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Well, the Sky Might Be Falling…
This coronavirus scare is not the same thing as the global warming scare. But one can’t help but notice a few parallels. Or perhaps, a lot of parallels…
First, someone notices possible early signs of a potential danger, makes a best guess on current data, enters that questionable data into an even more questionable computer model, writes and then re-writes the algorithm to confirm their suspicions, extrapolates to the worst possible outcome, and then tells the public that “science” says that’s exactly what’s going to happen unless you do as I say. And if you don’t do as I say, that doesn’t mean that you disagree with my view of the problem or the solution, it means that you don’t “believe in science.”
As I noted in a previous post about Harrison Ford’s views on global warming, “Those who accuse others of not believing in science tend to be those who don’t understand science.”
Another similarity between the global warming panic and the coronavirus panic is that those computer models that were designed to show a looming catastrophe end up being incorrect. Like, way, way, way off. Initial estimates of American deaths from coronavirus ranged as high at 1-4 million. So far we’ve got around 40,000 dead. We think. I’ll come back to that. But anyway, the computer models which guided early decision making on the coronavirus may end up being off nearly by a factor of 100. That’s not an error of 5 or 10 percent. That’s an error of 10,000 percent. That’s incredible.
The next step, of course, is to change how you measure the outcome that is not living up to the flawed computer models. For global warming, you shut down rural temperature stations, and have more temperature stations in cities and on the tarmac at airports, so you can get higher temperatures.
With coronavirus, they started telling doctors and hospitals that anyone who swabbed positive for coronavirus and then later died should be classified as a coronavirus death, regardless of whether the coronavirus actually contributed to their death. Now they’re telling doctors and hospitals that is a patient dies and the doctor suspects that coronavirus may have been a factor, that should be classified as a coronavirus death, even if the patient was never tested.
By the time we get to this stage of the show, even those who seek to take an honest look at the problem cannot do so. The data has been corrupted and thus becomes close to worthless. We are left wondering how many of those 40,000 Americans who are listed as coronavirus deaths actually died of coronavirus. Probably a lot of them. Maybe a vast majority of them. Hard to say, I suppose.
The next step is to go back and change data from the past. The global warming people go back and “correct” the data sets from previous decades, to make them colder (their thermometers were probably off, or the data was probably compiled differently than we do it, or whatever). Thus, as previous temperatures magically become cooler, modern temperatures look warmer in comparison.
The CDC just changed the number of influenza deaths from two years ago – it was 80,000, now it is 61,000. Why would they do that? Presumably because they were getting sick of people pointing out that coronavirus is not as bad as the flu.
Throughout this process, of course, we are told to drive Priuses, or wear surgical masks to Walmart, or something. And if we don’t do as they say, it’s because we “don’t believe in science,” or we actually want to kill people, or we’re so self-centered that we don’t consider the global significance of our choice in cars, or whatever.
But again, if we disagree with their recommended course of action, it’s not because we disagree with them – it’s because we’re evil. Or stupid. Or, most likely, both.
When global warming doesn’t work out they way they want it to, and the polar bears don’t die like they thought they might, then naturally, they make adjustments to the algorithms, and say that they weren’t wrong – it’s just that global warming will become an obvious crisis in 2032 rather than 1995.
Forgot to carry the 1 – sorry about that – but you still should do everything I say. I’m right this time. Don’t you believe in science?
With coronavirus, if the death toll is disappointing to some, it’s not that they were wrong, it’s just that the real threat is going to be the second wave. Or next winter. Or the surge from opening the beaches. Or whatever. It’s coming, and it’s just around the corner. You should still do everything I say. I’m right this time. Don’t you believe in science?
I could go on and on. And so could you, probably. But I think you see my point.
And just to be clear, my point is not that coronavirus is not dangerous. People are dying from it, and perhaps even more are dying from our response to it. So this is clearly a serious problem.
But I think this illustrates one of the real downsides of the centralized control fans using every crisis – real and imagined – as a tool to increase government control. Once we start to understand their playbook, we start to roll our eyes as we watch them go through it yet again, with yet another crisis. It’s almost fun to watch.
Unless one of their “crises” ends up being an actual crisis.
If that were to happen, the actual, real crisis could easily get away from us, because we’re too busy chuckling about all the same stuff from all the same people.
Crisis mongering is dangerous to us now, because it leads us to do foolish things today. But that’s nothing. It will cause real harm someday if one of these crises turns out to be the real thing. Someday, that is likely to happen.
I hope that day is not this day. I guess we’ll see…
Published in General
So you won’t consider the real reason the statistic from 2018 has changed is because the earth has become so hot our digitized statistics of the past are being jimmied around inside our computers’ HD’s while the computers are melting?
Have you not shame?
There really aren’t any even halfway decent papers covering prophylactic use. Studies of not very sick people didn’t show any benefit.
Whose studies show that it has no benefit? That is always the big question: is this study done independently or done by those with ties to industry?
Hydroxychloroquine must have some benefits. Otherwise there would not be lower death rates in the parts of the globe, like Europe and Bahrain, where it is used.
Bill Gates has rushed into the breech of doing a test analyzing whether hydrozchloroquine is worthwhile or not. However his study is riddled by one major flaw: the control group is treated with high levels of Vitamin C, a substance which of itself is able to reduce the likelihood of the disease gaining the upper hand. a decently done test would absolutely require an inert substance, like sugar water, rather than a competing treatment.
And the other major flaw is that it is not to Gates’ benefit to have a $ 20 per month treatment like HCQ which would only be used for those who are exposed or showing symptoms rather than his coming mandated vaccine for all 330 million Americans.
People think vaxxes are free. In reality they are $ 400 a pop. Someone has to meet that cost, be it your insurer, or MediCare, MediCaid or your employer.
Do the math: we are looking at a 132 billion dollar project for a vaccine that probably cannot accomplish much anyway. This is due to how viral illnesses like influenzas mutate and therefore the vaccines in production are usually not able to keep up with the mutations. By the time the vaccine is on the market, the viral flu has already mutated.
But hey, what is 132 billions of dollars among friends, like Fauci and Gates!
The studies are listed in the reference section at the end of the paper. I think most journals require the authors to disclose any financial ties they have.
How can there be? We have only had 6 weeks to conduct such studies.
I don’t expect there to be. I’d love to see somebody who’s given hydroxychloroquine to hundreds of people with positive coronavirus tests publish criteria, other diagnostics, outcomes and basic demographics, but that’s a heck of a lot of work for docs in the trenches with this who are probably so busy they has to make an appointment to talk to themselves.
I would seriously love there to be a widely available and cheap way to keep people at elevated risk from getting sick. I’m in my late 60s with decades of autoimmune disease in the rear view mirror (and ahead of me, too. I hope.)
So far the studies haven’t panned out for mildly sick people, and that makes me worry (see previous paragraph) that the prophylactic benefit may not be there either, but for all I know maybe there’s a point of no return early in the disease after which it won’t help.
I like this:
*He’s talking about the concern, now known to have been unfounded, that ACE inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers might upregulate ACE2 and thereby make things worse in COVID-19.
I agree. But vaccines are one thing, therapeutic drug trials are another. Speaking of vitamin C, I think in the sepsis trials for IV ascorbate, the last time I looked they were up to around 40g/d as demonstrably safe (I get that people have given five or more times that with no problem other than hypoglycemia, but when you’re doing formal drug trials demonstrating safety at likely therapeutic levels has to precede therapeutic trials; even so at lower doses they were seeing some benefit of ascorbate as an adjunct in sepsis. Heck, if I were running the trials for Gates, I’d want an arm with some zinc with and without ascorbate, too.)
That said, Brazil is all in on HCQ and chloroquine phosphate and they are now standard of care there… and though for that reason no placebos, their data didn’t really support HCQ; they tried two different doses and had to terminate the high dose arm due to dangerous heart problems in the subjects.
Fascinating information in the link. Robert F. Kennedy has been tarred and feathered by the mainstream media for years. However, the detailed questions he asks about debatable aspects of vaccination programs never seem to be answered adequately, just as happens with people who raise reasonable questions about global warming.
That said, Robert’s post also provides one example of how things haven’t changed vis-a-vis the mainstream media. He provides a link for a 60 Minutes show (near the bottom of the webpage) about the 1976 Swine Flu vaccination program that subsequently resulted in 4,000 people filing injury claims against the government. An important data point that Robert may have overlooked is that this program was initiated by the Gerald Ford administration. Robert says: “P.S. Just as a reminder, here is a 60 Minutes program from over 30 years ago. This is what journalism looked like before Pharma purchased the media.” It may be true that Pharma may have increased influence nowadays, but this news report also shows how the press hasn’t changed its stripes. This screw-up occurred during a Republican administration, so Mike Wallace had free reign to question the involved officials very critically and portray them in a bad light. One can quibble whether the officials should have been questioned and portrayed the way they were. However, I am confident that, had it happened during Carter’s tenure, Wallace would have shaped the reporting and questions differently, just as the MSM did for Clinton and Obama.
Fat Chance. They care about progressive politics, clicks, wealth and power. Helping people, not so much.
Which is why I distrust climate change models. Even if a model went back and plugged in numbers from 1900 and correctly followed the climate change pattern to the present (which itself would raise red flags), predicting the future – particularly 50-100 years out – is sheer speculation. And because it cannot be falsified since the data hasn’t happened yet (hat tip to Karl Popper), it’s an unproven theory yet to be verified or rebuked.
Good way to put it. My worry is this will happen again and again, each time because of lesser and lesser communicable diseases. Finally, we’ll enter a phase of total lockdown until a vaccine is developed for the common cold, at which point we will be under full totalitarian control . . .
CarolJoy, I don’t think that this is correct. At least at the moment, I don’t know how widespread use of HCQ was in various countries. There are not low death rates in Europe. There are very high death rates in Europe, higher than anywhere else, at least based on reported deaths.
This does not mean that HCQ is either effective or ineffective. I think that more information is needed to make this determination.
My strong suspicion is that the data remains unclear. I suspect this for largely political reasons, not meaning that my politics drives my opinion, but that politics would drive reporting. If HCQ had been shown to be ineffective by solid evidence, I expect that the media would have loudly proclaimed the President’s ignorance. If HCQ had been shown to be effective by solid evidence, I expect that the President and his strong supporters would have loudly proclaimed the fact. The silence suggests uncertainty.
Sparing kids and young workers, killing the old, and destroying families that can transmit a culture outside of the State. Maybe SARS-CoV-2 was (be it a found weapon or an engineered one) originally meant to target Uyghurs and similar populations. A little more lethal and it might have inadvertently saved Social Security.
Daniel Greenfield:
And it is also true that people who were needing organ transplants have been out of luck – as only COVID situations are being dealt with. Entire clinics across the country are shutting down, as with normal numbers of surgeries for tumor removal, heart operations and the like being eliminated from hospitals, clinic admins employing these doctors and their nurses simply cannot afford to keep them employed.
The Big Money people ahve been trying for th epast three eyars to get Americans to accept robo calls instead of live doctor to patient office visists. This will perhaps be the new futur ein MAwrica – if we do not get people like Pres Trump to read the report out of Stanford University as to the fact that this virus was over hyped and should never have been treated as an illness so virulent that the entire nation should be shut down.
This study is independent: Stanford is not like Johns Hopkins who gets so much money from Bill Gates, 1.2 billion and counting, that I expect JH to make a “new better” study in just 2 weeks time.
Run time is under 8 minutes and is totally necessary to understanding the actual nature of this serious, but non-pandemic disease:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB7szRDytZY
So I went and looked at the “study” that is in pre-press status, and here is what I will tell you: these types of studies are meaningless as they will 99.9% of the time end up promoting what it is that the industry behind the study wants.
For instance, we had this type of study coming out and peer-reviewed back in the late 1990’s, when Big Oil, Di Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi wanted citizens in Calif to swallow (literally) the crap known as MTBE. Since until Gov Davis appointed his Blue Ribbon study to examine the substance, there were over 950 studies by Big Oil “proving MTBE did not present risks to people and was good for the environment to boot.
As one lobbyist told me to my face “the studies I rely on show MTBE to be so safe we could let our children brush our teeth with it.” There was only one peer-reviewed study showing MTBE was not safe, but it was done by a scientist in Italy. It was ridiculed because Americans are taught that Europeans are inferior at science research. (Not true at all.)
Had this type of collating of studies for and studies against been possible and popular in the days of Gallileo and Copernicus, we would still be saying the earth does not revolve around the sun as most of the intricate models made out of wood and hanging in chambers in the Holy Mother Church’s archbishop’s sitting rooms indicated that the sun orbited around the earth.
Anyway, as far as MTBE, humanity got lucky due to courageous Dem Gov Davis, who was willing to stand with the mostly Republican activists and take the Blue Ribbon panels advice that MTBE was a-l-l risk and n-o benefit. For that a major scandal was created and he was drummed out of office. His actions saved our air and drinking water. (At 4 parts per billion, MTBE makes H2O taste like kerosene.)
I am hoping Trump reads the Stanford study and gets us away from these “science collators” and he restores our society. It will take courage, bu t I’m hoping.
I heard today from a ER doctor in Boston interviewed by Reason TV that flu estimates are estimates and they are typically over estimated and later the ‘real’ number is revised downward
The last time I got the flu? January 2018
a lot of people with no symptoms are positive but they don’t get counted in the denominator
because they are using IHME who revises their estimates at least once a week
has nothing to do with IHME. CDC reduced estimate for flu prior to Covid outbreak.