IT NEVER stops. The global health campaign to scare us all witless regarding covid continues.
The motives are threefold: first, to exert an element of control over our lives as there is nothing the global health busybodies like better than power, or the illusion thereof; second, they need to justify the utter insanity of the measures that were enacted during the false pandemic of 2020-2021 and counting; third, to continue pushing covid vaccines on those gormless enough to take them.
One of the tactics, lest covid fades from memory, is the continued discovery of new covid-19 variants. Each one is more deadly than the last and not likely to be covered by any of the present covid-19 vaccines.
Enter the latest variant BA.3.2, codename ‘Cicada’ due to its ‘long hibernation period and noisy return’ as expressed by Chris Baker, Senior Publicist, Smith Publicity Inc, in an email to our editor Kathy Gyngell. We met the hapless Chris last week following another email to Kathy trying to whip up a fever about the dubious condition of long covid.
Once again, Chris is pushing someone else we met last week, Dr Tyler Evans, who appears to be milking covid-19 for all it is worth. Chris’s email to Kathy informs that Dr Evans is ‘available to discuss’ this new and emerging existential threat to our species, and ‘other public health stories’. Naturally our editor was on the blower toute de suite to hear what Dr Tyler had to say . . . not!
Chris Baker does admit that ‘right now, we do not know if BA.3.2 spreads more easily or causes more severe illness than other recent variants’. So, nothing to see, in fact, and one wonders what Dr Tyler could possibly have to say about the cicada variant. Unless, like others in the covid commentariat, he has elevated speculation to an art form and, like so many of his ilk, is adept at converting bullshit into dollars.
In the same way as he doesn’t know what the threat is, Dr Tyler does not know what to do about it. But, just to stay on the safe side, he recommends ‘current protective measures like staying home when sick and staying up to date on vaccines’. The control so enjoyed by public health fanatics and the pushing of vaccines both in the same sentence.
Of course, the story has also been picked up by our old friend from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Global Health NOW (GHN) which provided a link captioned ‘New COVID variant with immune escape potential confirmed in US, 22 other countries’. The article linked to the caption came from another ‘frequent flier’ in this column CIDRAP, the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy at the University of Minnesota.
As with GHN, CIDRAP is never the organ to downplay the alleged threat of covid. Quoting the researchers who identified the variant they report that ‘many countries have limited genomic detection and surveillance capacities, [so] these detections likely underrepresent the actual geographic extent of spread’. The familiar ‘we are all at risk’ strategy.
They continue, quoting the researchers, to say that ‘mutations in the spike protein could reduce protection from a vaccination or infection’. Thus, new vaccines will be required and pronto. Luckily, we have mRNA technology to call upon to aid the design process . . . ker-ching!
The researchers also reckon that ‘continued genomic surveillance is needed to track SARS-CoV-2 evolution and determine its potential effect on public health’. Of course they do. Jobs for the boys (and girls).
In a similar vein, also linked in GHN, comes the news that ‘150,000+ previously uncounted COVID-19 deaths occurred in 2020 and 2021 in the US.’ The link provided is to an article in Science. But were these covid deaths?
The study inspected nearly six million death certificates using a machine learning algorithm. As such it did not identify individual deaths from covid-19; it estimated the number of deaths by assuming that all hospital deaths identified as covid-19 deaths were accurate and compared that with the number of deaths in the community based on clusters of symptoms meaning that the deaths were most likely covid-related.
The uncounted deaths were outside of hospital. The assumption in the model is that covid-19 testing in hospital was accurate, whereas testing in the community was either not done or was less accurate.
But the problem of false positive diagnosis of covid-19 and the old chestnut of death ‘with or of’ covid-19 is immediately raised. The modelling used in the Science article did not consider false positive results. This is just another effort to keep covid in the public eye and to exaggerate its lethality.
The problem for the public health lobby, Big Pharma and those who try to make a living from perpetuating covid fear is that, apart from the most gullible amongst us, nobody really cares about covid now. One of the biggest wolves of all time was cried in 2020 when we were threatened with piles of bodies on the streets and the presentation of vaccines as the only way to ensure survival.
The threat was never as big as they said it was going to be and the vaccines were barely effective. The vaccine side-effects are now ‘mainstream’ and even the UK Covid Inquiry has admitted that lockdowns were responsible for thousands of deaths. However, sadly, we probably have a few more years of covid-related fearmongering to endure.
