“We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”
Oh, that 19th century Scots journalist Charles Mackay were alive and writing in these discouraging days; he would have material enough for a whole additional section in his early treatise on popular follies, investment bubbles and the psychology of large crowds of people. Because a large number of our American and European fellow humans have indeed gone stark raving bonkers over the last few years; witness the antics of the Delta Karen in abusing a fellow passenger on an airline flight – only the most recent and most egregious of such occurrences. Really, the single-layer masks are useless – so why the fury over not wearing them? Another demonstration of Covid-based madness, I guess.
This all affords to the intellectually detached among us a first-hand demonstration of popular delusions and the madness of crowds over the last two years. The blame for this appalling state of public affairs lies at the feet of three institutions, or so I surmise; first, those news organs who willfully and eagerly whipped up hysteria. Panic, fear, hysteria is always good for clicks, links, and breathless coverage. The greater the fear, panic and hysteria the better for news media ratings. It’s their method of operation, ever since the development of mass news media sometime around the early part of the 19th century. The practitioners of mass media return like a dog to their vomit at every opportunity, as Don Henley so memorably pointed out, several decades since.
The second guilty party, or parties, would be those politicians at the federal, state and city level who saw in Covid-19 and variants, also known as the Wuhan Flu or the Chinese Commie Crud an opportunity to let their inner authoritarian out for a prolonged and well-publicized romp; dictating masks, social-distancing, mandatory closures of small businesses, vaccine mandates, flat fiats against gatherings of most social, religious, and familial sorts. It has been noted, again and again, that most of these authoritarians are a little shy about applying their rulings to themselves in their personal conduct, which has certainly led us cynics observing this to conclude that they do not personally fear the Covid reaper at all. And they just might be getting a frisson of unholy joy out of laying down the law on the lesser orders. The various governors and city authorities seem to use the Commie Crud-fighting dictates as a blunt tool to batter the powerless, and remind them again, and again, of what helpless, hopeless, powerless serfs they really are.
The third guilty party is the weaponized CDC, personified by the Weasel of Wuhan, Dr. Flip-flopping Fauci and his cohorts – who, like the above-listed politicians, seems to get off on authority, and never mind the many times that he has reversed himself, or otherwise bungled his exercise of authority.
The bottom line of all this – is that we all are tired. Tired of the flip-flopping, tired of being urged to take useless precautions by authorities who have demonstrated the uselessness of them, and tired of being terrorized. Are we done with the madness, or as Charles Mackay suggested, are the masses about to hare off in pursuit of another object?
Discuss as you wish.
No chance some delusions are on the other side, with the belief that Ivermectin treats covid, or that vaccines kill people, or that this is not a lab accident but an orchestrated attempt by the PRC. Delusion all on one side, is it?
Or the belief that those who disagree must have evil motives, or are cowardly, or stupid? That’s all just fine?
@Assistant Village Idiot,
Occasionally, you post things that make me wonder if you’re merely the assistant or if, perhaps, you’re the Senior Village Idiot…
Here is a quick pro-tip for identifying which side of an argument is probably the wrong one to take: Who is hiding evidence? Who is shutting down discussion, insisting that their side is the right one?
The FDA has locked down the mRNA test information for the next 75 years. Fauci has done his best to discredit anyone dissenting with his views, which is what he’s always done, going back to the AIDS “pandemic”, which he vastly overstated.
If you listen to any of these people surrounding Fauci and the insistence on the “ongoing crisis”, without feeling the slightest sense of “WTF are they hiding?”, you’re dangerously naive, and should probably be assigned a keeper when you go out in public. There is very clearly “something not quite right” with all of this crap that’s been going on since 2019, and if you’ve not noted the odd string of “coincidences” going on with all of this, beginning with all the dissimulations and outright lies by Fauci when testifying in front of Congress? Yeesh.
I’ve no idea what has been going on, but I do not take anything these “health care professionals” tell me on blind trust. These are the people who brought you Thalidomide, DES, and the Swine Flu vaccine, if you haven’t forgotten. All of those were approved and recommended by all the best medical authorities of the time, and the people who said “Hey, wait a minute…” were all decried as horrible people, too…
Frankly, I get way too many vibes off this whole thing that remind me of the Swine Flu fiasco, only much more severe. The fact that the “vaccine” is still experimental, and you have to sign a release to get it?
That’s a clue, buddy.
Just like the 75-year delay on the FOIA requests for the underlying studies and approvals. No doubt, by the time any of this comes out and lawsuits could happen, the victims will all be dead and there won’t be anyone left with standing to sue. 75 years is not accidental or arbitrary…
The WuFlu panic-demic is a prime example of how social technocracy (mal)functions:
> Put elites on pedestals of worship and trust … poster weasel: Anthony Fauci. Poster tyrants: Cuomo, Whitmer, Newsom, Pritzker and many others … all admired by Karens and Cartmans everywhere.
> Trust “non-profit” entities over those who admit they’re out to make a HONEST buck … the above elites, as well as “healthcare heroes” (but only those who are marching in lock-step with the above elites), dancing teachers and their union
hacksleaders – at the expense of businesses and jobs.> Replace thoughtful consideration with more and more “rules”. Such as forcing everyone to get stuck – and get stuck with the consequences, good or bad – with a rushed through “vaccine”, without regard to the relatively-low threat WuFlu poses to the vast majority of us. Such as mandating mask use, even for kids, when there is no reliable evidence that they are effective in a non-clinical environment beyond the assumption that they will be effective outside the clinical environment.
> Subordinate individual rights to “the common good”, as defined by the Pedestaled. From closed businesses, arbitrarily-created obstructions to get what each of us needs, and the disruption of our kids’ educations, to the mask and vaccine mandates.
> Consider the proximity-informed insight of ordinary people unqualified to challenge the above … and therefore expect nothing more from them than to … OBEY. And do so as the Pedestaled Elite flaunts the rules for themselves – as in, parading before the cameras unmasked, as the service workers dutifully stand by in masked submission. (The pictures of the masked “help” standing to the side at the recent MET gala, as the unmasked elites like AOC and Carolyn Maloney strut in unmasked “glory”, are particularly insulting.)
Malice and conspiracy may be behind some of this … but the enabling attitudes for the above are hubris, and the entitlement that is derived from it by our Pedestaled Elite and those who hang on their every utterance.
The three most dangerous words that come from government: WE KNOW BETTER … especially when our neighbors submit to them, in blind faith.
Where there is risk, there must be choice.
As for the origins of WuFlu itself …
It is an axiom of warfare that a wounded soldier poses more of a burden upon the ongoing operations of an adversary than a KIA … for it requires resources and attention from other soldiers to meet the needs of the wounded.
If one wanted to distract their adversary (an adversary already prone to distraction, though a tendency to over-react), such that they are less capable of responding in a timely and/or effective manner to offensive action on one’s part … and wanted to do so in a way that maintains plausible deniability until the offensive action becomes a fait accompli … WuFlu would be a reasonable choice to do so. An agent that does more physical harm erodes plausible deniability and could provoke a forceful response earlier in the conflict.
If I’m right, whoever designed this bug deserves the title of “magnificent bastard” that the cinematic Patton conferred upon his adversary Rommel.
But that being said, I think that the release of WuFlu into the “wild” was accidental … because it would have made more sense, if it is a bioweapon, to release it on the cusp of an overt move on Taiwan, and from what I see the PRC was/is not yet ready to make that move. WuFlu got out too early, to be maximally effective as the distraction it could be.
And thus by the expansion of media and communication, did The Silly Season become permanent.
“WuFlu got out too early, to be maximally effective as the distraction it could be.”
That’s one of the things that I think argues against “intentional bioweapon”, to my way of thinking. In a real war, an agent that had COVID-19’s characteristics would be a nuisance, not a game changer–Look at how effectively all sides during WWI shut down information about the supposed “Spanish Influenza”, and how much more lethal was that?
The only way COVID-19 makes any sense as a bioweapon is if you postulate that the people releasing it were incredibly skilled and incredibly Machiavellian. Either that, or it’s a first-stage agent, and there’s a second “something” out there that’s going to be released that will work with either the COVID-19 agent itself, or do like is supposed with the Spanish Flu, where they think that many of the fatalities came from people who’d been infected by the earlier 1890s Russian pandemic. Either of those scenarios postulate things fairly far in advance of what we know to be the “state of the art”.
Personally, I think it was more than likely an accidental release, incompetence, and opportunism. That’s the simplest explanation, and the one I’m going to go with until I see evidence showing otherwise.
Biowarfare is one of those things that I just don’t think anyone besides a lone nutjob or small group of said nutjobs are going to partake in, because of the inherent unpredictability. Sure, looks good–Release the hounds! But, then, what do you do if your agent mutates on you, or your vaccine doesn’t work…? Way too much risk, there. I can’t see anyone but some idiot like Hitler in a bunker doing a release, and even then…? I doubt that there will be minions willing to take the risk.
One of the things that I think militates away from a planned release is how the Chinese researchers have all gone missing, and the general unpreparedness surrounding what went on in Wuhan. If it had been a “planned release”, I think it would have been, y’know… Better planned.
What we need to worry about are the after-effects, because I’m pretty sure that when the actual side-effects from the mRNA “vaccines” become apparent, the damage done to the credibility of the public health organizations is going to be immense. I can’t see how the hell there can be a benign explanation for them essentially whacking the control groups and then locking down the data and research for 75 years–The whole thing smacks of a cash grab by Big Pharma, which we know for a fact that these bastards will do–Just look at the Oxycontin mess. Also, look at how many of the same key players are involved–I haven’t seen the paperwork personally to prove it, but an acquaintance in the medical field swears on a stack of bibles that Fauci had more than peripheral involvement in the Oxycontin mess. Not sure how that could be, but said acquaintance has made other, equally outrageous statements about the whole affair that proved to be true. She was telling me for years, back in the early 2000s, that there was something hinky with the whole “Oxycontin isn’t addictive” line of BS, and that she was pretty sure that what they were doing would eventually put people in jail in the pharma industry. At the time, I was like “Yeah, but the FDA wouldn’t let them do that… That stuff has to be legit…”.
Little did I know. At this point, having read up on everything surrounding the opioid “epidemic”, there’s not a lot I’d put past the industry. Up to and including getting approval on a very risky new technology “vaccine” opportunistically.
There’s something off with all this crap. The rash of “heart conditions” showing up in European athletes, alone? Something ain’t right with this whole thing. I did a casual search the other day, satisfying curiosity–I can’t find more than one or two mentions a year of some soccer player succumbing to a “heart condition” in the news before this last year or two. Now? There’s a couple every week since they started the vaccinations with this mRNA stuff, and oddly, that’s precisely one of the issues they identified with the animal testing of this technology going as far back as the 1990s. It’s been one of the major hang-ups getting this crap approved for human use.
Would not surprise me a bit if it turns out that there’s documentation showing just how many corners were cut during the approval process. I can’t see any other reason for that 75-year lockdown.
And, as usual, what the idiot class doesn’t understand is that by obfuscating all this, they’re providing more grist for the conspiracy theorists and destroying public trust they can’t get back. Proving yet again that they can’t do proper information management in crisis… You don’t want people believing outrageous conspiracy theories? Then quit doing things that feed the credibility thereof.
“with the belief that Ivermectin treats covid”
Question–why the massive campaign to not just argue ivermectin doesn’t “work” against covid, but that it’s actually dangerous horse-paste?
“or that vaccines kill people”
Question–where’s the study to monitor vaccine health effects? Hundreds of millions of people have been vaccinated, where’s the project to track them over time to demonstrate conclusively that “anti-vaxxers” are crazy and wrong? One of the FDA panelists to approve them for kids said “We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it”–so where’s the study following up on that?
“or that this is not a lab accident but an orchestrated attempt by the PRC”
Question–why the orchestrated attempt to say that a lab leak is impossible, and that the “natural” explanation is the only possible explanation? Where’s the investigations from outside experts (i.e., not including people like Fauci and Daszak who have motives not to look to closely at the Wuhan lab) into what actually might have happened? Why are those who look into the lab leak hypothesis slandered and attacked?
So many other questions…mostly at this point the question is why the unprecedented push to vaccinate every single person of any age with these mRNA vaccines? There’s never been a vaccine that gets anywhere near 100% usage. Where’s the push to approve non-mRNA vaccines, which would undoubtedly be accepted by many of the current people who refuse to get jabbed? The claim is often made that they don’t “work” as well as the mRNA ones, but that’s pretty much out the window at this point. Which brings up the question of where do Alex Berenson and others go to get their reputations back, after being banned from social media for saying things that we all now are supposed to say we’ve always known, like the vaccines don’t prevent transmission or infection for anything more than a brief time, etc.
As to the bio-war hypothesis — it all depends on what the objective of releasing the Covid Chaos was.
As an actual battlefield agent, Covid is of course pointless. But allied to the rather obvious situation that much of the media and Political Class know their bread is buttered on the Chinese side, it makes sense.
Look at what has happened from the hypothesized release of something broadly comparable to a bad flu, along with a deliberate program of hyping up the threat. Western media focused on it, changing the meaning of words (such as “case”, “vaccine”) and creating Project Fear. The Western world shut down lots of industry, commerce, and schools; flooded their economies with inflationary printed “money”; created large scale distrust in their own governments. End result — we are all now much more dependent on Chinese imports for everything. Meanwhile, China’s industry is booming.
Let’s just say — if Covid was an accident, the Chinese Communist Party leaders have done an excellent job of taking advantage of it. The West is now much less able to resist whatever China decides it wants.
}}} with the belief that Ivermectin treats covid, or that vaccines kill people, or that this is not a lab accident but an orchestrated attempt by the PRC. Delusion all on one side, is it?
Who are you, and what happened to the real AVI?
1 — MY doctor asserts that the evidence says Ivermectin is a valid treatment. And he is hardly the only MEDICAL DOCTOR who asserts this, including doctors with plenty of research creds to back up having an opinion in favor of it to make it NOT “a delusion”..
2 — I haven’t asked the former blogger and MD-Dr. “Dr. Sanity” what her position is on Ivermectin, but she does assert that she would have no issue with prescribing HcQ, which has a long history of being used to treat Lupus, and (her words, if I recall them correctly:) “has a well known list of side effects which are quite manageable” — and is thus hardly the “dangerous drug” that certain politically-driven agenda groups — many in government positions benefiting from control over the population as well as funding — have attempted to paint it as.
3 — I neither agree nor disagree with the notion that WuFlu was deliberately released by the PRC. I think there is inadequate evidence to suggest even a strong conclusion. Given the history of people in our own government in the past on various occasions, however, NO, I have no issues with merely entertaining the notion that it was a deliberate action on their part. It hardly drifts into tin-foil hat territory, such as the Trade-Center-as-bombing or Moon-Flight-Hoax. The argument that 911 was a government operation does not hold water. Is it *possible* there were some inklings of it known to government? Yes, it certainly is. Did Bush deliberately not act on them? Yes, it’s possible. Is there any evidence whatsoever to support that? No, there is not. But it is still possible it was **allowed** even if it cannot be demonstrated as likely (but there is no justification for the argument that it was an actual government op) — and that is where the China-intentionally-released idea lies — It’s possible, but no one has presented any evidence to that end.
So, offhand — the delusions are entirely yours.
Because of your two counter-assertions, one is ridiculously incorrect even on the basis of a casual examination of available evidence and recognition of the bonafides of some of the professionals who support it, and the other is hardly ruled out by either the behavior of past governments nor the behavior of “this” government (i.e., the PRC), which has been known to commit plenty of highly questionable acts against its OWN people, much less the rest of the world…
If you’re the real AVI, shame on you for such muddle-headed thinking.
The cynic would note that just as the tolerance of some in the West for the Covid Lock Downs is reaching breaking point, China’s Communist leaders have instituted a very strict Lock Down in the city of Xi’an. That is a city bigger than London — but only one of many cities bigger than London in China, containing less than 1% of China’s population.
Any Western politician who was wavering about the need to continue the Lock Downs is going to have her spine stiffened by this suitably-amplified Bad News coming out of Xi’an.
The cynic would not be surprised to learn later (much later!) that Xi’an also happens to be the source for some critical import required by the West.
AVI,
I really don’t know if Ivermectin or HQL work against kung flu.
I do known that hundreds of billions of doses have been taken of both over the past 40-50 years. I do know both are available cheaply, @10-20 cents a dose,
with no prescription in many countries around the world.
I do know that they have both been approved and are in common use, by prescription, in the US.
In other words they are safe.
Yet the govt goes to great lengths, including lawsuits, threatening to pull licenses.
Why? It can’t hurt, it might help even if only placebo effect.
If govt had said something like “we have no evidence that it works, we have not approved it and don’t recommend it. But if your doctor wants to try it, knock yourself out.”
If they don’t work there would have been a flurry of usage for a month or two. Non-efficacy would be apparent and use would have tailed off.
Otoh, if it turned out that they did work, it would have torpedoed the entire vaccine program and the hundreds of billions of of dollars involved.
The govt approach seems designed to encourage conspiracy theories.
So do you think ivermectin /hql should be permitted, although perhaps discouraged?
Or do you favor the current approach and why?
Just sayin’
Kung flu death rates per million population per worldometer just now
World – 697
USA – 2,522
China – 3 (not a typo)
Perhaps just a coincidence but China also has a DNA database with 50-75 million samples (or more?) of us citizen DNA. Thanks 23 & Me et al. We not only gave them our DNA, we paid them for the privilege.
Saying there might be a relation between the 2622, 697 and 3 is just the crazy talk of conspiracy nutters.
Taiwan has death rate of 36.
For the record, I don’t think anyone here normally has “evil motives, is cowardly, or stupid,” however much I might disagree with their points of view. But I’m relatively new here and have much to learn.
In Gavin’s plausible scenario, the key corner has been turned: Western elites and experts have no credibility. If anyone is around in a few centuries to write about it, 2019-20 might be seen as an equivalent to 1914-18 or 1939-45 in the discrediting of said elites and experts, so even if the Wuhan Lungscunge isn’t part of a ChiCom master plan the damage has only begun.
(I got “Ivan’s War” by Merridale in paperback for Christmas; “Stalin’s War” will have to wait until the little bugs have spoken.)
they had to proscribe therapeutics in order to force the eua, they couldn’t do it otherwise, you get bits and pieces, the outbreak worked well against those countries that had concessions in prerevolutionary china, iran was just the pass through,of course I’ve pointed out Nyberg’s conjecture on Hao Tchian, the emeritus military figure in the politburo fwiw,
Y’know… Point just occurred to me. If, and I do not take that as a given, if COVID is easily treatable with Ivermectin or HcQ, that makes an interesting datapoint to analyze from the standpoint of “Was this engineered, or not…?”.
Let’s say you want to achieve the effects that you’ve achieved, so far with this. You want to cripple the West, in retribution for whatever. So, you manipulate things such that your disease agent is easily treated with available drugs, and then vilify those drugs in the West for treating it through your captured agents… While retaining those drugs utility for your own and other populations.
Plausible? Don’t ask me, but it would be interesting to know whose marching orders the Western media are actually following. The whole Ivermectin/HcQ thing has puzzled me since the beginning. Surely, there must be a reason this stuff appears to work in India and Africa, no? Why doesn’t it work in the studies we’ve done, many of which seem designed to discredit the treatments, rather than follow the protocols used in India and Africa…?
All of this is suspicious, calibrated even. You don’t want paranoia, Mr. Big Government Believer? Then, don’t feed it.
if it is a bioweapon, to release it on the cusp of an overt move on Taiwan, and from what I see the PRC was/is not yet ready to make that move. WuFlu got out too early, to be maximally effective as the distraction it could be.
I keep suggesting that people read Tom Clancy’s novel “Rainbow Six.” He does a pretty good job of describing how a biowar attack would work. He also includes a scenario where enviro Nazis would have a motive to stage one.
I have no experience with Ivermectin but agree the opposition is peculiar I don’t trust the AMA one second and, after reading Scott Atlas’ book, “A Plague on our House,” I don’t trust anyone at the FDA or NIH. My wife takes HCQ for rheumatoid arthritis and we both took it when she had Covid in 2020. She has chronic immunodeficiency and spent three days in hospital with it, but recovered, I did not get it.
The whole reaction of government is peculiar. Early on, there was great fear from stories of high death numbers in Italy. Later it became clear that most were in people over 80 years old. All along this virus has affected the elderly and the obese while leaving young healthy people mostly alone and there is no evidence of any risk to children. In this respect, the virus resembles Polio, which does not affect small children. Chickenpox is another example. It is benign in young children but lethal after puberty. My wife got it when she was 16 and was critically ill for weeks.
Atlas’ advice, when finally called on for help, was to isolate elderly and high risk people. He recommended no society shutdown except the elderly. Dr Birx was the angel of death who kept going around the country advising Governors to shut their state down. Finally some Governors refused to see her. Trump agreed with Atlas’ advice but his administration was obsessed with the danger of firing Birx and Fauci.
It is a shame that this illness has been so politicized, which I attribute to the rage at Trump by the bureaucracy and the media.
italy was actually two of those concessionaries, venice and genoa, they had taken out salvini who was the critic of chinese domination in the tuscan region, the replacement went right along with the mandates
as I say, the lockdowns were decided upon in october 2019, all the key players imperial college, which generated the phony numbers john hopkins, who rockefeller foundation were part of this public health appalachin,
The COVID Karens (and Cartmans) in positions of authority respond as they have, because they have marketed themselves as Messianic – that they alone can save us, and not just from COVID. They are driven to play the hero, right over top of our lives.
The problem for them is that they know they eventually will be held to that Messianic standard, and face a fork in the road … do they continue to intervene, even if they burn down the village to save it … or do they admit the truth of their limitations,. that each of us have to deal with the presence of this virus, and lose the trust needed to maintain their authority in all areas of our society.
Either way, they lose – the difference is how much WE lose by (f_____g up and) trusting them in grand Flounderian fashion.
The strongest argument I can think of against an intentional release by China is the absolutely insane 0-covid policy. I have read that Xi’an was locked down for 127 cases. Other sources (that I can’t confirm myself) claim that there are or will very shortly be 300-400 million unemployed in China. The implosion of Evergrande and now others represent not just the loss of the life savings of millions but many that bought properties that will never be built will be on the hook for the mortgage on these same phantom properties for the rest of their life. Something is getting ready to blow and it won’t be pretty. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chinese experiment with Communism only outlasts the Russian 70 years by three or four years.
Here’s an article talking about some of the secondary effects of the lockdowns and quarantines:
https://gcaptain.com/more-supply-chain-chaos-expected-as-omicron-forces-transport-workers-to-quit/
Gavin,
Not sure it is pointless as a warfighting tool. It did take out more than 10 percent of our active carrier fleet, probably 50 percent of our westpac carrier fleet, for 2 months.
The roosevelt offloaded 4000 crew in Guam and went into cold iron status (to the extent a nuke can)
Had something happened, like an invasion of Taiwan by klingons the navy might have decided screw covid, let’s get underweigh, it still would have taken at least 12 hours to raise enough steam to get away from the docks.
It would take a week or two to get operational.
And during that 12 hours to get underweigh, it is a dead in the water sitting duck.
Carriers are incredibly fragile. Hard to sink, sure. But a single bomb or missile in the right place on the flight deck will put it out of operation for airplanes for months if not years.
Currently we have a Little Crappy Ship (lcs) out of action for a couple weeks at Gitmo.
I wish there were some sort of expert* who was trustworthy enough to explain whether there’s any there there in stories like this:
https://twitter.com/ydeigin/status/1471249247249080323
“Wow, pretty compelling case for Omicron to have come from mice. The big question — lab mice or wild mice. Can’t help but remember MA15, mouse-adapted SARS1. Took just 15 passages. ”
From a preprint linked in that post:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.14.472632v1.full.pdf
“Collectively, our results suggest that the progenitor of Omicron jumped from humans to
28 mice, rapidly accumulated mutations conducive to infecting that host, then jumped back
29 into humans, indicating an inter-species evolutionary trajectory for the Omicron outbreak.”
Which sure sounds to me like a lab experiment. Along with the fact that Omicron appears to be a mutation of the original alpha/Wuhan strain, rather than Delta. Which means what? Someone made a non-lethal version in order to try to end this? Honestly, there’s nothing I’ll rule out after the last few years…
* that expert can’t be Dr. Robert Malone, since he’s apparently just been banned from twitter. Kind of amazing they let him last this long, to be honest.
To Michael point about chicken pox, last summer when delta appeared cdc tried warning us it was as contagious as chicken pox.
That lasted for a week until people realized that while chicken pox was highly contagious, it was not deadly at all.
In a typical year, 4,000,000 people would get it. Virtually everyone who had not had it. Of that 4mm, 100 would be hospitalized and 10 would die.
When a kid got it, parents would send their own kids over to get infected an immunized.
CDC quickly realized their error and killed the cparodpn before pe realized delta was contagious but not dangerous.
If I knew someone had omicron I would go hang out with th hoping to get it
The 4mm was before the vaccine was developed in the 80s
Closer to zero now
A video interview on Covid therapy. HCQ and Ivermectin are discussed and I recommend AVI watch this.
https://rumble.com/vqt3p6-jre-1747-dr.-peter-mccullough.html
My kids had chickenpox when my youngest was about 4 months old. He didn’t get it as he still had circulating antibodies from his mother. Three years later he got it.
Chicken pox was an early case of a vaccine that wasn’t about a kid’s own safety at all. It’s about keeping kids from getting sick, when there was a critical mass of families without a stay at home parent. Our society has completely broken priorities.
Oh, the chicken-pox – it began circulating among the dependent kids at Zaragoza AB when my daughter was about nine or ten. When I heard that it was going through the dependent school like a wildfire, I applied for leave – for two or three weeks beginning on the day when my daughter first showed symptoms. She had it, eventually – I think all the kids did, that year. When my leave was up, and she was still showing unhealed spots, a friend of ours with small children offered to babysit, hoping that her own kids would contract it from my daughter.
The most devastating thing about the Chinese Commie Crud, though – is the realization that the CDC have been lying to us, all the way along, that the establishment news media is all about fomenting and encouraging panic … and that our political rulers are using that panic for their own vile purposes.
On the plus side, Sgt. Mom… Look at it like this: They’ve expended their credibility in all of this, and to what real end? We still don’t know, but the fact is that they’re going to experience more and more difficulty keeping the pretense up. The majority of the public is seeing behind the Potemkin village that is our governing class, and they do not like what they see.
Which is one reason I say “Bring it on; let it burn…”, because so long as the idiot elite can keep the charade going on, nothing can be done. The implosion of their credibility is of their own doing, and the long-term effects are not going to be beneficial to their interests.
Decentralization and removal of power from these centric hierarchical systems can only benefit the average person, and they’re making that almost inevitable by their overreach.
Decentralization and removal of power from these centric hierarchical systems can only benefit the average person, and they’re making that almost inevitable by their overreach.
The primary obstruction to that, is the fear ordinary folks will feel when confronted with having to make the decisions in – and live with the consequences of – managing their own lives, unbuffered by the actions of the Pedestaled Elite.
They have been told for so long that Smart People™ can always make better decisions than they can, they have sold themselves short like they were shares of GameStop … and the fear of failing without the buffer in place is in their minds.
But that IS the way out of this mess … getting ordinary people to build trust in their own proximity-and-consequence-informed insights and NOT delegate their decisions to others – even if that looks like more risk and effort for them – is essential to diminish the power of the Pedestaled and engage the distributed intellect of hundreds of millions in solving the problems right around them.
Kirk – the most plausible hypothesis I’ve seen for the Ivermectin success in India/Africa but not the west was posited by Scott Alexander (of Slate Star Codex) :
1) Parasitic worms are a significant co-morbidity for COVID
2) Worms are an issue in India/Africa but not the West
3) Ivermectin clears the parasites early in the infection
4) Patient heals normally, as they have no other co-morbidities.
This is just a hypothesis of course, But it is a plausible explanation for the data.
“They have been told for so long that Smart People™ can always make better decisions than they can, they have sold themselves short like they were shares of GameStop … and the fear of failing without the buffer in place is in their minds.”
What’s going on here is exactly what you’re positing: The Smart People are making it abundantly clear that they’re not smart, are barely “people”, and are entirely unnecessary. When the “Smart People” are telling you that boys are girls, and there’s no harm in having the sexually confused teenage male sharing the same hygiene spaces with your young daughter…? How long do you think people are going to “keep on believing…”?
I think we’re gonna be lynching a lot of these so-called “Smart People” in job lots before mid-century. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t see them pulling out of the nosedive they’ve put themselves into. It took me years to lose my respect and deference towards these creatures, but lose it I did, and they are never getting that back. Ever.
I’m kinda reaching that point with these people, that when they start discussing “woke issues”, I do what Hanns Johst’s character said in his play… “Wenn ich Kultur höre…entsichere ich meinen Browning”. Substitute “woke” for “Kultur”, and you’ve got a pretty good rule of thumb for dealing with these cretins.
And, yeah… I know who it was that said that, what he was, what he did. But, correct is correct, regardless of source. These people declared war on the rest of us a long, long time ago, and it’s about time that we recognized that fact and began fighting back.
@phwest,
I’ve seen the same things, read the same papers. I think there’s a good chance he’s right, but we need to do the work to prove it.
The problem with all this is that the cretins running things have made their decisions about what they are doing not based on evidence, but on ideology. That’s been a recipe for disaster since forever. I think they’re going to go down in history as having killed an awful lot of people.
If we want to talk about the madness of crowds, what about the “Green” “Energy Transition” — where Germany has shut down nuclear power plants and is dependent on Russia for gas to keep industry going and stop from freezing this winter. Sun don’t shine much in Germany in winter time, so those expensive imported Chinese solar panels don’t give much power — especially at night.
The problems have been absolutely obvious from the day the so-called “Green” movement (aka Who gives a tinker’s damn about those Black kids suffering in African cobalt mines?) kicked off. Yet here the Germans are. And they are only the first to go over the cliff.
For extra credit — Will the German Political Class go nose-to-nose with gas-supplier Russia over Ukraine?
Lots of discussion in a follow-up post to Alexander’s not-really-all-that-serious proposal
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/higlights-from-the-comments-on-ivermectin
This is another case where I just don’t understand why there hasn’t been a massive amount of data collected in serious studies. Vast amounts of people in America have taken it as both a prophylactic and treatment, where is the research? Why hasn’t a fraction of the energy spent throwing around “horse paste” slanders been spent on actually proving it’s so worthless?
Oh, I dunno, Brian… Maybe because they don’t want to actually find out? There’s too much profit to be made with the current “treatment” regime, which really isn’t one at all?
See, that’s a tell: There is not a damn thing out there about a standard treatment program for the infected. It’s all “Go home, return when you’re dying…”. D’ya think that maybe we could do a little better, in this day and age? I mean, at least the Spanish Flu victims got treated, even if it was overdosing them with the then-new wonder-drug aspirin…
Just on the outward indicators that any intelligent layperson can make out for themselves, something heinous is going on in the background of all this. Venal incompetence? Corruption? Conspiracy? Who the ‘eff knows, but there is something not at all right about any of this crap going on around us. The longer we remain in denial of that fact, the longer it will go on.
Fauci and Birx need to both be put up in front of tribunals and charged with all the outrageous incompetence that they’ve demonstrated, along with the lying. The fact that he’s actually admitted that he lied from the beginning about masking means he cannot be trusted, and should be fired and dealt with criminally. And, that’s just the barest outline of what we know from open-source information in the news…
Yeah, it was a rhetorical question. The system is completely corrupt and broken. No one who ever wants another NIH grant is going to risk being labeled a horse paste promoting kook.
test
Given the apparently long-term and broad use of some of these medicines on subgroups of the American population, has anyone seen how those subgroups fared? For instance, is the rate of contagion, hospitalization and death from Covid higher or lower among those with lupus? Like the child mortality rates (with or from Covid, accompanied by what co-morbidities?), these would seem to be observations on efficacy, danger, etc. that could be derived from already available data. This information seems to be controlled rather than seen as a rich mine of information and the consensus seems more manufactured than earned. Also wonder how much D deficiency has been correlated – or if it is tested for in patients with covid.
“ they had to proscribe therapeutics in order to force the eua, they couldn’t do it otherwise, you get bits and pieces, the outbreak worked well against those countries that had concessions in prerevolutionary china, iran was just the pass through,of course I’ve pointed out Nyberg’s conjecture on Hao Tchian, the emeritus military figure in the politburo fwiw,”
My thoughts exactly. One of the legal prerequisites for an Experimental Use Authorization (EUA) is that there be no effective therapeutics. None of the vaccines in use in this country have undergone full FDA testing, and been approved by them for general release as vaccines. Instead, they are (only) available under EUAs. And this probably won’t change anytime in the near future, because these vaccines all appear to be extraordinarily dangerous, when compared to traditional FDA approved vaccines. While VAERS appears to be logging only a tiny portion of the adverse side effects from these vaccines, they are still recording 100x the normal number of adverse side effects overall, as compared to pre-COVID-19 vaccine years. With a third jab, we are seeing elite athletes dropping like flies from myocarditis and the like. But under an EUA, this is just fine. Saving millions of lives (theoretically) was deemed by the public health bureaucrats as being better than maybe tens of thousands (maybe – we have no way of knowing the magnitude on either side) through the vaccinations. As long as these drug companies can hold onto their EUAs, while continuing to manufacture and sell their vaccines, they can’t be sued for the deaths caused by those vaccines.
I’m not sure what to make of this, it appears to be a legitimate article, via Robert Malone, now banned from twitter.
https://www.thecentersquare.com/indiana/indiana-life-insurance-ceo-says-deaths-are-up-40-among-people-ages-18-64/article_71473b12-6b1e-11ec-8641-5b2c06725e2c.html
(The Center Square) – The head of Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica said the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people.
“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”
OneAmerica is a $100 billion insurance company that has had its headquarters in Indianapolis since 1877. The company has approximately 2,400 employees and sells life insurance, including group life insurance to employers in the state.
Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.
Doesn’t surprise me a bit.
If I had to speculate as to what is causing it, I’d first look to the decrease in medical care because of COVID, and people not going in for medical issues they might have taken care of, pre-COVID. That’s likely at least a part of it, but I doubt highly that it is the sole cause, or even the biggest.
That, my friends, I strongly suspect would be the “vaccines”. They’re doing a massive, massive experiment on the general public, and I suspect that the outcome ain’t going to be either benign or insignificant. New technology like this mRNA medical device should have never been deployed in the questionable and widespread way that they forced on it. I have to blame Fauci and the rest of the cabal surrounding him and the “Big Pharma” companies, and I can only hope that the fools left some smoking guns to be found for the eventual tribunals.
A 40% increase in the death rate in that demographic ain’t chicken feed. It’d be highly ironic if the vaccines turned a new variety of the common cold into an actual “bring out your dead” pandemic.
IMO, the biggest guilty party are the masses themselves that yearn for a life with Zero Risk. Without them, the others would have no ground in which to plant their fear and no fertilizer to grow the state.
I don’t know why I’ve never before heard anyone suggest life insurance companies as the best way to track excess deaths, they’ve got the ultimate “skin in the game” to track that accurately…Kind of obvious once it’s pointed out…
The Economist has been tracking excess deaths in a range of countries; useful to compare with the insurance company data.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
Brian: “they’ve got the ultimate “skin in the game” to track that accurately”
Good point. However, let’s remember that a 40% increase in what should be a small number (premature deaths in younger people) is still a small number.
On the other hand, in terms of “Years of Quality Life Lost’, any increase in deaths among younger people would likely outweigh the years lost by accelerated deaths among the old & sick.
The lack of meaningful data makes it very difficult to get understanding & consensus.
Gavin: The very next line from the article says:
“Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.”
I wish I was still in contact with that friend I had back in the 1990s who went into actuarial science. Conversation with him was filled with all these disturbing little anecdotes he’d gleaned from his studies, and I’m sure that if he’s still around and paying attention, he’d be able to wring vast meaning from many of these reported stats.
My guess is that they’re actively suppressing as much of this as they can, or at least, doing their level best to obfuscate it.
If the numbers really are that high, and the idiots are trying to hide it, that’s only going to work for so long, and then the whole thing is going to come out and blow up in their faces. I honestly think that what we’re witnessing here is the mass unknowing suicide of the “expert class”, who’ve been coasting along on the reputation earned by their predecessors, and who are now faced with having to solve actual problems themselves. They’re not up to it, and that fact is made more and more apparent by the way they keep hiding things and trying to silence critics. Confident people who know what the hell they’re doing do not do that–You only resort to outright fraud and intimidation when you know you’re in the wrong, and have no choice unless you want things to come out. They are riding tigers, and have no idea of how to dismount.
I remember saying to someone back when Obama won his first election, something to the effect that he’d have to perform, now, and that his incompetence would soon be demonstrated. Turns out, I was wrong, but with Biden…? I think we’re seeing Obama’s third term, and what’s happened is that it’s finally caught up with them all. I figure that they’re going to try imposing price controls by this fall, and we’re gonna be full-bore early 1970s, like back when Biden first went to Congress. Apparently, he’s spent his entire career trying to reprise his early days, only this time around, as a farce.
Brian: “Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic”
Two views. One view — this increase in the deaths of young people is very unusual, far different from what was seen in the past. (Excluding war deaths, presumably). We agree — it is unusual, and presumably it has a cause.
Other view — The number of younger people dying in any (peacetime) year is low. It is a small number. Thus, the frightening 40% increase may not translate to a large number of additional deaths. If 5 people in a particular age range in a particular insurance group would historically have been expected to die in 2021, and 7 people actually died — that is a 40% increase.
Those views are not mutually exclusive. And of course any additional deaths are bad, especially of younger people. But without reliable data — about the past as well as the present — tracking down the cause could be difficult enough to allow Fauci to skate.
The whole reason why insurance companies can exist is that they get large enough groups of customers that they can predict pretty darn well what’s going to happen. If they had 40% swings from year to year they’d all go out of business very quickly.
Here’s national statistics for age-group death rates in 2018/9.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db395.htm#section_3
Very little change at all for any pre-retirement age group, except for 2.3% for 35-44 (already due to opioids, I wonder?).
It will be very curious to see the numbers for 2020 and 2021…
And now this from researchers affiliated with Kaiser Permanente:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268209v1
Risk of Myopericarditis following COVID-19 mRNA vaccination in a Large Integrated Health System: A Comparison of Completeness and Timeliness of Two Methods
Conclusion We identified additional valid cases of myopericarditis following an mRNA vaccination that would be missed by the VSD’s search algorithm, which depends on select hospital discharge diagnosis codes. The true incidence of myopericarditis is markedly higher than the incidence reported to US advisory committees. The VSD should validate its search algorithm to improve its sensitivity for myopericarditis.
So basically life insurance and health insurance companies, with actual skin in the game, are starting to sound the alarm about these vaccines. Go ahead and blow this off as nothing, we’re used to it.
From the Kaiser Permanente link:
“The encounter methodology identified 14 distinct patients … Among those who received a second dose of vaccine (n=146,785), we estimated a risk as 95.4 cases of myopericarditis per million second doses administered (95% CI, 52.1 to 160.0).”
First — agreed that this is an issue which should be taken seriously, but is probably being swept under the carpet.
Second — my pet peeve about people (including doctors) who know how to push a button on Excel but do not think about what they are doing. They had a group of 14 — and extrapolate that to the first decimal place, when even Excel tells them that the answer might be between 52 and 160, or maybe outside that range. False precision!
Third — my other pet peeve about lack of context. In their study group, 1 person in 10,000 who got a second dose of the “vaccine” showed symptoms. What would have been the comparable rate among people who did not get injected? It is very unlikely to have been Zero, simply because of the vicissitudes of health.
The negative consequences of the “vaccines” on otherwise healthy people are not nothing, and should be taken seriously. I just wish we had better data (which is a challenge) and better analysis (which should be much more feasible).
Brian, the handwriting has been on the wall for the last two years. This was a “bad flu”, for all intents and purposes. We responded to it in an unprecedented way because of politics, and the manipulation of circumstance by interests in our government and foreign governments, with the intent of driving the outsider (Trump) from office. Whatever they had to do, they did. The vaccines were an opportunistic grab for money, and to get a lucrative cash cow going with the mRNA approval, which ain’t ready for prime-time, if it ever will be.
When this all boils out, the denouement is going to be ugly. I think what they’re going to find is that this mRNA technology should never have been approved, period, and that all those who were involved in the vaccination mandates are going to be screwed to the wall the way the Sacklers should have been. People are going to die and/or have their health radically impaired from this BS, and someone is going to have to pay.
My guess is that the next ten years will see a radical change in the governance of this country, with most of the current oligarchy finding themselves out of work and in prison for their malfeasance. Something this big and deeply destructive cannot be swept under the carpet, and when people finally wrap their heads around the magnitude of it all, there will be hell to pay.
Stupid bastards. All the way ’round. I feel more and more justified in avoiding anything to do with this crap, and I’m just profoundly disturbed on behalf of the more trusting members of my immediate family who went out and got their shots as soon as they were available.
Mark my words: This is going to make the free-for-alls over Thalidomide, DES, the Swine Flu vaccine and the opioid crisis combined look like minor issues by comparison. And, what’s going to make it worse? The more they try to hide it, and the more they try to sweep it under the carpet, the bigger the eventual blow-up over it will be. You’ll know the capper is coming the day they start running stories in the papers crediting Donald Trump and Operation Warp Speed with the vaccines, which will be right before the really damning evidence comes out…
Stupid bastards own this, though…
I’m pretty sure you’re completely wrong, Kirk. The system is the very definition of Too Big To Fail. Higher rates of health problems will be chalked up to climate change, pollution, covid infections and/or “long covid”, etc. Only crazies will point to vaccines. There’s no way the average person will be capable of accepting the truth, and no one respectable will want to implicate the system.
You’ll know the capper is coming the day they start running stories in the papers crediting Donald Trump and Operation Warp Speed with the vaccines, which will be right before the really damning evidence comes out…
Except Trump – in arguably the greatest example of respect for federalism in my lifetime – didn’t impose a mandate to take the vax. And he wasn’t stuck on the vax being the ONLY solution.
Unlike his opponents. Because of their mandates and their vax-only focus, Kirk, you are right – they own this.
I think what they’re going to find is that this mRNA technology should never have been approved, period, and that all those who were involved in the vaccination mandates are going to be screwed to the wall the way the Sacklers should have been. People are going to die and/or have their health radically impaired from this BS, and someone is going to have to pay.
I tend to agree in principal but the Deep State takes care of its own. As far as I am concerned, my wife and I got the Moderna vaccine early but she got a classic case of Covid in June 2020, a year before the vaccine was available. She has chronic immunity problems but no reaction to the vaccine. Her case of Covid cost her 3 days in hospital but no ICU, etc. Maybe that was because we were both taking HCQ.
I’m not worried about long term consequences because I’m almost 84 and she is 77. I will not want my three grandkids vaccinated and their father has said he will take them out of state if mandatory vaxx for school is instituted in CA. My other son, who is a lefty, has been vaxxed and boosted and got Covid over Christmas. His two kids, who I never see, have also been vaxxed and freaked out when they found he had it. They are beyond my help.