The Andromeda Strain

April 27, 2020

The above picture from one of my favorite science not-so-fiction movies, The Andromeda Strain (1971), shows the cause of the disease that wiped out a small town in New Mexico. It almost defeated the most brilliant minds in the US bio-war establishment until, in a flash of insight, despite all their medical training, the bug was found to be not even organic—it was an inorganic crystal. Simple, yet extremely hard to defeat.

Maybe we’ll get a flash of insight in dealing our new friend, the coronavirus.

The most sought-after statistic these days is the prevalence of the coronavirus infection in the general population. And the most difficult to come by.

Only random testing for antibodies will determine how many of the general population have been infected. Dr Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University organized such a survey reported in medRxiv [here].
This shows that maybe 50 to 80 times as many people as previously thought have been exposed to the COVID-19 virus. And this means that they either showed no symptoms or else very minor ones not worth mentioning. So, therefore, the infection fatality rate would be 50 times less than previously thought, which is a significant difference in our favor. He has a fascinating interview on youtube: “Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Anderson” …

 

Since then, several other similar studies have been made in New York and a town in Germany. The results were similar.

In Fake News news, it seems the British government is following the lead of President Trump and giving up on the news Lobby, that’s the gaggle of media-bitches who ask stupid questions of government ministers every day. They are moving to questions from ordinary citizens—shock, horror! As Guido Fawkes observes:

Guido’s spent much of this pandemic covering the Lobby’s shoddy performance in covering Coronavirus, and in Saturday’s Guido Talks observed Matt Hancock had taken away the opportunity to ask follow-up questions at the Daily Briefings as No. 10 lose patience with the media’s attempted gotcha attempts. Today the Government has gone further and launched a new initiative asking the public to submit the questions they actually want answering. Think you can do better than Peston, Beth etc.? Submit your questions here…

About time. A blogger from Scotland [Lily of St Leonards]  opines:

What strikes me most from my online interactions is that ordinary Brits have gone beyond politics. We understand that we are not fighting a General Election. We are fighting the worst pandemic in the past one hundred years…. Too many journalists who think there is only one story to write about skim a few medical journals and then think they are qualified to tell the rest of us what should be done. They go from one extreme to other and pretend to have a knowledge that they don’t.

And neatly summing up the state of the media:

The worst of all is the daily press briefings. We listen to some of the best minds in the country explaining to us what is being done and why only to have a series of ignorant childish questions from journalists trying to score political points and trip up a minister. No wonder most of us switch off when we get to that point.

Which is exactly why President Trump gave up on them too.

Thank you Lily of St Leonards, I’m going to use another of your quotes because you can say it so much better than I:

If we had had the modern journalist profession in 1940, we would have lost the war. They would have complained about the Governments disastrous mistakes at Narvik. It should have known that the Maginot line wouldn’t work. Journalists would have demanded that Churchill should have been immediately sacked for the defeat at Dunkirk. They would have described our situation as hopeless and would have ridiculed our ability to fight them on the beaches and would have said it was mere arrogance to suppose that our pathetic little country could have a finest hour. After all the Germans do everything so much more efficiently than we do. They would have listed all the mistakes our country had made and called it insight. The British people however would not have listened to them then, just as we don’t read them now. Newspapers are going out of business. They deserve to.

A perfect description of the modern media mindset.

Dr. John Oxford, virologist and professor at QMU  London making further comments on the media…

“Personally, I would say the best advice is to spend less time watching TV news which is sensational and not very good. Personally, I view this Covid outbreak as akin to a bad winter influenza epidemic. In this case we have had 8000 deaths this last year in the ‘at risk’ groups viz over 65% people with heart disease etc. I do not feel this current Covid will exceed this number. We are suffering from a media epidemic!”

Can we develop a vaccine against “journalists”?

Rebel Yell

 

April 26, 2020

Time to Roll Back the Hysteria

I’m a big fan of Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, who is probably the best political commentator in the US right now. In relation to the latest fake news from the media hacks, he says:

1@ScottAdamsSays [here]

There’s a massive IQ test on the Internet today. If you think the president was asking Dr. Birx about injecting bleach or isopropyl alcohol into coronavirus patients — because it sounded that way to you — you failed the test. CNN ran an ad promoting this disingenuous poppycock: and Nancy Pelosi lied claiming that the President had said people should kill the virus by injecting Lysol.

Of course, these days we know the Democrats are lying when their lips move.
The media hacks lie and twist everything the President says to try to score “political points”. They should go back to their sewer whence they came. In a national emergency, they haven’t the smallest shred of common decency among them.

The Canadian media are just as bad, waxing fat by consuming their own anti-Trump bile, always laced with lashings of hypocrisy.

There are exceptions though. Conrad Black can be a voice of reason and calm midst all the hysteria currently consuming the media.

Sane public policy requires however, that we also keep in mind that Canada has also self-inflicted over a million unemployed and stock market declines of $670 billion in two months, a staggering $330 million for each of the nearly 2,200 lives that have been lost to this pandemic in Canada.

No matter how effective or ineffective the lockdown is, governments must have a plan to restart the economy. And soon. President Trump is moving towards that and in Canada the Ontario government has started planning a Jobs and Recovery Program with a similar objective. It may be that we all have to accept a higher level of risk in our everyday lives, but that is necessary. Now that we know much more about the virus and what measures are effective in stopping the spread of infection [rigorous hand hygiene and masks in enclosed public places] we can act accordingly. Destroying the entire economy would be a far greater crime and produce many deaths in other ways—that’s the opportunity cost.

Trade-offs must be made and political leaders make those decisions. The hysteria being whipped up by the media in many countries is not only irresponsible, it’s downright seditious at times. When a calm understanding of the facts is required, we get ‘gotcha’ yellow journalism from ignorant hacks behaving like monkeys at a chimps tea party.

But to switch to the real world, what is happening with Sweden?[here] How is the no-lock down policy working? To take one metric, the number of deaths per million of the population,

So Sweden is not on lockdown and the US and the UK are? So for Sweden it doesn’t look like the curve is any different from the curve in the lock-down countries?

Daily confirmed COVID-19 cases per million, 3-day rolling average

The number of confirmed cases is lower than the number of total cases. The main reason for this is limited testing.

 

This is one of the most interesting experiments going on right now in the context of testing whether the big gamble on shutting down economies and causing untold financial damage to ordinary people was worth it. If it wasn’t, then bad call, your credibility is shot.

Rebel Yell

 

April 25, 2020

The Correct Decanter for Kentucky Bourbon.

Harvard University in the US should really be named Greed U. What a disgrace to the “Ivy League”. With $40 billion in assets in endowments they still wanted to shake down the taxpayers for a handout. Shake Shack, the fast-food chain, after receiving a loan, decided others were more needful and returned the money[here] ….But,

Harvard University is no Shake Shack.

The fast food chain recently received $10M in forgivable loans under the government’s Paycheck Protection Program, meant to help small businesses pay employees struggling during the coronavirus pandemic. Shake Shack returned the money, CEO Randy Garutti and founder Danny Meyer explaining, “We’ve decided to immediately return the entire $10 million PPP loan we received last week to the (Small Business Association) so that those restaurants who need it most can get it now.”

It took a jab from President Trump to set the fat cats at Greed U straight:

“Harvard should pay that money back,” Trump said Tuesday during a coronavirus press briefing. “This isn’t meant for one of the richest institutions, far beyond schools, in the world.”
The university is now giving the bailout funds a pass.

Too bad they couldn’t have shown a bit of common decency first. Like Shake Shack. In the private sector.

In local news, the latest deaths in Ottawa are in long-term care facilities.

“To date, we have received confirmation that 51 residents and 28 staff members of Carlingview Manor in Ottawa are confirmed to have tested positive for COVID-19,” Dr. Rhonda Collins, Revera’s chief medical officer, wrote in a statement posted to Revera’s website. “The residents who have tested positive are in isolation. The staff members who tested positive are self-isolating at home.

It’s a sad state of affairs but one too common across not only Canada but all European countries. But it’s hard to see how any high-density living accommodations can be made safe. Maybe this is a warning for future high-density housing projects in trendy development plans in various cities. Everyone will demand something like UV decontamination of their individual air supplies? But on the brighter side  [see illustration above] ….

VANCOUVER — Rest assured, there’s no shortage of booze in the province, so nobody needs to rush to their local liquor store.
But shoppers are clearly changing the way they buy.
Single beer cans and mickeys aren’t hot sellers at the moment, nor are regular sized bottles of wine. No, lately it’s all about size and quantity.
Sales of cask wine (that’s a fancy way of saying boxed wine) are up 144 per cent. Those big 1.75-litre bottles of vodka, rum and whiskey are being scooped off the shelves 153 per cent faster, and 24 packs of beer 120 per cent.
“So, anything you can buy in a larger volume,” said Viviana Zanocco of the BC Liquor Distribution Branch. “Anything that can see people through, so that they don’t have to go out and buy again for a few weeks.”

My thoughts entirely. That’s why I’ve gone to drunk-in-a-box lately [for wine]; the empties are not filling up my office so fast. And for real drinks, for me, it’s bourbon.

Rebel Yell

 

April 24, 2020

The Party of Science?

Something a little on the lighter side today. Well, not really, because it shows how hopelessly clueless some of the leading personalities in the media are [h/t, thanks to Instapundit].

Chris Cuomo, aka Fredo, is one of CNN’s chief piffle-meisters  and brother to Governor Cuomo of New York State. CNN, the Cuckoo’s Nest Network, is one the propaganda machines of the Democrats and can be guaranteed to follow orders from the Party Politburo. Poor Chris came down with the coronavirus but didn’t seem to have too bad a time of it in his multimillion dollar mansion in New York. Later, so did his wife.

Whenever the Democrats talk about being the “party of science”, they mean exactly the converse. They are the party of pseudo-science and quackery. Whether it’s the end of the world next week, or President Trump is the cause of coronavirus or any other popular delusion of the Hollywood League of People Who Are Truly Bonkers, they don’t disappoint.

Chris Cuomo’s wife, Christine, immediately got to work to cure her illness. Here’s bit from her blog:

At the direction of my doctor, Dr. Linda Lancaster, who reminded me that this is an oxygen-depleting virus, she suggested I take a bath and add a nominal amount of bleach. Yes, bleach. So, I add a small amount—1/4 to ½ cup ONLY—of Clorox to a full bath of warm water (80 gallons). Why? To combat the radiation and metals in my system and oxygenate it. “We want to neutralize heavy metals because they slow up the electromagnetic frequency of our cells, which is our energy field, and we need a good flow of energy.”…

Clorox combating radiation and neutralizing heavy metals; my God, what planet are we on here?

 

And…

On Tuesday, my sinus congestion was so painful that I enlisted Dr. Roxanna Namavar from Pretty Healthy NYC, who also does vitamin drips, COVID-19 tests and anti-viral tests at home in the Hamptons. Doctors suggested the drip because New York hospitals and hospitals all over the world are using the vitamin C drip as part of their COVID-19 treatments since vitamin C has anti-viral properties, when vitamin drips had previously been brushed off as “alternative.” Dr. Roxanna shows up in a hazmat outfit and 3M mask. “Orally you can’t absorb the amount of vitamin C comfortably that is required for the anti-viral properties to combat this virus. The IV version is a safe alternative to untested pharmaceuticals,” says Dr. Roxanna.

All–righty…You have to wonder how anyone with half a brain can believe all this tripe. It’s just nonsense with some impressive-sounding words tacked on.

So just who is Dr Linda Lancaster [here] ? Well, she’s mixed up with Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s “Alternative“ medicine scam. Lancaster advertises herself as a “Board Certified Naturopathic Physician and Homeopath”—in other words, a quack. And Dr Roxanna Namavar [here] advertises herself as a psychiatrist, just the type of doctor required to give expert advice on viral diseases!  She also lists all the medical reporting services she does NOT contribute to, such as the

Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) [is] a Medicare program encouraging health care professionals and group practices to report information on their quality of care. Quality measures can show how well a health care professional provides care to people with Medicare.

And what did poor hubby Chris do? Well,

Every day, Chris and I both ate Ayurvedic food from Corey de Rosa at Tapovana to-go in Bridgehampton; his menu treats food as medicine. Aside from improving digestion, Tapovana’s Southeast Indian dishes are also nourishing and cleansing.

This is the mental state of people who try to pass themselves off as our betters, people who know more than the army of “deplorables.” Aside from being totally ignorant of elementary chemistry and medicine, they make no attempt educate themselves.

It is said that ignorance can be cured, but stupid is for life. Case closed here.

Rebel Yell

 

April 23, 2020

Sometimes perspective is a hard thing to come by. Projected deaths from covid-19 are about at the level of the 2017–2018 flu but significantly larger than the Swine flu of 2009. Still projected, not actual.

Bearing in mind the concern about the number of hospital beds available to treat seriously ill patients, this graphic from “Our World in Data” shows some of the comparison around the world:

 

Note that vast swaths of Africa present no information at all. These countries are without a functioning health care system, for all practical purposes. Also note, the Americas, both North and South, have a low number compared to Europe and Russia.

For New York, the epicenter in the US, hospitalizations have fallen. The US Navy ships sent to New York were barely used. What about the daily count? From NYHealth:

 

As things change for the better, will the level of hysteria subside—especially with some of those wanna-be authoritarian governors in the US? People are accommodating to a different world, and that includes a world with a higher level of risk. Real risk initiates real caution. It wonderfully sharpens the mind. The general population seems to have got it, only the media, as usual, have not.

Rebel Yell

 

 

Don’t miss Max and Stacey on the plundering which is the basis of the banksters super-crookdom in  the West today.

 

Rebel Yell

 

 

Number of Confirmed Cases per million

A Journal of the Plague Year (37)

April 22, 2020

 

Lockdown or not?  The US and the UK are doing the complete lockdown trip.  Is this making any really significant difference to the number of cases of corona virus and deaths?

 

But Sweden is taking a different tack.  Will it work, in the sense of keeping the county working as approximately normal, and having no significant difference in the number of deaths due to corona virus?

 

The graph above is very interesting for precisely these reasons.  The cases (per million of the population) for Sweden is lower than that for the US and the UK.  What does this tell us?  Right now, the jury is out on that, but it seems that the difference is not that much.  Is the total lockdown an over-reaction?

 

Sweden is the experiment that will tell us that.

 

Total Number of Confirmed Deaths per million

Here, the data are less clear: Sweden is between the US and the UK. Again Sweden has no lockdown and the US and the UK do.  So far, it doesn’t seem to show up in the data. Maybe Sweden is playing with the Devil.  Stay tuned on that one.

 

Rebel Yell

 

April 21, 2020

In a very revealing article by Dr Max Pemberton in the Daily Mail (UK) , some of the real reasons behind the failure of the British medical establishment to tackle the corona crisis are laid bare. As expected, the real people who make things happen, the doctors, nurses, paramedics, cleaning staff and everyone else can work wonders. But,

…It’s been fascinating to watch natural leaders taking charge in place of those we can now see were just in management positions because they’d been on the right courses. I’ve seen junior nurses step into the shoes of senior managers who have gone sick and bring a new passion.
Services haven’t disintegrated — in fact, if anything they have got more efficient. Long term we need to target resources at nurses, physiotherapists, doctors, healthcare assistants and porters — not the bureaucrats.

As in all bureaucratic organizations, eventually all the management positions are filled by the bean counters, MBAs, political hacks and talentless “managers”, exchanged between various management positions in the civil service, who know nothing about any science, medicine or nursing; in other words, the form-fillers and box-tickers. When the right people get going, Dr Pemberton says:

One of the things that has shocked me is the speed at which things are now done. It has forced people to prioritise jobs.
The NHS has had to start behaving more like a Silicon Valley start-up than the dusty, bureaucratic organisation it is known as.
Decisions that used to take months or even years because of endless, pointless form-filling and meetings are now made in less than the time it takes to boil a kettle.
This is how it should have been in the health service all along — but at some point the apparatchiks took over and stifled innovation.

Well, that’s what happens when everything is controlled by government.
On the business front, a similar picture of chaos and confusion  is apparent.

Michelle van Vuuren, who runs a London-based property company, turned her business into a PPE distributor working with Chinese suppliers last month as the virus began to spread around the world.

After failed attempts to contact NHS procurement services, Miss van Vuuren contacted Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s office on March 20.
She was subsequently passed to the Cabinet Office but her inquiries went ‘into a vacuum’ and were met with only an automated response.
Despite offering to sell millions of masks, gowns and aprons she said she had spent ‘five weeks hammering at the Government’s door’ without response.

And…

 

A British supplier said they were forced to sell millions of life-saving items overseas after attempts to equip the NHS were met with an ‘impenetrable wall of bureaucracy’.
Other firms complained they had ‘no choice’ about sending masks, respirators and other pieces of kit abroad because the Government had repeatedly ignored offers of help.

It’s pretty sad state of affairs for such an advanced country as the UK to be behind the eight-ball on such an elementary part of preparing for a health emergency. The other part of the problem, apart from the fossilized bureaucracy, is the just-in-time global supply chain. Any chain is only as strong as its weakest link and everyone in Britain, and other countries including Canada, are finding out that many strategic goods like protective equipment and drugs need to be manufactured at home, in house, for the needs of our citizens.

 

This is something that President Trump has been emphasizing for years: bring essential manufacturing back home. Perhaps the American people will now demand it of their feckless business community—and Canada will too.

While we all dearly love to hold the feet of our political leaders to the fire, expecting them all the time to be able to see into the future, like journalists and political talking heads, the “experts”, so beloved of the media-bitches of the press, are often wrong, more so than they would like us to know.

In an article in STAT : “Several months of magical thinking”, shows how even the best of the medical experts can misjudge events.

Most of the hang-ups and bungling has come from incompetent bureaucrats, over-regulation and pointless red tape in many countries. Even when spots of infection appeared around the world, the epidemiologists, who should have known better, were ignoring their own basic teaching:

 

Epidemiology 101 lesson: It takes time for a virus that spreads from person to person to hit an exponential growth phase in transmission, even if every new case was infecting on average two to three other people….“Everybody was in denial of this coming, including the U.S. And everybody got hit — just as simple as that,” Gary Kobinger, director of the Infectious Disease Research Center at Laval University in Quebec, told STAT.

 

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, and an expert in the field, was quick off the mark. After saying in early January that he didn’t think that the Wuhan virus would turn into a pandemic, the rapid spread in China, and the frantic reactions of the Chinese, convinced him that it would be….

…Within days, Osterholm’s thinking shifted. By Jan. 20, he was warning the 3M Company — which makes N95 respirators — that the virus, in his opinion, would cause a pandemic. The company immediately moved to increase production.

Note that private industry was moving rapidly before any of the bureaucracy knew what was going on!

And Dr Fauci, the CDC Head, now on the President’s team was saying…

…Even in mid-February, Fauci was describing the risk to Americans as “relatively low,” saying that he hoped sustained human-to-human spread might not occur in the United States.

[snip]…

Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the CDC, agrees that there was a kind of unreal quality to the emerging evidence as cases continued to climb….“There’s a sense for all of us pandemic influenza planners and responders and respiratory virus folks that look back at [the Spanish flu pandemic of] 1918 and say, ‘Well, we always need to prepare and be ready for that.’ But in the back of your mind it’s sort of ‘Yeah, but I’m not going to have to go through it…’”

 

That, strangely, is in the minds of everyone who is, or has been, part of emergency response operations, whether for a plague, nuclear accident, radiological disaster or whatever. It’s.. “yeah, this is the exercise, but it won’t really happen on our watch.”

Yeah, right.

Rebel Yell

 

 

April 20, 2020

As General Turgidson said in the War Room in Dr Strangelove, “…Although I hate to judge before all the facts are in, it’s beginning to look like General Ripper exceeded his authority.”

Maybe the same is true of some of the computer modeling being used by politicians to direct their decisions in this recent unpleasantness? Maybe not. The science journal Nature reports: Antibody tests suggest that coronavirus infections vastly exceed official counts. The Nature article refers to the Santa Clara county study in California published in medRxiv
The testing involved a test for Covid-19 antibodies in the blood of the local population, a random sample of which was selected for the study. In the paper the authors say:

…A combination of both data sources provides us with a
combined sensitivity of 80.3% (95 CI 72.1-87.0%) and a specificity of 99.5% (95 CI 98.3-99.9%).

That’s a pretty good specificity.

…We conclude that based on seroprevalence sampling of a large regional population, the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Santa Clara County was between 2.49% and 4.16% by early April. While this prevalence may be far smaller than the theoretical final size of the epidemic, it suggests that the number of infections is 50–85-fold larger than the number of cases currently detected in Santa Clara County.

If true, this is huge. Why? Because a vast number of people may have encountered the virus, been infected, developed antibodies, and never gotten ill, which means that many more people are now immune than has been supposed. The only way to settle this is for all regions to carry out significant randomized sampling for the antibodies. Everyone seems to be behind the curve on that one.

In terms of projections, the School of Public Health at Georgia State University, has online a set of interactive graphs tracing the projected cases at various times with the actual data illustrating how the projections change all the time. It should impress one thing on everyone’s minds–data are real, projections are not.

Short memo today; interrupted by online cocktail party.

Rebel Yell

 

PS Interview with Swedish epidemiologist; Why the lockdown approach is a waste of time and counterproductive….

 

 

April 19, 2020

Making sense of the data coming in is a huge problem for the decision makers. So much is contradictory. Only if you are a “journalist” can you blame people for not seeing the future.

In Ottawa, in the Frozen North, 22 deaths are reported  in total, of which 19 are in one care home facility west of town. Non-essential border crossings to the US are to be extended for another 30 days. Also, the Élizabeth Bruyère research institute reported that

…’“Outbreak is a very scary word, so we need you to know two things. The first is that in the response to COVID-19, given the vulnerable nature of our long-term care population, one staff member having a positive result is enough to declare an outbreak, regardless of where they acquired the virus,” the statement said.’

So an outbreak may be one case.

Just how some figures can be misleading, consider the figures for New York City, about which much raving nonsense is available on the Fake News media. The graph below shows the distribution of cases between NYC and other cities:

 

Note the vast difference between NYC and any other place in the US. At the time President Trump was shutting down travel to and from China, Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo were driveling on about …”travel on the subway, go out and mix, there’s no problem”. Meanwhile, real men were getting down to work.

Of course, it was exactly the wrong position to adopt and NYC is paying the price. Mayor de Blasio, don’t blame others for your bad call.

On another front, Nature  reports that:

…An analysis of the blood of some 3,300 people living in Santa Clara county in early April found that one in every 66 people had been infected with SARS-CoV-2. On the basis of that finding, the researchers estimate that between 48,000 and 82,000 of the county’s roughly 2 million inhabitants were infected with the virus at that time — numbers that contrast sharply with the official case count of some 1,000 people reported in early April, according to the analysis posted today on medRxiv. The work has not yet been peer reviewed.

Here, antibody testing seems to reveal that vastly more people have been infected, without getting sick, and, presumably, generated antibodies in their blood. If that is true, then the infection fatality rate (IFR) is very much less than the case fatality rate (CFR).

The Santa Clara team estimated an IFR for the county of 0.1–0.2%, which would equate to about 100 deaths in 48,000-82,000 infections. As of 10 April, the county’s official death count was 50 people. The study’s IFR is lower than the IFR used in models by researchers at Imperial College London, which estimated an IFR for Great Britain on the basis of data from China to be 0.9%. In another study, the same group estimated an IFR for China of 0.66%, and a study of deaths on the Diamond Princess cruise ship estimated an IFR of 0.5%.

All of which indicates a significantly smaller death rate than heretofore presumed. Which brings us to the point of considering when the economy should be opened up and wound up: people need to get moving. Some doctors, Jonathan Geach https://medium.com/@jbgeach/changing-the-goalposts-four-more-reasons-it-is-safe-to-open-america-560cfc0ab4c3 MD on Medium, are claiming that…

…The purpose of “Flatten the Curve” was to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed with patients suffering from COVID-19. The reality is that the healthcare system is now underwhelmed and healthcare workers are being laid off and furloughed in droves as a result of healthcare centers having neglected patient care not related to COVID-19 in fear of a COVID-19 surge that failed to materialize on a nationwide basis. This means tens of millions of patients are failing to receive the medical care they need in a timely manner. Almost every hospital outside of the hotspots is empty.

[snip]…

If the goal of the shutdown was to flatten the curve and prevent healthcare system utilization, why are we still under a shutdown when the healthcare system is significantly underutilized and tens of thousands of healthcare workers are being terminated or furloughed? Why are we still denying non-COVID-19 patients the care they need when hospitals are sitting idle and laying off staff in droves? The only surge we’ve seen thus far is with respect to initial weekly jobless claims; tragically, there’s a good chance we will see a surge in suicides later this year as well.

Well, yes. When will there be a cool analysis of the situation? And from Neurologica blog, some mixed feelings about the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO has long been in the back pocket of the communist tyranny in China. But that’s not the worst part. By kowtowing to the PC world and “respecting” cultural differences, for instance, like “traditional” medicine, aka quack medicine, they have done a huge disservice to the developing world. As Neurologica points out:

…Perhaps most outrageous was then they straight-up endorsed traditional Chinese quackery. They [WHO] wrote:
The goal of this policy “is to promote the safe and effective use of traditional medicine by regulating, researching and integrating traditional medicine products, practitioners and practice into health systems, where appropriate”.

But we have heard this defense before – you cannot regulate nonsense. You cannot mix quackery with real medicine without destroying the scientific standards of medicine. This move only served to validate unscientific medicine. I cannot tell you how many times people have used the WHO position to justify their own use or endorsement of quackery, both personally and institutionally. It has had the exact effect that we warned about.

Medically speaking, this is malpractice of the first order. There is no way Western governments should be contributing to an organization that is undermining the first principles of scientific modern medicine. “Alternative medicine” is an alternative to medicine.

And these guys in the WHO were supposed to be the experts? All their recommendations at the beginning of this unpleasantness were wrong.

At least we know why now.

Rebel Yell