Panic Pandemic – Why Are People Who Should Know Better Buying the Controlavirus Hype?

 

Editor’s note: Good stuff from the Off Guardian. I agree, one of the more disappointing things about this hysteria has been seeing parts of the alt-media buy into it. And I’m not even talking about views on how bad the disease is. We can have an honest disagreement about that, that’s fine. But however much of a threat you think this virus is, should you really go from being a dissident one day to demanding government mandated-lockdowns of entire populations the next?

I think not, I think even if you think this is the worst thing since the Spanish Flu you should still retain a measure of skepticism as relates to government incentives, intentions, and competence. After all, if we are being that dramatic then the most recent event in human history to stack up a toll in the tens of millions was not the Spanish Flu but Mao’s (well-intentioned but horribly repressive) Great Leap Forward. Government action, repressive and arbitrary as it usually is, can be every bit as harmful to human flourishing as a plague, and has the stubborn tendency to take a small problem and turn it into a far bigger one, with a far greater death toll (think the man-made famines such as 1932-33 USSR or 1943 British India).

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The only certainty about the ‘novel’ virus is that a great deal of nonsense is being talked about it by people who really ought to know better, and a great deal of opportunism is being displayed.

From Netanyahu grabbing the chance to postpone his corruption trial to Hollywood starlets claiming they have ‘tested positive’ (surely not a sad and cynical attempt to up their profile), this bandwagon is seething and teeming with those trying to seize their moment of fame or get rich or stay out of jail or just join in the mayhem

It’s cool to be nCoV-positive now. Maybe that’s why such inordinate numbers of famous people are staking their claim to it.

ISIS are apparently a bit worried about nCoV also and is allegedly sending out travel advisories to its jihadists.

Yup, that’s a real thing, right there. Really happening. Definitely.

Meanwhile, the propaganda is relentless, and there’s a variety for all tastes.

If you like your fear porn vanilla you can read all the articles based on total speculation that tell you millions will die if we don’t demand martial law and vaccines. (Speaking of vaccines, the as-yet-untested Covid19 vaccine is going to mandatory in Denmark, and in the US the manufacturers will have legal immunity should it cause any ill-effects).

If you are of a more skeptical turn of mind well, how about nCoV as bio-weapon? Plenty of juicy stuff on that topic also.

And scientists and science journals are not immune. There’s no shortage of people with PhDs willing to talk nonsense with a sciencey spin in order to convince the more inquiring proles that the governments are correct to invoke emergency powers and get that untested vaccine cranking out asap.

Look at this beauty. Written by a team of MDs and other ‘experts’ and appearing in The Lancet, it is about the most naked example I have seen to date of pseudoscience being used to inflate the perception of nCoV as something other than what it is.

The purpose of the article is apparently to find some sort of barely rational reason for estimating the nCoV case fatality rate to be higher than it actually is by a factor of ten.

Here’s the ‘reasoning’ it offers:

However, these mortality rate estimates are based on the number of deaths relative to the number of confirmed cases of infection, which is not representative of the actual death rate; patients who die on any given day were infected much earlier, and thus the denominator of the mortality rate should be the total number of patients infected at the same time as those who died.

They actually suggest with a straight face (though they don’t say why) that in order to get a ‘real’ figure for case fatality we need to count deaths as a percentage only of those who became infected at the same time as those who died.

So, if on Day One of a hypothetical new disease, two people get it and one dies, this would be a 50% case fatality ratio.

Sure, no problem. Common sense and statistics agree with that.

But what if from Day Two to Day Ten inclusive 198 more people get it and none of them die?

Well, according to the normal method of assessing CFR that would be 200 cases, one death, and a CFR of 0.5%

But with this brilliant new method, it would still be a CFR of 50% – because we are only allowed to count the cases who got sick on the same day as the fatality. And only two people got sick that day, of whom 50% died.

You see the corrupt genius of it? It’s a statistical nonsense that crucially gives permission to any would-be stats compilers in the WHO or elsewhere to overestimate the CFR of this bug, or indeed any other subsequent alleged ‘killer’ virus.

If you doubt this is the point, then read the article. This is just what the authors do, having the total gall to claim the ‘real’ CFR for nCoV is anywhere up to 20%, based solely on this crazy new way of figuring out the stats.

Which will look great in future headlines, and help pave the way for public acceptance of a total fascist dictatorship.

If you ever doubted that corruption is now endemic and all our institutions – political, legal, medical – are stacked with yes-men and jobsworths or fools prepared to put their names to any junk proclamation that might get them a raise or save their professional skins, just think of this article. Written by alleged world-class ‘experts’, published in the Lancet, and nothing more than a word salad of contradictory nonsense and meaningless conclusions designed to promote a political and propagandist point.

It even at one point acknowledges the probability of many many subclinical or symptom-free carriers of this supposed virus. But while the authors satisfy some dormant scrap of conscience by alluding to it they don’t draw their readers’ attention to the concomitant fact this lowers the case fatality by quite a way. In fact they allow themselves to sort of imply the opposite, because that is the level on which such people work:

Notably, the full denominator remains unknown because asymptomatic cases or patients with very mild symptoms might not be tested and will not be identified.

This is just one example of the forest of disinformative, hysterical, fog-bound garbage being poured on our heads about this so-called pandemic. That this is part of a coordinated and massive attempt to instill worldwide fear and enact worldwide population-management methods is now undeniable.

What is nCoV19? I honestly do not know.

The more the fear porn ramps up, the less certain I become of any aspect of the narrative surrounding it. We are definitely all being discouraged from questioning its virulence, discouraged from referring to its official fatality and case numbers, which do not correlate with the level of fear we are being told is appropriate.There is certainly a massive and multifaceted attempt to fudge and inflate those numbers to bring them in line with the ‘response’.

This brings us back to our revelation that good old Wikipedia have been downgrading the CFR of the Spanish Flu. It’s hard not to see this as part of the same process.

The actual death rates just aren’t high enough. So talk them up, play pea and thimble games with the stats, and do some Memory-Holing so that the 1918 pandemic suddenly has a very similar CFR, allowing your tame media to make all the right comparisons in their op eds and editorials, pointing out how many millions died back then despite it only having a fatality ratio of 2.5%.

They seem aware of the discrepancy, and are making efforts to prevent people researching it. The WHO are warning people not to read “too much” about the disease in order to protect their mental health. In a write up on the reccomendations, the BBC says this:

There is a lot of misinformation swirling around – stay informed by sticking to trusted sources of information such as government and NHS websites

Whether this virus is as imaginary as some are saying, or entirely real, it’s being hyped to a point beyond any connection with reality, and not just in the media.

It’s a multi-pronged assault on our minds right now. Allegedly reliable and authoritative medical professionals are just as likely to talk propaganda at you as some government minister or media halfwit.

Even in the alt-media, many have stopped thinking and gone full deer-in-the-headlights, devoting their websites to recycling government talking points and urging those same governments to lock down their citizens.

How bizarre is it that outlets who were – just weeks ago – warning against trusting anything that comes out of the mouths of our ‘masters’, are now prepared to surrender entirely to official narratives and official ‘safe-keeping’ – and for a virus which, even if totally real, has killed about 7,000 people – or around 7% of the numbers who have died over the same time period – of the current flu.

Yes, that is a real statistic. Check it out.

And no, don’t tell me it’s “not a fair comparison” because the flu is ‘always’ here and nCoV is new. All you do by that is display your unthinking foolishness. Flu viruses are RNA viruses that mutate all the time – which is why you can catch ‘the flu’ over and over again; You’re catching a different strain, a ‘new’ variant. Just like nCoV it needs to travel by infection routes. And just like nCov it has to start small.

But unlike nCov it has already managed to kill around 100,000 people since Jan 1 this year. So let go of that particular piece of nonsense, ok?

Do the alt-media types backing these extreme quarantine and self-isolation notions think the anti-assembly laws, mandatory vaccines and other special powers will all just vanish once this crisis has subsided (because all pandemics eventually do go away)? Do they think the de facto martial law will be temporary?

Do they think we can just ask nice and everything will go back to the way it was? (assuming, of course, the entire system hasn’t morphed into the Hunger Games due to global financial meltdown and mass poverty, because we all basically signed off on closing down what remains of our economy.

Are they thinking at all, or just reacting?

The panic is now seeding itself and doing the propaganda work for those who set it off, and an obvious and very very alarming agenda is being rolled out right behind it.

It’s never been more important to stay alert, sceptical and objective. We’ll keep trying to do that – and you should all do the same.

Source: Off Guardian