu was 11 times more deadly than covid if you go by professor Ioannidis’ antibody based numbers, and 19 times more deadly than covid if you go by the fatality rate provided 12 days earlier by the WHO’s Mike Ryan.
And this is missing one big point about covid. The average person who dies from covid is over 80 years old and has multiple underlying health conditions. In other words, their life expectancy is very short. The average person who died in the 1918 pandemic was in their late 20’s. So each death in the 1918 pandemic actually meant around 50 years more of life lost per person than each death in the covid pandemic. Multiply that by the fact that it had a 19 times higher death rate, and the 1918 flu was in fact 950 times more deadly than covid, in terms its capacity to shorten people’s lives.
OK, I’ve discussed the fatality rate of the 1918 flu pandemic, and compared that to covid. But what about the fatality rate of the common cold viruses that are constantly circulating in society? How does covid compare to them?
Many people think that the common cold viruses are harmless. But in fact, among elderly people with underlying health conditions, they are frequently deadly. A study carried out in 2017 found that, among frail elderly people, rhinovirus is actually more deadly than regular influenza. In that study, the 30 day mortality for frail elderly people admitted to hospital due to a rhinovirus infection was 10%. For frail elderly people admitted to hospital due to influenza, 30 day mortality was 7% .
What is my point? If you are old and frail, and have underlying health conditions, then even that most harmless of all infections, the so called “common cold,” can be deadly. In fact, it often is. Covid-19 is not a unique disease, and does not appear to have a noticeably higher mortality rate than the so called “common cold.”
There is one final aspect to all this that needs to be discussed. And that is the effect of covid on overall mortality. If it turns out that covid has no effect on overall mortality, then that really brings in to question why we are locking down, since we’re not actually preventing any deaths. So, what is the effect of covid on overall mortality?
Let’s look at Sweden, since that is perhaps the country that has taken the most relaxed approach of any to preventing spread, and which should therefore also be reasonably be expected to have had the highest impact on its overall death rate. From January to September 2020, Sweden experienced 675 deaths per 100,000 population. That is less than both 2017 and 2018. In fact, 2020 is so far the third least deadly year in Swedish history.
What does this mean? It means that covid, a supposedly deadly viral pandemic, has not killed enough Swedes to have any noticeable impact on overall mortality.
How can this be explained, when we know that 6,000 Swedes have died of covid?
As I see it, there are two possible explanations. The first is that most people who died “of” covid actually died with covid. In other words, they had a positive covid test and were therefore characterized as covid deaths, when the actual cause of death was something else. The second is that most people who died of covid were so old, and so frail, and had so many underlying health conditions, that even without covid, they would have died by now. There are no other reasonable explanations.
I am not saying that covid is nothing, or that it doesn’t exist. I am saying that it is a virus with a marginal effect on longevity. And yet, public policy in most countries has been driven by doomsday scenarios based on completely unrealistic numbers. To put it simply, we’ve acted like we’re dealing with a global ebola outbreak, when covid is much more like the common cold.
You might also enjoy reading my article about why I think Sweden has herd immunity, or enjoy watching my conversation with Ivor Cummins of Fat Emperor about covid-19.
FDA Approves Gilead’s Remdesivir To Treat COVID-19 Despite Data Showing Drug Doesn’t Work
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 10/22/2020
Despite reams of data from an international WHO study raising serious questions about its efficacy, the FDA has finally approved the use of Gilead Science’s remdesivir – a powerful antiviral originally developed to treat ebola – for the treatment of COVID-19, making it the first such drug approved to treat the virus in the US.
The FDA first granted the drug emergency authorization in May, allowing hospitals and doctors to use the drug even though by all accounts it wasn’t that widely used.
President Trump received one course of remdesivir along with several other COVID-19 therapies after contracting the virus. Doctors also gave the president dexamethasone, a steroid that has a much better track record for treating the virus, according to the available data. Trump also received an experimental drug from Regeneron, which, along with Eli Lilly, has filed for emergency use approval for its COVID-19 antibody treatment.
Gilead has been waging a PR campaign against the WHO, which recently publicized the results of its global trial of remdesivir, producing data that was widely hailed as definitive by other scientists.
But Gilead had a lock on approval seemingly from the very beginning, as US officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, praised the drug. Dr. Fauci once said the drug would “set a new standard of care” for COVID-19.
Back in August, Gilead said the company planned to produce more than 2 million courses of the drug by the end of the year, with “several million more coming in 2021.”
Initially, Gilead says it will initially focus on meeting “real-time demand” in the US.
Oddly, none of the initial coverage of the FDA’s decision included much discussion of the WHO’s trial data, which pretty clearly branded the drug a flop. Even the evidence that Gilead has managed to marshal in remdesivir’s defense has been pretty unconvincing.
Magic Novichok
By Craig Murray | October 23, 2020
The security services put an extraordinary amount of media priming effort into explaining why the alleged novichok attack on the Skripals had a delayed effect of several hours, and then failed to kill them. Excuses included that it was a cold day which slowed their metabolisms, that the chemical took a long time to penetrate their skins, that the gel containing the novichok inhibited its operation, that it was a deliberately non-fatal dose, that rain had diluted the novichok on the doorknob, that the Skripals were protected by gloves and possibly only came into contact in taking the gloves off, or that nerve agents are not very deadly and easily treated.
You can take your pick as to which of those convincingly explains why the Skripals apparently swanned round Salisbury for four hours after coming into contact with the novichok coated doorknob, well enough to both drink in a pub and eat a good Italian lunch, before both being instantaneously struck down and disabled at precisely the same time so neither could call for help, despite being different sexes, ages and weights. Just as the chief nurse of the British army happened to walk past.
So now let us fast forward to Alexei Navalny. Traces of “novichok” were allegedly found on a water bottle in his hotel room in Tomsk. That appears to eliminate the cold and the gloves. It also makes it possible he ingested some of the “novichok”. I can find no suggestion anywhere it was contained in a gel. So why was this deadly substance not deadly?
There seems no plain allegation of where Navalny came into contact with the “novichok”. Assuming he spent the night in his hotel room, then the very latest he can have come into contact with the deadly nerve agent would be shortly before he left the room, assuming he then subsequently touched the bottle before leaving. This is true whether the bottle was the source or he just touched it with novichok on his hands. After poisoning with this very deadly nerve agent – which Germany claims is “harder” than other examples, he then checked out of the hotel, went to the airport, checked in for his flight, had a cup of tea and boarded the flight, all before being taken ill. This after contact with a chemical weapon allegedly deadlier than this:
Which of course is aside from all the questions as to why the Russians would use again the poison that was ineffective against the Skripals, and why exactly the FSB would not have swept and cleaned up the hotel room after he had left. All that is even before we get to some of the questions I had already asked:
Further we are expected to believe that, the Russian state having poisoned Navalny, the Russian state then allowed the airplane he was traveling in, on a domestic flight, to divert to another airport, and make an emergency landing, so he could be rushed to hospital. If the Russian secret services had poisoned Navalny at the airport before takeoff as alleged, why would they not insist the plane stick to its original flight plan and let him die on the plane? They would have foreseen what would happen to the plane he was on.
Next, we are supposed to believe that the Russian state, having poisoned Navalny, was not able to contrive his death in the intensive care unit of a Russian state hospital. We are supposed to believe that the evil Russian state was able to falsify all his toxicology tests and prevent doctors telling the truth about his poisoning, but the evil Russian state lacked the power to switch off the ventilator for a few minutes or slip something into his drip. In a Russian state hospital.
Next we are supposed to believe that Putin, having poisoned Navalny with novichok, allowed him to be flown to Germany to be saved, making it certain the novichok would be discovered. And that Putin did this because he was worried Merkel was angry, not realising she might be still more angry when she discovered Putin had poisoned him with novichok
There are a whole stream of utterly unbelievable points there, every single one of which you have to believe to go along with the western narrative. Personally I do not buy a single one of them, but then I am a notorious Russophile traitor.
The eagerness of the Western political establishment to accept and amplify nonsensical Russophobia is very worrying. Fear is a powerful political tool, politicians need an enemy, and still more does the military-industrial complex that so successfully siphons off state money. Many fat livings depend on the notion that Russia poses a serious threat to us. The nonsense people are prepared to believe to maintain that fiction give a most unpleasant glimpse into the human psyche.
Google Promotes Maine Shellfish Scare – As Production Sets Record
By James Taylor | ClimateRealism | October 20, 2020
Google News is promoting claims that global warming is killing off Maine’s shellfish. However, objective data show that Maine is producing a record aquaculture harvest and Maine’s lobster catch is also setting records.
At the top of search results today for “climate change,” Google News is promoting a Sci Tech Daily article titled, “Iconic Food Web Threatened by Climate Change.” The article cites a dubious new study asserting a decline in Maine shellfish during the past 20 years.
“A dataset collected over two decades, including numbers of five species of mussels, barnacles, and snails, shows that all have been experiencing declines,” claims the article.
As the title of the article makes clear, the article blames the decline on climate change. Nevertheless, the authors speculate many factors may be causing the asserted decline, including invasive crabs that feed on shellfish, pollution, and overharvesting.
Data from the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) throws cold water on the assertion that global warming is killing off Maine’s shellfish. The Maine DMR reports that Maine’s total aquaculture harvest value set a new record last year. The same is true for blue mussels, which were featured in the Sci Tech Daily article. The same is true for Maine oysters.
Some people may argue that aquaculture harvests are not necessarily an apples-to-apples comparison with the number of wild marine animals. However, if global warming were imposing stress on wild marine-life populations, that same temperature stress should show up in marine aquaculture production. Instead, Maine aquaculture production is setting records. Indeed, Maine mussel production is currently double what it was just a decade ago. Maine oyster production is quadruple what it was a decade ago. That is not what one would expect in increasingly temperature-stressed conditions.
Also, while the study promoted by Google News and Sci Tech Daily relies on a speculative assessment of shellfish numbers, Maine’s wild lobster catch is also setting records. The Maine DMR reports that each of the 10 highest annual lobster catches occurred during the past 10 years. Lobster catches in Maine are presently double what they were just 20 years ago.
If global warming is decimating Maine’s shellfish and other marine life, Mother Nature sure has a strange way of showing it.
James Taylor is Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute.
Facebook fact checkers CENSURED me when I said Covid infection fatality rate was around 0.1%. But what do the latest studies say?
By Malcolm Kendrick | RT | October 21, 2020
The world’s top scientists can’t yet be certain how deadly Covid-19 is, so why are Facebook’s censorial police consistently flagging stories saying this is ‘misinformation’ & claiming the rate is NINE times worse than my estimate?
Covid-19 has impacted the world with massive force, a pandemic beyond anything seen in living memory. There has been an unprecedented reaction – some would say an unprecedented over-reaction. But what are the real figures, what is the true risk from the virus?
It is very difficult to know. At the start of any pandemic, no one knows how many people have been infected. As the World Health Organization states:
“Under-detection of cases may be exacerbated during an epidemic, when testing capacity may be limited and restricted to people with severe cases and priority risk groups (such as frontline healthcare workers, elderly people and people with comorbidities).”
As a general rule, the fatality rate starts by being significantly overestimated, and then falls, as more and more people are tested, and those with mild or asymptomatic infections are identified. With swine flu, the lowest estimated infection fatality rate – the total number of people who die after being infected, whether or not they suffer any symptoms – 10 weeks into the pandemic was one in a thousand. It ended up at two in ten thousand. Five times lower.
A few weeks ago, I suggested that the final infection rate from Covid-19 could be as low as 0.1%. By which I mean that out of every one thousand people infected, one would die.
This created something of a storm, and various self-appointed fact checking ‘authorities’ decreed that this figure was completely wrong. Under the heading ‘What is the real death rate’ it was stated that:
“By looking at English data, it is clear that the death rate in this country must be much higher than 0.1%. The researchers who conducted the REACT-2 survey produced a more detailed analysis, which estimated an overall death rate that is nine times higher, at about 0.9%.”
Of course, this is important to get right. If the infection fatality rate is 0.1%, then the total number of deaths in the UK will top out at around 67,000. If it is 0.9%, the final death toll could be over 500,000, which means we have (potentially) another 450,000 deaths to go. Indeed, it is the fear of the ‘450,000’ figure that is driving the renewed lockdowns.
So, where do we stand now? The figures are still all over place, with some perhaps more reliable than others. Interestingly, the WHO (perhaps inadvertently) estimated the rate at far lower than 0.9%
Around two weeks ago, Dr. Mike Ryan, the executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies programme, stated the WHO estimated that 750 million people have been infected worldwide:
“An estimated 750 million, or 10 per cent of the world’s population, have been infected by Covid-19, World Health Organisation (WHO) official Dr Mike Ryan has said.”
At the time of his statement, there had been just over one million deaths recorded worldwide (1,034,068 to be fully accurate). Using these two figures, the IFR can be easily calculated. It is 1,034,068/750,000,000 = 0.138%. How accurate is this figure? Well, who knows for certain? It is probably as accurate as most other current estimates.
Yet even using these WHO-endorsed figures is apparently verboten in the eyes of the Facebook ‘fact checkers’. Another site that reported these numbers also found its story flagged as “misinformation” by Facebook, and has subsequently accused the social media giant of “selling falsehoods and re-writing history.”
One wide-ranging piece of work, a review of 61 studies of Covid-19 deaths covering 51 countries, was done recently by John Ioannidis, a professor of epidemiology at Stanford University, and a man described as “a lion of medical science.” The article, peer-reviewed and published by the WHO, concluded that the infection fatality rate currently stands at 0.23%, and suggested it would fall further, warning: “The inferred infection fatality rates tended to be much lower than estimates made earlier in the pandemic.”
Who would one rather believe on this matter? A Harvard-trained infectious disease specialist, author of some of the most cited articles in medical history, and a man who the Atlantic has called “one of the most influential scientists alive”? Or some ‘fact checkers’ who, I’m confidently guessing, don’t have quite such a track record or expertise?
It is true the fatality rates currently differ widely from country to country, influenced by other factors such as age and health. In Singapore, there have been nearly 60,000 ‘cases’ recorded, with 28 deaths. This represents a case fatality rate of 0.02%.
As for Iceland, which was (proportionately) the most tested population in the world, and used as a benchmark in the early days of the pandemic, things have moved on. As of late October, they have had just over 4,000 ‘cases’ of Covid-19 and 11 deaths.
This represents a case fatality rate of 0.26%. You may have noticed my switch to ‘case fatality rate’. Case fatality rate means (or used to mean) those with symptoms of the disease, not just those infected. So, the case fatality rate will always be higher than the infection fatality rate, as the infection fatality rate includes those with no symptoms. Many of whom will be untested and undetected.
Another paper by Prof. Ioannidis looking at the global Infection Fatality Rate came to the conclusion that it stood, as of October 7, at 0.15‐0.20%.
Of course, this figure is for the entire population, including the elderly, and those at higher risk because they have other serious medical conditions. His latest estimate of the IFR in the population aged under 70 is 0.04%. Which is four in 10,000, and this figure includes people with serious underlying medical conditions.
What would it be for healthy people under 70? Almost certainly a lot less, but I have seen no good figures on this.
As you can see, the figures have not yet settled down, and different countries have very different estimates. One constant thing though, as with previous pandemics, is the high fatality figures found at the start are steadily falling. The Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in Oxford has been looking at the declining case fatality rates over time, and says:
“Crude estimates of the CFR over time show that for people aged 80 and over the average CFR was 29% up to week 18, fell to 17% in weeks 19 to 27, and for mid-July onwards the CFR was 11% – a decrease of 61%.
“A larger decrease is seen in the ages 60-79 with average CFR ~ 9% in March/April falling to 2% in July August.”
Of course, it is up the individual to decide which figures they believe to be the most accurate. This is an area where the science is clearly not yet settled. Different authorities are claiming very different fatality rates. But – despite what Facebook’s ‘fact checkers’ maintain – very few researchers currently appear to believe that the infection fatality rate of Covid-19 is anywhere near 0.9%.
What about those who believe that they can determine what the infection fatality rate for Covid-19 really is, and will be, and also believe that they can act as judge and jury in determining who is right, and who is wrong, on this issue? Well, at the risk of being damned again, I politely suggest a bit of humility would be appropriate. Attempting to shut down debate in science used to be the role of the Spanish Inquisition. I thought we had moved on. Debate is the lifeblood of science.
Malcolm Kendrick is a doctor and author who works as a GP in the National Health Service in England. His blog can be read here and his book, ‘Doctoring Data – How to Sort Out Medical Advice from Medical Nonsense,’ is available here.
Scott Atlas: I’m disgusted and dismayed
Unherd | The Post | October 20, 2020
Freddie Sayers caught up with Scott Atlas, a healthcare policy academic from the Hoover Institute at Stanford, who has become the latest lightning rod for the controversy around Covid-19 policy and his support for a more targeted response.
Speaking from inside the White House, where he is now Senior advisor to the President and a member of the Coronavirus task force, he does not hold back. He tells us that he is disgusted and dismayed at the media and public policy establishment, sad that it has come to this, cynical about their intentions, and angry that lockdown policies have been allowed to go on so long.
He won’t be rushing back to Stanford, where his colleagues have rounded on him, if the President loses in November.
KEY QUOTES
Why him?
“I’m a healthcare policy person — I have a background in medical science, but my role really is to translate medial science into public policy. That’s very different from being an epidemiologist or a virologist with a single, limited view on things.”
Dr Fauci
“He’s just one person on the task force — there are several people on the task force. His background is virology, immunology and infectious disease. It’s a very different background, it’s a more limited approach, and I don’t speak for him.”
Herd immunity policy?
“No. It’s a repeated distortion, lie, or whatever you want to call it… What they mean by ‘herd immunity strategy’ is survival of the fittest, let the infection spread through the community and develop a population immunity. That’s never been the policy that I have advised. It’s never even been discussed inside the White House, not even for a single minute. And that’s never been the policy of the President of the United States or anybody else here. I’ve said that many many times… and yet it persists like so many other things, hence the term that the President is fond of using called fake news.”
On herd immunity
“Population immunity is a biological phenomenon that occurs. It’s sort of like if you’re building something in your basement: it’s down on the ground because gravity puts it there. It’s not a ‘strategy’ to say that herd immunity exists — it is obtained when a certain percentage of the population becomes resistant or immune to an infection, whether that is by getting infected or getting a vaccine or by a combination of both. In fact, if you don’t believe that herd immunity exists as a way to block the pathways to the vulnerable in an infection, then you would never advocate or believe in giving widespread vaccination — that’s the whole point of it… I’ve explained it to people who seemingly didn’t understand it; I’ve mentioned this radioactive word called herd immunity. But that’s not a strategy that anyone is pursuing.”
What is his policy?
“My advice is exactly this. It’s a three-pronged strategy. Number one: aggressive protection of high risk individuals and the vulnerable (typically the elderly and those with co-morbidities). Number two: allocate resources so that we prevent hospital overcrowding, so that people can be treated for this virus and get the other serious medical care that is needed. Number three: open schools, society and businesses because keeping them closed is enormously harmful — in fact it kills people.”
Has the policy changed?
“It is the White House policy on Coronavirus, but it always was. The President started this with an observation that was overlooked by most people in the world: he said in the third week of March that the cure cannot be worse than the disease… In April the White House released a formal ‘opening up America’ document, which included extreme protection of the vulnerable and opening up society… It’s not been a shift.”
Effect of lockdowns
“We must open up because we’re killing people. In the US, 46% of the six most common cancers were not diagnosed during the shutdown… These are people who will present to the hospital or their doctor with later stage disease — many of these people will die. 650,000 Americans are on chemotherapy — half of them didn’t come in for their chemo because they were afraid. Two-thirds of screenings for cancer were not done; half of childhood immunisations did not get done; 85% of living organ transplants did not get done. And then we see the other harms: 200,000 cases plus of child abuse in the US during the two months of spring school closures were not reported because schools are the number one agency where abuse is noticed; we have one out of four American young adults, college age, who thought of killing themselves in the month of June…
All of these harms are massive for the working class and the lower socioeconomic groups. The people who are upper class, who can work from home, the people who can sip their latte and complain that their children are underfoot or that they have to come up with extra money to hire a tutor privately — these are people who are not impacted by the lockdowns.
This is the topic, this is why you open up. A secondary gain might be population immunity, but this is the reason to open up.”
On short-term immunity
“We don’t know how long someone’s immunity lasts to this, but this is a coronavirus, this is not a completely novel disease… Coronavirus exposure typically has a year, or even a few years, of immunity — we can make a first guess that probably there’s a good chance that will happen… Yes, we know that antibodies disappear… but that’s true for every infection, that’s a typical scenario and not a cause for panic. Why? Because we know there is resistance to infection that seems to be coming out in the literature that is not purely due to antibodies, there are other components of the immune system. Suffice to say this: do we know that people have immunity? You don’t need to be a scientist to understand that when you have hundreds of millions of cases… do you know how many cases of reinfection there are? At the most, five in the world… It is not true that there is no immunity to this, that would be a bizarre conclusion.”
Climate of fear
“This is one of the biggest failures of the voices of public health in the United States and in the world — they specifically instilled fear with their proclamations and statements… And the models that were put forward that were worst case scenarios and were just hideously wrong, and the media that has hyped up these rare exceptions like multi-system inflammation in children even though we know the overwhelming evidence is that this disease is absolutely not high risk for children. All the hyperbole, the sensationalising and the failure of public health officials to articulate what we know instead of what we don’t know… The fear is due to what was said by the so-called experts, by the media and by a failure to understand or care that they were instilling hear… I just heard a famous epidemiologist from Harvard the other day say that to have the idea of herd immunity even being discussed is ‘mass murder’ — these kinds of statements are hideously outrageous.
It’s never appropriate to have fear. There is no such thing as a government leader who is competent who instills fear.”
How to protect old people
“We have not been perfect at it, there’s no question — it’s very challenging. The first is to educate people: put forward the guidelines. I think our society has learned — no-one knew what social distancing meant… that was a foreign concept and we now understand that — but there are more specific measures. We have shipped every single nursing home point of care rapid testing — we have mandated weekly testing of every staff that enters a nursing home, but when there is community increase we recommend going up to… four times a week.
We cannot guarantee that we can protect everybody — there is not such thing as zero risk in life…”
But
“I have a 93 year old mother in law, and she said to me 2 months ago, “I’m not interested in being confined in my home. I am not interested in living if that’s the life… I’m old enough to take a risk, I understand social distancing. I’m going to function, otherwise there’s no reason to live.” This sort of bizarre, maybe well-intentioned but misguided idea that we are going to eliminate all risk from life, we are going to stop people from taking any risk that they are well aware of, we’re going to close down businesses, we’re going to stop schools — these are inappropriate and destructive policies.
There are between 30,000 and 90,000 people a year that die — that are high risk elderly — in the United States every flu season. We don’t shut down schools in response to that…”
Is it politics?
“I see that there is a different philosophy in life. In my own family we have different views on things. But we need to start by looking at the data.
One thing that’s been really shocking to me is that in the US and I think all over the world, we have a really contaminated media. Their politics has really distorted truth… I think that has now contaminated public policy and science. There’s been a massive distortion — a complete almost disregard for objectivity, including in some of what were the world’s best journals like Lancet, New England Journal, Nature, Science: these people feel compelled to be politically visible, and that’s contaminated the discussion.”
On test and trace
“Now, there are 7 million registered cases in the US but even the CDC says that it’s probably tenfold that, that’s 70 million people at least; if we look at the world’s cases, maybe 40 million cases but we know that it’s probably 10 to 20 times that. So it’s not possible to do things like contact tracing and isolating asymptomatic people.
A lot of these people who have very fancy CVs have engaged in very sloppy thinking. And now, partly because it’s a political year in the US with a massively polarised electorate, the politics have entered the scene and there’s a massive amount of digging in to the original beliefs even though they are completely wrong…”
On his own reputation
“My position here is not political — zero politics. My motivation was that the President of the United States asked me, a public health policy person who understands medical science, to help in the biggest healthcare crisis of the century. There would be something wrong with you if you would say no to that, no matter what your politics…
When I did that though, I knew I would be vilified, because in the US there are a lot of people who think that this President is radioactive, so there is a massive destruction that ensues immediately when you associate with this President. It’s a very sad statement on America, on American culture, on the world — these people are blinded, even scientists, to the data because they despise the political side of this. And they have a massive ego, and can’t admit they’re wrong. OK I’m a contrarian, I’m used to being a contrarian, I’m proud to be an outlier when the inliers are wrong.
I’ve gone through various levels of being angry. I’m not angry but I’m sort of disgusted and dismayed at the state of things… It’s just sad to me. I’m cynical about the state we’re in right now and the future… I’m disturbed. I have children of my own who are in their twenties, and I wonder what the future is if we have lost truth in the media, to a great extent, and we are now starting to lose truth in science…
I am angry at the people who were wrong and who insist on prolonging these policies that are killing people, particularly people who are not in their socioeconomic class. It’s no problem for a person who has a high level job in government, or an academic job, to sit there and pontificate when the average guy is being destroyed. That I am angry about and I think history will record these people very harshly — it is an epic failure of massive proportion that they have abandoned regular people here with their own hubris and political agenda. In that sense – yeah I’m angry.”
On masks
“Things like universal mask wearing — honestly that is contrary to the science as well as common sense, to think that you need to wear a mask when you’re in the middle of the desert, when you’re in the car on your own, when you’re bicycling through St James’s Park. This kind of stuff is nonsense. There is no science to support universal masking.
You can look at LA County, Miami-Dade county, many states in the US, the Philippines, Spain, France, the UK, all over the world mandating masks does not stop, for the population, does not stop cases. That is just super naïve, wrong, and that’s just garbage science really. The WHO does not recommend widespread mandatory masks, the NIH does not recommend that, the CDC data itself shows that that doesn’t work. That’s bordering on wearing a copper bracelet as far as I am concerned.
I do think masks have a role… in medicine we wear masks for surgical procedures. The reason you wear a mask is when you’re very close to somebody, or a sterile environment like an open incision, you want to stop a cough or droplets from getting in there and infecting something. That’s very different from breathing… If you’re socially distanced, there’s no reason to wear a mask.”
On the Stanford letter
“They expose themselves for who they were when they wrote that letter… It’s preposterous what was said. But I have a lot of support inside the Hoover Institution, a lot of support in faculty… I certainly have lost some friends, there’s no question about that — would I do it again? Absolutely. It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done.
I’m disgusted by politics – completely disgusted — and it’s a sad statement. People were exposed when someone came into power who they didn’t agree with it they were exposed for who they were. That’s a gross embarrassment, and its sad… There’s a tremendous amount of emotion rather than rational thought.”
The only thing worse than Trump is Biden
By Jon Rappoport | NoMoreFakeNews | October 20, 2020
I’m not talking about the breaking Hunter Biden scandal. I’m talking about the response to the fake pandemic.
Trump bought the big lie: a computer projection claiming 2 million COVID deaths would occur in the US. This Neil Ferguson projection was funded by Bill Gates. It was nothing more than a scare tactic DESIGNED to convince national leaders to declare states of emergency and lock down their countries.
Trump fell for it (see also here). He issued the US state of emergency. He set the tone. He praised the upcoming vaccine, as if it were a new championship golf course. He vowed to use the military to inject Americans with the shot.
He presided over the massive hit to the national economy, the very cornerstone (“make America great again”) of his pitch and promise to voters.
He refused to assert, uncompromisingly, that COVID was nothing more than a severe season of flu-like illness, and we would live through it, as we always have.
So what could possibly be worse than that? Who could be worse than Trump?
Biden.
I have explained why before, but it bears repeating.
Trump left the door open for US governors to devise their own “virus-containment” policies. Of course, this was no picnic, because all but a few governors are criminals. They deserve to be imprisoned for their COVID actions. Nevertheless…
This is better than what Biden is promising and fronting for: an overall coordinated national plan, mandated from the federal level, to “contain the virus.”
Biden represents a fascist scheme that would, if enacted, override the states and set up a dictatorship, the likes of which has never been seen on US soil.
Mandatory mask wearing for all citizens. National lockdowns declared at the whim of the White House. A vaccine federally mandated.
With Trump, you get glints of light; with Biden, you just get darkness.
In a half-sane country, neither Trump nor Biden would be the next president. But our political leaders have made sure we aren’t living in a half-sane country. It’s not even close.
Trump brought in Dr. Scott Atlas as a presidential coronavirus advisor. Atlas understands the whole public policy designed to “control the pandemic” is sheer madness. He has made this point several times, despite overwhelming opposition and attacks from the medical establishment and the press.
With Biden, there would be no Scott Atlas. Some Darth Vader would replace him.
If America were a sinking boat, Trump would say, “Guess what? I’ve just discovered we’re carrying a million tons of bubble gum. We can use it to patch the holes in the hull.” Biden would say, “I promise you there is a new undersea kingdom all laid out for us, as we take on more water and drop below the waves. Join me in establishing an aquamarine era…”
For the longest time, it’s seemed the choice between presidential candidates has been insignificant, because both sides are corrupt beyond the telling of it. Both parties represent the same force bent on escalating federal power over the population, no matter what labels you might want to apply to the operation.
But now we are sitting in the middle of a (planned) crisis whose dimensions are so far-reaching and insidious, we’re experiencing political, economic, and human disintegration. Not long-term gradual corrosion. Short-term devouring of even the pretense of civilization.
So now, faced with the differences between these two presidential choices, we have to look for shreds of possibility, openings, paths for restoring freedom that haven’t been completely shut down.
And on that basis, the only thing worse than Trump is Biden.
Trump, mired in his delusion that he can escape responsibility for torpedoing the whole economy, hails the “the ongoing recovery.” Biden has been told he is the reincarnation of Franklin Roosevelt, and he can enforce a New Deal for the 21st century—after he completes the job of locking down America. He can create a federal works program that will tie the people to government for survival itself. After which the globalists and technocrats will move in and make the nation over into one great Smart City, with wall to wall surveillance, a currency reset, reduced energy quotas for all citizens, and the other accoutrements of high-tech slavery. Called Peace.
Trump is the fast-talking swaggering cowboy striding into a Wild West bar with his holsters open and his hands above his guns. He wears a two-cent badge he bought at an arcade. He tells the patrons the bar has to be shut down temporarily, because the whiskey has been poisoned.
Biden is the demented lifeless code inspector. He comes into the bar with an army of bureaucrats and a posse of “concerned citizens” (meddlers). He has a list of 137 violations he needs to check, and the bar will be shut down and boarded up immediately. If it ever re-opens, the mayor will own it, and it will sell seeds and grain—despite the fact that three other privately owned stores in town are already selling these items.
If the re-fitted bar fails as a grain and seed store, who cares? The government will do something else with the place. And if that, too, fails, it doesn’t matter, because the central fact is: the government owns the property. That’s all that counts.
COVID-19 is, as I’ve been documenting for months, a fake. Both presidential candidates are faking. But there are important differences between them. An assessment of their differences reveals that, like it or not, public resistance to the lockdowns stands a better chance under Trump than Biden.
Sorry, Google News, Climate Change Is Helping End World Hunger
By H. Sterling Burnett | ClimateRealism | October 19, 2020
At the top of search results today for “climate change,” Google News is promoting an article claiming climate change is causing world hunger. However, data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) clearly show global crop production and food stocks have increased significantly and steadily during recent years and decades as the Earth modestly warms. Climate change is helping end world hunger, not making world hunger worse.
The Google-promoted article, published by InkStick Media, is titled “Climate Change Is Hampering Our Ability to Combat World Hunger.” The article claims there has been an increase in world hunger since 2014, the article blames this on human-caused climate change. The author quotes Swedish diplomat Jan Eliasson saying the world needs to “make peace with nature.” Unless we do so, the author warns, “Today, without a global effort we will certainly lose the battle for survival.”
Even if it were true that there has an increase in world hunger since 2014, the blame would be on political instability and corrupt centralized governments in Third World countries [among other factors], not crop production or climate change. The FAO’s recent “Cereal Supply and Demand Brief” clearly shows both cereal crop production and cereal stocks have steadily increased since 2014, and have increased dramatically since 2010 (See the figure Below).
FAO Cereal Supply and Demand Brief, August 10, 2020.
Cereal grains include the Big Three food staples of corn, wheat, and rice, as well as some similar crops. Corn (maize), rice, and wheat comprise 66 percent of global human food consumption. Also, just 15 crops provide 90 percent of the humanity’s food energy intake. Cereal grains make up nine of those 15 crops. As shown above, the FAO reports cereal grain production set new records seven of the past 10 years.
Looking ahead, the online agriculture news service World-Grain.com recently published a story, “IGC projects record output for corn, wheat and soybeans,” highlighting the International Grains Council’s findings that it expects global yields of corn, rice, soybeans, and wheat to set new records again in 2020, despite the pandemic.
Global warming lengthens growing seasons, reduces frost events, and makes more land suitable for crop production. Also, carbon dioxide is an aerial fertilizer for plant life. These factors combined have resulted in the largest decline in hunger, malnutrition, and starvation in human history.
Although 700 million people worldwide still suffer from persistent hunger, the United Nations reports the number of hungry people has declined by two billion people since 1990.
To the extent hunger has increased some over the past few years, poor infrastructure, political corruption, internal conflicts, and war – not long-term human-caused climate change – is to blame.
As much as the media and climate alarmists may try to equate climate change with crop failures and hunger, the fact is global crop yields set new records virtually every year in response to beneficial ongoing warming.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is managing editor of Environment & Climate News and a research fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute.
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From the Archives
Israel Is A Genocidal Society
The Israeli Political Spectrum From The “Liberal Left” To The Far Right, Is United In Genocide
The Dissident | May 5, 2026
… The fundamental issue of Israel is not Benjamin Netanyahu, but the fact that Israel is overwhelmingly a bloodthirsty, war-ready, genocidal society.
Historian Zachary Foster has documented that the overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis have supported every Israeli war since the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, writing:
2006
86% of the Israeli adult population justified “the IDF operation in Lebanon against Hizbollah,” or 2006 Lebanon War, in which Israel killed 1,191 people, the vast majority civilians according to HRW (Note that the % of Jewish Israelis who supported the war was even higher)2008-2009
82% of the Israeli public thought that the 2008-9 war on Gaza was justified (in which Israel killed 1,417 Palestinians, the vast majority civilians.) Note that the % of Jewish Israelis who supported the war was even higher2012
90% of Israeli Jews supported war on Gaza ( in which Israel killed 160 Palestinians, 66% civilians)2014
95% of Jewish Israelis believed the war on Gaza was justified (in which Israel killed 2,310 Palestinians, 70% civilians)2021
72% of Israelis believed the war on Gaza should continue (as of May 21) after Israel had already killed 250 Palestinians in Gaza, vast majority civilians. The % of Jewish Israelis who supported killing more Palestinians was much higher.2024
A January poll found 95% of Jewish Israelis thought the Israeli military was using either the “appropriate” amount of force or “too little” force in Gaza at a time when Israel had already killed >25,700 Palestinians in Gaza.2024
In September, 90% of Jewish Israelis supported the war on Lebanon (in which Israel killed 800+, including hundreds of civilians)2025
In March, 82% of Israeli Jews supported the forced expulsion of residents of Gaza, Israel’s main goal in it’s genocide & war on Gaza.2025
In June, 82% of Jewish Israelis supported the war on Iran known as the “twelve day war”2026
On March 4, 93% of Israeli Jews expressed support for the war on Iran. 97% of “right-wing” Jewish Israelis support it, compared with 93% in the center and 76% on the left.
The overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis also have openly genocidal views towards Palestinians.
Polls in Israel have shown that:
- 84% of the (Israeli )public gives the IDF an excellent or very good grade regarding the moral conduct of the army
- 75% of Jewish Israelis agree with the idea that ‘there are no innocents in Gaza.’
- A vast majority of Israeli Jews – 79 percent – say they are ‘not so troubled’ or ‘not troubled at all’ by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza.
The fundamental problem in Israel is Zionism, not Benjamin Netanyahu. – Full article
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