Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Covid mania has only supported junk science, not genuine science

Most of the Western countries have been putrifying under the influence of the New Left for years – contaminated and damaged by the evil activists with their woke culture, anti-male sexism, anti-white racism, anti-nation-state drive and the universal pro-migration globalism, the global warming hysteria, and a few more. But the coronavirus epidemics has sped up all these pathological tendencies and unified them into a wide, loosely connected stream of devastating political causes.

The support for the nationwide Covid restrictions belongs to the authoritarian left-wing corner of the political 2D plane (or 3D space) for obvious reasons:
  1. they restrict the individual economic freedom and gives the power to the central authorities and politicians teamed up with the self-anointed would-be experts
  2. the virus is a good excuse for the unprecedented redistribution of the money; the budget deficits are incredibly huge and mostly flow to the privileged classes and occupations and the well-connected people; a much greater portion of the people's income and wealth is being decided centrally, not by the free markets
  3. the memes about the existential threat are a good excuse to restrict even "political" civil rights such as the freedom of assembly, religious freedoms, and the freedom of speech
  4. indeed, the very human lives, the right to move, and the individual health was being nationalized (have you been annoyed by a doctor claiming that his or her expertise gives him or her the right to own and control your body?); billions of people have really lost their right to decide about their own bodies and health – these decisions, and indirectly the bodies themselves, belong to the self-anointed experts and/or their allied politicians and must behave in a way that serves the public health, as argued by the self-anointed powerful experts
There may be a few effects that I have forgotten and each of those that I didn't forget have many overlapping aspects and flavors. A priori, these effects are independent of each other and it may look like a coincidence that all of them are considered "left-wing". But it is not really a coincidence and these effects aren't really independent of each other because the left-wing recipe for the society is about (1) collectivism and (2) the elevation of groups that are said to be oppressed because they are unsuccessful in some way, and it is obvious why events such as the Covid epidemics help to strengthen the case for all these left-wing memes.

Tens of percent of the regular people have been exposed to the continuous influx of propaganda which has been primarily all about the fear and emotions. All of us are going to die, Covid-19 is the worst event in the history of mankind and the Universe, no simple treatment and no relaxed attitude may possibly work, all of us need to be obedient in our lockdown and in our patient waiting for the vaccine salvation.

When this sort of stuff started a year ago, I got terrified and offended by the immense stupidity and dishonesty and I have largely avoided all the TV news and other news whose composition is decided by someone else, unless I verified that it is not obnoxious garbage (Hit Radio FM Plus is totally OK with me for a long time!). I spend an incredible amount of time by Covid news but it is always me who decides what I search for and what I read; this choice wasn't "quite essential" before 2020 but it got totally fundamental in the Covid epoch.

And I think that every person who allows someone else to decide what is being pumped into his ears for hours a day; and who doesn't get incredibly angry and is "capable" of watching stuff like the "mainstream" TV news is basically brain-dead. I don't believe that a person with at least some traces of critical thinking may want to watch this garbage for 10 minutes let alone for hours let alone for hours a day for every day in a year.

A big part of the propaganda was all about meaningless figures and irrelevant, confusing factoids concerning the sick people (the only "real message" coming from all these irrelevant factoids has always been "you are obliged to be scared of Covid") and even the people who are incorrectly claimed to be "sick" but they are actually healthy, just positively PCR-tested for Covid-19. ("Unhealthy" means, has always meant, and will always mean to have symptoms that reduce the quality of life through directly physical effects or increase the probability of premature death. If you don't have either, then you are healthy, in contrast with the omnipresent lies about the "asymptomatic sick" people which is an oxymoron.) In recent months, scenes of vaccines have been added everywhere.

But there is another theme: physicians and medical researchers are sold as an extraordinary occupation. Well, count me as a skeptic. There are two main problems with this assertion: (1) the ideologues don't really mean what they say because they don't actually have any real respect for the doctors; (2) even if they meant it, it isn't true. OK, first, they don't really mean it. You could see tons of doctors who were literally harassed by the Coronazis (especially if they dared to say that Covid wasn't the end of the world; or if they promoted a treatment that wasn't approved by the globalist HQ of fear and that indicated that Covid could be treated to some extent). Most doctors knew that this has been just another infectious respiratory disease, on par with a totally new strain of flu which only kills a greater number of the people because no one has a full immunity to start with. All actual doctors in the hospitals know that Covid doesn't "qualitatively" differ from some "typical" infectious diseases they have been treating for decades. But only some selected doctors were promoted, those who were convenient for the "predetermined", accidentally universally far left, conclusions that I have sketched.

Also, more than 50% of the Czech physicians were planning to refuse to be vaccinated against Covid. Suddenly, someone stood above the actual doctors. The doctors must have been wrong and misinformed about the medicine, the far left ideologues were ludicrously claiming. Or take this notorious violence of city cops against a dad of a 3-year-old screaming son. (The boss of the city police and the mayor have apologized for the action by these rogue cops; the minister of interior has incredibly supported them! What a stunning scumbag.) An interesting aspect of this shocking video is that the mother of the screaming child was... just taking care of Covid patients in Intensive Care Units (ICUs), a Covid nurse. No one cared. No one allowed her to publicly advocate her husband whom she obviously supported (and whose only sin was not to have a face mask on the street).

The second issue is that the work of the doctors hasn't been so terrible. Czechia is a country of 10.7 million. There are 50,000 doctors with a doctorate; plus 120,000 other healthcare workers without a doctorate. At this moment, almost 200,000 healthcare workers are taking care of... 8,500 patients in the hospital who are Covid positive. Only 1,900 are in a serious condition, the remaining 6,000+ don't really need any substantial care at all (and 40% of them were once estimated to be completely asymptomatic, just hiding in the hospitals because no one wanted them at home). Taking the number 1,900, you have basically 100 healthcare workers per serious Covid patient. (I count all doctors but it's because all doctors are often getting a huge credit for the Covid work and it's mostly right to count all doctors because all doctors are capable of taking care of an average Covid patient; you don't really need much "specialized" expertise for a Covid patient.) Is that an incredible amount of work? No, it is not. Even when the hospitals got full, it was "normal intense work".

If some hospitals had to triple the intensity of their work, it is an impressive change but you shouldn't overlook another way to deduce something from this tripling: it shows that at most times, the doctors were only working at 33% of their capacity – while getting their usually extraordinarily high salary. Well, since Spring 2020, it was different, many of them really worked, sometimes for the first time in their life. It is an analogous situation as that of soldiers when a war erupts. Soldiers really don't do too much useful stuff in the time of peace – but they have been hired exactly to reliably serve their country in the exceptional moments that may come. It should be somewhat analogous with the doctors.

Researching drugs and vaccines

Doctors have been greatly overrated but from my perspective, the distortion is much more infuriating when it comes to the researchers in the field of medicine. Why? Because the media have totally avoided the promotion of the real experts and those who do something brilliant and something that can be useful. Instead, they have constantly promoted "scientists" like Anthony Fauci – and his numerous national clones such as Colonel Prymula in Czechia – who have done zero or nearly zero valuable or useful science in the Covid epoch so far. Instead, they have sold their pre-existing credentials as scientists to promote junk science, medieval superstitious policies that don't work, and especially the extremely left-wing plans to reorganize the society that I started with.

When the typical media have talked about a "scientist" or a "respected scientist" (or "epidemiologist" and other related words) in the Covid context, they actually meant "an unhinged radical left-wing and/or authoritarian ideologue who can hide his disgusting, dangerous, dishonest, and pathological ideology behind a doctorate or a previous useful work in the field of epidemiology and related ones". These are two totally different things and the conflation of the two is a proof that the media landscape is a cesspool composed of human waste. These ideologues weren't really using the tangible scientific knowledge in any way. They were just abusing the widespread perception that they had something to do with science for personal and political goals (gain).

One side of this total misinterpretation of "who is a relevant scientist" or "who is a great relevant scientist" is that the totally counterproductive proponents of the lockdowns and other left-wing policies that harm the society but don't help anybody have been promoted by the junk "journalists". The other side of the coin is that the real scientists who have been doing some great work were overlooked – and sometimes attacked by the "journalists" (and by the politicized "scientists").

When the disease started to spread all over the world one year ago, it was a dangerous situation and an opportunity for "problem solvers". Every reasonable person kept his or her composure and knew that mankind would survive in some way – the case fatality rate was known to be well below 1% already more than a year ago (the first values for the CFR around 3.4% were quickly known to be hugely overstated by everyone who was thinking rationally and who could subtract obvious systematic biases) – but the task was to minimize the total losses and damages of all kinds that we care about. When a normal disease of this kind arrives, we want to continue as mankind (the healthy people should keep their freedoms) while the sick people should primarily be isolated and get some treatment. The first treatment are drugs, not vaccines.

A month ago, the Czech ex-president Klaus fell in love with the "drugs not vaccine" slogan. For a while, I smiled a little bit – does he really have the credentials to decide whether it was better to focus on the drugs or vaccines etc.? But after a month or two, I believe that all my doubts were totally misplaced. Klaus, a brilliant professor of economics, actually has everything he needs to discuss these questions. Why? Because this is about the cost-and-benefit analysis and he knows everything he needs to know. The number of people who may be helped by a vaccine, the average help caused by a vaccine, the same about drugs, the approximate prices of vaccines and drugs, the expenses spent on research, and the probability that such things succeed. Some of these parameters may be taken from the medical experience (uncertainty exists but physicians and economists may be similarly uncertain now, when it comes to a disease that seemed new a year ago) or from the current opinions of medical experts. But the likes of Klaus are the perfect people to deduce consequences – the rational recommendations for our policies and behavior – and that is what he did.

We have heard lots of amazing garbage, and much of it was repeated all the time (and it still is, in many cases). Everyone has to wear a face mask. I have proudly promoted face masks exactly one year ago – and I still keep some pride about the fact that Czechs and Slovaks were the first white nations that adopted this culture (although I was confident from the beginning that we shouldn't have been slowing down Covid one year ago at all). Today, I believe the numbers indicating that the most ordinary face masks only reduce the R0 by a few percent. The respirators are probably more effective and should have been adopted a year ago (or nothing). Everyone had the "moral duty" to assume that the vaccine will take years so we need to assume the worst case scenario. Do you remember these talking points that it was impossible to get a vaccine within a year or even two? It was complete garbage and we have at least 9 widely used, verified, competing vaccines now. There has never existed any reason to think that the "vaccine against Covid" would be a particularly difficult task for the scientists.

Similar comments apply to the drugs. We don't have too many terribly good Covid drugs but there exist no rational reasons to think that Covid-19 would be particularly capable of "invalidating" all efforts to find an effective drug. Lots of the drugs have turned out to have a limited effect only. I mean favipiravir (that isn't discussed much today), remdesivir (that remained somewhat inconclusive and is surely not a miracle drug in the real world although the positive effects were stunning obvious in the test tubes), isoprinosine as a great relevant way to strengthen the immunity response (more effective than vitamins C,D), those "somewhat alternative" solutions including HCQ and zinc and azithromycin, the morally analogous Spring 2021 repetition of this controversy under the name of Ivermectin (a drug against parasites, mostly in the horses' fur), and then various artificial antibodies and similar stuff. Eli Lilly's bamlanivimab and... Yes, I think that Trump's miracle drug, Regeneron (also some artificial antibodies of a sort), might still be closest to a miracle drug.

None of them has been generally accepted as a miracle drug but there are many approaches to Covid drugs and which of them is working should have been tested for more than a year – on many patients. It has never been a priority. The media have always preferred to spread the hysteria – instead of supporting the search for effective Covid drugs. Let me mention a fun article that the University of Glasgow researchers published yesterday:
Human rhinovirus infection blocks SARS-CoV-2 replication within the respiratory epithelium: implications for COVID-19 epidemiology
...Google News...
Note that most common cold cases are caused by rhinoviruses, a minority is caused by adenoviruses, coronaviruses (below 20%), and perhaps at most two other groups. Rhinoviruses are omnipresent, they occur throughout the year but they have two peaks. One is between September and November. The other is in between March and May. At any rate, these folks present nontrivial evidence that this (rhinovirus) common cold virus is an egotist warrior that basically cures you of Covid (through an interferon response that blocks the replication of SARS-CoV-2, if you need to know). When we were kids, we sometimes repeated a joke about a cure that involved "contracting a larger, stronger virus that beats the weaker one" and this seems to be a serious realization of the joke.

It is totally plausible. I am not certain that it works just like I couldn't have been totally certain in any of the previous drugs and I would currently bet that most of the drugs in the list above are incapable of reducing the case fatality rate by more than 50%. But mechanisms of those types surely exist and it is extremely likely that at least one of these drugs indeed works and is a "miracle drug". Most of us don't have the tools and expertise to truly correctly evaluate which of them is the right one, or to invent a bit artificial, ingenious Covid drug. But we should be able to see something that surrounds this medical research, and it's the following troubling observation:
There isn't a real, substantial demand for research of these things and for the drugs themselves and the media make sure that there isn't much demand.
It's because the media plus other leftists plus the Big Pharma companies don't really want the people to learn something like
When dealt with properly, Covid-19 isn't really a serious problem.
By a "scientist with the Covid expertise", the "journalists" didn't really mean folks like the ingenious researchers with their test tubes who are mostly silently and modestly constructing a Covid drug. They meant someone who screams "I am a scientist, shut up, we need to lock everybody in a cage and increase my salary". People who are pure evil, lying, parasitic scum that doesn't do any actual science.

If the quote above were the outcome, their profits and their power – and their ability to transform mankind to their image in which they play a permanently privileged role – would be threatened. Instead, we would be closer to the sane world in which they are punished for the huge damages that they have caused. So I think it is obvious that a huge portion of the "journalists", of the Fauci-like "epidemiologists", and several other groups have been actively suppressing the search for the Covid drugs. I found almost every "particular conspiracy theory" about this suppression to be far-fetched but I surely agree with the general spirit that all these people are greatly incentivized to slow down the drug research; and very many of them are doing something to slow it down (at least by selecting what they talk about and what they emphasize vs what they are silent about or even try to actively suppress). They haven't talked about it, they implicitly pretended that drugs were impossible, they didn't promote the drug research, they haven't celebrated the scientists who made important findings (although some of the researchers could very well turn out to be in the "nearly Louis Paster" category), and they did everything they could to silence the readers and other people who were interested.

This is how hundreds of thousands – of millions – of lives were actually unnecessarily ended because, make no mistake about it, we will learn that Covid-19 isn't such a big deal when dealt with properly.

No Covid drug has been widely accepted as a "miracle drug" as of today. But there are emerging signs that many of those things are helpful. Some of them have no side effects. When a relative of yours has (or you have) Covid, (make him or her) take vitamins C,D, and zinc; eat the oregano oil capsules and try to inhale the oregano oil spray (LM TM), try to buy isoprinosine, use aspirin when your fever gets above 38 °C (aspirin always does the same thing in these conditions, with or without Covid), take the drugs against inflammation if appropriate, and look for ways to obtain Regeneron, convalescent plasma, and other things. If something has minimal side effects or no side effects, it is likely to have a positive expectation value of net benefits in the world of uncertainty.

I feel fairly certain that Summer 2021 will be mostly Covid-free; the disease will look line a tiny relative problem some 3-4 months from now (in almost all countries) and a great majority will see that the return to normalcy is a matter of common sense. Most of mankind should regain common sense much earlier. Especially with the vaccination that has been applied to roughly 1/2 of the vulnerable people in the West and with some advances in the treatment, Covid-19 is an incredibly shrinking problem (although it has already lasted many months more than most of my previous expectations). Billions of people, you should finally stop listening to the crooks and killers who don't really want the "problem named Covid-19" to shrink. They have never wanted the problem to shrink (listen to Jane Fonda's admission) and you should have never listened to these evil liars but now it's really getting ludicrous and most of your friends will see the light soon if they haven't seen in yet. Don't be the last one who will abandon the dishonest murderous power-thirsty demagogues, censors, and enemies of the real science, prosperity, our normal lifestyles, and the pillars of the Western civilization.

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