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A leading microbiologist gives the opposite view of virologist Marc Wathelet whose approach to controlling the virus I have posted on this website.
Both scientists make a lot of sense. As I understand them, Dr. Wathelet’s recommendations stem from the West’s unpreparedness. The lack of masks, tests, hospital capacity, and ventilators, together with the high infection rate of the virus, means that the health care system can be easily overwhelmed by the numbers of sick people. As the virus progresses further in some people than in others, it is not predictable who among the sick are in the most danger, except generally—the aged with prior conditions. Therefore Wathelet focuses on controlling the spread as people of all ages die from the virus.
Dr. Bhakdi focuses on the downsides of isolating the population—the social and economic disruption and the state of fear that it creates. He believes that many who have the virus and are dying could be dying from other existing illnesses. If the overall morbidity rate is not rising, the isolation might be counterproductive.
This could be one of those situations in which both scientists are correct. Perhaps if the West under the influence of neoliberal economics had not let their health care systems run down with so many hospitals closed, had heeded the Chinese warnings and moved quickly into production of masks and ventilators and hospital preparation, and removed the prohibitions against using the successful anti-malarial drugs and ozone treatments, the extent of social and economic shutdown would not have occurred.
It is difficult not to wonder if the restraints placed on treatments reflect Bill Gates’ and Big-Pharma’s emphasis on developing a vaccine. If successful low cost treatments are available, people should not be allowed to die while awaiting a vaccine, assuming one is possible for a rapidly mutating virus.
Too bad the West was focused on war, privatization, and paper profits for the one percent. We are now paying the cost of our erroneous public policies. These costs will rise as various interest groups use the health and economic crises for their selfish ends.
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Can boomers like Paul Craig Roberts please stop endangering the lives of everyone around them?
“Too bad the West was focused on war, privatization, and paper profits for the one percent. We are now paying the cost of our erroneous public policies. These costs will rise as various interest groups use the health and economic crises for their selfish ends.”
EXACTLY.
The truth…..
Various interest groups USE the health and economic crisis for their selfish ends.
They may also have CREATED this crisis for their selfish ends. It very conveniently arrived at the absolute maximum of the world’s greatest speculative bubble, and the MSM immediately orchestrated a hysterical response – which more or less obliged politicians to shut down their societies and crash their financial markets.
They’re not 1% and they’re not paper profits.
They’re more like 0.001% (one in one hundred thousand) and their paper profits (buying and driving up stocks with unlimited borrowed money at zero percent) are converted into real money when they are the first to dump everything on the coronavirus panic – conveniently created by their very own MSM.
From this POV, the Coronavirus Panic was a fabricated event in the same way as 9/11, designed to produce a specific outcome – with the MSM immediately employed at full volume to deliver the correct message.
There’s also the implication that the virus was a US creation.
It was planted in China (NWO target) – although they couldn’t resist the opportunity to also attack Iran. Note that the MSM Wuhan animal market story was almost instantaneous (no investigation required) and delivered around the globe at full volume.
Covid-19 presents a dilemma. One way or another it will be overcome, through a vaccine or our own immune system. No pathogen has wiped us out: we are better fitted to do that ourselves.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
The myopic pragmatism of this issue reminds me of the torture debate: Torture works! Does not! Does too! Does not! Does too!
That was a convenient distraction from the logically prior point that nothing justifies torture under the supreme law of the land.
Now with SARS-COV-2 as justification, government at various levels has taken away a bunch of your rights. You’re subject to movement restrictions, privacy intrusions, restrictions on assembly, association, and religion practice. These are permissible in an emergency that threatens the life of the nation, *subject to* the provisions of ICCPR article 4 and the Siracusa Principles.
The US government has blown off these crucial human rights protections at every level. There’s no indication that anyone gave the supreme law of the land a thought. They’re not even flouting it, they’re just ignorant of this bedrock legal protection. It matters because state emergency authorities are frankly totalitarian Cold War relics. For instance, the proud blue-state freedom fighters of Massachusetts live under the iron heel of an enabling act. The authority for states of exception is Chapter 639 of the Acts of 1950, The Civil Defense Act. (https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2016/09/xk/chapter-639-acts-of-1950-civil-defense-act.doc) Its § 8 confers arbitrary rule by decree at the governor’s discretion, whether an emergency is declared or not. Its § 8A empowers the governor to supersede any law or regulation with an emergency decree.
Bet you wondered how the government could get away with the humanitarian travesty of the Boston Marathon police murder spree, paramilitary occupation, and show trial of innocent patsy Jokar Tsarnaev. The federal government declared a lawless state of exception, “Massachusetts Explosions, EM-3362.” The governor of Massachusetts didn’t even have to declare an emergency – Juliette Kayyem could get busy choreographing her fake terror martial-law extravaganza because the USG evaded independent treaty body scrutiny.
Until people start demanding the US honor its legal commitments and obligations of human rights law, you’re going to get screwed a little more with each new emergency pretext. You’ll lose more and more rights and you won’t get them back.
Stopping the spread of a highly contagious new virus is more important for humans than the economic and sanitary downsides of locking down populations even when the virus does not cause a high mortality rate across the demographic structure presently. Letting the new virus spread is playing Russian roulette with its evolutionary capacity: the more the virus spread, the more it replicates, the more it finds different physiologies, the faster it mutates. The new virus is replicating trillions of trillions of times per day across the biological diversity of humans. It is imperative for humans to slow down this replication.
Thank you, Mr. Roberts, for presenting this viewpoint. Hopefully, sooner than later, a hybrid solution can be found that will not overwhelm nations’ health care systems and at the same time not cause substantial economic and mental hardship to the populace. It is not as if there are not some fine examples to follow.
I too wish to add my vote regarding the very sad truth of your last paragraph.
Life is so simple for bumper sticker minds. . .
How many times have I heard rightwingers online and in real life proclaim that an economic collapse or other serious event is both imminent and necessary for the survival of the west?
It is typical of rightwingers that they made no preparations for such an event and just want things to go back to normal as soon as something actually happened.
Also typical that it hasn’t gone like they imagined it would in their fantasy scenarios, where the cops and military unite with the white middle class to – do something?
Anyway, stay healthy and let’s hope that this will be the event that causes rightwingers to take a more active role in their own governance both nationally and locally.
Last summer I sold my Mom’s house to a guy who barely qualified. He had to take his wife off the loan application, probably due to her credit rating. He had to raid his 401K. He had to apply for a special program with the state where the state takes a second on the property. The house was small. It was probably his one and only chance to get out of the rent trap.
I guess him and his family’s future is OK to destroy as long as a some already very sick or old people don’t die. These are the realities for a lot of low middle income people. I wonder if he will be better off when his credit rating is ruined, his 401K is gone, and he is scrambling to find a place for his family to live?
Thank you for the delicious irony! (I’d use AGREE if I had status.)
Of course, somethimes people get what they deserve. That can also be tasty.
“Too bad the West was focused on war, privatization, and paper profits for the one percent.”
I still cannot comprehend why the average citizen cannot see that the globalists are selling their souls for extra profit. Maybe people are still too comfortable to care?
The 1% will watch you and your family die and turn around and import a family to replace you. America is long gone at this point.
People who use the term boomer as some sort of snide insult are almost always know-nothing idiots but only a truly special kind of idiot is capable of thinking that Paul Craig Roberts is a Baby Boomer, he is not even close to being one.
How would you know that?
If you have any ability at Mathematics at all, check this site and its videos from a British Mathematician. Mainly lots and lots of numbers, and the accompanying charts, that help you understand the situation and why the ‘lockdowns’ are idiotic and useless. There isn’t much about the terribly destructive effects on our economy, our freedoms, and our society, and in particular on our health, but you can look elsewhere for that. Humans are readily susceptible to mass hysteria and in todays World, that can mean the entire World. Hopefully Sweden will stick to its no lockdown policy, and demonstrate that this ‘black death / Spanish Flu’ was not unusual at all. Which means … we could do this every few years!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmFDE8P6_M-C4HTOuWwm4Dg
A sad story.
Indeed! Excellent, compelling points raised!! Thanks.
Can entitled Millenials with “daddy issues” quit blaming all the world’s problems on baby boomers? Since you are @ Unz Review I assume you are steeped in alternative literature enough that you should likely know that the Hippy Movement was a government Psyop with entitled but talented rich kids whisked in to strategic locations around the US to grandstand for the subversion project of “tune in, turn on, drop out”. (Kristopherson-Nashville; Dylan- New York; Jim Morrison- Ken Kesey, Frank Zappa, David Crosby-LA; Graham Parsons-Bakersfield; JJ Walker and Willie Nelson-Texas and John Prine-Steve Goodman- Chicago)
The ideal was to make America less controlled by white goyim traditions. (Notice, the real problem has been what congress has done as a reaction to the 60’s but then look at you Millennials. You have happily gone along with the sleazy sex agenda and the women’s bullshit issues pushed bigtime after our hayday ; all we did is point out there were a few hangups in those areas. (Funny, I continue to notice the word ‘goyim’ is not considered a word by Jewish “spell check”)))
Reading the local Sunday morning paper serving my rural county, I discovered this article. The authorities are upset that boys, probably mostly minorities, are continuing to get together for pick-up basketball games. Well, such outrages must be stopped, so they’ve locked the parks and removed the hoops. Little kids can’t even play in the playgrounds. The mayor said that walking is fine as long as social distancing is kept. Masks may soon become mandatory.
Well, with the schools all closed and not even pick-up basketball allowed, how long will these boys be content with solitary walking? (Ha,Ha). I’ll bet they won’t be, and there aren’t enough police to stop them if they decide to get together and go “wilding.” Our ignorant authorities are creating a powderkeg, which I think is about to explode. They’ve forgotten the old bromide that “Idle Hands are the Devil’s Plaything.”
All this, with, at latest count, only 3 in my county having died from the virus.
What good are our “demands” when public gatherings and peaceful protests are prohibited? Required public meetings, once open to all citizens, are now closed to the public with the Sunshine Act suspended. Isolated individual letters, emails, and calls (if you can get thru) mean little to politicians, who know where their bread is buttered. They will send you a form letter telling you how much they care, while they continue to screw you behind closed doors.
Mass civil disobedience, not just demands, is what is most urgently needed.
I need to amend my prior post. There have been 23 total cases in my county to date, with only 1 death, not 3. Compared to how many for the ordinary flu, I wonder?
The people calling for lockdowns, shelter in place or whatever you want to call them will get to eat and get paid no matter what and will keep their healthcare. Not so for tens of millions of Americans.
Sweden is not locking down their nation and COVID-19 hasn’t infected large numbers of the citizens or brought that nation to its knees. Now I’m not saying we just throw all caution to the wind but we have to seek a happy medium. One example is for state governors to impose more restrictions on “hot spots” but let other areas of their state unaffected by COVID-19 to carry on with life.
Destroying the economy and creating a host of other more intractable problems including suicides, heart attack and nervous breakdowns resulting from the economic impact of a prolonged shutdown isn’t acceptable.
The doomsday model said America would be at 240K deaths by Easter so that means roughly 231.5K people will expire this week and that is with all the shelter in place orders. When this doesn’t come to fruition then the health “experts” will tell us that we only averted the predictions in the doomsday model because of shutdowns and social distancing.
Follyofwar, a very good question in 21. I would never advocate petitioning the bribed and blackmailed assholes who sit in government chairs with their dotted line reports to CIA. What you do is go over their head to the world. You can report the state’s arrogation of arbitrary powers to the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva (https://www.upr2020.org/) this spring (that’s deferred too, but not for long.) There is an individual complaint mechanism that the US can’t opt out of. Unlike the fake duopoly parties, they give a shit what your think. State compliance is subject to independent expert review.
There you have to ground your complaints in human rights chapter and verse. If you think in those terms at home as well, then you’re free of the suspended, loophole-ridden constitution that they use to fuck you over. Unlike the constitution, human rights law has teeth.
https://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CCPR.aspx
http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/gencomm/hrc29.html
https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/jus/humanrights/HUMR5503/h09/undervisningsmateriale/SiracusaPrinciples.pdf
It may seem abstract but it’s the most root-and-branch subversion you can do.
When we or the SCO knock over this CIA regime, or when it collapses in kleptocratic drift, any successor state will have to grab for the nearest available support. There is only one credible support for state sovereignty,
https://ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/UniversalHumanRightsInstruments.aspx
So boning up on this law is a way to get ready. The reconstruction will be based on it.