IT IS FIVE years since the World Health Organization (WHO), having changed its tune considerably about the nature of the mystery viral illness in China, declared a ‘pandemic’. But if Global Health Now (GHN), the daily dose of health-related hype from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, has anything to do with it, we will never be allowed to forget.
The GHN issue of March 11 is instructive, if nothing else, offering an insight into a mentality that can only fairly be described as ‘covid derangement syndrome’, or CDS for short. The issue is headed by an article assimilating many sources in which exaggeration, half-truths and downright untruths are presented to impress on the reader, as if they did not already know, that covid was probably the worst global health disaster the world has ever seen. On that point, I can agree with them – but for very different reasons.
I am often confronted about my views on covid, viz that it was a grossly overblown load of nonsense designed to give the public health fanatics their day in the sun and to generate massive profits for major corporations who stood to profit from selling all manner of covid-related paraphernalia and vaccines. I then remind critics that I was at ‘ground zero’ when it started.
I was in Wuhan in December 2019, admittedly before the ‘pandemic’ was declared but well into the time when, as we now know, the Chinese authorities were aware that something was amiss regarding attendance and hospitals and a flu-like illness. This was the time, according to demonstrably faked videos, when people were collapsing in the street and bodies were being collected from the pavements. No such thing was happening, and after I returned to the UK, maintaining contact with my Chinese colleagues in Wuhan, a year on from my visit not one of them reported having covid.
It is hard to know where to start with the GHN article of March 11 and, for those with a jaundiced eye regarding all things related to covid, it is probably worth reading. The opening line says: ‘On March 11, 2020, the WHO confirmed what everyone already knew: The novel coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2 had spawned a pandemic.’ Not true: not everyone believed there was a pandemic, though many did because they had been primed on the nightly television news and in the daily newspapers that this was what was likely to happen.
It is possible to trace the death rattle of the press and media in the UK to the day Boris Johnson announced a lockdown. The legacy press and mainstream media lapped it up, avoided any challenging questions and, except for the journalist Peter Hitchens who, on March 29 2020 condemned Boris Johnson’s mass arrest, reinforced the pandemic-lockdown mentality. (Sound judgement and scepticism was left to ‘alt media’. On March 18th 2020 The Conservative Woman published Laura Perrins’s seminal article Liberty shackled and the future blighted: RIP Europe, 312 – 2020. We had a good run. Toby Young followed more cautiously two weeks later in The Critic asking whether the government had overreacted to the Covid crisis.)
There follows the incredible claim that while the WHO reported 7million covid deaths, the true figure was more likely to be 20million. Frankly, it is unlikely that even the lower figure is anywhere close to accurate. It fails to differentiate ‘died of covid’ from ‘died with covid’, or to account for the adverse effects of lockdown, health service closures, warehousing of older people in care homes and deaths resulting from covid vaccines.
Then the massive cost ($16trillion), the adverse effect on education (1.6billion children), and the increase in poverty (130million people) are referred to as resulting from the ‘pandemic’. No, these things were caused by the response to the ‘pandemic’, and we now know that lockdowns and face masks were ineffective at stopping the spread of covid but highly effective at destroying lives, economies and societal cohesion.
The ’never-ending pandemic’ means that this year up to February 16 3,600 Americans were hospitalised due to covid. ‘Due to’ is a vague term masking the difference between those ‘with’ and those hospitalised because ‘of’ covid and is likely to be largely a function of persistent and flawed covid testing whereby people hospitalised for reasons unrelated to covid and who show no symptoms are nevertheless classified as cases.
Of course, ‘long covid’ makes a cameo appearance in relation to the WHO claim that around six of every 100 people who had covid developed it. Given the thoroughness with which we have dealt with the probable myth of long covid in these pages it is sufficient to say that some of those claiming to have had covid probably did not have it and, with the vagueness and imprecision of diagnosing long covid, most of those have likely mistaken some common and unrelated symptoms as long covid. Given that those who report long covid are likely to be the same people who have repeated covid boosters, how many of them are suffering from post-vaccine syndrome?
A Lancet Psychiatry article is cited, reporting that one in five people hospitalised with covid reports severe depression. I do not doubt the raw figures reported in the article. However, all the caveats above apply and I strongly suspect that ‘response bias’, which cuts both ways, is at work here. For example, people who believe they have been damaged by vaccines are more likely to participate in studies related to vaccine harms. Conversely, people who believe they were hospitalised due to covid and were adversely affected by it are more likely to participate in studies about adverse effects of covid.
Finally, according to an Axios-Ipsos survey only 62 per cent of Americans trust the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and only 57 per cent trust the National Institutes of Health (NIH). While I am surprised that the figures are so high, I am hardly surprised that GHN should think that trust in these organisations would be higher. As the narrative of an unending pandemic persists, the real crisis lies not in covid itself but in the unwavering grip of fear and misinformation, or covid derangement syndrome, that continues to shape public perception and policy.
