B25 wrote:Well, I don't know why all this in fighting is going on, as according to Tim Drayton we don't actually have a problem, the death rate is only about 0.3% (according to some German doc he keeps referencing) and that is it just a simple flu like virus and we should not worry about it.
The fact that 10's of thousands of people are dying of this and thousands daily and that the rest of the world are just fucking idiots for closing down and that everything should open and be as normal, well, that makes the who is to blame and who started it irrelevant. Or am I missing the point here???
So GR, there is no point getting stuck in your basement with the wife because you have nothing to worry about according to some posters here. Of course until they or their close family get it and .......... Good luck.
Here the Germans are so fkn clever:
έχει δημιουργήσει το Robert Koch-Institut, το τελευταίο 24ωρο διαπιστώθηκαν 242 νέοι θάνατοι, με τον συνολικό απολογισμό των νεκρών να ανέρχεται έτσι σε 4.110
They lost another 242 souls in the last 24 hrs, they must of had the flu I guess. Where's that German doc to give us more advice???
Thank you for picking up on some of my points. I think you may have broken all records for having the maximum number of straw men in a single post. So, let me address some of these straw men and other misconceptions.
We supposedly don’t have a problem. Yes, we do. There is a major viral epidemic taking place, the like of which happens every decade or so, and it is placing a great burden on health care systems. This happens during every epidemic, as the following New York Times headline at the time of the 2017/8 flu epidemic shows:
N.H.S. Overwhelmed in Britain, Leaving Patients to Wait
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/worl ... rvice.html
In other words, while there is a serious situation, it is something that has happened and will happen every few years for as long as humans exist and does not merit the ridiculously alarmist and sensationalist coverage it is being given in the media to the extent of reporting absolutely nothing else.
It is just a simple flu-like virus, the implication being that it is therefore not dangerous. But influenza is lethal. It claims 650,000 lives annually worldwide. However, we seem to manage to cope with that without going into a panic, usurping fundamental human rights and placing the planet under house arrest and taking measures that will probably cause a recession of 1930’s proportions that will in the end cost more lives than are saved through these measures – and the evidence from Sweden so far is that the same number of people will ultimately die from the coronavirus whether you have a lockdown or not.
I refer to “some German doc”! This person is actually Professor Hendrik Streeck, professor for virology and the director of the Institute of virology and HIV Research at the University Bonn, who is an HIV researcher, epidemiologist and clinical trialist. Suit yourself, but in my opinion such an eminent academic in the field probably has some idea of what he is talking about. He is also the first person to go out into the field, to the German town of Heinsberg that was hard hit by the virus, and do comprehensive research using samples collected from the population at large. Indeed, he concluded the mortality rate relative to the overall population to be a mere 0.37% and discovered antibodies in 15% of the population. There is a report here about his study:
https://www.thenational.ae/world/german ... -1.1004050
I am tempted to ask who needs science and people who have devoted their lives to studying virology and epidemiology when you can consult some ignorant, foul-mouthed estate agent from Limassol on the subject instead, but that would be a bit below the belt. I have linked above to a TV interview he did in German but with English subtitles of dubious accuracy. Actually that was here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQZG_V_ ... e=youtu.be but I have just checked and see that this has now been taken down – which is tending to happen with all material that challenges the big pharma-sponsored perception of the epidemic, which is the perception that will help them to earn tons of money on the back of a terrified population – a point made by “some American doc” Dr Shiva Ayadurai in the interview here B25 kindly provided the link to earlier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf-qv9o ... e=youtu.be in which one of his main arguments is that people’s immune systems have become weakened in Western countries and the need is to rectify this which can be done with better diets and healthy lifestyles so they don’t need to fall sick and then earn profits for big pharma with the drugs used to treat them (declaration of interest: I have put most of my investment money into pharmaceutical stocks because try as some people are to get the alternative message out they will fail and big pharma is going to win and make big profits from all this panic and hysteria it is sowing – exaggerated claim? well the Gates Foundation, founded by Bill Gates, described by James Love, the director of the nonprofit Knowledge Ecology International, as “a big defender of the big drug companies”, has given $250 million “to media companies and other groups to influence the news” both quotes from: https://www.thenation.com/article/socie ... lanthropy/ ). If people want to hear and understand Streeck’s opinions and what he discovered, it is out there. If they don’t, that’s their prerogative. I found a longer and more detailed interview he gave to German TV, unfortunately without subtitles, in which, inter alia, he says they investigated whether the virus was present on surfaces and came to the conclusion that it wasn’t and he remarks that in order to infect a doorknob, a person with the virus would have to sneeze directly onto it and even then it would only be infected for a short time. This conclusion casts doubt on certain measures that are being widely imposed, e.g. wearing gloves, but again it is your prerogative whether you believe what an eminent academic in the field thinks, or the message being pumped out non-stop by the media based on no scientific evidence.
In fact, I have not only referred to “some German doc”. I referred to an interview, in my view most enlightening and certainly not extreme conspiracy theory stuff but extremely fair and balanced, with “some American doc” having a Greek name to boot, none less than Dr John P.A. Ioannidis, professor of medicine and professor of epidemiology and population health, as well as professor by courtesy of biomedical data science at Stanford University School of Medicine, professor by courtesy of statistics at Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, and co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) at Stanford University, whose is the second interview down on this page:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55026.htm
and one of the points he forcefully makes is the crucial need for hard, reliable data on points such as the real mortality rate and how much immunity there is out there to enable the correct strategy to be implemented to tackle the virus crisis. I would suggest that “some German doc” Prof. Hendrick Streeck has done a massive service in going out for the first time and collecting such hard data and there is a need for far more of this and less Gates-Foundation and big pharma-sponsored non-stop panic mongering with scant scientific basis. The first interview on the same page above is with another “some German doc”, this time one who has settled in the USA, Professor Knut Wittkowski, who for twenty years headed the Rockefeller University's Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design, and I think his ideas that challenge the conceived “wisdom” on the matter pumped out by the media are worth listening to. Others may think that some ignorant, foul-mouthed estate agent in Limassol has all the answers and that is of course their prerogative. Incidentally, in a more recent interview – here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs2dsUQcMA0 – Wittkowski gives the good news that in his opinion – and he was professor of epidemiology for twenty years so does this not count for anything? – that the virus is showing signs of peaking everywhere and will thus be over in a few weeks’ time. I was thinking of posting another excellent and balanced interview with an expert in the field but thought better of it, having concluded that the media has by now virtually created an aversion among the sheeple to seeking out the opinions of the greatest experts in the field in interviews in which they bring their expert knowledge to bear in a way that is comprehensible to the layman that they will shun them like the plague. The interview is with “some American doc” Dr David L Katz who is a former professor of public health, has authored over one hundred academic papers, and is the former director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center and associate director for nutrition science at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. What can he know? Anyway, I will waste my time posting the link to his interview, which is by no means extreme and sums up the pros and cons of the received “wisdom” and response to the virus as well as those of alternative views, just so the sheeple can ignore it (it is about one hour long):
https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/16/wat ... andemic-3/
Anyway, who cares what “some German, American and Greek docs” have to say?
Tens of thousands of people are dying of Covid, the implication being that I am ignoring this fact despite having declared this to be a “flu-like” illness and influenza kills on average 650,000 people annually worldwide. Of course people are dying, even though there is considerable anecdotal evidence that these figures are being consciously inflated, as testified to by, sorry, “some American docs” again:
Montana physician Dr. Annie Bukacek here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5wn1qs_bBk and
Minnesota Senator and Doctor Jensen here: https://www.valleynewslive.com/content/ ... 58361.html
and the same is suggested in an article written by some “pesky British doc” - Dr John Lee, an English consultant histopathologist at Rotherham General Hospital and formerly clinical professor of pathology at Hull York Medical School - in the following article:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The ... s-we-think
There is a desperate need to put these alarmist figures the media is pumping out into some kind of context. Yes, “tens of thousands” sounds like a big number when it is screamed at you, but is it in the wider scheme of things. As a widely-circulated Facebook post https://fullfact.org/online/coronavirus-daily-deaths/ reads:
“One of the worst days so far for Coronavirus was the 10th of February. On that day, 108 persons in CHINA died of coronavirus.
BUT, on that same day
26,283 people died of Cancer
24,641 died of Heart Disease
4,300 people died of Diabetes
and on that day, Suicide, unfortunately, took more lives than the virus did, by 28 times.
Moreover, Mosquitoes kill 2,740 people every day, HUMANS kill 1,300 fellow humans every day, and Snakes kill 137 people every day.
Take a deep breath, and wash your hands.”
Indeed 1.35 million people die in road crashes each year and on average 3,700 people lose their lives every day on the roads. Thousands die globally in one die of Covid and the media is full of garish hysterical headlines about this. Thousands die every day of road accidents and not a murmur. Why? There is a harsh fact that death is part of life. We are all mortal and must die of something one day. Risk is inherent in life and life is impossible without risk. If all economic activity is to shut down and the world economy be pushed into recession and everyone is to be stripped of their fundamental rights and placed under house arrest because tens of thousands are dying per day of Covid (now at its peak according to “some German doctor” Knut Wittkowski), what about the thousands who die on the road every day. Surely, by the same logic, we should ban all vehicular traffic and return to the horse and cart. It is inevitable that more people will die if we use internal combustion engine-propelled vehicles, but this is a risk we are prepared to take because the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. You literally play Russian roulette whenever you take to the road, but nobody gives this a second thought. Why can’t we put Covid into the same kind of wider context, too? How many people will die as a result of the 1930’s-style recession the world is going to be tipped into by the ensuing recession. Many are saying this number will be greater than the number of lives that the lockdown will save, and the evidence so far from Sweden, where they have avoided a lockdown, actually suggests that the same number will die whether you have a lockdown or not, e.g. here:
“It’s good to take precautions against coronavirus, but locking down the entire world to this degree is absolutely blind panic. It could easily cause more devastation and death than coronavirus itself would. That’s because recessions are as deadly as pandemics.”
https://www.ccn.com/studies-panicking-i ... ronavirus/
242 died in one day in Germany so “some German doc” (actually an esteemed expert in virology and epidemiology) supposedly has it wrong. How so? In the first place, given that a total of 925,200 people died in Germany in 2015 https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Socie ... _node.html this makes for a daily average of 925,200/365=2,535. Put into context, 242 deaths against an average of 2,535 doesn’t sound quite so alarming and “some German doc”, the expert in the field Prof Hendrick Streeck, does not claim that nobody is dying or that there isn’t a crisis, “some German doc” has demonstrated by gathering random data from a reasonable sample of the population, that the true death rate – while, yes, people are dying you have to compare this to the number of people in total – is far, far lower than the exaggerated figures the media is pumping out with no scientific basis whatsoever, very often the number of deaths per a small number of people tested after presenting serious symptoms, which does not constitute a cross-section of the population at large.
Still, it is everyone’s prerogative what they believe. If you wish to wallow in the fear being stoked up endlessly by the media without making the effort to seek out alternative views and hear what many eminent professionals are saying, and more and more are speaking out, despite knowing that big pharma can and will destroy the careers and lives of any medical professional, especially academics now that medical departments at universities everywhere are finance by big pharma, that is your right. It looks like this is what the vast majority of the sheeple are going to do, so whatever the political and economic motives behind the hysteria currently being whipped up, and I believe ulterior motives exist but am not fully sure what they are, I am convinced they will succeed.
