By Patricia McCarthy, AMERICAN THINKER
One of the left’s standard attacks on the President is that he doesn’t listen to the science! Sadly, he did listen to the so-called experts who predicted wildly hyperbolic death and destruction and he agreed to the economic shutdown.
“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” – Niels Bohr
The President surely realizes by now that he should have operated on his gut instincts which rarely fail him. Dr. Fauci, for example, sees no patients. He looks at computer models, all of which were wrong. Dr. Birx probably has more hands-on experience, but she too recommended closing up the nation. They were wrong.
Governor Cuomo was wrong when he whined that he needed 40,000 ventilators and thousands more hospital beds. Trump provided everything he demanded, but they were not needed. Cuomo has no common sense and sent Covid-positive patients into nursing homes rather than the Navy hospital ship or either of the two other Army-engineered field hospitals. This one order caused the deaths of fragile elderly people. Cuomo’s handling of the crisis in his city has been disastrous on every front. His state was the least prepared for such an event after bragging that New York was ready. It was not.
At every press briefing on the pandemic, the scientists to whom Trump has been listening have presented their data upon which the President has relied. But the numbers extrapolated from their models were all wrong. And now this mass hysteria that has brought the American economy to a full stop is devastating millions and millions of Americans.
Our Democrat politicians and the members of the media who show up at those briefings uninformed, aiming only to entrap the President, haven’t missed a paycheck or lost a dime. The millions of small businesses that have been shut down, many of them permanently, do not seem to enter their minds.
They have embraced this virus as though they’ve won the lottery; it’s another crisis they mean to exploit in every way possible. Their essential talking point? Blame Trump and claim he is ignoring science. That they think they are convincing anyone with half a brain would be amusing if it were not so deadly serious. Oh, they are convincing the uninformed, the headline readers, but our media is well and deservedly loathed by all thinking persons for good reasons.
So invested in concealing the actual science, YouTube took down a fascinating press conference held by two doctors in California about what they are seeing in their ER rooms. Their science was declared “misinformation” by the powers that be at Google/YouTube and they removed it because it deviated from the official talking points of the WHO. You can still see it here. Google/YouTube pretends that what the WHO says is legitimate when we and they surely know it is not; it is China that controls that institution.
We are perilously close to losing the rights guaranteed by our First Amendment – speech, religion and assembly. Zuckerberg is upfront about wanting the government’s approval of censorship of anything with which they disagree — which means anything remotely conservative. The Atlantic magazine has virtually become a voice of China’s communist party, as has Bill Gates. It was his Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) that provided the models on which Drs. Fauci and Birx advised the shutdown of the country. So much for science. Pelosi throws the word around with abandon as if her party’s assertions that Trump has ignored it will stick.
But all those Americans who have been watching the briefings know the opposite is true; it is the science that has been faulty.
“Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.” (Michael Crichton)
It’s time for all the governors who care about their citizens to put an end to the lockdown. The longer it stays in place, the more permanent damage is done. It will turn out to be the biggest national mistake in US history, thanks to “the science.” President Trump needs to go back to trusting his own good instincts, for they are more dependable than the faulty science that has undergirded this fiasco. The fatalities are not very different from the seasonal flu last year or the year before.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” (Christopher Hitchens)
Trump banned flights from China after only one death here and was eviscerated for it. But that single act probably saved thousands of Americans from becoming ill with the virus. But the shelter-in-place orders were very likely ordered in error, not just because of inflated computer models but for the science of immunity. It may be setting up all those who sheltered to be vulnerable once released from their house arrest. Immunity always is derived from exposure, from letting our immune systems prepare for the inevitable attacks from countless viruses that surround us. The doctors from California were stating what George Carlin had to say in his 2009 comedy act on germs.
No doubt most of us have learned by now that doctors around the country are being pressured by their hospitals to classify any death throughout this event as a Covid death, no matter how many or how serious their underlying conditions may have been and, in some cases, even if they have not been tested for the virus. Not very scientific to pad the number of deaths; suddenly few are dying of heart disease, diabetes, pneumonia, stroke, etc. Many of those who have passed away during this pandemic will most likely be counted as a Covid death. That is due to politics – more deaths for which to blame Trump — and financial; hospitals receive more money for every Covid death.
This will all soon be over, but the lockdown should never have been put in place and should be over today. Those most vulnerable to the illness should remain quarantined but they need not be isolated from their families if basic precautions are observed.
This has all been a very unscientific scam, an avenue for the left to institutionalize their socialist agenda, to destroy the ability of millions of Americans to support themselves and their families. Make them dependent on the government. Control what they can say publicly and online. This is all the stuff of fascism, not science.
President Trump rose to this occasion, confronted the ludicrous CDC and FDA regulations that initially prevented unapproved labs from distributing tests. The bitter media tried their best to undermine the use of hydroxychloroquine simply because Trump mentioned it as a possible cure; it is one of several. The same media trashed every study that proved it is very viable cure. It is the media and the Democrats who reject or ignore any “science” that conflicts with their political agenda.
@ dreuveni:
“Doctors are reporting bizarre, unsettling cases. They describe patients with startlingly low oxygen levels – so low that they would normally be unconscious or near death – talking and swiping on their phones. Asymptomatic pregnant women suddenly in cardiac arrest. Patients who by all conventional measures seem to have mild disease deteriorating within minutes and dying at home.
“Some of these abnormalities may be explained by severe changes in patients’ blood…
“COVID-19 autopsies have shown some people’s lungs filled with hundreds of microclots…”
— https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/04/covid-19-is-causing-blood-problems-in-patients.html
With the dems everything is emotional in particular when they are the perpetrators!
The only relevant cause of death is retrieved by executing a post mortem. Unfortunately, due to various trumped up reasons, no, or very few PMs have actually been performed. This means that any death that might, by any stretch of the imagination, be associated with COVID-19 has been bundled into the toll. As told in the article, there is a very implausible reduction in the number of “usual” causes of death such as heart diseases, diabetes etc, because they are being reported as COVID-19 deaths.
We all urgently need to get both feet back firmly on the ground and use our (maybe) not so common sense to figure out what is going on.
It would be wonderful if the press could be made accountable for their part in all of this.
“One month ago, as the country went into lockdown to prepare for the first wave of coronavirus cases, many doctors felt confident that they knew what they were dealing with. Based on early reports, covid-19 appeared to be a standard variety respiratory virus, albeit a very contagious and lethal one with no vaccine and no treatment. But they’ve since become increasingly convinced that covid-19 attacks not only the lungs, but also the kidneys, heart, intestines, liver and brain.
That is a dizzying list. But it is not even comprehensive. In a fantastic survey published April 17 (“How does coronavirus kill? Clinicians trace a ferocious rampage through the body, from brain to toes,” by Meredith Wadman, Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, Jocelyn Kaiser, and Catherine Matacic), Science magazine took a thorough, detailed tour of the ever-evolving state of understanding of the disease. “Despite the more than 1,000 papers now spilling into journals and onto preprint servers every week,” Science concluded, “a clear picture is elusive, as the virus acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen.”
In a single illuminating chart, Science lists the following organs as being vulnerable to COVID-19: brain, eyes, nose, lungs, heart, blood vessels, livers, kidneys, intestines. That is to say, nearly every organ:
And the disparate impacts were significant ones: Heart damage was discovered in 20 percent of patients hospitalized in Wuhan, where 44 percent of those in ICU exhibited arrhythmias; 38 percent of Dutch ICU patients had irregular blood clotting; 27 percent of Wuhan patients had kidney failure, with many more showing signs of kidney damage; half of Chinese patients showed signs of liver damage; and, depending on the study, between 20 percent and 50 percent of patients had diarrhea.
On April 15, the Washington Post reported that, in New York and Wuhan, between 14 and 30 percent of ICU patients had lost kidney function, requiring dialysis. New York hospitals were treating so much kidney failure “they need more personnel who can perform dialysis and have issued an urgent call for volunteers from other parts of the country. They also are running dangerously short of the sterile fluids used to deliver that therapy.” The result, the Post said, was rationed care: patients needing 24-hour support getting considerably less. On Saturday, the paper reported that “[y]oung and middle-aged people, barely sick with COVID-19, are dying from strokes.” Many of the patients described didn’t even know they were sick. . .”
From the same New Yorker article. Amazing that none of these doctors even considered the possibility that they were dealing with many different diseases, not one “COVID-19.”
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We are now almost six months into this pandemic, which began in November in Wuhan, with 50,000 Americans dead and 200,000 more around the world. If each of those deaths is a data point, together they represent a quite large body of evidence from which to form a clear picture of the pandemic threat. Early in the epidemic, the coronavirus was seen as a variant of a familiar family of disease, not a mysterious ailment, however infectious and concerning. But while uncertainties at the population level confuse and frustrate public-health officials, unsure when and in what form to shift gears out of lockdowns, the disease has proved just as mercurial at the clinical level, with doctors revising their understanding of COVID-19’s basic pattern and weaponry — indeed often revising that understanding in different directions at once. The clinical shape of the disease, long presumed to be a relatively predictable respiratory infection, is getting less clear by the week. Lately, it seems, by the day. As Carl Zimmer, probably the country’s most respected science journalist, asked virologists in a tweet last week, “is there any other virus out there that is this weird in terms of its range of symptoms?”
You probably have a sense of the range of common symptoms, and a sense that the range isn’t that weird: fever, dry cough, and shortness of breath have been, since the beginning of the outbreak, the familiar, oft-repeated group of tell-tale signs. But while the CDC does list fever as the top symptom of COVID-19, so confidently that for weeks patients were turned away from testing sites if they didn’t have an elevated temperature, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, as many as 70 percent of patients sick enough to be admitted to New York State’s largest hospital system did not have a fever.
Over the past few months, Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital has been compiling and revising, in real time, treatment guidelines for COVID-19 which have become a trusted clearinghouse of best-practices information for doctors throughout the country. According to those guidelines, as few as 44 percent of coronavirus patients presented with a fever (though, in their meta-analysis, the uncertainty is quite high, with a range of 44 to 94 percent). Cough is more common, according to Brigham and Women’s, with between 68 percent and 83 percent of patients presenting with some cough — though that means as many as three in ten sick enough to be hospitalized won’t be coughing. As for shortness of breath, the Brigham and Women’s estimate runs as low as 11 percent. The high end is only 40 percent, which would still mean that more patients hospitalized for COVID-19 do not have shortness of breath than do. At the low end of that range, shortness of breath would be roughly as common among COVID-19 patients as confusion (9 percent), headache (8 to 14 percent), and nausea and diarrhea (3 to 17 percent). That the ranges are so wide themselves tells you that the disease is presenting in very different ways in different hospitals and different populations of different patients — leading, for instance, some doctors and scientists to theorize the virus might be attacking the immune system like HIV does, with many others finding the disease is triggering something like the opposite response, an overwhelming overreaction of the immune system called a “cytokine storm.” ”
With such a “dizzying array” of symptoms, perhaps “COVID-19” is not one disease at all, but several different ones. The fact that someone has a certain virus in their systems in detectable amounts is not proof that that is what is making them sick. Some people who “test positive” for SARS-CoV-2. May have some disease other than “COVID-19.”
This is from an article in New Yorker magazine.