Panicked and irresponsible responses to Covid-19 are destroying the very societies they purport to protect, some of the world’s leading experts claim.
The scientific community is increasingly coming out to condemn the societal wide shutdowns ordered by numerous, increasingly authoritarian governments around the world.
State of the art epidemiological research suggests that Covid-19 is proving no more dangerous than an average flu season; that it targets the old and the sick, like any normal flu, and has little impact on healthy populations, like any normal flu.
Perhaps the most prominent of those speaking out is the eminently credentialed Dr John Ioannidis co-Director, Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford University, one of the world’s leading tertiary institutions.
He argues that the initial data governments used was unreliable and is quickly leading to wrong decisions.
I am much more concerned about the consequences of blind measures, the possible destruction of an economy … and the larger number of lives that can be lost in conditions of economic and social collapse.
I hope we avoid the worst and show calmness, solidarity, brotherhood, and courage instead of panic.
Dr Stanford does not believe the mortality of COVID-19 to be as high as initially estimated, and does not believe that shutting down economies should be a policy.
The clusters seen in New York and northern Italy are a result of elderly or already sick populations.
The shocking images of mass graves in NY are because those who are dying are street people, in poor health, without family and often enough without even identification. It brings to mind the horrors of lunar right eugenically minded military operatives who regard the ice epidemic, for example, as nothing more than insect spray to rid society of weak people it does not need.
Completely inappropriate policies of sending otherwise healthy people who test positive to Covid-19 to hospitals, viral hotbeds at the best of times, has compounded the problem.
Dr Ioannidis says by way of explanation as to how the scare campaign began:
Many of the elements we use in mathematical models are uncertain. The measurements are not accurate enough to give definite results.
An initial estimate by the team at Imperial College was that more than 2 million people would die in the United States and 500,000 in Britain. The parameters were uncharacteristic and have nothing to do with reality. They have now corrected some of the parameters, predicting a much smaller number of deaths.
You cannot remain in a lockdown state indefinitely. Then there will be deaths from the effects of lockdown’s consequences, such as suicides or heart attacks due to the stress of unemployment and inactivity.
The probabilities that were being given for someone dying from COVID-19 were unrealistic.
In fact, the likelihood of someone dying from coronavirus is much lower than we initially thought. Word was getting around that if you caught the virus, you were going to die. I estimate that the mortality rate will be slightly — but not spectacularly — higher than the seasonal flu. The vast majority of people who become infected have no problems. They recover.
For the academically minded, Dr Ioannidis’ world leading research can be downloaded from here:
The absolute risk of COVID-19 death ranged from 1.7 per million for people <65 years old in Germany to 79 per million in New York City.
The absolute risk of COVID-19 death for people ≥80 years old ranged from approximately 1 in 6,000 in Germany to 1 in 420 in Spain.
The COVID-19 death risk in people <65 years old during the period of fatalities from the epidemic was equivalent to the death risk from driving between 9 miles per day (Germany) and 415 miles per day (New York City).
People <65 years old and not having any underlying predisposing conditions accounted for only 0.3%, 0.7%, and 1.8% of all COVID-19 deaths in Netherlands, Italy, and New York City.
CONCLUSIONS: People <65 years old have very small risks of COVID-19 death even in the hotbeds of the pandemic and deaths for people <65 years without underlying predisposing conditions are remarkably uncommon. Strategies focusing specifically on protecting high-risk elderly individuals should be considered in managing the pandemic.
As A Sense of Place Magazine has previously published, numerous other experts around the world are coming out to disclaim government responses to Covid-19 and to warn of dire social consequences not as a result of the virus but as a result of widespread unemployment and the lurch to totalitarianism conducted under the cover of Covid-19.
In Australia millions are being thrown onto the dole queues —in a tiny country with a population of 25 million.
The government was already on the nose when Covid-19 arrived, wreathed in scandal and cloaked in the stench of corporate cronyism. The brief surge in popularity after its ludicrous over-reaction to the “pandemic” will sputter out in an instant. What will be left is a smoking ruin of an economy.
Just like your average citizen, your average member of local police forces wants to believe their government is doing the right thing. Often entrenched in the communities they serve, they are ill-prepared to act as a paramilitary police force, as they are now being required to do.
Chaos ensues. Particularly when the orders make no sense to them, much less the citizenry.
Much of the population show few if any symptoms from Covid-19 and don’t know anybody who has died from it.
The tragically counterproductive scare campaigns run by governments with the totally corrupted mainstream media as their willing handmaidens is becoming more problematic by the day.
They all knew a pandemic was coming, academics, researchers, every intelligence agency, according to famed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In a groundbreaking Vice News interview Snowden declares: “There is nothing more foreseeable as a public health crisis in a world where we are just living on top of each other in crowded and polluted cities, than a pandemic. And every academic, every researcher who’s looked at this knew this was coming. And in fact, even intelligence agencies, I can tell you firsthand.
As authoritarianism spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world, do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets will not be kept? No matter how it is being used, what is being built is the architecture of oppression.
“Apple Inc. and Google unveiled a rare partnership to add technology to their smartphone platforms that will alert users if they have come into contact with a person with Covid-19,” reads a new report from Bloomberg. “People must opt in to the system, but it has the potential to monitor about a third of the world’s population.”
“World Health Organization executive director Dr. Michael Ryan said surveillance is part of what’s required for life to return to normal in a world without a vaccine. However, civil liberties experts warn that the public has little recourse to challenge these digital exercises of power once the immediate threat has passed,” reads a recent VentureBeat article titled “After coronavirus, AI could be central to our new normal”.
“White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s task force has reached out to a range of health technology companies about creating a national coronavirus surveillance system to give the government a near real-time view of where patients are seeking treatment and for what, and whether hospitals can accommodate them, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions,” reads a recent article by Politico, adding, “But the prospect of compiling a national database of potentially sensitive health information hasprompted concerns about its impact on civil liberties well after the coronavirus threat recedes, with some critics comparing it to the Patriot Act enacted after the 9/11 attacks.”
“Mass surveillance methods could save lives around the world, permitting authorities to track and curb the spread of the novel coronavirus with speed and accuracy not possible during prior pandemics,” The Intercept’s Sam Biddle wrote last week, adding, “There’s a glaring problem: We’ve heard all this before. After the September 11 attacks, Americans were told that greater monitoring and data sharing would allow the state to stop terrorism before it started, leading Congress to grant unprecedented surveillance powers that often failed to preempt much of anything. The persistence and expansion of this spying in the nearly two decades since, and the abuses exposed by Snowden and others, remind us that emergency powers can outlive their emergencies.”
As we discussed recently, it’s an established fact that power structures will seize upon opportunities to roll out oppressive authoritarian agendas under the pretense of protecting ordinary people, when in reality they’d been working on advancing those agendas since long before the crisis being offered as the reason for them. It happened with 9/11, and we may be certain that it is happening now.
The reason for this is simple: the powerful are afraid of the public. They always have been. For as long as there has been government power, there has been the fear that the people will realize the power of their numbers and overthrow the government that is in power. And understandably so; it has happened many times throughout history.
Leaders are made vastly more fearful and skittish by the fact that this dissatisfaction with the current world order just happens to be occurring at a time when that world order is already at its most tenuous point in decades, with a surging China poised to surpass the US as a superpower on the world stage and collaborating with Russia and other unabsorbed nations to create a truly multipolar world. It becomes much more difficult to control dominant narratives in a way that can effectively manufacture consent for the aggression that will be necessary to freeze and reverse this shift away from unipolar domination when the denizens of that unipolar empire are out in the streets demanding its downfall.
And so of course internet censorship is being ramped up as well, with the mass media demanding that plutocrat-owned tech companies do more to combat coronavirus “disinformation” and these government-allied tech giants all too happy to oblige.
In a recent escalation in this ongoing trend, Youtube changed its rules and began deleting videos accordingly after David Icke said there is a connection between coronavirus and 5G in a controversial video on that platform.
The escalations in internet censorship and the escalations in surveillance are both directed at a last-ditch effort to control the masses before control is lost forever, and neither are intended to be rolled back when the threat of the virus is over.
People are now off the streets, with their communications being restricted and the devices they carry in their pockets being monitored with more and more intrusiveness.
There are of course some good faith actors who legitimately want to protect people from the virus, just as there were some good faith actors who wanted to protect people from terrorism after 9/11, but where there is power and fear of the public there will be an agenda to reel in the freedom of the masses.