The unseen evil of Covid restrictions … a dehumanising denial of physical contact
By Frank Palmer | The Conservative Woman | May 26, 2021
THERE should have been more outrage at the inhuman restrictions placed on us since March 2020.
The cat is now out of the bag about the psychological tricks used by the Government’s behavioural psychologists, with the collusion of the MSM – the terror tactics, the mixed messages creating uncertainty and insecurity, the successful attempts to polarise people, the gaslighting.
However, the full significance of the physical restrictions – the ‘social’ distancing, the prevention of meetings, the covered faces, the outlawing of affectionate hugs or handshakes – has not, I believe, been deeply enough understood.
The latter goes far beyond mind games, and has taken place in a modern culture that had already become increasingly depersonalised.
Long before Covid, face-to-face contact, or even telephone contact, with banks and other institutions (including GPs) was made progressively difficult. Staff at railway stations, banks and supermarkets were being replaced by machines. Enforced online accounts have been reducing us to disembodied digits. ‘Faceless bureaucrats’ abound.
In the streets, there was less and less eye contact or courtesy, with zombie faces headphoned, or glued to smartphone screens.
Aversion to physical contact was implied in the everyday language of ‘personal space’, ‘safe spaces’, and – in the cowardly euphemism for ending a relationship – ‘I need some space’.
‘I understand/sympathise’ was being replaced with ‘I know where you are coming from’ (a locution which already presupposes spatial remoteness).
Meanwhile, with online ‘socialising’ you don’t see or meet a person, you see a screen with an image, an increasing replacement for the real McCoy, a fantasy engagement devoid of the moral and emotional risks involved in engaging with a person ‘in the flesh’.
And of course, you have absolute control, where this simulacrum of a human presence can be ‘ghosted’ at the click of a mouse.
The upshot is that people are increasingly reduced to abstractions, which can obliterate the need for integrity in the way they are treated. A power-mad government can therefore easily reduce us to what Johnson called ‘pure mathematics’, or pieces on a chessboard.
In proper human interaction, the reality of the other person consists in their physical presence. We are embodied persons, with all the moral implications that generates.
Our moral imperatives are not mere mental abstractions. They are infused with references to our embodied nature, one sign of which is that our moral perceptions are not unrelated to our aesthetic sensibilities, which involve our sensory capacities.
Our reaction to wrongdoing or evil is not simply cerebral disagreement, it involves visceral repulsion. There are overtones of our sensitivity to beauty and ugliness in being appalled at the repulsiveness of greed, the slime of dishonesty, the filth of obscenity, and the stench of corruption.
We are not mere ‘rational beings’ (even Mr Spock has some feelings ). Our moral perceptions seem connected to a series of aesthetic contrasts between pure and impure, clean and dirty, savoury and unsavoury, harmonious and discordant, sweet-smelling and foul-smelling, and natural and unnatural (which are not for us mere ‘value-free’ biological categories).
That is not to say that our morality can be reduced to aesthetics. I merely emphasise a point about our embodied condition.
Professor Anthony O’Hear has reminded me of the significance of the following remarks of Simone Weil in her essay The Iliad, or the Poem of Force …
‘The human beings around us exert just by their presence a power which belongs uniquely to themselves to stop, to diminish, or modify, each movement which our bodies design. A person who crosses our path does not turn aside our steps in the same manner as a street sign, no one stands up, or moves about, or sits down again in quite the same fashion when he is alone in a room as when he has a visitor.’
The reference to (physical) presence is what is vital here. We meet people ‘in person’, and this presents a challenge to our self-centred tendencies in accepting the ‘reality’ of other people.
There are some things which are basic and primary to any further sophisticated views we reach about human beings. In one of his philosophy lectures, Professor David Hamlyn once asked: ‘How does an infant acquire the concept of a person?’
Pat came the answers from students about the ratiocination (the process of exact thinking or reasoning) involved in conceptual development.
‘No’, said Hamlyn, ‘the infant acquires it through being treated as a person. By being cuddled and burped, by being smiled at … and so on.’
In his essay Eine Einstellung zur Seele (An attitude towards a soul), Peter Winch argues that our primary reactions to people are ‘unreflective and primitive’, that these reactions are ‘part of the primitive material out of which our concept of a human person is formed’.
It seems to me that these instinctive reactions are present when we walk with someone and automatically match our steps to theirs, we harmonise with their facial expressions, and these reactions are not derived from ratiocination, nor from intellectually inferred beliefs about what it is to be human.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, challenges the idea that we infer mental states from bodily behaviour by saying: ‘We see emotion … we do not see facial contortions and make the inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom.
‘We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features – grief, one would like to say, is personified in the face.’
He also makes the telling observation that ‘we don’t see the human eye as a receiver, it seems not to let something in, but to send out …’
Again, our embodied nature is revealed in such expressions as ‘lending someone a sympathetic ear’, ‘being touched or moved by generosity’ or ‘my heart goes out to you’.
In the 19th century, after the prison reforms of 1835, ‘silent treatment’ was used in some US prisons as an alternative to physical punishment.
It consisted of forbidding prisoners from speaking to one another, calling them by numbers rather than by their name, and making them cover their faces – all to dehumanise them and break their will.
The physical restrictions, the prevention of interaction, and the face coverings imposed upon us by this government are equally unethical, if not downright evil.
But, for the reasons given earlier, so many people cannot see this. They have been forcibly alienated from their own nature and will no doubt uncritically accept their reduction to trackable digits on the biometric identity passes being planned – the price of their future so-called freedom.
Stanford review finds 45% of 117 pediatric “Covid hospitalizations” were not hospitalized for Covid
By Meryl Nass, M.D. | May 24, 2021
Four things we know of probably helped drive up the number of hospitalizations coded as due to Covid-19.
One was the payment of considerably more funds by Medicare for a hospitalization coded with a Covid DRG than for a comparable illness.
Two was an extra federal payment to hospitals that met a certain threshold of Covid cases during a specified time period, as discussed by Scott Jensen, MD and recent member of the Minnesota legislature, who is now running for governor.
Three was a required Covid test for every admitted patient, which has some false positives and presumably also identifies asymptomatic cases.
Four was extra emergency payments to states that could show they had a preponderance of Covid patients.
Physicians at Stanford’s quaternary (super specialized and able to care for the very sickest patients) pediatric center examined 117 Covid-coded pediatric hospitalizations that occurred during a 9 month period from May 10, 2020 to February 10, 2021. They determined that 45% of these children were not admitted because of Covid. Their paper is short and straightforward. Worth a quick look.
The Myth of the ‘Asymptomatic Spreader’ Dealt Another Blow This Week
21st Century Wire | May 24, 2021
Since the pandemic crisis began in early 2020, government and public health officials have been adamant that any difficult measures taken were all being done in order to ‘control the spread of the virus’ or ‘stop the disease.’ Thus, a litany of so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions, and also pharmaceutical interventions – were deemed by the consensus to be essential measures in fighting the spread of what was being characterized as an asymptomatic disease.
Over a year later, a few industrious ‘public health’ mavens have summoned the courage to actually test this fundamental assumption. Recently in the UK, officials have staged and monitored nine large-scale events, including an FA Cup final football match, and the Brit Awards – both of which were exempt from the usual COVID rules. The results of this test should be hailed as good news, but for those heavily invested in the narrative, it’s nothing short of a meltdown: little to no coronavirus “cases” turned up.
Officials managed to scrape together just 15 alleged “cases” or “infections” (deemed as such merely from a single ‘positive test’) out of some 60,000 total attendees.
The result of this experiment has dealt a crushing blow to the central myth upon which the entire COVID-19 ‘global pandemic’ crisis has been built – namely the myth of the asymptomatic spread, and the much-maligned notorious “super-spreader” events.
Sky News UK reports…
Nine large-scale events were staged as part of the government’s plan to allow for the return of big crowds this summer. Those who attended were exempt from certain coronavirus rules, such as the rule-of-six.
The government confirmed to Sky News that 15 COVID cases had been recorded out of nearly 60,000 people who attended the events, which “is in line with the broader population”.
Latest figures show the rate of people testing positive for COVID in the UK is 22 infections per 100,000 people.
The pilot events included three football matches at Wembley Stadium – the FA Cup final which was attended by 21,000 supporters, an FA Cup semi-final and the Carabao Cup final.
IMAGE: Animated graphic from NPR’s debunked April 2020 propaganda article entitled, “What We Know About The Silent Spreaders Of COVID-19.”
Combine this latest UK admission with the recent backtracking by Dr. Anthony Fauci and the US Center for Disease Control CDC on masks and asymptomatic transmissions, and it’s clear that officials will have no choice now but to back-off supporting the nonscience-based myth of the asymptomatic spreader or “silent spreaders,” and it’s not difficult to see how problematic this widely held assumption is now becoming, with many media doctors and public health officials now facing challenges over what can only be described as a collective propaganda effort deployed by government, media and medical industry over the last 14 months.
The peer-reviewed literature is also clear, with large-scale studies conducted, including at the supposed epicenter of the pandemic in Wuhan, China – all of which showed no evidence of alleged asymptomatic spreading of the ‘novel’ coronavirus. See their results here, here, and here.
Of course, none of this should surprise any honest doctor or real scientist. We’ve always known that any disease requires symptoms first. But somehow, common sense has been completely abandoned during the Covid crisis.
Of all the widely-held assumptions and hysteria surrounding the COVID crisis, none has been more pivotal than the myth of the ‘asymptomatic spread’ in ballasting every single unprecedented ‘health intervention’ policy including:
- Social Distancing
- Mass Testing
- Reliance on non-diagnostic PCR and Lateral Flow tests
- Track and Trace bio surveillance
- Lockdowns
- Quarantining the healthy
- Masks
- Border Closures
- Business Closures
- School Closures
- Mass Vaccinations
- Vaccine Passports
It’s astonishing to consider that every single one of these emergency measures have been predicated on the widely-held, nonscientific myth of the asymptomatic spread.
Perhaps more shocking is the fact that no one in government, media or the legions of newly-crowned ‘public health experts’ – have bothered to challenge this key assumption, perhaps out of fear, or more likely because it was politically and economically expedient for stakeholders of the current crisis narrative.
It is not uncommon the see the bevy of experts and media anchors, all repeating ad nauseum presumptive statements like:
“A third of people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus have no symptoms but are just as infectious as those with COVID-19.”
Unraveling the murky ontology of the myth of the asymptomatic spreader, we can point to an informative piece published recently in Lockdown Skeptics entitled, “How Did a Disease With no Symptoms Take Over the World?” A fair question, and indeed a necessary one too.
The article answers this question quite simply – it’s so obvious and still profound if one pauses to consider just how many of the so-called experts and health ministers have routinely avoided applying any real epistemology or scientific method to the wild ‘pandemic’ claims which have become so commonplace over the last 14 months:
“Given that this is all so blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever been near a biology textbook, the only reasonable conclusion we can draw about the creation of an asymptomatic disease is that it wasn’t done by a biologist but instead by individuals (probably on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B)) whose agenda is not to convey accurate information to the public but something different: fear and uncertainty.”
It’s been 14 months, and the world has been turned upside-down, and the billionaire class have reached new heights in wealth and consolidation of power and influence, while everyone else has slid downwards.
Let there be a reckoning. It’s time to talk about the real science – which does not even remotely support the inflated ‘global pandemic’ narrative.
America’s Public Health System Is Utterly Corrupt
By Paul Craig Roberts • Institute for Political Economy • May 24, 2021
A sure sign of a country’s collapse is the open corruption of its public and private institutions. When corruption no longer has to be hidden but can be openly flouted, the values and standards that comprised the country’s soul have eroded away.
Try to find an American institution that is not corrupt. Even when presented with the Covid threat the US public health system could not rise above the greed for profit. Effective cures, such as HCQ and Ivermectin were demonized and in many states prohibited. Most Covid deaths are the result of non-treatment.
Throughout the alleged “Covid Pandemic” regulatory agencies, health bureaucracies, medical associations, state governors, media, and Big Pharma have acted to prevent any alternative to a vaccine.
From day one the emphasis was on the profits from a vaccine. To get people to submit to an experimental and untested vaccine required the absence of cures. To keep the road open only for a vaccine even supplements such as NAC, which has shown effectiveness as both preventative and treatment of Covid, has been challenged by the FDA in its use as a supplement. In response, amazon.com, a major online marketer of dietary supplements removed NAC from its offerings.
The generation of fear was essential to stampeeding people to line up to be vaccinated. The fear was supplemented by threats of inability to travel, to attend sports events, to resume working at one’s job.
A Covid test, known as PCR, was intentionally run at high cycles known to result in a very high percentage of false positives. These false positives guaranteed a high infection rate that scared people silly. Economic incentives were used for hospitals to report all deaths as Covid deaths, thus greatly exaggerating Covid’s mortality.
As you might have noticed, last winter had no reporting of flu cases as flu was added to the Covid statistics.
A number of reports have been published that the Covid vaccine does not prevent some vaccinated people from coming down with Covid. Other reports say that vaccinated people become spreaders of Covid. There are also reports of a large number of deaths and injuries from the Covid vaccine.
In order to suppress the facts and keep the Covid vaccine selling, the Center for Disease Control (CDC), which supported running the PCR test at high cycles in order to inflate the number of Covid cases, runs the PCR test at much lower cycles in the case of infected vaccinated people in order to minimize the number of vaccinated people who came down with Covid.
To further create an artificial picture of the vaccine’s effectiveness, asymptomatic and mild infections are excluded from the reporting of vaccinated people who catch Covid. Only vaccinated people who catch Covid who have to be hospitalized or die from Covid are counted among the people who caught Covid despite being vaccinated. However, unvaccinated people with only minor symptoms or false positives from a high cycle PCR test are added to the number of Covid cases.
This is obvious and blatant manipulation of statistics in order to scare people about Covid while reassuring them about the vaccine’s effectiveness. Overstating the number of cases among the unvaccinated while simultaneously understating the number of people who caught Covid despite being vaccinated is shameless and protects the contrived picture of the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine.
The falsification of statistics in order to produce massive public fear and the prevention of treatment with known safe and effective cures in order to maximize death rates produced billions of dollars in profits for Big Pharma and associated industries, with Moderna’s CEO topping the list of nine new billionaires made rich from the rollout of Covid vaccines. These billionaires rode to their riches on the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people who died from an enforced lack of treatment — mandated deaths to protect vaccine profits.
Will anything be done about this extraordinary corruption of the American public health system?
How the vaccine can make Covid worse
By Neville Hodgkinson | The Conservative Woman | May 24, 2021
EVIDENCE is growing that Covid-19 vaccines may worsen the disease in some recipients. The danger arises when a vaccinated person meets the actual virus. Antibodies developed as a result of the jab can end up enhancing disease rather than protecting against infection.
Previous warnings about this potentially lethal effect, known as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), have been downplayed or dismissed as theoretical by the manufacturers. The phenomenon has been seen with vaccines against other viruses but is considered very rare.
After reviewing published evidence concerning the effect, however, two US experts [1] have concluded it is ‘non-theoretical and compelling’. Receiving the vaccine could convert a subject from someone who experiences mild disease ‘to someone who experiences severe disease, lasting morbidity or even death’.
They say that to meet the ethical requirement of informed consent, all potential vaccinees, as well as trial participants, should have this risk specifically drawn to their attention.
Meanwhile, an international group of doctors and scientists have published an appeal to governments, regulators and vaccine developers worldwide to halt mass-vaccination programmes until safety issues, especially ADE, have been resolved.
They say that given the high rate of adverse effects there is a need for better understanding of the benefits and risks, particularly in sections of the community who were excluded in most of the clinical trials. These included the elderly and people with prior exposure to SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19.
Exclusion of the latter, the group says, is particularly unfortunate ‘as it denied the opportunity of obtaining extremely relevant information concerning post-vaccination ADE in people that already have anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.’ Without careful monitoring, cases of ADE or similar immune pathology caused by the vaccine would be indistinguishable from severe Covid-19.
The same may be true of damage caused by a toxin, the so-called ‘spike’ protein, production of which is triggered in our body cells by the vaccine. The protein is a uniquely dangerous characteristic of the virus, and the aim of the vaccine is to alert the immune system to it so as to block infection.
But not a single study has examined how long the toxin continues to be produced in us following vaccination, the doctors say. The jab itself may be causing the very symptoms it is designed to protect against, symptoms then erroneously diagnosed as ‘coincidental’ cases of infection. ‘If so, the true adverse effects of the current global vaccination strategy may never be recognised unless studies specifically examine this question.’
This an extraordinarily serious concern, since across the world sicknesses and deaths seen immediately in the wake of vaccination are regularly attributed to the virus itself. This has been the case even with dramatic increases in deaths concurrent with vaccination drives, such as last January in Gibraltar.
A family doctor in Texas highlighted the risk of ADE in evidence this month to the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs. Dr Ben Edwards said more than half of Texans now have natural immunity to the virus, and this confers ‘a more robust immunity’ than the vaccine. But two different studies have shown that ‘vaccinating someone who is already robustly immune increases their risk of adverse reactions 2-3-fold.’
He told the committee that in the past four months, 4,178 deaths associated with the Covid vaccine had been reported to the US Government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), almost the same as the 4,182 deaths reported from all vaccinations combined over the past 20 years.
The deaths included those of a 15-year-old boy in Colorado, two 16-year-old girls in Wisconsin, a 17-year-old girl in Wisconsin and a 17-year-old boy in New Hampshire, all previously healthy.
Pointing to studies indicating that only a tiny percentage of adverse reactions reach VAERS, Dr Edwards added: ‘To give context, in the 1976 swine flu epidemic, after recording 500 cases of paralysis, with 53 deaths, the vaccine was pulled off the market.
‘I have received numerous reports from family members of my patients, and close friends of my patients, that within hours to days of receiving the vaccine they’ve suffered stroke, heart attack, pulmonary embolism, blood clots, sudden death; and as far as these family members know, none of these were reported by the medical staff as being associated with the vaccine. So my concern is that there is indeed vast under-reporting.’
He said there was no need for the jab in people who have acquired immunity, whether through having had the disease, or having been exposed to the virus without developing symptoms.
Asked by the committee chairman if people can do anything to strengthen their immune system, Dr Edwards said: ‘Absolutely . . . through proper nutrition, hydration, exercise, sunlight, and most importantly, peace – not the spirit of fear which in my opinion has overcome this nation.’
Last week former White House Covid-19 adviser Dr Scott Atlas made a similar criticism of fear-based policies which, he said, had caused rational and critical thinking to disappear. Lockdowns in the United States and across the globe had not only been a ‘heinous abuse of power’ by public health experts, but had also failed to protect the elderly and vulnerable. The harm caused would be felt for decades to come.
In an interview with Epoch TV, Atlas said he believed lockdowns were appropriate in the early stages of the pandemic, when it was thought the virus could be more lethal than turned out to be the case. But a ‘frenzy’ took over, and the goal gradually shifted from protecting health care facilities to stopping Covid-19 cases altogether.
‘Fear is very powerful, and it was really shown how powerful fear is during this pandemic,’ he said. Americans bought into the initial control measures because they thought they would be temporary, and a small price to pay to get things under control. But poor leadership by ‘the faces of public health’ led to persistent lockdowns that defied logic, causing loss of medical resources for countless others.
Child abuse and domestic abuse skyrocketed, opioid deaths and suicides surged, and there was a dramatic rise in young people suffering from depression and anxiety. Children were kept out of school – ‘sacrificed’ – out of fear for adults, even though the children had no significant Covid risk.
‘I think it is still somehow held by many people that OK, the lockdowns are an economic harm, but we’re saving lives. No, you’re destroying families, you’re destroying lives, and you’re literally killing people. It’s a disgrace.’
Fear-based public health responses to the Covid crisis as described by Dr Atlas have caused immeasurable harm in many countries, including the UK. We still don’t know the full outcomes of this ‘frenzied’ period, including whether the vaccines are fit for purpose.
At least some are weathering the crisis well. As Saturday’s Daily Mail revealed, nine executives from four vaccine companies have become billionaires during the pandemic, reaching a combined net wealth of $19.3billion. The list was compiled by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a campaign group that includes Oxfam, UNAIDS, Global Justice Now and Amnesty International.
And according to a January report by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies, 651 existing US billionaires, including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Elon Musk, saw their collective wealth grow by more than $1trillion during the first nine months of Covid-19, even as the less fortunate faced economic hardship and hunger.
How Did a Disease With no Symptoms Take Over the World?
The WHO Says COVID-19 Asymptomatic Transmission Is “Very Rare”
Lockdown Sceptics | May 22, 2021
There are two ways in which people are controlled: first of all frighten them, and then demoralise them. An educated healthy, and confident nation is harder to govern.
Tony Benn
Biologists tell each other stories. These stories might involve lots of acronyms and use strange and wonderful verbs and nouns but, unlike say mathematics, the mechanism by which biologists convey their science is at heart through the use of language. But unlike works of creative writing, the language used by biologists needs to be precise because bad English can lead to bad science. Which is why it jarred so much when I first read the following statement:
A third of people with COVID-19 have no symptoms.
The more technically correct statement (assuming that “a third” is accurate) is:
A third of people infected with [more correctly, testing positive for] the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus have no symptoms.
So why did the first statement raise my biological hackles so much when at first glance these two statements might appear to be essentially very similar? It is because from a biological perspective they are profoundly different. The first statement asserts the existence of a disease with no symptoms i.e., a sickness that is indistinguishable from being healthy, while the second statement asserts that a viral infection does not necessarily result in a disease. It is not a question of semantics but accuracy and mixing these two concepts up is the sort of thing that would have resulted in an ‘F’ if I were to have submitted it in an essay to one of my professors. Yet, this is exactly the inaccurate language that has been used throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and not by students learning their discipline, but by experienced senior scientists who, one assumes, are well aware of what they are saying.
One could argue that this is unimportant as surely the point is to convey the idea that you could be infectious with coronavirus and be unaware of it and the first statement is an easy way to do this for the layman. Not only does this assumption treat the public as if they were children unable to understand the nuances of infection and disease, but I’d argue that the second statement is just as easy to understand as the first. No, the reason to create a disease with no symptoms is based on a profound decision, one that I believe was made with the intention of ensuring compliance but has, since its inception, grown to dominate our entire response to COVID-19.
First, let’s see why defining having a disease based purely on the presence of a pathogen is a flawed concept. This is best illustrated by reference to another virus, Epstein-Barr Virus or EBV. You’ll be forgiven if you’ve never heard of this virus, but it could be argued to be one of the most successful human pathogens because almost everyone is infected by it. Most people are infected early in life and if this happens then EBV takes up residence in your B-cells (the cells in your immune system responsible for making antibodies) where it quietly persists throughout your life. Every now and then the virus goes into active replication and makes copies of itself which get shed into your mouth, a process that you are blissfully unaware is happening. The problems with EBV generally occur if you don’t get infected early in life but avoid infection until you’re much older. Now when you get infected with EBV, you can develop a disease called infectious mononucleosis or, more commonly, glandular fever. This often happens in young adults when they become interested in close physical contact with members of the opposite (or same) sex… which is why glandular fever is sometimes referred to as “the kissing disease”.
Now let’s apply the new asymptomatic COVID-19 orthodoxy to EBV where we define having a disease purely through the presence of a viral genome. So, according to this definition, almost everyone in the U.K. (and the world) is suffering from a new disease, asymptomatic glandular fever, and if we were to do a large-scale mass screening campaign we’d discover that there were millions of ‘cases’ of asymptomatic glandular fever in the U.K. alone!
Of course, this is complete nonsense. We aren’t all ‘suffering’ from asymptomatic glandular fever. Glandular fever requires infection by EBV, but EBV infection does not necessarily lead to glandular fever. The same is true of COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 and so the concept of asymptomatic COVID-19 as a disease is as ridiculous as that of asymptomatic glandular fever.
But as is the case with EBV, being infected with SARS-CoV-2 means that you can still pass it on even if you aren’t sick. However, it is a matter of degrees and the reason that people can be healthy carriers is simply because they have less viral replication and a lower viral load, which is why they aren’t sick. Of course, if the lower levels of SARS-CoV-2 in an asymptomatic individual were sufficient to mean such an individual was as infectious as someone with symptoms, then from an infectivity perspective the distinction between asymptomatic carriers and people with COVID-19 is unimportant and our statement would need to read:
A third of people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus have no symptoms but are just as infectious as those with COVID-19.
However, this situation would mean that the R number for SARS-CoV-2 would likely be much greater than it is, and that coronavirus infection and COVID-19 would have crashed through the population in one huge tsunami at the start of last year. This wasn’t the case, and all the evidence is that healthy, asymptomatic carriers (and pre-symptomatic sufferers) are much less infectious than those with symptoms and a disease (see Will Jones’s summary of COVID-19 facts for links to supporting evidence).
Given that this is all so blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever been near a biology textbook, the only reasonable conclusion we can draw about the creation of an asymptomatic disease is that it wasn’t done by a biologist but instead by individuals (probably on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B)) whose agenda is not to convey accurate information to the public but something different: fear and uncertainty.
The effect of the asymptomatic disease is to blur the lines between being healthy and being sick and means that people will consciously, or subconsciously, transfer some of their understanding of symptomatic COVID-19 and apply it to asymptomatic COVID-19. The implication being that the absence of symptoms is somehow not relevant and that just because you feel fine, you are in fact suffering from a deadly disease. This naturally creates fear, fear for oneself (what if I have it?) and fear of everyone else (they look O.K., but what if they have it?). This fear is useful if you now want to control the behaviour of people and drive compliance with policies designed to limit the spread of COVID-19, but the problem is that having created the asymptomatic monster as a mechanism to ensure compliance, it soon starts to consume everything because you now need to manage this disease with no symptoms.
The first thing asymptomatic disease needs is a way of identifying who has it. By definition, asymptomatic individuals have no symptoms and so in order to identify who is sick we need a test. Not only do we need a test, but because anyone who is healthy could be silently suffering from this illness, we will need a lot of tests. And because healthy people can become sick without any change in how they feel or look, then the testing needs to be endless. Also, because the disease is only defined by the presence of the virus, then positive screening results (real or false positives) naturally become ‘cases’, confirming the ongoing presence of the asymptomatic disease. Testing begets more testing.
The whole host of non-pharmaceutical interventions – including lockdowns – can also be seen as logical steps to take in fighting an asymptomatic disease. If sick people have no symptoms, then we need to employ strategies in everyday life to manage them. In effect, we have to treat the entire population as if it were ill and deploy measures across the whole of society with this in mind. This effectively leads to ‘reverse quarantine’ where we lock up the healthy to try and protect the few genuinely sick people.
Likewise, vaccine passports are also driven by the need to manage asymptomatic disease because it is only by proving that you’ve had a medical intervention that we can be sure that your lack of symptoms are not a cause of concern. But being immune doesn’t stop an individual from becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2, it just means their immune system more rapidly and effectively recognises and deals with this infection and as a result they may never develop symptoms. In other words, vaccination is no protection from asymptomatic COVID-19 and suitably sensitive screening will continue to detect asymptomatic ‘cases’ amongst the immune population. Proponents of vaccine passports acknowledge this and argue (correctly) that if immune individuals are infected with coronavirus, they will carry a lower viral burden and so are less infectious. However, they then go on to demonise unvaccinated, naïve healthy individuals because they might be asymptomatic carriers. In reality, healthy people are healthy and even if they are carriers are unlikely to infect other people in normal social situations regardless of vaccination status. In fact, if you support the notion of asymptomatic COVID-19 ‘sufferers’ being a significant source of infection, it could be argued that we need vaccination certificates to protect the non-vaccinated from the vaccinated!
Finally, there is the whole question of variants. Clearly, a new, virulent more deadly strain of coronavirus that evades current immunity is a very concerning thing as it would essentially reset the clock back to the start of the pandemic: in effect it is a new disease. But because we have blurred the distinction between infection and disease and our focus is on the presence (and sequence) of viral genomes, every new variant is now treated as if it actually were a new disease. This in turn drives the need to continue to monitor (picking up more and more new variants) and manage ‘the spread of cases’ irrespective of the severity of disease they cause or the prior immunity within the population. Again, testing begets more testing in an endless cycle that will never stop unless we decide to stop it.
What all this means in practice is that the management of asymptomatic COVID-19 has become the the focus of the Government’s coronavirus policy, but if we go back to the original (mis)statement about asymptomatic COVID-19 and swap it around we get:
Two thirds of people with COVID-19 have symptoms.
Of course, this should read “three thirds (all!) of people with COVID-19 have symptoms” but the point I’m making is that hiding in plain sight is the fact that most people infected with SARS-CoV-2 get ill to varying degrees. We also know that people with symptoms account for the majority of onward transmission of the infection (again see Will’s summary for evidence). So, if we were designing an effective policy to manage COVID-19 we would focus our efforts on the sick as this is where we’re going to get the most bang for the buck.
What would this mean in practice? First, we would only need diagnostic testing capacity for the minority of the population with symptoms, rather than the industrial-scale screening that we have had to deploy to deal with asymptomatic COVID-19. Second, restrictions would be focused on ill people, and this would be much easier, not only because these individuals are easier to find, but because sick people behave as if they were, well, sick and as such may not require much encouragement to prevent others getting ill. (“Don’t come too close, I’m not very well.”) They also probably wouldn’t want to go to work, or the gym, or the pub, or visit Granny. These restrictions would be time limited as they only apply to an individual while they are ill. We could use the billions of pounds saved on not destroying the economy in a futile attempt to quarantine the entire healthy population to ensure that these individuals were supported until they got better. We could invest in extra capacity in the healthcare system to manage any increase in hospitalisations and focus resources on improved treatments rather than testing and managing healthy people. The need for vaccination certification becomes irrelevant because healthy people are treated as healthy people and new variants only become of concern if they make individuals sicker. Essentially, we could stop treating COVID-19 as a special case with all the collateral damage this causes to non-COVID-19 related health and manage it as we would any other potentially serious infection. None of this is surprising as it is based on centuries of accumulated wisdom about how to manage infectious diseases. Unfortunately, the creation and focus on asymptomatic disease has drawn our eye away from the real illness and devoured huge amounts of time, effort, and money.
Being told that you are sick with a major illness can be a devastating piece of news, not just for the individual themselves but for those around them. Even if this news is couched in terms of positive treatment outcomes, it would be impossible to not be fearful and run hundreds of ‘what if’ scenarios through one’s mind. Regardless of how you feel today, the worries are all about progression and how you will feel tomorrow. Normally, clinicians would have a duty of care to their patients and spend time in discussing a diagnosis and helping their patients come to terms with this news. But for COVID-19, people receive the results of their diagnosis with no support. Worse through track-and-trace they might even receive this news completely unsolicited; imagine if a complete stranger phoned you to tell you that you might have cancer? Then, rather than offer support and comfort, we demand that individuals cut themselves off from others (self-isolate); you’re ill but on your own. All of this has consequences, especially for those who have bought into the concept of asymptomatic COVID-19, and so is it not surprising that some people want to cling to mask wearing, social distancing and lockdowns. In the end, it turns out that – ironically – asymptomatic COVID-19 might not be asymptomatic after all because for any number of vulnerable people the very existence of this asymptomatic disease has the potential to make them sick – sick with fear, worry and anxiety.
The author, who wishes to remain anonymous, is a senior research scientist at a pharmaceutical company.
Facebook’s fact-checkers accused of censorship over mask-wearing in kids
The Manhattan Institute says their “fact-checking” is actually “fact-blocking”
By Ben Squires | Reclaim the Net | May 21, 2021
Facebook’s fact checkers are “fact-blockers,” according to Manhattan Institute’s John Tierney, whose article on the downsides of mask-wearing in children was flagged. Mask-wearing in children still remains a controversial topic, where there’s no scientific consensus.
In April, Facebook flagged Tierney’s article on the risks of mask-wearing in children, adding a warning label that the information in the article was “mostly false.”
In the article, published by the City Journal, Tierney argues that masks are not only ineffective, but also psychologically harmful for kids, because they harm the development of their linguistic skills, and cause psychological damage, and other effects.
“City Journal appealed the ruling, a process that turned out to be both futile and revealing,” Tierney wrote. “Facebook refused to remove the label, which still appears whenever the article is shared, but at least we got an inside look at the tactics that social media companies and progressive groups use to distort science and public policy.”
A major flaw in Facebook’s appeals process is the lack of a neutral arbiter. Instead, the fact-checker, in this case Science Feedback, was allowed to be its own judge and justify why flagging the article was right.
“This exercise obviously wasn’t about accuracy. The fact-checkers were actually fact-blockers,” Tierney wrote.
Part of the reason Science Feedback flagged the article was because it cited a study by German researchers who interviewed parents about the effects of mask wearing in children. The fact-checker deemed the study flawed and self-selective.
“Any study can be faulted for methodological shortcomings, but that doesn’t mean its results should be ignored or suppressed, particularly when the findings are consistent with a large body of evidence from other researchers,” Tierney argued. He referred to another German peer-reviewed study, that concluded there is “statistically significant evidence of what they termed “Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome.’”
Another issue Science Feedback noted in Tierney’s article was the reference of a Swedish study that concluded that there was no significant difference in the spread of the virus in older kids studying online and unmasked kids attending in-person classes.
“This makes it seem as if mask-wearing is implemented primarily to protect kids or parents from dying or getting hospitalized. But in reality it is used to limit the spread of the disease in the population, control the epidemic, and prevent the death of individuals at risk,” Science Feedback said.
“To the extent that I can make any sense of this objection, it seems that the fact-checkers at Science Feedback believe that the unmasked schoolchildren were infecting large numbers of Swedish adults while miraculously leaving their own parents unscathed. And I’m the one guilty of ‘flawed reasoning’?” Tierney wrote.
According to Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, the censorship of such articles harms the trust the public has in science.
“Science depends on dissent, free speech, open debate. Yet in the name of science, they’re actually censoring those tools of the scientific method itself,” Ramaswamy said, in an appearance on Fox & Friends on Wednesday.
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UAE tortured, killed journalist for opposing Israel normalization
The Cradle | October 31, 2026
UAE security officers detained, tortured, and killed Emirati poet and news editor Habib al-Sayegh in August 2019, shortly after he published a column opposing UAE normalization with Israel, according to a newly published book.
“Princes and Thieves,” a book by investigative journalist Matthew Cole published on 25 October, alleges that UAE security officers raided Sayegh’s Abu Dhabi home shortly after the publication of the column, hooded him in front of his wife and took him to a detention facility where he was tortured to death.
His interrogators reportedly pulled out several of his teeth with pliers and beat him repeatedly with a sharp metal object.
On 11 August 2019, Sayegh criticized the UAE’s plan to normalize relations with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords in his weekly column for Khaleej newspaper. The column was titled “Israel Is Our Real Enemy and A Dangerous Project.”
Sayegh described Israel as “a real and natural enemy” while questioning “who authorized the normalizers to speak on behalf of everyone?”
Nine days after the column was published, Emirati state media announced his death, without stating a cause. … continue
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