[T]he Government overlooked two vital pieces of evidence that raise frightening questions about the impact of its draconian lockdown strategy – and whether lockdown was ever even necessary.
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Lockdown might actually be slowing the tendency of this new disease to get milder with time. Which raises an important question: might the lockdown be causing more harm than good.
Two and a half thousand years ago Hippocrates told us that medicine should ‘First, do no harm’, and this is still a key tenet. Making absolutely sure that the treatment is better than the cure takes a long time and requires that we carefully examine as many angles as possible. Unfortunately, in the rush to apply the lockdown treatment for Covid, this principle was the first casualty.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/could-the-lockdown-have-side-effects-no-one-has-considered
This will affect the road haulage industry substantially, which already suffers from a HGV driver shortage of 59 thousand drivers according to an October 2019 FTA report. Government statistics show that there are approximately 300 thousand HGV drivers in the UK3, meaning if 20% of drivers are off sick at once, this will effectively temporarily double the driver shortage to 120 thousand. What this could mean on a short-term basis is that there is a marked increase in subcontracting out jobs to other hauliers, as some hauliers will be much harder hit than others in terms of driver numbers – due to various factors such as regional considerations and timing.
Generally speaking, 40% to 50% of patients with severe respiratory distress die while on ventilators, experts say. But 80% or more of coronavirus patients placed on the machines in New York City have died, state and city officials say.
…Similar reports have emerged from China and the United Kingdom. One U.K. report put the figure at 66%. A very small study in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the disease first emerged, said 86% died.
The new coronavirus is real.
The response to the coronavirus is hyped. And in time, this hype will be revealed as politically hoaxed.
In fact, COVID-19 will go down as one of the political world’s biggest, most shamefully overblown, overhyped, overly and irrationally inflated and outright deceptively flawed responses to a health matter in American history, one that was carried largely on the lips of medical professionals who have no business running a national economy or government.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/28/coronavirus-hype-biggest-political-hoax-in-history/
A frontline nurse working in New York on coronavirus patients claims the city is killing sufferers by putting them on ventilators, advocating against them
The nurse persuaded a friend, a nurse practitioner who is not working on coronavirus patients, to make the video to get the word out
‘It’s a horror movie. Not because of the disease, but the way it is being handled,’ the frontline nurse said through the friend, who only was identified as Sara NP
Sara said COVID-19 patients are placed on ventilators rather than less invasive CPAP or BiPAP machines due to fears about the virus spreading
She explained: ‘The ventilators have high pressure, which then causes barotrauma, it causes trauma to the lungs’
More than 12,000 people have died from the virus in NYC, with another 4,300 dying in other parts of the Empire State
New York emergency room doctor Cameron Kyle-Sidell stepped down this month because he didn’t want to follow the hospital’s ventilator protocol
Republican Minnesota Senator Scott Jensen told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham that Medicare pays hospitals three times as much if patients are placed on ventilators
Scientists who advised the World Health Organization on its influenza policies and recommendations—including the decision to proclaim the so-called swine flu a “pandemic” had close ties to companies that manufacture vaccines and antiviral medicines like Tamiflu, a fact that WHO did not publicly disclose.
Council of Europe to discuss whether pharmaceutical firms spread alarm over pandemic to boost orders of medicines
European health chiefs are to hold emergency talks about whether pharmaceutical giants have unduly influenced governments into squandering public money on vast stockpiles of unnecessary swine flu drugs.
At today’s hearing, several committee members pressed the WHO and vaccine company officials on two main issues. They expressed deep suspicions that vaccine industry experts on WHO advisory groups improperly influenced the WHO’s assessment of the pandemic in order to financially benefit pharmaceutical companies. Council members also questioned the WHO official, Dr Keiji Fukuda, special advisor on pandemic influenza to the WHO director-general, about confusion surrounding consideration of severity in its definition of a pandemic, which was revised at about the time the novel H1N1 virus was identified.
Some government public health officials and influenza experts have strongly rejected Wodarg’s claims, defending vaccine stockpiling as a prudent public health response and calling the charges “preposterous.”
In his opening statement, Wodarg said he was skeptical about the threat of the H5N1 virus and the contracts that countries had in place with vaccine makers in the event of a pandemic. “WHO had the trigger,” he said, alluding to the pandemic plans of some countries that activate the contracts when the WHO declares the highest alert level. He speculated that vaccine makers are making a financial windfall from what he claims are more expensive patented and adjuvanted vaccines. He also argued that the billions that governments have spent on pandemic vaccines could be better spent on other health issues.
He charged that the change in pandemic definition “made it possible to turn a run-of-the-mill flu into a pandemic and translate into millions for vaccine for no good reason.”
Wodarg also claimed that adjuvanted vaccines used in Europe were not adequately tested, especially in children, and expressed doubts about the safety of cell-based pandemic vaccines.
The 48-year-old physician, father of two and aspiring triathlete worried that an invasive ventilator would be harmful. But soon after entering the clinic, Bergmann said, he struggled to breathe even with an oxygen mask, and felt so sick the ventilator seemed inevitable.
Even so, his doctors never put him on a machine that would breathe for him. A week later, he was well enough to go home.
Bergmann’s case illustrates a shift on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, as doctors rethink when and how to use mechanical ventilators to treat severe sufferers of the disease – and in some cases whether to use them at all. While initially doctors packed intensive care units with intubated patients, now many are exploring other options.
One next step should be making the lockdown voluntary, not mandatory. People can be asked — not ordered — to be careful. To keep their distance, not take undue risks. Return to work, where it’s safe to do so. Send young children back to school. Sweden has tried this approach and found a strong public response. Travel to Easter holiday hotspots was down 94 per cent; city streets, even now, are almost deserted. Sweden’s logic is that economic repair can happen more quickly if the pandemic is controlled by public consensus, with liberties protected.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-case-for-trusting-the-public-is-stronger-than-ever
When foreign commentators discuss Sweden’s light-touch response to Covid-19, they tend to adopt an affronted tone. Which is, on the surface, surprising. You’d think everyone would be willing the Nordic country to succeed. After all, if Sweden can come through the epidemic without leaving a smoking crater where its economy used to be, there is hope for the rest of the world. So far, many signs appear encouraging. The disease seems to be following the same basic trajectory in Sweden as elsewhere.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/25/sweden-succeeds-lockdownswill-have-nothing/
During the Cold War, the British Government used the general public as unwitting biological and chemical warfare guinea pigs on a much greater scale than previously thought, according to new historical research.
In more than 750 secret operations, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Britons were subjected to ‘mock’ biological and chemical warfare attacks launched from aircraft, ships and road vehicles.
Up until now historians had thought that such operations had been much less extensive. The new research, carried out by Ulf Schmidt, Professor of Modern History at the University of Kent, has revealed that British military aircraft dropped thousands of kilos of a chemical of ‘largely unknown toxic potential’ on British civilian populations in and around Salisbury in Wiltshire, Cardington in Bedfordshire and Norwich in Norfolk.
A new analysis by Edge Health, a leading provider of data to NHS trusts, warns that a second and then a third wave of “non-corona” deaths are about to hit Britain. Unless radical solutions can be found to resume normal service and slash waiting lists, the NHS may be forced to institute a formal regime of rationing.
Social distancing orders to keep two metres apart to stop the spread of coronavirus is based on a made up figure, a government adviser has warned.
Robert Dingwall from the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) said the rule was ‘conjured up out of nowhere’.
How it works, why we need it, and why it’s taking so damn long for the US to get people diagnosed.
https://www.wired.com/story/everything-you-need-to-know-about-coronavirus-testing/
Unlike covid-19, this is a killer we have created and that we can do something about. Boris called the first lockdown because the science pointed that way at that time, and the First Secretary, Dominic Raab, presumably renewed it because Boris was ill. But whoever renews the lockdown again would simply have blood on their hands.
The political reality is that the government has boxed itself in by allowing policy to be dictated by opinion-poll; it bowed to pressure to copy everyone else (apart from the free Swedes), then had to scare the public into compliance with the lockdown they’d demanded, and now the public is indeed scared. But look purely at the likely toll: even if declaring lockdown was originally the right move, leaving it in place can certainly be the wrong move. Protect the vulnerable, sure, but lift the lockdown: back to Plan A.
https://thecritic.co.uk/its-hurting-but-its-just-not-working/