COVID Retrospective (vaccines, masks, treatments, natural immunity, herd immunity, and more)

In my last post, I wrote of the ineffectiveness of mask mandates at stopping the spread of COVID. Dr. Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist said, “face masks are an easy solution, and I’m deeply distrustful of easy solutions to complex problems” (To Mask or Not to Mask: That is the Question – Seek the Truth (seek-the-truth.com). Masks are at best innocuous. For those of us who don’t believe they are effective, they are more of an annoyance than anything else. We wear a mask for a time as required and we are not likely to be harmed by the experience (although for young children and those forced to wear them every day for extended periods, there can be negative side effects). See the final section below for even more on masking; the evidence to support this case keeps flowing in.

Vaccines are a far more complex mitigation measure and the consequences of bad vaccine public policy are potentially far more dangerous and much longer lasting than ineffective masking policy. Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of the mRNA technology and vaccine advocate has been raising alarms about the manner in which vaccines are being applied. Many other medical experts are concerned as well (see below), yet the discredited Dr. Fauci and the CDC continue to hold sway over so much of the public. Many common folk are also concerned about long term impact of the vaccines and who is to say we know all the impacts at this point?

I still believe the vaccines were a modern miracle and and I was hoping like the rest of you they would help return life to normal in 2021, but over the summer, the vaccines failed to slow the spread of COVID as the number of “breakthrough” cases has risen steeply. Israel, the pace-setter for vaccinations, has double-vaxed more than 80% of their adults and triple-vaxed 26%, yet COVID cases in September 2021 are the highest they have ever been, higher than all of last year when nobody was vaccinated. It appeared this summer that the vaccines had saved the day. In the entire month of June, only 16 Israelis died from COVID, but two months later, even before the end of summer, 27 Israelis are dying from COVID every day. What is going on here?

Here is a microcosm of what’s happening with vaccines: all 27 COVID cases on board a recent cruise of the Carnival Vista were among vaccinated patients. In fact, 96.5% of passengers were vaccinated along with 99.8% of the crew; the very small percentage of unvaccinated were clearly not driving this outbreak as they were all unaffected (of course, nobody died and nobody had to be hospitalized, so maybe we should not be concerned):

I posit the problem is not so much the vaccine itself, but our vaccine policy. I am deeply distrustful of public health officials like Fauci and Wallensky given their COVID track record, and when I see their only response to breakthrough cases is to push the vaccines even harder, my doubt increases. They keep pushing the same prescription even though some adjustments are clearly needed; COVID cases in the U.S. went from record lows in June to levels exceeded only last December and January. Last January, COVID was at its absolute peak and hardly anyone was vaccinated, but today 53% of all Americans are fully vaccinated. Why is the virus spreading so much when we should be nearing herd immunity levels? Deaths too in the U.S. have risen five-fold over that period to now more than 1,200 per day, well off its peak, so the vaccines appear to be tamping down deaths, but deaths are higher than we would expect after all this time and effort to vaccinate.

Could we have done better? There have been many alternative voices suggesting different strategies. Today, we are in the midst of the fourth wave (which is just now peaking). Is a fifth wave coming this fall and winter? We don’t usually see so many waves with epidemics; the Spanish flu, one of the worst pandemics in history, died out on the fourth wave, but COVID appears to be coming back for more.

Let’s ask a few more questions which highlight some of the shortcomings of our government public health leaders. How come the vaccine is the only public policy recommendation (other than mask mandates which are not universal and not effective) they are pushing? Why are they glossing over the limitations of the vaccines? How many booster shots will they ask us to take and for how long? Can they predict when another wave is coming or will they forever be in reactionary mode? The vaccines have definitely had a short-term benefit, but will they continue to prevent deaths as time progresses and more variants arise? Our government officials don’t appear to have good answers to any of these questions, or at least none they are unwilling to share them with us.

Natural Immunity

It adds significantly to my lack of trust when Fauci and company ignore the benefits of natural immunity. I have previously shared copious empirical evidence as well as medical studies demonstrating the clear advantage of natural immunity over vaccine immunity and have included more below. We continue to see this in real time now as more studies are able to compare the effect of two different types of immunity over long periods of time:

• A new study from Israel looked at thousands of people who had either been vaccinated against COVID-19 or were unvaccinated but previously infected 
• Participants who were double jabbed were 5.96 times more likely to be infected and 7.13 times more likely to experience symptoms 
• After three months, risk of infection was 13.06 times higher among immunized individuals and they were 27 times more likely to experience symptoms

This video from Peak Prosperity breaks down the Israel data in detail in an easy-to-understand manner: Natural Immunity Stronger Than Vaccine Alone | Peak Prosperity.

The Israel results are relevant to us in the U.S. because we are following the same path as Israel; we are primarily using the same vaccines as them and are slightly behind them in vaccinations. They are 8 percentage points ahead of us, so we can vaccinate another 27 million people during the next month to get the same lackluster results Israel has today. With such results, we are unlikely to convince the remaining vaccine hesitant to come on-board.

Here is another video which also discusses natural immunity vs vaccine immunity: In this interview, Girardot talks extensively about the fallacies surrounding asymptomatic transmission and the waning natural immunity of those who have recovered from Covid-19. The power of natural immunity against viral infections is thoroughly explored, with Girardot stating that ‘evolution has done things perfectly.’  Natural immunity vs vaccine-induced immunity: An interview with Marc Girardot of PANDA (biznews.com)

I recently spoke with a doctor friend of mine who explained a serious limitation with the current vaccines. The current COVID vaccines target a particular strain of COVID-19, the original strain. They are highly effective against this one strain, but less effective, and possibly totally ineffective, as more variants emerge. Natural immunity, on the other hand, offers a broader range of protection as it does not focus on a specific target. He also told me this shocking tid-bit: as of July, there were almost 4,000 variants from the original strain. The virus mutates on average every nine days (source: https://odysee.com/@FrontlineCovid19CriticalCareAlliance:c/flccc-weekly-update-28-july-2021-covid:6; fast forward to 10:55 mark).

These variants run the full gamut, some are totally harmless while some are more virulent than the original strain. The ones we’ve heard about such as delta, lambda, and gamma have had the biggest impact to date, but there are thousands of others not yet having a significant impact. But how many more are lurking in our future?

My friend is concerned a new strain could impact a different demographic, perhaps even kids and adolescents. He reminded me the first wave of the Spanish flu was not so deadly, but the second wave in late 1918 was unusually deadly. Death would follow within hours or days because the lungs filled with fluid. Other signs and symptoms were seen including bleeding from the mouth, nosebleeds, miscarriages in pregnant women. There was an altered mental state – delirium. People lost their hearing. As we extend this pandemic (through lockdowns and quarantines and the like) are we making ourselves more vulnerable to another deadly COVID wave, one that the current vaccines may not be able to touch at all?

Treatments

Another doctor friend informed me that we have effective treatments for COVID; with an early intervention, the prognosis is very good.

There are those who push the vaccine as a primary means of treating the infection and they ignore things which are in front them – there are medications (hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin) which effectively treat the infection. They will use anything to support their stance. 

These doctors are very frustrated by the lack of emphasis our government health officials have placed on effective treatments. Because of the pressure that has been applied last year to doctors who advocated for hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) to treat COVID and this year the for those advocating for ivermectin, many doctors are afraid to prescribe these drugs. You can easily find stories saying ivermectin is a panacea pushed only by right wing anti-vaccine nuts who want to use it in place of vaccines to discredit pro-vaccine advocates and achieve a political win: How anti-vaxxers weaponized Ivermectin, a horse de-wormer drug, as a COVID-19 treatment | Salon.com.

How about the alternative explanation that the drug might save thousands of lives? This is not a shadowy claim such as sprinkling shark fin powder over your cereal every morning to cure COVID along with whatever else ails you. There is plenty of science backing ivermectin as a treatment. Ivermectin has been around for decades and it won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2015. It is also FDA approved for human use. Billions of people, not just horses, have been treated with ivermectin for a variety of diseases. This article highlights several studies that show the drug is effective: Ivermectin: a multifaceted drug of Nobel prize-honoured distinction with indicated efficacy against a new global scourge, COVID-19 – ScienceDirect.

The argument that it is a drug for animals or that it is not safe after all these years is ludicrous and highlights how those in the media are desperately and deliberately misleading the public.

But even if there are doubts ivermectin is effective for COVID, why not at least give a drug that has been proven safe in humans and effective at treating other human illnesses a chance? The same narrative was created for HCQ last year; HCQ was also widely touted by numerous practitioners, including the America’s Front Line doctors, doctors who are the ones seeing the results of treatment first hand. It is another drug that had been proven safe and effective; it had been used for more than 50 years and has also been given to billions of people over the years. In 2020 suddenly, we were told it too was no longer safe and not effective, even while many doctors continue to tout the efficacy for their patients.

Compare the safety record for ivermectin vs. the COVID vaccines. The CDC data shows fewer than 20 have died from ivermectin but almost 10,000 from COVID vaccines. If we are willing accept this many deaths from COVID vaccines, why is the safety record of ivermectin even an issue?

Popular pod-caster Joe Rogan recently contracted COVID and took ivermectin for treatment. Joe Rogan says he has Covid, took widely discredited drug ivermectin (cnbc.com). Rogan too has to be attacked because he had a positive experience with ivermectin and wants to inform his sizeable audience.

For some reason, Salon, CNBC, and the rest of the one-channel media echo-chamber paint every COVID-related issue as political. Why do they always make COVID (along with sports, movies, and everything else that interests people) a political issue? Why do they divide up strategies as liberal or conservative? They want to convince us liberals are for vaccines and conservatives are anti-vax, that conservatives are for ivermectin and HCQ and liberals know better, as if these drugs are in direct contrast with vaccines; they want to convince us liberals are for masks and conservatives are against the science of masks when the real objection is actually based on the science.

It’s just silly and a big lie; it is done only to further a political agenda, and the media is culpable for their lies. They want their liberal audience to simply take their word; they are telling their audience what should believe, rather than allowing them to discern the truth themselves. Don’t be this lazy. Get the facts and think for yourself. Furthermore, the media is engaging is broad generalizations and stereotypes (which my liberal friends are often critical of) which quickly break down.

Let’s take the politics out of this. Let’s quit trying to control this virus from the top (CDC, NIH, NAIAD, and the administration); let’s allow more voices to enter into the debate; let’s trust doctors to do their jobs and follow their Hippocratic oath. Take off your political hat and watch the following video on ivermectin; it has doctors on both sides of the issue and is quite informative. I give you the experts, the facts, the data. I’m not acting like CNBC who tells you what to think if you are of the same political stripe as me. I’m trusting anyone with an open mind will come to the same conclusions I have:

https://youtu.be/-wIkEYtqius. (Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID)

Ask yourself: Have we done enough? Shouldn’t we give it a try? Why are they trying to attack this drug like they attacked HCQ (I could write a complete post on the travesty of this)?

Why has Fauci and CDC locked us in to vaccines as the only strategy and why are ivermectin and HCQ seen as threats to that strategy? Besides politics, the other commonality between HCQ and ivermectin is that they are no longer under patents. They are cheap and easy to obtain, so there isn’t as much money to be made through widescale distribution. The vaccines, however, are proving quite lucrative for Pfizer, Johnson&Johnson, and others, especially if several boosters are needed. Sometimes, figuring out what is going on is as simple as following the money.

Public Policy and Herd Immunity:

A few folks on the inside of government are growing concerned about our public policy. Last week, the following news broke:

source: https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/fda-officials-resign-covid/2021/09/01/id/1034608/

Two top Food and Drug Administration officials resigned Tuesday over the Biden administration’s announced plans to roll out COVID-19 booster shots before the agency had approved the inoculations, Politico reports.

Politico, which spoke to 11 current and former health officials, said the FDA “is facing a potential mutiny among its staff and outside vaccine advisers, several of whom feel cut out of key decisions and who view the plan to offer boosters to all adults as premature and unnecessary.”

One former senior FDA leader told Politico that Gruber and Krause were leaving because they felt that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been making vaccine decisions that should have been left to the FDA.

They were also upset with top FDA vaccine official Peter Marks for not insisting that these decisions be made by the agency, Politico said.

The Biden administration announced last month that most people will be offered a COVID-19 booster shot about eight months after vaccination – the final straw for Gruber and Krause, the Politico source said.

Mind you, these were not just any two FDA officials, both were senior officials, one the director Office of Vaccines Research & Review, someone who should have a great deal of influence over policy.

My doctor friend explained that a major problem with our vaccine policy is that we have lost the opportunity to achieve herd immunity. The goal of herd immunity is to have the vaccinated protect the unvaccinated. Herd immunity is reached when a large enough percentage are vaccinated (or naturally infected) and the spread slows because there are fewer and fewer unvaccinated or previously infected hosts to attack, but with the delta variant, the vaccinated are now becoming infected and spreading the disease to the unvaccinated. We cannot achieve herd immunity when everyone is vulnerable to infection and we are unable to slow the continued spread of the disease (as shown above). My friend sent me the following as well:

I think there is much more to come. The vaccine was supposed to create herd immunity and “protect the unvaccinated”. Now we know that the virus still infects the vaccinated. We also know that vaccinating 66% of the population (Israel) does not create herd immunity! We also know the virus mutates at an enormous rate and the people pushing the vaccine want to create a program where they will continuously provide a “booster”.

There are a few in universities that recognized this potential problem early and advocated for letting nature play its role. Dr. John Ioannidis of Stanford University said the following with regard to the lockdown policy that was the main part of our mitigation strategy at the time:

John Ioannidis: Coronavirus lockdowns questioned by Stanford scientist on Fox News – The Washington Post

Ioannidis, 55, insists he is doing what he has always done: following the data and sometimes contending with the head winds of conventional wisdom or popular opinion. He says governments should focus on protecting the sick and elderly from infection while keeping businesses and schools open for the less vulnerable.

“There is a lethal virus circulating out there. We all have responsibility to do our best to contain it as much as possible. It’s not a joke. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not fake,” he told The Washington Post. “But we don’t panic. We don’t destroy our world. We don’t freeze everything.”

The point is to let the virus spread among the healthy and the least vulnerable, especially children, while locking down the elderly and the most vulnerable. The advantages of such a policy are two-fold:

1. it gets us closer to herd immunity while not putting at risk a significant portion of the population.
2. It allows the virus to burn itself out more quickly before new variants emerge.

This is the approach taken in Sweden. They have been spared another wave all summer; since July 1 this country of 10 million has averaged just one death every two days, better than any other country at the moment.

This notion of letting the virus spread seems counter-intuitive as it pretty much the exact opposite strategy we have pursued to this point, but many very smart people have been calling for it. Per Dr. Marc Girardot: “You actually want this to be shared as much as possible. In fact, we need it long term. What you need is for people to have it in a low dose as much as possible”.

The children and adolescents, the least vulnerable and the least impacted, should have formed the basis for herd immunity, but instead last year we locked down all schools, K-12 and above, and this year we continue try to keep a tight lid on COVID in our schools. If we had let COVID spread more widely, the vaccine and treatments would then become our remaining linchpins. We vaccinate the most vulnerable and re-introduce them into the general population, so they would be protected by the rest of the herd. Then we treat those infected; we shouldn’t just quarantine the infected, but as my doctor friend said, instead, we are using the vaccine as the treatment.

The lockdown approach we have taken has given the virus an advantage and more time to mutate into more virulent strains, and as it mutates, the vaccines currently used become less effective. We did much to limit the spread when we should have been getting a head start on herd immunity, and we continue to limit the spread, especially in schools where every runny nose is a cause for alarm. The initial goal was to flatten the curve, but we have widened the curve. More, in fact, will die because we did not rely more on herd immunity, because we did not listen to more voices, because we relied on vaccines instead of treatments.

Last summer, the Great Barrington Declaration was released. Its authors were doctors from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford. It was originally co-signed by another 50 or so medical professionals. It now has 850,000 signatories. Like Ioannidis, these doctors emphasize the need to allow some spread of the virus and focus protection on the most vulnerable. The science on this is settled?

Great Barrington Declaration (gbdeclaration.org)

Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice. 

Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.

Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing. We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza. 

As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e.  the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity. 

The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection. 

As we moved into 2021, Dr. Ioannidis spoke out again: Stanford’s Dr. John Ioannidis Destroys The Covid Lockdown Narrative | Covid Call To Humanity His conclusions of where we stand now are an indictment on the methodology that has been employed by most world governments to this point:

• Zero COVID is not possible.
• COVID has become endemic.
• COVID has led to many deaths, but it is not the “apocalyptic” predictions made by the early models. Infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID varies from region to region, but Global IFR is at 0.15%
• If we utilize precision shielding and prevent the infection and death of those who are highly vulnerable to the disease, then endemicity means that SARS-CoV-2 may not be more virulent than the seasonal flu.
• 40-70% of people would do better if infected with SARS-CoV-2 than with influenza.
• We need to look more carefully at the adverse events caused by vaccines because these are new technology, new vaccines, and is only on emergency use authority.
• Very few countries have benefited from the vaccines. The waves of the pandemic were mostly complete in many countries before the vaccines were rolled out.
• Vaccines can be a key modifier for future pandemics but it will all depend on their efficacy against emerging variants and risk compensation.
• Compared to Sweden and South Korea which did not utilize draconian measures, other countries which locked down did worse.
• Non-pharmaceutical interventions (lockdowns, face masks, social distancing) should have been tested with randomized control trials to see its effectiveness, but governments relied only on models.
• The coronavirus measures implemented by governments led to massive deaths and the rise of other health outcomes.

Kids and Zero Covid:

Per the interview with Dr. Marc Girardot  above:

Well, the first thing that people need to know is that vaccines are never trivial. You know, you’re tinkering with your immune system. It’s a very sophisticated system. It’s a beautiful system that’s protecting our lives and [the lives of] everybody we love – and we’re tinkering with it. And you shouldn’t tinker with it for something that kills, well, today it’s 0,04%, ok? Just makes no sense to take that risk, especially for most people [who] actually have less risk than that. Kids don’t have any risk. So, that’s the first thing; it’s a medical procedure, and a lot of people forgot about that. It’s serious, and when you do that on a massive scale, it’s dangerous. Some people will die.

My children’s school board (along with most school boards in America), does not understand any of what I’ve laid out here. They want to protect every single kid from disease, a disease which has killed 3 children in my state of North Carolina over the last 18 months, a threat which rivals lightning strikes. Instead of accepting a risk which is for all practical purposes zero, they send kids exposed to COVID home for a week or more; many kids fall behind in their studies and miss out on sports and other significant milestones, but for what benefit? Per their policy, there are three exceptions to sending kids home:

1. If you are fully vaccinated (two weeks after the second dose), you do not need to quarantine if you are not showing symptoms.

2. If you have tested positive within the last 3 months and do not have symptoms, you do not need to quarantine.

3. If you are not fully vaccinated, you will not need to quarantine after exposure if both you and the person who has tested positive for Covid-19 were both appropriately and consistently wearing a mask.

Even if you agree with the goal of stopping the spread of COVID whenever possible, the policy is not completely logical:

• Restriction 1: As we have seen the vaccinated are highly likely to spread the disease, but they ignore that fact completely.
• Restriction 2: Natural immunity is proving itself better than vaccine immunity, so this be for more than three months.
• Restriction 3: My son asked me this week: why do they limit four at a table for lunch, but multiple times per day during class changeovers there are hundreds of kids packed into the hallway? Do we really think masking is helping in this situation?

Who is to Blame?

Clearly, Dr. Fauci and the CDC have taken us in a different direction than the experts I have quoted. They have focused on short-term gain (less loss of life initially) rather than the larger long term benefits of herd immunity (less loss of life over the long term). The road less traveled, the more sensible one, was bypassed. Have they learned from the mistake? No. They double down on the same policy prescriptions which have not extricated us from this mess after 18 months.

They have led us down the primrose path, but who do they blame? Mostly you and their political opponents. COVID has become political, so one of the keys to COVID policy is to shift the blame. In reality, the problem is not a non-compliant public, not anti-vaxers who are relatively few in numbers, not red states, and not Trump supporters. Again, like I often do, let’s look at the numbers to show they are lying yet again.

This administration’s policy prescription has been followed and their goals met, yet today we are still looking at 165,000 COVID cases per day and the potential for yet another wave as we go into the winter. What was their prescription and how did we meet it? When the Biden administration began on January 20, they set a goal of 100 million vaccines in 100 days. This goal was easily achieved as the vaccination rate reached 1 million per day in the first week or so, the table having been set by the Trump administration. In other words, Biden told us he would shut down COVID and his goal of 1 million vaccines per day was how he would get us there. The American public complied; they did exactly what the Biden administration asked; in fact, we have far exceeded the goal of 1 million vaccinations per day. Vaccinations began on December 11, 2020. Since December 11, 374 million vaccines have been distributed in the U.S. The average daily distribution over that period of almost 9 months is more than 1.4 million per day, far exceeding the standard provided us. Is the problem the lack of compliance or maybe a faulty standard?

Furthermore, the Biden administration said early this year that if we could just keep up the pace for a little while longer, we would be out of this mess by July fourth (I was hopeful as well myself). But despite the fact that 53% of all Americans and 62% of all adults have been fully vaccinated and 3/4 of all adults have had at least one dose, and despite the fact that the U.S. is still vaccinating 950,000 per day two months after July 4, the administration vociferously complains that the public has not done enough. The call to vaccinate has been answered across the board; all but five rural states have vaccinated half or more of their entire population with at least one dose, and the rest will get there soon (ND: 48.8%, MS: 47.7%, WV: 47.3% WY: 45.9%, ID: 44.7%). The American public has done what was asked of it, yet the Biden administration continues to lash out at the unvaccinated, red states, and red state governors. You set the goal for us Mr. Biden; we far exceeded the goal you set and we keep pushing it even further than you asked and now you want to blame others for an epidemic that just won’t end? How do you figure?

Last year, we imposed lockdowns, set curfews, and shutdown the economy, but still we have had more COVID waves this year. Both last year and this year, we said masking was key, but masks have not saved us, nor will they ever. Our schools continue to do everything they can to slow the spread and send the kids home for the sniffles (or with no symptoms at all). This year, we said the vaccine is the key, but it should be only one of several. The goalposts keep changing: flatten the curve, slow the spread, lockdown until it is over, vaccinate enough to reach herd immunity. It is never enough. Now, the goal appears to be to crush COVID completely, and that just isn’t possible. It is an impossible goal: https://seek-the-truth.com/2021/08/08/the-fools-gold-of-zero-covid/.

Lack of Honesty

The lack of honesty among our government public health officials has been a major cause for vaccine hesitancy among those still unvaccinated. I don’t blame folks for being distrustful of the vaccine given the messaging from our government. It is the fault of folks like Biden and Harris who pooh-pooh’d the vaccine when it was in their political interest. It is the fault of folks like Fauci and Wallensky who have lied to us, who have tailored the message to their short-term goals, but not given us the whole story and all the facts.

But this is not just my opinion; my pediatrician who I’ve often quoted, said the following in a recent newsletter:

Poor quality messaging is eroding our confidence in the CDC. As noted in previous newsletters and a recent NYTimes article, the messaging, among others, was that less than 10% of the Covid cases occur outdoors when the actual number is between 0.1% and 1%. They are misleading the public by a factor of 10 to 100. Not good for trust.

“Saying that less than 10 percent of Covid transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year. (The actual worldwide number is around 150.) It’s both true and deceiving.” (Leonhardt 2021)

We need to demand transparency and truth from our scientific leaders and health care policy makers. This kind of messaging erodes the public trust making mask mandates and vaccination requests less complied with as fear rises. They should state exact numbers and truth as known by today’s data. That can change and that is ok as we always plan to change our behavior based on the evidence at hand and not the fear based altered data sets.

I will fill in the blank in the doctor’s comment: the CDC misled because they wanted us to wear our masks outside, and if lying achevied that goal, so be it.

They misled us again in June of this year, when CDC claimed adolescent ICU cases were rising in an effort to boost vaccine counts. This was just more manipulation of statistics: http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2021/june/08/contagious-lies-cdc-claims-hospitalization-rising-among-unvaccinated-teens-contrary-to-its-own-data/

As I watch doctors outside of government, I appreciate how little Dr. Fauci (and the CDC) is trusted among his peers. Dr. Jay Bhattachayra of Stanford is one among many who have tried to expose this charlatan: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9657451/Stanford-epidemiologist-says-Dr-Faucis-credibility-entirely-shot.html

Where do we go from here?

We need a different approach and we need a real goal, the goal that we will adjust and live with the new reality of COVID, the goal to expand our toolbox. Below is summary of what I have highlighted throughout the year:

• demand more accountability from our government public health officials. They have been given too much power over our lives and they have not adequately justified or provided sufficient evidence for many of their recommendations.
• take the politics out of COVID. Reduce the power of the federal government to mandate policies and turn more control to local doctors.
• allow more debate among medical experts; stop censoring voices who challenge conventional wisdom. Rise up in defense of our Constitutional freedoms; they must be defended or will be moot.
• learn to live with COVID; it is not going away.
• change your lifestyle: lose weight, eat better, and exercise more. Many of the risk factors for COVID are avoidable and some of the same factors for many other diseases.
• eliminate the negative impacts of COVID policies: stop harming our kids education, stop hurting businesses, and stop forcing vaccines on those who may need them or want them.
• look at again at our vaccine policy and determine if we are on the right path. Make adjustments so that we use the vaccines to their fullest benefit.
• determine how many of our citizens have actually had COVID (and hence natural immunity), so we can determine where we actually stand. Take advantage of nature’s beautiful strategy for defeating disease.
• give us the straight answer on asymptomatic spread. If it is not real, then quit masking kids and quit quarantining the healthy.
• give us a straight answer on vaccinating kids. Kids don’t have risk of dying from COVID. 
• look again at treatments for COVID. Tell the truth about ivermectin, HCQ, and other treatments.
• stop using COVID policy to divide Americans against each other.
• fire Dr. Fauci and Dr. Wallensky.

More on vaccines:

To this point, the vaccines have held down deaths while clearly not controlling the spread. I’ve included analysis and empirical evidence of this in prior posts, yet I still think we should not assume we know everything about vaccines. We need to educate ourselves about the vaccines. Here are a few more links forwarded to me:

Vaccines: awesome ingenuity or huge mistake – discussing subject with Dr. Bossche: https://youtu.be/cjMZvpmuaKY

Warning from a vaccine specialist – Dr. Bossche: https://youtu.be/BNyAovuUxro

Spike protein is cytotoxic: https://youtu.be/Du2wm5nhTXY

More on Masks:

Since I did a deconstruction on masks in my last post, more information has come to light. A study from the University of Louisville provides more evidence that mask mandates are not effective. The study looks at the available empirical evidence from U.S. states, information readily available to the public. I won’t go through the gory details of this study, but here a few conclusions:

Click to access IRJPH-2021-08-1005.pdf

Because COVID-19 can spread via respired droplets, most US states mandated mask use in public settings. Randomized control trials have not clearly demonstrated mask
efficacy against respiratory viruses, and observational studies conflict on whether mask use predicts lower infection rates.

Conclusions: We did not observe association between mask mandates or use and reduced COVID-19 spread in US states. COVID-19 mitigation requires further research and use of
existing efficacious strategies, most notably vaccination.

Our main finding is that mask mandates and use likely did not affect COVID-19 case growth. Mask mandates were associated with greater mask use but ultimately did not influence total normalized cases or post-mandate case growth.

I share one other link from Dr. Michael Osterholm. He is highly credentialed, a former Biden advisor, and a very thoughtful person attempting following the science. He has an interesting perspective on masks.   People want to reduce the discussion today to those who are wearing masks are good, patriotic, and doing everything to protect themselves and others while those not wearing masks are reckless and endangering others.  It’s not nearly that simple.  This is a very enlightening video in which he plainly explains why masking is not effective.  Please listen. (19) Michael Osterholm – Masks June 12 2020 – YouTube

Harvard’s Dr. Martin Kulldorff, one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, is skeptical as well. He describes the current pandemic policy of COVID lockdowns and mask use this way; “after 300 years, the Age of Enlightenment has ended.”  

The negative impact of prolonged mask usage in children needs to be considered again. A study done by Research Square in Germany found the following negative results from prolonged mask wearing:

Methods: At the University of Witten/Herdecke an online registry has been set up where parents, doctors, pedagogues and others can enter their observations. On 20.10.2020, 363 doctors were asked to make entries and to make parents and teachers aware of the registry.

Results: By 26.10.2020 the registry had been used by 20,353 people. In this publication we report the results from the parents, who entered data on a total of 25,930 children. The average wearing time of the mask was 270 minutes per day.  Impairments caused by wearing the mask were reported by 68% of the parents. These included irritability (60%), headache (53%), difficulty concentrating (50%), less happiness (49%), reluctance to go to school/kindergarten (44%), malaise (42%) impaired learning (38%) and drowsiness or fatigue (37%).

source : https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-124394/v1

After all this science do you still want to put your faith in masking?

One study from Bangladesh which came out just this week, touts the efficacy of masks, but like other studies which make similar claims, this one has some holes:

In a First, Randomized Study Shows That Masks Reduce COVID-19 Infections | Yale Insights

• The study found a “cocktail” of four interventions, helped reduce COVID spread, but masks were just one of four interventions. How do we know if there was not another factor that had more impact? (furthermore, as I highlighted above, stopping spread should not always be the goal).
• The study indicated that masking reduced COVID spread among those over the age of 50, but says nothing about those under the age of 50. Why such limited impact?
• Finally, you have to weigh the result of this study against so much other empirical evidence. Like any scientific study worth its salt, it must be repeatable and be consistent with results found elsewhere. I see no real-world evidence that mask mandates have reduced the spread in all the places I’ve looked or all the studies I have shared. As they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.