COVID-19 News

[Randall]

Just FYI: The controversial "Obamacare" or Affordable Care Act, although falsely labeled as some sort of socialized medicine, is actually a based in large part on a Republican plan that was originated by the conservative Heritage Foundation several decades ago. That includes the so-called individual mandate, that fines people who don't have health coverage in order to make sure the insurance pool is as wide as possible. It uses the private insurance market, thus helping to guarantee that those companies will have a steady flow of busiensss.

It was put into effect in Massachusetts when Republican Mitt Romney (now a Utah Senator) was governor there.

When President Obama originally decided to push for a national health care plan in his first term, being a rather moderate individual, he opted to choose a national version of that plan, developed with some of the same people who worked on Romney's plan, no doubt under the mistaken belief that Republicans would work with Democrats to push it through.

Republicans opposed it, even though they would have enthusiastically supported it had Senator McCain been elected instead.

Romney opposed the national version of his plan when he ran against Obama in 2012.

I trust that tells you just how screwed up healthcare is down here in the colonies.

Yes. I and I don't get why. The American people are smart enough to figure out that partisan politics is a lousy way to govern a country. So what is it that keeps it in place? Is it just big money spent on propaganda by mega-corporations that are run like fascist empires? Can't the voters see through that?

 

[Gene Steinberg]

Democrats won the House in 2018 largely over healthcare concerns.

This year, one of the biggest issues pushing people in favor of Biden is healthcare again, particularly due to the high disapproval of Trump's response to the coronavirus. Meantime, Trump and his Department of Justice support a case pending in the U.S. Supreme Court that attempts to declare the healthcare law unconstitutional. And that's not fake news.

Meantime, Biden's healthcare plan is a hybrid. Offer an improved version of the existing Obamacare plan, but add a "public" option, meaning that a buy-in to Medicare will be offered. The expectation is that, after a few years, the private insurance market will be reduced in favor of the public option.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

One more thing: I have Medicare Advantage, the version run by a private insurance company. It includes the benefits of Medicare plus what would normally be a supplement that covers drugs, a small amount of dental care, and some vision coverage.

So I receive free eye exams, but have to pay $30 for contract lens refraction. I also get $200 towards the purchase of contact lenses or eyeglasses. If I choose one, I get a 20% (I think) discount on the other.

Confused yet? I go for the contact lenses, since my vision hasn't changed much and thus I keep my existing pair of eyeglasses.

Now you know the rest of the story.

 

[Randall]

Now you know the rest of the story ...

Indeed ... A smart man ... he was ...

 

[Gene Steinberg]

Yes, my choice was deliberate.

Good day!

 

[Steve Wehba]

The Great Barrington Declaration is absolutely advocating a pre-vaccination herd immunity strategy. Here's a quote from paragraph 5:

As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity

So, let's do some simple math. There are 330M people in the US. To achieve herd immunity, at least 60% of those people would need to be infected and have survived with immunity. That amounts to 198M people. Assuming a mortality rate of 2%, that means that 220M people would have to have been infected, and 4M would have died from COVID-19. As of 2020-11-02, we have 9.3M cases in the U.S. and 231,000 deaths — around 20x the number of infections and death.

Is this really something to sign on to?

 

[Gene Steinberg]

A bit of a reality check: It's clear that testing is not nearly adequate to catch all or even most infections. People who show no symptoms or mild symptoms won't bother to put up with the possible drudgery of a test.

The actual total may be up to 10 times or more higher. So 9 million may mean 90 million overall. If it's 20 times higher, of course, you'd be at the threshold of herd immunity, of course, but we don't even know how long antibodies last. Maybe a few months, so this theory wouldn't work in the real world anyway.

 

[Randall]

Is this really something to sign on to?

Thanks for your feedback, please read these screenshots from the site: Great Barrington Declaration and Petition, and the following explanation:



So, yes, the GBD talks about herd immunity, but it also says that their usage of the term is being misrepresented, and that the tens of thousands of medical practitioners and scientists ( now over 44,000 in total ) who have signed onto the GBD are not advocating such misinterpretations. There is also a problem with setting the mortality rate at a fixed 2%. Given current numbers, actual fatalities start at about 0.1% ( or lower ) and increase with the seriousness of preexisting conditions and age.

So seniors with preexisting health conditions are at highest risk, but even most of them don't die, and the rest of the younger population with no preexisting conditions are at far lower risk, with as many as 40% - 90% having symptoms so mild that they don't even know they have the disease.

In light of this, The Great Barrington Declaration advocates a much more targeted approach to caring for those at high-risk, while reducing the collateral deaths from COVID-19 management measures, particularly those that fail to take into account the increase in poverty, which before the COVID-19 lockdowns was responsible for around 250,000 deaths per year in the USA alone, and this doesn't even include the other consequences of the lockdowns.

What this boils down to is that the GBD strategy makes far more sense as it will save all the same lives as the current approach plus many more, possibly millions more worldwide, all while preserving our quality of life and reducing authoritarian government controls.

I hope this helps, and by all means, feel free to discuss this further. The GBD has been highly politicized, but I'm neither Democrat nor Republican, neither Conservative nor Liberal. I just want to see suffering and deaths reduced as much as possible, and when I do the math, the GBD is the closest approach to meeting that objective that I have found that has a reasonable chance of making a difference.

 

[stonehart]

Drastic measures have been imposed on millions of perfectly healthy people,
all for the sake of a 0.02% chance that they might get a disease
that is so mild that 40% of those who get it
don't even know they have it. ​

 

[Randall]

I am very concerned at what the actual end game of this really is ...

I hear you. The other day the news was going on about how we all have to obey the measures and restrictions in order to "protect the health care system". Being more analytical than a blind follower, I immediately responded in my mind with: They seem to have this all backwards.

It's not the public's job to protect the healthcare system. It's the healthcare system's job to protect the public. The focus has shifted from protecting people to protecting the "system" which equates to the government, and unless we comply, we are harmed with measures that go beyond simply reducing our freedoms and forcing perfectly healthy people to go out of business.

Did you sign the GBD as a concerned citizen?

Great Barrington Declaration and Petition

As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection

gbdeclaration.org

 

[Randall]

Reaching Immunity | A Private Summit of Epidemiologists Against Lockdowns

​

 

[stonehart]

I hear you. The other day the news was going on about how we all have to obey the measures and restrictions in order to "protect the health care system". Being more analytical than a blind follower, I immediately responded in my mind with: They seem to have this all backwards.

It's not the public's job to protect the healthcare system. It's the healthcare system's job to protect the public. The focus has shifted from protecting people to protecting the "system" which equates to the government, and unless we comply, we are harmed with measures that go beyond simply reducing our freedoms and forcing perfectly healthy people to go out of business.

Did you sign the GBD as a concerned citizen?

Great Barrington Declaration and Petition

As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection

gbdeclaration.org

Yes and I have passed it on... Not sure what to do next the world stands at a crossroads and I feel most people are just blind sheep sadly and will simply do as they are told.

 

[Randall]

COVID-19 Mortality Has Dropped​

Here's Why COVID-19 Mortality Has Dropped

There's no single answer, but a host of contributing factors

www.medpagetoday.com

This was from November 17, 2020 , and it confirms what I've been saying now for months, and this data should support the strategy proposed by the Great Barrington Declaration. Here are some specifics:

Infection fatality rates:

age 10: 0.002%
age 25: 0.1%
age 55: 10.4%
age 85: 15.0%

Although these statistics clearly suggest that The Great Barrington Declaration would be the most rational approach, even these statistics cannot be considered entirely reliable. This is due to the way deaths from, versus deaths with, are being counted. Also, what is often overlooked is the difference between "confirmed cases" and "confirmed deaths".

Of particular concern is the idea that 10 out of 100 people aged 55 will likely die from COVID-19 if infected. If that were actually the case, and there are actually as many people infected as they claim, then there would already be millions upon millions of deaths of people in their 50s, but that just isn't happening.

Also, the 0.002% of ten year olds who reportedly died from COVID-19, may in fact have died from a preexisting condition, and in every single case I've been able to get information on, preexisting conditions have been the case. This has also been the case for all victims of COVID-19, in every other age group.

However, here in Canada, instead of focusing on the high-risk groups, we're getting more threats of lockdowns and higher fines for gatherings of perfectly healthy people. Given the data, This makes no sense. So my question is: Why?

 

[Randall]

Alberta Now Under "Enhanced Public Health Measures"
​

Effective Nov. 24, 2020, here in Alberta we're now under the most restrictive freedoms I've imagined short of curfews and rolling in the military.

In Home Visitors & Gatherings: Enhanced public health measures

• Close contacts must be limited to people in the same household.
• Indoor social gatherings, even among members of the same cohort ( see PDF on Cohorts ) are not permitted.
• People who live alone can have up to the same 2 non-household contacts for the duration of this restriction.
• Outdoor social gatherings can have up to 10 people.

Restaurants: Enhanced public health measures

• Maximum of 6 people from the same immediate household at a table and no movement between tables.
• People who live alone can meet with up to 2 non-household contacts as long as they’re the same two throughout the duration of these restrictions.

Penalties: Fines of up to $1000 for violations. People are also being encouraged to report indiscretions.

What Isn't Clear:

What isn't clear is whether households where people don't live alone are allowed to have any visitors at all, or whether those contacts who we are allowed to visit with at restaurants also have to be the same people that we can meet with at home.Either way, this limits who we can socialize with to either 2 or 4 people in total ( excluding those who are already in the same household ).

So now we're being told who we can have in our own homes or face a $1000 fine. This is outrageous. A local radio personality has also been censured for voicing her perspective and is now having to take a passive approach to her coverage.So basic freedoms to gather and speak have been suppressed in the name of protecting "the system".

On close inspection, the reasoning for these measures simply doesn't stand-up. They are in-place because people in power, who also just happen to have guaranteed incomes and work for the government, have either scared or threatened citizens into compliance. Those who have been scared into compliance cannot be reasoned with because fear isn't rational.

Those who are okay with these measures cannot have taken the time to identify all the problems with the reasoning behind them. They're either ignorant or in denial about the problems, or are just blind followers. If they're neither of those, the only remaining possibility is that they're advocates of repressive government controls enforced by police.

What are Cohorts?

See the attachment for how the Province looks at the issue of "cohorts" also called "pods" in some places. These "Enhanced Measures" have further restricted gathering between Cohorts.

Podcast: Danielle Smith Nov 24, 2020

 

[Randall]

Danish Mask Study, COVID Vaccines, & Thanksgiving Messaging Fail (w/Dr. Vinay Prasad)

 

[Randall]

We Must Question The COVID-19 Status Quo (w/Dr. Jay Bhattacharya)

Important - Listen To This !​

 

[Randall]

Here's a recent vid from Kim Iversen ....

Really interesting. Isn't it convenient that they've developed a treatment rather than an actual vaccine. This is typical, and is also what they've been doing with cancer, so as to keep people on the medication, when other therapies have completely eliminated the cancer altogether.

Other points made by Iversen are also really significant, and taken together mean that these "vaccines" are basically pointless, and possibly even contributory to further infection and community spread, especially if in the process of reducing the patient's symptoms, it also prevents our own immune systems from going into action and attacking the virus.

More info on these "vaccines" are needed before they can be considered as effective as they're being promoted to be. After all, basic high school math tells us that when it comes to percentages, the real question is a "percentage of what".

 

[Gene Steinberg]

Not sure what you mean. There are three vaccines that will likely be available in the U.S. and some other countries before the end of the year. The first, from Pfizer, will likely be administered beginning in mid-December to first responders and other essential workers. By mid-2021, most of the U.S. population may be inoculated, thus making herd immunity possible.

If you mean to argue against vaccines, well I have had the flu vaccine every year for years, without exception, and I'm still here. I think.

 

[Randall]

Not sure what you mean ...

To get the significance of this, we need to review and understand the implications of the video Gulstein posted. If this news is true, and so far I don't see a reason to think it's not. These "vaccines" aren't anything like the flu vaccines you're used to. I've heard similar rumblings from others, but haven't looked into it in enough detail to know the full context and ramifications.

Most simply, these examples are more like a medication or treatment than a classical vaccine. In other words, traditional vaccines introduce inert samples of viruses that your immune system can use as models to build countermeasures from. What is being exposed in the video is that the examples they're calling "vaccines", don't do that. Instead they only alleviate symptoms, not the virus itself.

 

[Randall]

UPDATE ON THE PFIZER VACCINE :

"The Pfizer vaccine uses a brand new technology called messenger-RNA, or mRNA. It has never been approved for human vaccination before. Instead of using bits of virus to provoke an immune response, the mRNA trains the immune system to target the spike protein found on the surface of the coronavirus."​

​

Despite promise, many questions remain about Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine

Pfizer's vaccine is a new type of technology that's never been used in mass human vaccination.

www.nbcnews.com

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

CDC provides credible COVID-19 health information to the U.S.

www.cdc.gov

​

If it works, the messenger-RNA strategy is IMO actually very promising,
perhaps even better than the traditional approach.