Barrel Strength

May 25, 2020

What’s this? Trump right again!? More liberal heads explode. Back in March, the well-known subsidiary of the Chinese Communist Party, the World Health Organization, was touting a 3.4% fatality rate for the coronavirus. At the time, President Trump was ridiculed by the usual suspects for doubting this, saying that it would probably turn out to be less than 1%. [here]

As more has become known about this virus and its effects, particularly the large numbers who suffer no ill effects, the CDC has revised its estimates of the fatality rate to….0.26%, barely different from a nasty flu.
But, now here’s what the CDC is saying about the fatality rate the coronavirus:

• 0-49 years old: .05%
• 50-64 years old: .2%
• 65+ years old: 1.3%
• Overall ages: .4%
According to the CDC’s current best estimate, the case fatality rate of the coronavirus is .4 percent. And that’s just amongst symptomatic cases, which, the CDC estimates, is 65 percent of all cases. This means the CDC estimates that the fatality rate for all infections across all age groups, symptomatic as well as asymptomatic, is approximately .26 percent.

Yoram Lass, the former director of Israel’s Health ministry, was interviewed by Spiked! Online . When asked why he called the general response to coronavirus world-wide, he replied:

It is the first epidemic in history which is accompanied by another epidemic – the virus of the social networks. These new media have brainwashed entire populations. What you get is fear and anxiety, and an inability to look at real data. And therefore you have all the ingredients for monstrous hysteria.
It is what is known in science as positive feedback or a snowball effect. The government is afraid of its constituents. Therefore, it implements draconian measures. The constituents look at the draconian measures and become even more hysterical. They feed each other and the snowball becomes larger and larger until you reach irrational territory. This is nothing more than a flu epidemic if you care to look at the numbers and the data, but people who are in a state of anxiety are blind. If I were making the decisions, I would try to give people the real numbers. And I would never destroy my country.

And Dr Max Pemberton, writing in the UK Daily Mail:

We will never have a guaranteed zero risk of infection — it’s crazy to think that’s a possibility. And what about all the other risks we happily take every day? For example, there were 1,870 road deaths last year, but that hasn’t stopped most people driving.
It’s time to get the country back on its feet, while maintaining social distancing and regular hand-washing — and protecting the most vulnerable.
It’s natural to be afraid, but we cannot let fear control us. We will most likely be living with this virus for a long time, so for all our sakes, let’s get back to some common sense normality.

And for a superb summary of the current zeitgeist from the Burning Platform:

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

“If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.” – Samuel Adams

 

After observing the reaction of the America people, over the last two months, to a virus that will not kill 99.97% of them, I wondered how could a country created upon the blood and courage of patriot farmers and leaders who knew they would hang if their revolution failed, have degenerated into an infantilized nation of obedient slaves to un-Constitutionalized authoritarianism. It saddens me that a country borne by revolutionary means against an overbearing authoritarian monarchy has turned into a nation of bed-wetters curled up in their basements sucking their thumbs, begging government overlords to protect them from a virus.

I guess it shouldn’t be surprising after decades of government public school indoctrination where U.S. History facts have been usurped by feelings, diversity and gender agendas pushed by less than mediocre teachers. Government controlled education hasn’t taught children to think critically or question authority, but to obey rules and allow emotions to drive their actions. When multiple generations have been programmed to feel, rather than think, using panic and fear to make them do as they are told isn’t a difficult task. This pandemic reaction is a testament to their decades long propaganda and misinformation campaign. Rather than developing herd immunity the country developed a herd mentality.

A-men, brother.

Rebel Yell

Data here:  https://wmbriggs.com/public/worldometer13may.csv

May 22, 2020

Yesterday, I alluded to a British politician and Cabinet member, Dr Therese Coffey (PhD Chemistry, UC London), the only real scientist in the higher echelons of the government in the UK, who mentioned that maybe BoJo was getting some “duff advice” from some of the semi-secretive “advisory” committees.

Naturally, the Fake News media unloaded on her. As the task of the media is to spread panic and lies, real objective advice will be ignored and actively suppressed.

Jump to this side of the pond, especially to Professor William Briggs (Statistician to the Stars) for a few comments on lockdowns. Now that we are getting a much better handle on how to deal with things, we need some rigorous analysis of the thinking (or lack of) concerning lockdowns.

The picture above compares countries with and without lockdowns and death rates per million people.

Not looking good for the lockdown crew. And from UK data ….



During none of the previous outbreaks was the entire economy of the country destroyed with all its concomitant deaths (which never seem to be considered by the hysterical media)?

Talking of hysteria, it’s not only the media. Many people in positions of authority, and who should know better, are peddling hysteria. Consider this:

…Consider this scaremonger from the AIDS days:
Back in 1983, one scientist and doctor was sole author of a paper in the prestigious medical journal JAMA which stated that AIDS might be transmissible through “routine close contact, as within a family household.” That turned out not to be true, of course, but in the meantime the media had widely propagated the myth, naturally setting off a wave of hysteria.
Nevertheless, within months the author was promoted to chief of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, a position he still holds.
Who was that person? His name was… Dr. Anthony Fauci.

But let me finish with some sane words from the American Council on Science and Health[here] (Alex Berezow PhD Microbiology):

In the coming months and years, those with political agendas will use COVID-19 to criticize the politicians they love to hate. But remember that the novel coronavirus caught us all off guard. The biomedical community was always worried about influenza, not coronavirus, which is why most of us (myself included) were dead wrong about the danger posed by SARS-CoV-2. Anyone who says otherwise, namely that they “knew” this pandemic was coming, is engaging in revisionist history.

Rebel Yell

May 21, 2020

Recognize this woman? Probably not. She is Therese Coffey, a junior minister in the government of BoJo in the UK who had the nerve to suggest that scientists are sometimes wrong and the government may have had some “duff advice” from the eggheads [see Daily Mail here].

Cue up a hysterical reaction from the Fake News media about how “unproductive” her remarks were, especially as the government is always “guided by the science”.

As Stephen Glover points out in the Mail:

I shouldn’t describe the Work and Pensions Secretary as ‘Miss Coffey’. She is Dr Coffey, having obtained a PhD in chemistry at the respected University College London. Her scientific background makes her almost unique in the Cabinet.
The only other senior minister who can lay claim to a scientific training is Business Secretary Alok Sharma, who studied applied physics with electronics. International Development Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan read maths. The other 19 members of the Cabinet studied non-scientific subjects, or nothing at all.

Apart from being a real scientist, she brings to the fore the slavish misrepresentation of science in the media and the other scientifically illiterate opinions molders.

Most of the time, particularly with a new phenomenon, things are not well understood, data are lacking and sometimes confusing and contradictory. Scientists disagree all the time, even when analyzing the same data. Experts are often wrong. For example:

Another piece of fatal guidance given to the Government was that it was ‘very unlikely’ care homes would be affected. Talk about famous last words. Sage debated for weeks whether masks would be useful, long after most other countries had commonsensically decided that they were.

Everyone made that mistake.

And much more. However real science always involves being sceptical, especially of your own work. But changing one’s views and recommendations is necessary when new facts emerge. So is admitting that a new situation requires a new direction—there’s nothing wrong with that, everything right, in fact.

So Dr Coffey should be applauded, not denigrated by an ignorant media mob.

 

In a similar vein, Dr Knut Wittkowski, appears in an interview with spiked . He was:

…for 20 years, Wittkowski was the head of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at The Rockefeller University’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science.

He argues that the whole thing has now been blown out of all proportion and the real pandemic is now hysteria. Read the whole interview because that Youtube video with Dr Wittkowski has been censored by the Thought Police because he does not accept state propaganda…

Governments did not have an open discussion, including economists, biologists and epidemiologists, to hear different voices. In Britain, it was the voice of one person – Neil Ferguson – who has a history of coming up with projections that are a bit odd. The government did not convene a meeting with people who have different ideas, different projections, to discuss his projection. If it had done that, it could have seen where the fundamental flaw was in the so-called models used by Neil Ferguson. His paper was published eventually, in medRxiv. The assumption was that one per cent of all people who became infected would die. There is no justification anywhere for that.

What was all that about “following science”?

Rebel Yell

May 19, 2020

This Jedi-level troll tweet from Governor Abbott of Texas was in response to the Democrat governors of California and New York and their whining for more federal bailouts from Washington.

It’s really interesting to see the aspiring tyrants ready to arbitrarily impose draconian suppression of rights at the slightest pretext are all Democrats. Democrats running impoverished states. Democrats driving jobs and business away. Democrats refusing to face up to reality and instead focus all their energy on Trump hatred.

“’The time has come’, the walrus said,
‘To speak of other things,
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax,
Of cabbages and kings’…”

The time has come to get the world up off its knees and on to its feet again, and to get back to reality. We now know we are not dealing with anthrax, yellow fever, smallpox, or any of the really bad guys of the bug world, but with a nasty influenza bug.

Destroying the lives and livelihoods of millions is plainly and simply wrong and governments should face up to this.

Less than 5% of deaths are those without the chronic comorbidities of diabetes, morbid obesity, hypertension, dementia and other afflictions of the old (and not so old) and infirm. It is tragic that so many of our old folks in care homes have been struck down, but this WAS a foreseeable event based on past experience, and one that was not heeded by such short-sighted politicians as …Governor Cuomo of New York.

And Mayor de Blasio, the bloviating mayor of New York City, was telling New Yorkers to ride the never-cleaned subway as a rebuke to the “racist Trump” when he quite rightly shut down air travel between China and the US.[here] That, as an MIT report pointed out, was the major epicenter of infection in New York. Thanks, mayor de Blasio, don’t mention it.

The new site Lockdown Sceptics  has oodles of topical information on what’s really going on. Make sure you read the latest critique on the now-infamous modeling of the Bonking Boffin, Neil Ferguson from Imperial College. For my part, it’s time for this nonsense to end. By all means practice common-sense hygiene, even where a mask in confined public spaces like public transport and malls, but this endless “we’re all gonna die unless you remain locked up all year” has got to go.


I have a suggestion: it’s this—all the politicians, bureaucrats, medical experts, and “experts”, and all the computer modelers, every one, be forced to live with no wages, no salary, no income, and no prospect of future employment, until this thing is over. Just like they are forcing all normal working people to endure. And as for the journalists, all of them should be fired and forced to re-apply for their jobs, if they are required, which I doubt.

Until then, I’m not prepared to take any more of their nonsense for one minute longer.

 

Oh, don’t let me forget, President Trump’s letter to the WHO…read the whole thing, it’s definitive…[here]

[snip]…

It is clear the repeated missteps by you and your organization in responding to the pandemic have been extremely costly for the world. The only way forward for the World Health Organization is if it can actually demonstrate independence from China. My Administration has already started discussions with you on how to reform the organization. But action is needed quickly. We do not have time to waste. That is why it is my duty, as President of the United States, to inform you that, if the World Health Organization does not commit to major substantive improvements within the next 30 days, I will make my temporary freeze of United States funding to the World Health Organization permanent and reconsider our membership in the organization. I cannot allow American taxpayer dollars to continue to finance an organization that, in its present state, is so clearly not serving America’s interests.

Sincerely,

Donald Trump

Rebel Yell

May 16, 2020
When the coronavirus struck in the winter, it really did look like a major plague could have consumed the world. It is; but this we now know is not the Black Death, or yellow fever, or cholera, or smallpox or any of the truly nasty ones.

The lockdown approach, given what was known at the time, was probably the best approach, although there is considerable disagreement about that, notwithstanding the endless hysteria and misinformation from the media.

The rationale behind the lockdown was to “flatten the curve”; not let the health services be overwhelmed. Fair enough. But they haven’t been and are unlikely to be given any reasonable scenario now. But notice how the goalposts are being moved by the panic industry; now it’s “..it has to be ‘safe’ to open up the economy”, whatever that means.

Of course, trying to explain anything scientific to a journalist is an almost hopeless task. Nothing is ever ‘safe.’ There are no guarantees. Of course more people will die—but how many? You can say with almost a certainty that tens of thousands will die of influenza next year, and the year after that… Does that mean we bankrupt the economy and throw tens of millions into penury again? Not unless you are an idiot.

Getting our countries back to work and functioning again is essential for all our nation’s health. And soon. Not doing so will cause an even greater amount of suffering. This is something that journalists with the cushy jobs and utter lack of responsibility can afford to forget about. All they have to do is insult political leaders and ask stupid questions.

An interesting article from the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH)  highlights some uncomfortable facts…

Politicians would have us believe that it is an unprecedented, unanticipated, unpredictable bolt from the blue. Not true. The warning signs were ignored, and we were ill-prepared.
A review article in the American Society for Microbiology’s publication, Clinical Microbiology Reviews, entitled, “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus as an Agent of Emerging and Reemerging Infection,” concluded:
• Coronaviruses are well known to undergo genetic recombination, which may lead to new genotypes and outbreaks. The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb. The possibility of the reemergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories and therefore the need for preparedness should not be ignored.
That review was published in 2007. (Yes – 13 years ago.)

The National Science Foundation in the US is the prime funder of non-military scientific research—or should be. Too much money is wasted on non-scientific sociology and alternative medicine nonsense. One has to wonder why the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (one of the alternative to medicine outfits) was awarded $152 million of taxpayers money in 2018? As Dr Miller says, this was…

the most ever,… an affront to the NIH-funded researchers who are at the cutting edge of their disciplines and face increasing difficulty getting federal funding for studies that rank high on scientific merit.
The primary culprit is the NSF’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. Underlying its ability to dispense grants is the wrongheaded notion that social-science projects such as a study of animal depictions in National Geographic and a climate change musical are as important as research to identify early markers for Alzheimer’s disease or pancreatic cancer – or the biology and epidemiology of coronaviruses. This is what happens when, as a former senior NSF official put it, “the inmates run the asylum.”

This is why so many bureaucratic organizations in the US, UK and Canada need massive overhauls and rigorous culling of this nonsensical waste of money and time in the scientific world.

Rebel Yell

May 14, 2020

Dr Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford  has been making waves recently with a different assessment of the Covid-19 outcome.

A study conducted in New York revealed, allegedly, that 25% of the population tested positive for antibodies to the coronavirus. But of these people, 70% of those who showed the presence of antibodies were asymptomatic–they never showed symptoms. The majority never will. As he says:

This testing also places the death rate at somewhere between 0.1- 0.5%. This is orders of magnitude lower than originally thought.
This is important because, according to Dr. Bhattacharya, containment strategies are not likely to be effective and the virus is not going to disappear:

[snip]…

“I think in the back of people’s heads there is this idea that somehow we can eradicate this disease if we just stay locked down. That is not possible. The serologic evidence, even the MLB study, suggest this. It suggests the epidemic is too widespread to eradicate. It spreads via asymptomatic contact. Like people who don’t have very many symptoms, even mild cold symptoms can spread the thing. They aren’t going to show up for testing. They aren’t going to show up at a hospital or a doctor.”

So despite the idea floating around that it’s all going to be hunky-dory after the wave passes, Bhattacharya disagrees:

“There is no safe option. If you think that having a lockdown will provide you safety, you are mistaken. Because the problem is this lockdown has had enormous negative effects on the health of people in the United States and around the world.”

It means that we must all accept living with a higher degree of risk. It has to be. We now know how better to avoid infection (hand washing, masks in confined public places etc.); destroying economies is not going to help.
When asked, Dr. Bhattacharya clearly understood the political calculations that leaders are making. He said leadership is what is needed because politicians are going to face the consequences of COVID-19 or the problems caused by economic collapse. According to his assessment, a vaccine is an open-ended question. None of the other coronaviruses that infect humans have one and there is no guarantee this one will.

On the world front, it still seems like Sweden is not really any different from other major countries in number of cases per million of the population. Stay tuned on that.

 

Either way, it’s going to be a bumpy ride and it’s quite a way until touchdown.

Rebel Yell

 




May 12, 2020

Randall Denley in the National Post asks how much is this going to cost? Good point. Of course, you can hear the wailing of “you can’t put a price on a human life” crowd even now. But of course, every day of our lives we do just that. The insurance companies make a living out of it; every day you drive to work you accept a risk of dying in a car crash and your family receiving monetary compensation based on your life insurance policy.

As of Monday, 1,669 Ontarians had died, the vast majority in homes for the elderly.
Throttling the provincial economy can be seen as a great success in terms of public health, with the significant exception of the death toll among the elderly. The economic and fiscal cost has been colossal and unprecedented.

Absent the care home deaths then a few hundred people in Ontario have unfortunately died from Covid-19. How many of them had comorbidities like obesity and diabetes? Then even fewer people in reasonable health have actually died from Covid-19. And the livelihoods of millions, yes millions, of people have been destroyed because of this? Things have to be weighed in the balance. The costs for our province are becoming unbearable. Some getting back to work while accepting and dealing with a higher level of risk must be accepted—and most people will because they are reasonable. As for the models:…

…That Ontario model predicted that 100,000 people could die if nothing were done, but that between 3,000 and 15,000 would die with strong health measures, including closing down much of the economy. As of Monday, 1,669 Ontarians had died, the vast majority in homes for the elderly.


Likewise, similar happenings in Sweden. There were two models in Sweden used to model the plague, inspired by the Imperial College model from April. As noted in the Spectator:

Here are the models’ prediction of the number of Covid-19 patients in Swedish intensive care units, ICU (the highest curve is a model without lockdown):
H. Sjödin et al: ‘Covid-19 health care demand and mortality in Sweden in response to non-pharmaceutical (NPIs) mitigation and suppression scenarios’, 7 April. The graph suggests critical care demand would peak above 16,000 patients per day by early May, and pre-pandemic intensive care unit capacity would be exceeded 30-fold….

 

…Then came J. Gardner et al, ‘Intervention strategies against Covid-19 and their estimated impact on Swedish healthcare capacity’, 15 April. It was an even more pessimistic assessment, showing a peak of over 20,000 patients by early May – with an ICU need around 40 times capacity.

So what has been actually happening?

Gardner et al predicted that Sweden would have 82,000 Covid-19 deaths by 1 July. That implies around 1,000 deaths every day since the paper was published in mid-April. However, the total number of Swedish Covid-19 deaths at the time of writing is 3,313.
One reason why the models failed is that they – just like most countries’ politicians – underestimated how millions of people spontaneously adapt to new circumstances. They only thought in terms of lockdowns vs business as usual, but failed to consider a third option: that people engage in social distancing voluntarily when they realise lives are at stake and when authorities recommend them to do so….
…The Swedish experiment casts huge doubts on the models, and makes the case for trusting the public.

“…Although I hate to judge before all the facts are in, it’s beginning to look like….. the Swedes might be right.”

It’s time for all governments to take a valium and get to grips with reality. And that reality is not locking down or locking up entire populations indefinitely. Let’s get back to work.

Rebel Yell