COVID: Can Life Ever Return to Normal? Only if We Demand It.

COVID is clearly fading into the background in 2022. But how long will it remain there? Will the awful precedents our politicians tried to establish the last two years be revived in the near future? Have we ended these miscreants power grab? How do we protect ourselves from the return of such anti-democratic policies?

The masks have come off, although many remain convinced of their benefit. CDC Director Robert Redfield said in 2020 masks were better at stopping COVID than a vaccine. Yes, he said that. Empirical evidence shows masks have been ineffective at slowing the spread for two years, especially for the more communicable strains now present. We still publicly debate the efficacy of the vaccines as well. I won’t go so far to say they were not of value (I am not qualified to say so), but without a doubt they were over-sold. Deaths hardly decreased in 2021, the year AFTER the pandemic started and the year vaccines began in earnest (they were available the entirety of 2021). Remember what was promised and note what was manifested. I was certain in the first half of 2021 that vaccines were a modern miracle, but I also monitored. They were not all effective at limiting deaths. What else matters? However, too many follow the COVID ideology: masks and vaccines must work; they have to.

So many experts, especially government and academic experts, lied. This was a shock and disappointment. It has to be the case because so many others, others as well or better credentialed, contradicted their stories. All cannot be telling the truth. You can decide who are trustworthy, but really it is not that hard to discern. Dr. Fauci and CDC Directory Walensky said nothing while Ivermectin, a Nobel-prize winner on the WHO’s list of essential medicines was characterized as “horse medicine”. CNN anchors, sports celebrities, and politicians said you were a fool to consider it, and millions parroted their words. Kids represented a fraction of a fraction of all COVID deaths, but they were used as pawns to market a drug that had no benefit for them. Few in charge commented on the impact to kids and so school districts blindly followed counter-productive policies. Dr. Fauci told us he “is the science”; if we didn’t believe him, we were contradicting science. We now know Superman isn’t Clark Kent after all. Dr. Deborah Birx published her tell-all book recently, and openly admitted she was not afraid for her job because she and several other key officials formed a pact to blackmail the president should any of them be removed

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/apr/29/deborah-birx-makes-astonishing-deep-state-admissio/.

I remember when the standard lines were: “I am a public servant” and “I serve at the pleasure of the president”.

When will the scoundrels, their lies, their manipulation of the truth, their scheming, and their bad behavior be called out? When will they be held to account in a meaningful way?

The vaccine mandates have been withdrawn (mostly). The most unpopular restrictions abandoned as well, but can they snap back into place at any time (in fact, some keep trying; see more below). What legislation has been passed and what court rulings actually protect us from a re-imposition of these power grabs when another opportunity is presented? There isn’t much that’s been done to prevent this in the future.

Governor DeSantis is one of the few who seems concerned about our freedoms and is actually taking action. He recently told the Special Olympics: State law will be enforced, and you will not force a vaccine mandate while in Florida.

https://www.fox4now.com/news/state/desantis-touts-win-after-special-olympics-drops-vaccine-requirement

“Delegates who were registered for the Games but were unable to participate due to the prior vaccine requirement now have the option to attend,” according to the announcement.

Thursday, Special Olympics announced it was “lifting the vaccine requirement for delegation members attending the 2022 Special Olympics USA Games … as demanded by the state of Florida officials on May 27, based upon the Florida Department of Health’s interpretation of Florida law.

As far as I can tell the COVID lockdown crowd doesn’t care about tradition, current laws, the truth, common sense, or anything else which contradicts the message they want to sell, a message at least some truly believe in. If they can’t sell it in an honest, decent, and direct manner, I am not going to trust them. Governor DeSantis is direct and honest in telling them no. He will tell you why as well–in a straightforward and cogent way. We need more wins like this one. The courts will not save us, only common sense, action, and true conviction will.

But don’t listen just to me. Our local pediatrician, someone who is an actual authority on COVID, shared his words of wisdom this week: where we have been, how we are doing, and where we are headed. I take solace because he confirms my own observations. His opinions have also evolved over time as new facts arrive, a tell-tale sign that he is beholden to the pursuit of truth, not an ideology like those others I have decried.

I look at the COVID numbers again this week. I speculate about what might be coming this summer. I end finally with an important question: why does COVID suck up all the air time? What else are we missing?

A Doctor’s Perspective

It is hard not to be encouraged by recent COVID news. The current numbers are trending in the right direction. Here are a few points from our pediatrician’s newsletter:

Link to newsletter: https://visitor.r20.constantcontact.com/manage/optin?v=001xQbTsTOUeGCCuHBIaK9NoqSiCrtJi5d_kvi0-tJS-L8K1JEayZdxQWmPMtfopQ60MJ4FpkexhFqGUrTcYYKSxP-IEbqaboMe22l_ofG55c8%3D

• North Carolina is moving along like the pre-pandemic days.
• Salisbury Pediatrics is Covid testing between a zero and 2% positive rate week by week still. Influenza A was prominent in our practice but has faded.
• In NC, we are down to 4% of admitted patients needing a ventilator and 11% needing an ICU bed for Covid

We should also be encouraged that most people are responding to the latest data rationally per this poll the doctor conducted:

• Knowing the latest data, are you getting a booster? 80% say NO
• Knowing the latest data, are you boosting your children? 82% say NO

Wonderful. Most parents are not blindly following mind-numbing disinformation spewed by one-channel media and political leaders. They are following what we have learned in the last year:

1) vaccines lasts fewer than six months, and boosters even less

2) there are more risks for this vaccine than other medical treatments in the past

3) children and young adults are at an extremely low risk from severe impact from COVID while also at more risk from the vaccines than other demographics

4) in the later stages of the outbreak, unvaccinated populations have done as well and sometimes better than vaccinated populations.

5) government officials and health organizations who have lied about COVID should be distrusted. The lies do not mean COVID is not a threat for many, but the lies do dissuade people from the actions which officials argue for. Why must they manipulate or hide the raw data rather than persuade us through dint of effort? Only one answer makes sense: they think us too stupid to interpret the facts and data ourselves.

Yet, our CDC continues to insist on vaccinating your kids. I received this gentle reminder from my employer this week:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now recommends children ages 5 and older get a COVID-19 booster, when eligible. According to CDC’s May 19, 2022, media statement, “Since the pandemic began, more than 4.8 million children ages 5 through 11 have been diagnosed with COVID-19; 15,000 have been hospitalized and, tragically, over 180 have died. As cases increase across the country, a booster dose will safely help restore and enhance protection against severe disease.” Use the CDC’s COVID-19 booster tool to learn if and when your child or teen can get boosters to stay up to date with their COVID-19 vaccines. Refer to CDC’s 6 Things to Know About COVID-19 Vaccination for Children for information for parents and caregivers of children ages 5 years and older.

• Only 180 deaths out of 4.8 million cases. That’s a case fatality rate of .003% (3 deaths out of every 100,000 cases).
• 180 deaths of 25 million kids in this age group. That is .0007% death rate (about 3 deaths out every 1 million kids annually). For healthy kids, the rate is even lower–on par with lightning strikes.

This continue push to vaccinate kids despite the FDA warnings of myocarditis, especially in healthy young males.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/25/health/fda-covid-vaccine-heart-warning/index.html

The US Food and Drug Administration added a warning about the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis to fact sheets for Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines Friday.

The warning notes that reports of adverse events following vaccination — particularly after the second dose — suggest increased risks of both types of heart inflammation.

But I am not a doctor, so who am I to question the CDC?

Our doctor also discusses medical results in considerable detail; this is more meaningful for medical personnel, but may be interesting for some of the rest of us as well. He asks and then answers an important question unequivocally: COVID will continue to be a problem, a significant problem for some, but not for most.

What does the future hold with the continued exposure of humans to SARS2 now that most of us have had exposure and/or been vaccinated multiple times?

Katherine Wu writes in the Atlantic a solid piece loaded with thoughts that run the gamut of possibility. (Wu K. 2022) I land in the camp that the SARS2 virus will become a nuisance for most, a major headache for a select few and a rare death for the unhealthy. This reality will play out over time as we watch the reinfections play out in real time. If it goes according to my prediction, we will see reinfections every 2-3 years per person based on T cell and B cell immunity weakening coupled to SARS2 mutations. The infections will likely be less severe each time based on T cell epitope spreading as opposed to the first time we all immunologically saw this little 120 nm troublemaker. Some folks predict infections 2-3 x a year. I am very dubious of this reality at this point after reviewing more data. We shall see.

On boosters and natural immunity, he had this to say:

5) Third dose of mRNA vaccine induces a hybrid like immunity that has increased immunity against multiple variants. (Andreano et. al. 2022) This is good to know for those that are getting a third dose and haven’t been naturally reinjected. The natural route is definitely providing vastly better variant immunity and length of protection as has been shown in repeated studies.

9) Among persons who had been previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 (regardless of whether they had received any dose of vaccine or whether they had received one dose before or after infection), protection against reinfection decreased as the time increased since the last immunity-conferring event; however, this protection was higher than that conferred after the same time had elapsed since receipt of a second dose of vaccine among previously uninfected persons. A single dose of vaccine after infection reinforced protection against reinfection. (Goldberg et. al. 2022) This is a marginal benefit but still a benefit.

The preponderance of the data to date shows that boosting adds 1-5 months of protection against SARS2 infection. Many gain only 2 months of protection against symptomatic disease. In another study, Jung and colleagues noted that transmission was cut in half for fully vaccinated versus unvaccinated or partially vaccinated individuals. (Jung et. al. 2022)

10) From Nature Immunology: Although mRNA vaccine efficacy against severe coronavirus disease 2019 remains high, variant emergence has prompted booster immunizations. However, the effects of repeated exposures to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) antigens on memory T cells are poorly understood.

This is a very important study! It says that both infection via natural route and vaccination provide different yet beneficial immune responses. The boosters will increase the spike specific memory in a expanded epitope pattern which is useful for variant identification.

However, I think that mild natural infection appears to be the best way to get high quality robust immunity for those that are not at risk for a bad outcome and have already seen the virus before. This path will likely lead to longer lasting immunity per cycle and less illness overall. This is my hypothesis based on all that I have read to date.

Finally, the opinion below is worth reading. Vaccines have some benefit for some; however, mass vaccination, especially for the young, is foolish policy. Our government officials are under the wildly mistaken notion that condoning non-vaccination for certain groups will discourage vaccinations for other groups, groups that may indeed benefit from vaccines. They appear to believe that the rest of us, the unwashed masses, cannot think for ourselves, so they must tell us what to think. Many justify their lies because they think they are serving a good cause.

Opinion: I am not yet sure why many Colleges and Universities are mandating SARS2 boosters when there is not a national mandate nor a long term benefit. The logic is hard for me to follow other than any less disease is desirable for a college campus. If we treat SARS2 like the influenza illness moving forward, we will vaccinate every fall and gain a few months of protection for some of the vaccinated. Then what? Boost again in January? Do we have any data on biannual boosting with mRNA vaccines for the next 20 years? How do we treat the natural infections? Vaccinate anyway afterward? This is going to be a mess. The reason for pushing hard against the SARS2 virus initially was to slow death and hospitalization. That is now decoupled from infection as most, if not all, of the US has now been exposed to the virus and have T cell immunity moving forward.

If you would like to hear what a few more doctors have to say, here are a couple of recommendations.

• The title of Dr. Pierre Kory’s new book says it all: The War on Ivermectin: The Medicine that Saved Millions and Could Have Ended the COVID Pandemic https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/War-on-Ivermectin/Pierre-Kory/9781510773868
• Dr. Scott Atlas exposes more villains in his book as well, A Plague on our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America. https://www.amazon.com/Plague-Upon-Our-House-Destroying/dp/163758220X

The Numbers

Deaths in 2022 are down 25% through the first five months as compared to last year:

Total deaths January 1 – May 31, 2021: 240,600 (48,120 per month )
Total deaths January 1 – May 31, 2022: 181,200 (36,240 per month)

Remember last year was the year the vaccine was going to save us. How did it do?

Deaths have declined dramatically throughout 2022:

• February 1, 2022 the death rate peaked at 2,705 per day
• April 12, 2022 the death rate had fallen to 494 per day (the first time it was below 500 per day since August 2021)
• May 13, 2022 the rate had fallen to 301 per day
• June 2, 2022 the number stood at 264 per day (one week prior to this post)

The death rate as of June 2 (the death rate from COVID itself, not COVID policy) is just shy of its lowest value in the last two-and-a-half years (245 per day as of July 7, 2021). However, last year, cases began increasing in mid-June and deaths spiked rapidly after reaching these low death levels. This year, cases peaked at 112,000 per day May 29; the average is now steadily declining. Deaths will decline further without a doubt. We will be at the lowest death rates ever by the end of June. As I have said the last several posts, 2022 is definitely the year of natural immunity.

However, I caution that we should watch the numbers this summer. The last two summers COVID has flared. In North Carolina, we are on the verge of the warmest weather right now. The weather in the South is unpredictable during Fall, Winter, and Spring (could be warm, could be cool, could be anything), but in Summer there is no doubt. We will be hot and humid. It happens every single year without fail. The last two years, COVID rose as Summer began in the South (and more people congregated indoors). Will it happen this year? As the doctor says we will have flare-ups of COVID, like we have flareups with the flu. COVID will be with us forever, but unless we see another new virus as we did in 2020 it is unlikely to impact us again as it did the last two years.

Still, the CDC continues to recommend boosting children ages 5-11. Thankfully, parents are saying no. The threat to all of us is declining dramatically in 2022 and the threat to healthy kids (even the threat to unhealthy kids) has always been minimal. The FDA warned us that the vaccine may be a bigger threat to kids than the virus itself (yet Drs. Fauci and Walensky continue on the same path they have been on for two-and-a-half years). What do parents know that the CDC does not know (or is ignoring)? Who is paying government officials to say these things?

Consider This

While we focused on COVID, other infectious diseases continue to plague our civilization–as they have for years prior to COVID. They just don’t get the attention. COVID killed more than a million in the U.S. alone and was the third leading cause of death in our country during 2020 and 2021 (heart disease and cancer are one and two), but that pales compared to how many malaria and TB have killed in recent years.

Malaria came to the New World when Europeans migrated there. It is not simply a tropical disease. It was a major killer in England in the 1500s. It killed millions during our nation’s founding. It devastated the settlers at Jamestown, Virginia and spread from there across the colonies. It and other diseases like smallpox, influenza, and measles devastated the American Indian population (it is estimated that by 1600, 90% of the indigenous population succumbed to these diseases unknown to them previously).

Malaria is no longer a serious problem for Western civilizations, but it still kills hundreds of thousands annually in parts of the world. Why do we place so much focus on COVID but ignore malaria which over the last few centuries has killed orders of magnitude more? I will note we often focus on the things our news media wants us to pay attention to. They forced us to pay attention to COVID, forced us to respond to the insanity of COVID policies, and yet they continue ignore a disease like malaria which is now a problem only in one region in the world. They have certain issues they want us to notice, yet others they would rather we not know about. This gives us a warped perspective of what really are problems and what are not. So, few people know malaria is still such a large problem today.

https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/malaria_worldwide/impact.html

In 2020, an estimated 627,000 people died of malaria—most were young children in sub-Saharan Africa. Within the last decade, increasing numbers of partners and resources have rapidly increased malaria control efforts. This scale-up of interventions has saved millions of lives globally and cut malaria mortality by 36% from 2010 to 2020, leading to hopes and plans for elimination and ultimately eradication.

Malaria is one of the most severe public health problems worldwide. It is a leading cause of death and disease in many developing countries, where young children and pregnant women are the groups most affected. According to the 2021 World Malaria Report:

• Nearly half the world’s population lives in areas at risk of malaria transmission in 87 countries and territories.
• In 2020, malaria caused an estimated 241 million clinical episodes, and 627,000 deaths. An estimated 95% of deaths in 2020 were in the WHO African Region.

TB as well is a problem–and it is a curable disease that has been virtually eliminated from the Western world. We could do more about this. We should do more about this, but we don’t because few people know. We run around with our loose fitting masks that are useless against stopping Omicron. We wring our hands over the problem of our neighbor not wearing masks to protect us while millions die from TB, a disease we know how to overcome. You decide what this means and what is wrong with our culture and what is wrong with how information is distributed and interpreted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis

In 2018, one quarter of the world’s population was thought to have a latent infection of TB.^[6] New infections occur in about 1% of the population each year.^[12] In 2020, an estimated 10 million people developed active TB, resulting in 1.5 million deaths, making it the second leading cause of death from an infectious disease after COVID-19.^[13] As of 2018, most TB cases occurred in the regions of South-East Asia (44%), Africa (24%), and the Western Pacific (18%), with more than 50% of cases being diagnosed in eight countries: India (27%), China (9%), Indonesia (8%), the Philippines (6%), Pakistan (6%), Nigeria (4%), and Bangladesh (4%).^[14] By 2021 the number of new cases each year was decreasing by around 2% annually.^[13][1] About 80% of people in many Asian and African countries test positive while 5–10% of people in the United States population test positive via the tuberculin test.^[15] Tuberculosis has been present in humans since ancient times.^[16]

For more on my earlier COVID posts: https://seek-the-truth.com/category/covid/

Here are a few individual posts recapping the endless insanity of COVID. It is the most revealing event in my lifetime. Please wake up and stop the insanity. Don’t let it ever happen again. Take action. Demand action.

Quick Hits: Vaccine Safety/Who Killed Ivermectin?

Curious Case of Sweden (and Omicron! Too)

COVID Game Changer

Memo to Fauci, Biden, CDC: How Can You Live With Yourself?

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

COVID: Fauci is the Science, Check Your Mask at the Door, and Be Informed on Vaccines

COVID: What Have We Done?