RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/it-s-time-for-an-alternative-to-lockdown

As France and Germany lock down again – and as Britain considers whether to follow suit – many people will be wondering: can’t we think of a better way to handle this pandemic? No one is in any doubt about the threat posed by the Coronavirus. But nor should there be any doubt about the harm posed by lockdown: the mental health, the economic destitution, the deep damage inflicted on families, communities and societies. Perhaps the worst of it is the idea that, when lockdown ends, the virus resumes – and you are back where you started. Where is the exit strategy? And where is the assessment of the costs?

We should, in moments of crisis, be open to ideas about how best to handle it. The previous strategy – lockdown – cannot claim to have been a great success. Which is why it’s strange to see such hostility in so many quarters to the idea of even debating a better way out of this mess. The Great Barrington Declaration calls for another way. The focused protection ideas discussed in the Declaration would minimise the harms that would befall those at high and low risk of mortality from Covid should they become infected. The plan would protect higher-risk people (mainly older people over 70) by devoting overwhelming resources and ingenuity to the cause of preventing exposure to infected Covid patients. It would protect lower risk people who face a much greater medical and psychological harm from lockdowns than they do from Covid (an infection fatality rate of five deaths per 10,000) by permitting them to resume their normal lives.

Despite the evident common sense of these ideas – they represent a return to the successful way we have dealt with similar epidemics over the last century – the release of the Declaration has led to a fierce counter-attack by lockdown proponents. These attacks have routinely resorted to propaganda, inaccurately characterising the approach as a ‘herd immunity strategy’ in places like the New York Times. This despite the fact that population immunity is the inevitable endpoint of the epidemic, no matter what policy we adopt. Though a few stalwarts may pine for zero Covid, we would destroy civilisation worldwide in the quixotic bid to achieve it. All viable options – including the lockdown-until-vaccine and the focused protection strategy share herd immunity as an end state. The only open question is how best to minimise death and human despair from both Covid and non-Covid sources in the process of getting there. And the answer is focused protection.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/29/ny-gov-cuomo-goes-on-self-congratulatory-book-tour-as-doj-probes-covid-nursing-home-deaths/

As New York Governor Andrew Cuomo embarked on a self-congratulatory book tour this week, the U.S. Department of Justice requested additional data from his administration on coronavirus deaths linked to nursing homes.

According to the New York Post, the DOJ’s inquiry could reveal if the state significantly undercounted the number of COVID-19 fatalities among the residents of more than 1,000 private nursing homes.

New York records provided in response to an August Justice Department inquiry indicated that a quarter of deaths in the state’s roughly two dozen public nursing homes weren’t disclosed to federal health officials, administration sources said.

New York indicated that about 400 residents of the state’s public facilities died from COVID-19, according to federal sources, who said that state facilities had only disclosed about 300 deaths to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In total, the New York Health Department publicly reports about 6,720 deaths from the serious respiratory bug in nursing homes and adult-care facilities. But the true scope of New York’s tragic toll in nursing homes is expected to be much higher.

According to the AP, the state only counted residents who passed away on the nursing home premises but not those who were sent to the hospital. An AP analysis in August estimated that the state was likely undercounting such deaths by thousands.

With over 33,000 fatalities, New York leads by far all of the other states in the number of deaths by the coronavirus, while it is number four on the list of total COVID-19 cases in the United States.

The Democrat governor has denied accusations that his administration’s now infamous directive mandating that nursing homes accept patients diagnosed with the coronavirus contributed significantly to NY’s disproportionately large number of deaths.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/covid-19-pcr-testing-worthless-jack-kerwick/

While some of us who value thinking and science above politics have long known it, it seems that even the New York Times (and, by implication, all who equate its pronouncements with the Gospel) are beginning to realize that the much vaunted PCR test is essentially worthless.  

At the very least—and this is putting it undoubtedly too generously—it is anything but “the gold standard” of COVID-19 determiners that we have been led to believe it is.  In fact, it’s not even “the divining rod” that my martial arts instructor and USMC Lieutenant-Colonel Al Ridenhour, who has some experience working with deadly nuclear, biological, and chemical agents, once referred to it in a conversation with me.   

While some self-styled “fact-checkers”—who are invariably leftist partisans who are only interested in “fact-checking” the claims of those who dare to challenge their agenda—are accusing conservatives who repeat its assertion that the PCR test has a 90% false positive rate of “misinterpreting” the Times piece, there wasn’t any misinterpretation at all.

One American News Network (OANN), The Blaze, Red State, and Townhall Media are among the sites that have come under fire for having allegedly misread The Times.  The Health Feedback “fact-checker” states:

“The claim that the U.S. has an inflated COVID-19 case count due to the sensitivity of the diagnostic PCR test for the virus that causes COVID-19…is a misinterpretation of a New York Times news report…[which questions whether] PCR test results for the virus that causes COVID-19 are a practical way of informing an infected person what steps they should take after their diagnosis [.]”