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Hmm. I thought that Wuhan Institute of Virology were using humanised mice for serial passage of coronaviruses; transgenic ones that had been given human ACE2 receptors. SARS-CoV-2 does very well in such humanised mice apparently, much better than it does in bats, prompting some to speculate that these humanised mice were the illusive intermediate species for SARS-CoV-2 between bats and humans. It’s just as well that’s all conspiracy theory or someone could be in deep for compensation for all the deaths and lockdowns; I don’t see how they’d ever pay it off, it’d crash any underwriter.
There are various “humanised mice” used but none of them had a humanised immune system. Now they can see how drugs and vaccines etc. stimulate the immune system of these mice. There are also available various tissue types to test viruses etc. on, such as lung tissue cultures.
Cord blood samples are frequently taken for various valid reasons such as say blood type antibody incompatibility with mum and babies. Remember all the concerns around STEM cell research a number of years ago. I find it difficult to imagine many people would consent for their cord blood research samples to be used to develop humanised mice if they were asked directly.
From commenter AG on the Climate Change Denialists thread, here:
– “I fear exaggeration, even scaremongering, practiced by – of all people – scientists during the Covid period…”
AG, I did not notice such exaggeration from the scientific community; rather, I felt that the scientific perspective was marginalised by the mass media. That same mass media certainly over-reported on the issue, and their reporting was sensationalist and uninformative, dominated by statements from politicians, most of them utterly clueless, followed closely by emotional but anti-educational “human interest” pieces. I think a discussion about the true problems presented by SARS-CoV-2 could be helpful, as at least in England, the mass media has never made these clear, neither at the time nor since.
However, my experience in England may differ considerably from yours in Germany, so I suggest you start us off with a summary of what you encountered.
Clark
Indeed as my limited knowledge goes I may only judge (and condemn) conduct in Germany. Public opinion in a similiar manner as now with the war over Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza is monopolized by a single thread of what the elite thinks, by which I mean the major TV and print media, academic institutions of the humanities and of science branches such as the Leibniz Society, the Leopoldina or the Max-Planck-Institute, and eventually the fine and performing arts. Above all these are towering governmental executive bodies and legal institutions – and law enforcement.
From the now completely declassified versions of the Robert-Koch-Intitute-Files (over 2000 pages) we know that the axiomatic decisions of the German government were struck in the last instance on political grounds not scientific data.
Decisions which meant to impose lockdowns with all the long-time economic and social implications, to impose mass vaccination, to order vaccines in huge numbers (at the same time deny them to Third World countries and eventually dispose of them when unnecessary) and to agree on scandalous deals with the pharmaceutical companies.
Those members of the scientific community who were involved in these decisions and supported them did so despite the fact that data did not justify a complete lockdown, instead of focusing on care-homes for the old e.g.
As far as Statista.com goes among the 183.000 dead of Covid in the past 4 years (May 2024) 118.000 were over 80, 55.000 over 60. Which were those groups who could have been protected the easiest. This casts a shadow of enormous moral corruption over a capitalisticaly organized society which does the opposite of what it publicly claims.
Scientists who in public contradicted this were silenced by those who claimed expertise themselves – which were the science departments of the serious papers (not tabloids which have not the same influence as in GB) and TV, administrative representatives from the health and interior ministry who spoke with the power of “science” and were backed by models provided by scientists and sicentists who had a public role as affiliates.
Here apparently – and this has been known for 2 years or more – some models were used by mathematicians e.g. who were explicitely not specialized in modelling virus break-outs among populations. It was never answered why they were chosen to do the job.
In fact there were small factions of scientists outside government highly critical of these policies.
Already during the 2-year-Covid period it became known that scientists had modelled exaggerated predictions for dead under pressure from the interior minister in Bavaria I think (but I guess you could find similiar stories for every state.) They in fact had complained about this pressure afterwards. It was immediately forgotten.
Same goes with a leaked paper fom the interior ministry that had suggested scaremongering tactics. It confirmed what crictics thought but changed nothing about the executive decisions which were after all binding for 80 million people.
The denouncing of those who opposed obligation for vaccination was immense. It was a precursor of today´s prejudice and discrimination – people lost their jobs, were forced by courts, denounced in public and insulted in social media, by huge papers, in ad campaigns, by the major television channels.
Since it was about viruses it always and exclusively built on scientific expertise and was thus considered beyond debate and doubt since it could be „proven“. This again was not possible without the complicity of major parts of the science community which in many cases stayed invisible, spoke through government decisions.
In other instances bodies visible and very outspoken failed utterly. The advisory body by the Leopoldina (German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina) was in favour of lockdown and vaccination. They did not do what they were supposed to, namely provide independendent assessments, articulate caution and if necessary intervene.
One member of the Leopoldina, Alena Buyx, also chaired another institution, the German National Ethics Commission. Its job description is in its name. Instead of doing that Buyx (and other members too) publicly denounced citizens who did not want to get vaccinated. (It might be no surprise that Buyx is active in the WHO global governance plans, as far as I remember.)These are just a few examples of a practice of daily smearing.
Heads of the governmental health bodies called the unvaccinated the cause for the state of emergency, and much worse ad hominems. When it became known that neither of the vaccines protected from getting infected or infecting others, only protecting from severity of an infection, there was not a single word of apology to those who rejected the vaccines (for whatever reasonable or non-reasonable argument). And what is so infuriating people – the government knew how vaccines worked and how they did not, all along and lied about it. Again this was only workable with considerable cooperation by scientits.
It was striking that all of the sudden after 2 years of this campaign 24/7 which had put an entire country under the spell of the views of a technoratic elite when it came down to parliament to actually decide over vaccination the MPs voted against it.
I at some point didn´t follow this madness any more closely since I had no time and I frankly had naively trusted the non-partisan position of scientists and the politicians they had advised as I had trusted the German company that had introduced one of the vaccines. And I was therefore surprised about the no-vote by 700 MPs. Only later it came to light what kind of rigging had been going on. The vote was unexpected and a rare moment of raw truth which shows you how limited the information was that had been communicated to the public by the media.
None of this could have been pulled off without the complicity of the scientific community.
The above mentioned mathematicians who had been in charge for one of the influential models never answered to why their model was faulty and inadequate for the purpose. As fellow mathematicians had warned from the beginning yet had been ignored by the media.
And throughout there was not a week without some doctor, lung specialist, virologist, warning of mass deaths and calling people all kinds of nasty things if they rejected to agree.
Even though early on there was not enough data to put formulas to use. The decision on what number to use was therefore very much a political one. And as such prone to collecting and concentrating power instead of letting loose as – sry for this clichéd example – I believe Swedes did in fact attempt. The Swedes were far from perfect but unlike the German regime the Swedish accepted scrutiny of their actions. Something to this day German government still is unwilling to do. Even though the facts and the truth are all out now and everyone can read them. Still the mainstream is ignoring it. Which doesn´t help and furthers social division. (Which might be the intended goal.)
One particulary infuriating case was Heinz Bude who is a left sociologist and had been an influential figure holding one of the prestigious chairs in Germany.
(Since the Frankfurt School and the 1960s, sociology in Germany has an unusual influence on intellectual life and group-think of the now senior generation in power in academia. This however did not keep these people from betraying democratic ideals.)
Bude had been part of an exclusive circle of academic bigwigs advising the government during the Covid years. Last year in Vienna, not Germany (!), he appeared in public and spoke very honestly and in fact proudly so, about how this circle used (in fact ab-used) its powers to install and test policies to manipulate and disinform the public to find out how far it would be possible to direct the masses in moments of emergency. For this in particular he stressed the importance of instigating fear and terror in the hearts of people. It didn´t occure to him that doing so, and scaremongering other human beings, is the most dishonest and despicable thing a “left“ sociologist could engage in. One who has been in a renown teaching position (!) for almost 4 decades. And with that he would betray the anti-fascist traditions where he had come from as Bude in his student years had participated in illegal occupations of apartments and resistance to police, which was part of West-Berlin life in the 1970s and 1980s. And by all means Bude is not the only such case.
One last example is the German association of hospital directors. In 2022 the directors of the German hospitals had their annual meeting. I read the report back then. The report did mention Covid and that it might increase pressure in some instances but by no means would the pandemic overwhelm German hospitals. In fact hospitals on average had less to do than before 2020 because people simply stopped going to the hospital due to fear of the virus, and the lockdown and the fairy-tales that everyone not severly ill would take away space fom those infected with Covid. This annual report ended with the advice that since the system „worked“ a reduction in hospital beds and a cutting of budget would be justified. So the professors and managers of medicine sitting their decided in a manner that would totally contradict German public hysteria that was taking place at the very same time all over the country. Of course this annual budget meeting remained unnoticed by 99% of the people. When I tried to tell others and gave them the report they discarded it. Of course who has time to read an entire pdf. Especially if it doesn´t concure with what government representativse are telling us.
But these are the ugly truths. And had scientists opposed this from day 1 in their overwhelming majority we could have handeled this in an entirely different way.
I was surprised then. I am not any more considering that today members of antiwar groups, and so-called peace institutions, nuclear physicists, sociologists, historians, politicians, engineers, are calling for WMDs in Germany.Hypocrisy, the lack of reasoning, putting hatred in place of sanity and skepticism have become standard. All of this could be observed during the Covid years taking shape. I didn´t understand that back then.
I still don´t regard them as exchangeable cases of course, but as power in Germany is concerned the mechanism and manifestations are very similiar. By now it doesn´t matter if it´s a virus breaking out or lies about RU threatening Europe. And none of this could happen without scientists participating in the cover-ups. The population doesn´t know the details. But they have a fine understanding of why they are being lied to. So if the same academic sphere now tells them they have to give up on certain things due to climate models it is understandable they won´t be eager to listen.
In February 2020 a colleague of mine who was pregnant at that time sent me an initial internal paper from the Berlin Charité which was operating with a potential death rate of 1-3%. We know those estimates were incredibly bloated and one of many estimates out there while others were very contradicting. Naturally Charité decided on this „version“ not the more somber estimates. I had my doubts because the numbers went through the roof and the dissenting voices were everywhere at that early point in time. But what are you supposed to tell a pregnant woman if she holds papers in her hands given to her by trusted friends from one of the most prestigious intitutes in Germany?
It´s not entirely like the RU threat today. But to those who believe in the system it doesn´t matter if its secret military intelligence or the Charité. They both are state institutions. In the past people used to be doubtful of the state when it was governed by people who had no connection to formerly leftist organisations of public resistance or the civil rights movement. Since this has changed (THE GREENs and the Social Democrats) critical conscience has dissipated among the „educated“ epecially those who consider themselves progressive and thus „superior“. And the Covid „betrayal“ was one of their first major failures.
I am sure many people of all political sides agree with the problem of climate change and can dinstinguish. But as the saying goes „fool me once“…
Clark
correction: The above mentioned report by the hospital directors in the last quarter of my post was of course 2021, not 2022. Published in April 2021, analyzing the year 2020.
The court hearings over Ursula von der Leyen´s 35bn Euro deal for vaccines have started. The plaintiff is a Belgian lobbyist working for the EU. He is supported by 500 individuals and the governments of Hungary and Poland. I have no idea if this will lead to anything. The main goal is getting access to the SMS which apparently contain the information about that deal. It is indeed hair-raising and pathologic to say the least that in a Medieval manner 35bn Euros (of tax money) over vaccines are agreed on between private partners/acquaintances concerning the lives of 300m citizens in a major crisis. And eventually the deal is kept secret. Welcome to the age of Louis XIV. And then parliament confirms another term for that same woman? They should put her in prison and along with her kick out the entire parliament.
Once politicians and the pharmaceutical industry realised they could use the pandemic as an opportunity and means to an end, the game changed completely. If I recall correctly, it was announced within a few weeks of the outbreak that a ‘vaccine’ had been developed and would be available within months and would be ‘safe and effective’. I’m not a virologist or immunologist, but a research paper I published in the 1980s was cited in the trials for the HPV vaccine. Prior to that, part of my clinical practice involved the management of polio complications in the lower limbs.
Until Covid, I assumed a vaccine would prevent infection and transmission of the agent and that its development would take some years to ensure it was ‘safe and effective’. For polio, it was over two decades; for HPV it was 17 years. It takes time to study the effects of all drugs on humans, but with vaccines it also takes time to consider fully the effects on the virus and, if it is non-sterilising, will it increase viral fitness and immune escape?
Perhaps it’s just a sign of the times that we think that our technical and scientific expertise can defeat any threat from nature, quickly and with relative ease – much like the proposed solutions to the energy crisis. But I fear we’ve been misled by the promise of a ‘quick-fix’ and may well have made matters much worse. The pandemic is far from over and the last six months has seen an explosion in the viral mutation.
https://nextstrain.org/ncov/gisaid/global/6m?dmax=2024-04-20
Shibboleth, I very much agree with your comment #99831, but wish to add one thing. The sudden emergence of a completely new virus changed the background to vaccination safety testing; vaccines had only to offer less danger than the virus itself. By coincidence you have worked with the virus I’d use as an example – HPV or human papillomavirus. If HPV suddenly arrived on the scene, any vaccine against it would struggle to gain approval because at first sight HPV causes only cosmetic damage. But years later, some strains of HPV cause cancer, so the possibility of long term risks from vaccination must be weighed against known long term risks from the virus.
In the case of SARS-CoV-2, long term risks from both virus and vaccines were (and to some extent remain) unknown. However, vaccination certainly reduced short term risks – which could well suggest that long term risks will also be lower with vaccination than without.
AG, thanks for your post. There is so much to go into that I’d best compose it over time and post it later. I may do it in sections.
AG, there are many similarities, and some differences, between the responses to covid in Germany and Britain. Governmental and media pressure for mandatory vaccination, and blaming-and-shaming of those declining vaccination or opposing compulsion was very similar. Likewise, the British public were subjected to deliberate fear-mongering, and dishonest claims that vaccination would “stop the spread” and create herd immunity. However, in Britain, scientific institutions are not given a public platform. Instead, the media present a motley assortment of ‘experts’. Unless such experts are government advisors or called to government committees, the public are not told how the media chose them, but often they are from partisan think-tanks, or recommended by PR companies through the infamous British “old boy network”. This led to various anti-lockdown scientists being platformed, but it added only heat rather than light to what I would not grace with the term ‘debate’.
I should now go through some background points.
1) – Infection Fatality Rate IFR.
A big misconception is that IFR is a fixed attribute of a given virus. I realised during the first year that this is not so. Rather, IFR is an attribute of the interaction between an infection and the society it is infecting. From memory, with no vaccination (as was the case early in the pandemic) SARS-CoV-2 makes about 3% of those infected ill enough to require hospitalisation. More or less of those survive and recover, depending upon treatment. This was a brand new virus, so the medical community were learning on the job. For instance, infection lowers blood oxygen saturation, which in turn damages internal organs. At first, doctors treated this by using mechanical ventilators, and there was a big panic because there were far too few ventilators. But soon it was found that oxygen enrichment was adequate in most cases, so more patients recovered and the IFR fell, e.g. on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, early in the pandemic, IFR was accurately measurable because everyone on board was tested multiple times. It was found to be 1.6%. Much lower figures were found later in the pandemic as better treatment options were discovered.
Clark – yes, I accept that, but calculating risk with a novel infection and a completely new delivery platform is impossibly complex and underlines the need for patience and comprehensive studies. It takes time. That’s how it was with polio and there were many victims who endured life changing injury, but compared to what might have happened with a sub-optimal vaccine that promoted immune escape and resistance, it was a good outcome.
We place so much trust in technology as a solution to all our problems and rarely consider the associated risks. This is particularly so in pharmaceutical research. The industry has been experimenting with SARS for almost 16 years, manipulating the original virus under the guise of vaccine research and pandemic protection, and never delivered at a safe and effective product before 2020.
I’ve no idea how this runs out – nobody does. But I do have a sense that we acted very much in haste and may have made matters much worse than if we had followed established practice.
Shibboleth:
– “But I do have a sense that we acted very much in haste and may have made matters much worse than if we had followed established practice.”
I agree. I was never keen on vaccines as a solution; they are just the lesser evil that ‘Western’ governments have left us with – given a choice between facing the virus vaccinated or unvaccinated, I have chosen vaccinated.
I argued for stamping out the virus, with intense but brief lockdown followed by intensive trace-test-quarantine. This was doable, as China, Australia, New Zealand and various islands demonstrated, and it resulted in a fraction of the time spent locked down, suffered by a fraction of the population.
..something I don´t get is this statement (in this example by US author CJ Hopkins):
“Mask mandates do not work against airborne viruses.”
This is one of the arguments in the Covid-discussion that I don´t understand. Of course they don´t work if people don´t wear them properly or take em off. Which I understand very much during the pandemic for working spaces other than hospitals where it is not part of the routine (cafés, supermarkets, schools, taxis, public transport etc). But that is not a scientific argument.
p.s. I will post the court case against CJ Hopkins for his pictures combining masks with swastikas in the Gaza forum. The post is interesting in order to understand odd German legal thinking regarding Nazism vs. freedom of speech because it also applies to the suppression of anti-Israel protests.
re: children/Germany
from X via Dr. Gerhard Scheuch
“(…)We suggested to the then minister for health @jensspahn
a ‘children’s study’ to find out whether children are as infectious as adults. Was rejected!
We then carried out 3 studies using our own resources and found that children inhale far fewer aerosol particles than adults and are therefore much less infectious. We had already expected this from earlier studies on young adults. Unfortunately, there were no consequences.
(…)”answer on X by Bastian Barucker member of the RKI-Files/protocols publishing team
“(…)What I would add are the recurring statements in the protocols since February 2020 that children are neither at risk nor significant transmission drivers. The absurd measures seem even more disproportionate in light of this.(…)”
re: my above question on masks Dr. Gerhard Scheuch had this (31/1/23):
“(…)
Now there is a clear result: wearing surgical or FFP2 masks has no(!) effect on the incidence of infection. As an aerosol researcher, I had expected a different result. However, this detailed study shows no significant influence
(…)”
see: https://x.com/DrScheuch/status/1620323602221383681I find that post odd. But be it. Unfortunately the link provided for the study under the X link isn´t working any more:
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/content?templateType=full&urlTitle=/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6&doi=10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6&type=cdsr&contentLanguage=“children inhale far fewer aerosol particles than adults and are therefore much less infectious…”
That sentence is weird.
Children inhale fewer aerosol particles and are thus less likely to become infected and if infected, children exhale fewer aerosol particles and are thus less likely to infect others. Probability is doing the heavy lifting there. Children maybe less likely to become infected and less likely to infect others but the probability is not zero. Children will become infected and will transmit virus to others albeit at a lower probability. It also depends on age and other factors. Add that if children do become infected it far more likely to be mild or asymptomatic.When I am the despotic ruler of the universe and there is another pandemic caused by an aerosol transmitted respiratory virus I’d hate to have to make the decision as to whether schools should or shouldn’t be closed.
As said despotic ruler I directed my minions to prepare a paper on all most people could ever want to know on “Airborne transmission of respiratory viruses.”
Is this what you’re looking for?
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full
Authors’ conclusions – excerpt
– The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions. There were additional RCTs during the pandemic related to physical interventions but a relative paucity given the importance of the question of masking and its relative effectiveness and the concomitant measures of mask adherence which would be highly relevant to the measurement of effectiveness, especially in the elderly and in young children.
Since the authors have such low confidence in their own study, I think Gerhard Scheuch (a physicist, and founder and CEO of GS-Bio-Inhalation GmbH, Aerosol Medicine and Pulmonary Drug Delivery) probably posted this for political reasons. Strangely reminiscent of Mike Yeadon’s antics, though not as harmful.
ET, when you’re a despotic leader in the next airborne pandemic, please implement border quarantine, or/and stamp it out fast as China did and Australia learned to, because then the question of whether schools (and everything else) should shut down for months will never arise.
Gerhard Scheuch is making a fuss about a non-issue. We could still stamp out covid; we’d need ventilation mandates, UV lamp mandates, CO2 monitors, free tests for all, state funded quarantine facilities, test-and-trace professionals, and guaranteed, easy to access short-term sick pay. Governments should jump at this because it would keep the workforce fit and boost economic growth.
Remember, we only have to get covid’s reproductive rate below 1 and it will decline, it will be on the path to extinction. Get it down to manageable levels, then stamp out the remaining pockets. We have fire in every home, yet our cities aren’t permanently on fire, because we know how to contain it.
Clark
Thank you very much.
I assume that´s what he meant.A bit odd that the study has the publication date 30/1/, just one day before Scheuch made his TWITTER comment.
However I do remember that from the outset it repeatedly was suggested that children caused little exposure for infection of others. I would of course assume this additional to the fact that they breath smaller volumes. (What about diseases where children spread beyond proportion?)
I am not a (medical) scientist as I have reiterated and which puts me in a difficult position beyond providing material and present anecdotal summaries as the mine above. And this pdf alone demonstrates the problem of our time, it has over 300 pages. I have no time to go through it. And I doubt that even if I did I could adequately judge it.
p.s. For comparison: I once looked up the report of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on “Russiagate”. It had several hundred pages with masses of footnotes. I have better judgement on that since I have read about the problem for a few years now.
We thus know that all in that report was bullshit produced to keep people from reading it. An old tactics. I don´t want to suggest this was the same with Covid. But it is not unlikely that papers were prduced to disinform and discourage readers in some instances, among countless others which were genuine. Besides that comes the problem of exaggerating a phenomenon under the magnifying glass of studies. I remember German doctors who were contradicting in their day-to-day experience in hospitals and with the conclusions they drew. There is unfortunately a world beyond our personal experience possibly contradicting much we believe to be true. (see climate change…). Does it mean there is no truth? No. But it can make arguments really hard.“Epidemic outcomes following government responses to COVID-19: Insights from nearly 100,000 models”
https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.adn0671by Eran Bendavid and Chirag J. Patel
Science Advances
5 Jun 2024
Vol 10, Issue 23Abstract:
Government responses to COVID-19 are among the most globally impactful events of the 21st century. The extent to which responses—such as school closures—were associated with changes in COVID-19 outcomes remains unsettled. Multiverse analyses offer a systematic approach to testing a large range of models. We used daily data on 16 government responses in 181 countries in 2020–2021, and 4 outcomes—cases, infections, COVID-19 deaths, and all-cause excess deaths—to construct 99,736 analytic models. Among those, 42% suggest outcomes improved following more stringent responses (“helpful”). No subanalysis (e.g. limited to cases as outcome) demonstrated a preponderance of helpful or unhelpful associations. Among the 14 associations with P values < 1 × 10−30, 5 were helpful and 9 unhelpful. In summary, we find no patterns in the overall set of models that suggests a clear relationship between COVID-19 government responses and outcomes. Strong claims about government responses’ impacts on COVID-19 may lack empirical support.AG, for some reason unknown, the link you gave won’t open on my (admittedly outdated and quirky) system, so I’ll be reading from the link below:
Grief, it’d take me many hours at least, and more probably days, just to understand what the authors actually did with all that data! My uneducated impression of their “multiverse analysis” is that they fed huge amounts of data into nearly 100,000 different software mathematical analyses, collated the outputs and found no consistent patterns. I really have no idea whether that’s a reasonable thing to do or not, but my guess is – not. You’d have thought they’d have found some policy that either helped or hindered, wouldn’t you?! For instance, New Zealand’s border controls at least seemed to result in zero social restrictions and zero covid – an excellent outcome I’d have said – but maybe the multiverse analysis didn’t test for that, or buried this golden needle in a haystack of other findings.
Full marks for transparency though. All their data is available, you can play with their models on some website called Shiny Apps, and even inspect the code.
Life is too short for this one. If I really wanted to understand this paper I’d start by waiting for reviews of it by epidemiological statisticians – pure laziness on my part; let someone with relevant background experience do the work!
Clark
I just think making it available is better than not.
May be you are right and the work in itself doesn´t yield immediate results useful for society right now. But other scientists can build upon it. With the rise of AI for pattern analysis I guess this kind of what you correctly call multiverse approach will become more and more common.
* * *
Today a general assessment on COVID-19 by Detlev H. Krüger and Klaus Stöhr in the BERLINER ZEITUNG.
“Klaus Stöhr and Detlev Krüger: Several Corona measures either unnecessary or harmful
There are scientific rules for dealing with epidemic outbreaks. In the case of Corona, these were often not followed. What does this mean for the future?”https://archive.is/j8ZJI
or
https://www-berliner–zeitung-de.translate.goog/open-source/klaus-stoehr-und-detlev-krueger-etliche-corona-massnahmen-entweder-unnoetig-oder-schaedlich-li.2236610?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp&_x_tr_hist=true“Professor Dr. med. Detlev H. Krüger was director of the Institute of Virology at the Charité Berlin from 1989 to 2016. At the same time, he worked for many years as a member of the board of the Society for Virology, deputy chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Paul Ehrlich Institute (Federal Institute for Vaccines and Biomedicines) and as editor-in-chief of the journal “Virus Genes” (published by Springer-Nature, New York).
Professor Dr. Klaus Stöhr worked at the WHO headquarters in Geneva from 1992 to 2007, among other things as coordinator of global Sars research, as WHO pandemic officer and headed the WHO Global Influenza Program for many years. His international team discovered the Sars-CoV-1 virus. From 2007 he worked in vaccine research and development at Novartis and later at the company headquarters in Basel. He has been a freelance consultant since 2018.”
AG, you were not part of the many covid threads that this blog posted during the pandemic where we posted everything to death, literally. I read the link you posted above and stopped when I got to this paragraph:
“In this situation, it became clear once again how important it would have been to distinguish between those who were ill with Corona and those who had died with it, but unfortunately this distinction was not made: Due to infection with the efficiently spreading virus, many patients who came to the hospital because of a traffic accident, heart attack or many other medical reasons were found to be positive for Corona in routine tests and were included in the statistics as “Covid-19 cases” without the infection being the cause of hospitalization or even death. One can only speculate about the distortion of the statistics.”
The from and with argument again!
Hospitals should have screened for covid, like they do for MRSA, so that patients infected can be isolated regardless of the reason for presenting to hospital in the first place. If someone is positive for MRSA then you wouldn’t put them in a post-op ward, Similarly with covid. A positively identified case of covid is a case of covid whether symptomatic or not and whether that was the reason for your presentation or not. It’s perfectly reasonable to record a positive test as a covid case but that doesn’t mean if you died because your head was squashed by the wheel of a bus that covid would be put on the death cert as cause of death. Doctors are not stupid.
Also, deaths were calculated using different parameters. Deaths within 28 days of a positive test, covid mentioned on death cert as cause of death or as co-morbidity and excess deaths from all causes. They all correlated well enough with each other with excess deaths from all causes probably being the most accurate assessment. This guy is again suggesting that stats were distorted. Excess deaths from all causes cannot be distorted.
I stopped reading the rest.
