From Ivor Cummins, I learned just this morning of this powerful and insightful essay, written back in September, by Manfred Horst. Please do read the whole thing carefully; here, as teasers, are some slices:
Perhaps we should consider it a privilege to live [in] one of the absurdest and grotesquest episodes of recent world history.
Perhaps we should consider it a privilege to witness how easily scientific and democratic control mechanisms can be overwhelmed by a global panic disorder.
Perhaps we should consider it a privilege to be merely publicly and socially ostracised if we dare utter a dissenting opinion to the uniform mainstream madness and hysteria.
Perhaps we should consider it a privilege to only be fined or imprisoned (not eliminated) if we dare disobey ridiculous and inhuman governmental orders.
Certainly, in the developed West, we must also consider it a privilege to still be living quite well.
Any one of the hundreds of subtypes of common cold/bronchitis viruses which assail our immune systems every year would produce the same clinical and epidemiological features as SARS-CoV-2 – if we decide to test and look for it:
- Non-specific symptoms – fever, cough, headaches, muscle aching, diarrhea etc.
- If we look very closely, perhaps we’ll find something a little more exotic (but still not truly specific), e.g. anosmia and ageusia
- A generally benign and transitory illness
- In some rare cases, longer-lasting sequelae
- Possible severe complications in elderly, frail and particularly susceptible patients
- A mortality at an average age which corresponds to the average age of death of the general population
All this was known before the end of February 2020. Chinese scientists had diligently published the data,1although their authoritarian government had reacted completely disproportionately, as most other governments would in its wake.
At the very latest, the presentation of the first Italian cohort of 2,003 “Corona deaths” on 12th March2 allowed only one rational conclusion: SARS-CoV-2 is not a killer virus.
The average age at which these deaths had occurred was 80.3 years, 75% were male – almost exactly the average age of death in the general Italian population. They had all – with two possible exceptions – been suffering from at least one serious co-morbidity which could also explain or contribute to the fatal outcome.
…..
The world’s response to SARS-CoV-2 has been anything but rational, however. A population driven into hysterical fear by the mass media demanded of its elected representatives or its authoritarian rulers to be protected from this particular common cold virus, and the politicians have obligingly imposed draconian measures. This has been, and still is, a terrible panic pandemic.
Emotional pictures of coffins, of patients on ventilators and shuffled into trains or on planes, absolute numbers of cases and deaths – these have been the mass media’s main daily offerings during the past few months. People, often very intelligent people, have been frightened to death, totally unable to look at the sober numbers and facts and put them into perspective.
Every day, more than 150,000 people die on this earth,3 half of them from cardiovascular disease and cancer. Most of us don’t keep daily count of all those deaths – it would be difficult to carry on with our normal lives otherwise.
…..
A (perhaps) hitherto unknown virus, originating from China where the authoritarian government – for whatever reason – imposes a temporary local quarantine, the rapidly available possibility of testing (though with a completely unvalidated procedure) and thus the illusion of being able to follow the virus’s spread around the world, a daily recording of cases and deaths in a manner reminiscent of a football league table,8and of course virtually all the media riding on the hysteria with emotional pictures and stories – these were the main ingredients which made people panic and governments stumble into horribly disproportionate measures. A planned and orchestrated propaganda, bent on destroying freedom and democracy, could hardly have been any more effective.
None of the governments which imposed societal lockdowns and deprived their populations of most of their fundamental liberties seems to have done so on the basis of any kind of benefit/risk analysis. They all followed the advice of some very peculiar “experts” – mostly virologists and epidemiological model builders. They all seem to fear that they could be held to account for an exponential number of deaths resulting from this “new” disease. They all seem to however completely disregard the enormous damage which their measures are inflicting on their citizens, their societies and the world at large. None of them listened to – let alone stimulated – contrarian opinions from other experts, who often had to accept an appearance in alternative media outlets in order to make their views known. Hopefully, the cautionary tale of the current hysteria will serve as a lesson for the future. Science is not monolithic dogma, but continuous hypothesis testing and falsification. Supposedly scientific models predicting the future can be as awfully wrong as any oracle or prophecy.
Every political measure destined to “save lives” has a cost – in terms of both money and human lives.9 Given the age characteristics of people dying with COVID-19, there was, from the start, not much – if any – life which could be saved. The “war” declared by our heads of state against this virus has been, and still is, an entirely futile fight against normal population mortality: We all die, and on average we die at our average age of death. It did not matter which measures governments took, the epidemic (like every common cold epidemic) ran its self-limiting course anyhow.10 Had we accepted the appearance of this mutated Coronavirus as we have so far accepted all the other newly mutated respiratory viruses every year, without testing for them, we could have carried on with our lives as before, and we would not have seen any unusual upswing in population mortality.
Unfortunately, the first part of Horst’s closing paragraph turns out, three months later, not to be as solid as he seems to have anticipated:
Thank goodness, more and more people around the world are waking up and beginning to challenge the Covid religion. Whether there be a method and plan to it or not – we must end this madness. Nothing less than human civilization and progress may be at stake.
