… is there anything we could be seen to be doing?
Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr. to Roosevelt during the coalstrike.
There is always pressure in any given situation of discomfort of any kind to do something about it, hence the Hippocratic dictum of “First, do no harm,” is so particularly brilliant, because it addresses that very human urge to want to do something about the situation, with the risk of making it worse, not better. Also, it focuses the attention on the consideration that every intervention produces side effects, so the risk/benefit trade-off should be foremost on the doctor’s mind and shared with the patient, so they can make an informed decision. Too often, simply meddling for the sake of doing something may produce worse outcomes. In politics the pressures can be particularly strong, for after all, you were elected to do something to make things better. Too often we make things worse, but again, in politics the bills often do not even come due until well after the crisis has been forgotten and the politicians in most cases are long since dead and gone. Be that as it may, by now the example of Sweden has richly confirmed that a minimalist approach was best.
In these pages, I have recently been emphasizing that good healthcare in terms of infectious disease is simply about keeping your immune system humming, with good nutrition and a healthy lifestyle. My own experience with Covid seems to emphasize the truth of this, and it’s not like you’re going to be impervious to infections, but rather you are reinforcing your body’s ability to fight such challenges. The many chronic diseases we suffer from nowadays, which are all caused by diet and lifestyle, are the very comorbidities of Covid, and it should be clear to anyone that age is statistically to a large degree is a proxy for comorbidities. In the US, about 80% of Covid-deaths were obese, which is the single biggest risk factor and 94% of Covid deaths has at least one comorbidity, while the mean Covid-death had about 2.7 comorbidities. So, again and again, we seem to have a comorbidity problem more so than a virus problem and the pursuit of healthy living is evidently worthwhile. In other words, age is the background signal, for statistically my chance of dying in the next decade is always higher than it was at the beginning of my previous decade, but the real issue is that because of unhealthy lifestyles the comorbidities increase in number and severity, and that aspect is completely preventable and reversible. A healthy person in their 80’s might do better beating the infection than a person of 70 with several comorbidities.
The argument against the experimental vaccines is mostly of the do no harm variety, especially because under an EUA (Emergency Use Authorization), testing on safety and effectiveness has been cut short, and presently the growing reports of adverse reactions remind us of this fact almost non-stop. Thankfully, also some doctors and other experts have been speaking up increasingly, such as Dr. Michael Yeadon (see his inteview for Planet Lockdown), and the Irish doctor Martin Feely, who offers a heartfelt message of concern that caused him to resign his position with the health service. There was recently also a brilliant summary of the whole experience by Dr. John Lee, a professor of pathology in the UK, see the following YouTube video.
The Alternative to Lockdowns never was “doing nothing”
The whole situation called for an extremely careful assessment of the real risks and the best strategies to deal with it, what happened instead was completely a panic reaction which many feel was consciously engineered by the CCP. The whole drama of people falling down on the street and the mass exterminations and lockdowns were possibly no more than a Chinese psyop and if so, they were hugely successful. No other explanation is as cogent, for the idea of quarantining the healthy population really was never taken seriously before this time, when China began promoting it heavily, and with the notable exception of Sweden, most countries copied this most unlikely strategy in one form or another and with differing degrees of stringency. There was no serious analysis of why something suddenly would work that had always been ruled out before,countries just did it without any reasonable cost/benefit analysis. The virus propagates by aerosols, that can hover in the air for weeks on end. It also does not obey stop signs. Today it is clear that we overreacted, wildly, and that the costs of the lockdowns far exceed the damage the virus could have done on its own, possibly by 10x to 100x, or even more. In short, the world forgot the simple logic of “do no harm.” Every action has a cost.
The proof that the lockdowns greatly worsened the outcomes is coming in from all directions. In the US, Florida is coming out smelling like a rose, and Gov. Ron DeSantis has new found national credibility as a result. A lively literature is growing, and will keep growing for years. Here is one good, common sense take on it from Donald J. Boudreaux of Aier. There was also an excellent March 27th article on Aier from Jenin Younes, focusing on the issue of obesity as a major comorbidity and how countries with very obese populations have 10x more Covid deaths than countries with leaner populations. A very powerful assessment came from Panda, narrated by Nick Hudson, an actuary by trade who is well versed in quantitative analysis, in three parts, (Part1, Part2, Part3), with a very businesslike approach. Like Ioannidis, he estimates that the lockdowns made the damage anywhere from 10x to 100x worse than the virus would have done on its own. The bottom line is lockdowns, quarantines of the healthy, were always thought to be nonsense and were proven to be useless by the numbers. Anywhere from 130 million to perhaps 250 million or more were thrown into starvation, and some 1.6 billion children saw their education disrupted, which amounts to a lifelong setback for a generation of children. The lockdowns, social distancing and mask regulations where a pure human rights abuse and unconstitutional in many countries, because in no case was there adequate science to support it nor was there any cost/benefit analysis to support it. Those who want to follow the legal aftermath and subsequent prosecutions should periodically check in with the Corona Ausschuss in Germany, which is at the center of global efforts to right this wrong through the courts. Parts of their material are in English.
Informed Consent, Vaccination
The other dimension which has gone wrong and has greatly increased the harm done by our handling of this pandemic is the matter of the experimental vaccines and informed consent. So much social pressure has been brought to bear that informed consent has been completely frustrated. Eric Clapton’s account speaks for itself. Just to be sure we stay ahead of the censors, here it is on Odyssee also.
Some of the most credible warnings come from the likes of Dr. Mike Yeadon, Dr. Peter McCullough, Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi, and many others. And the volume of adverse effects that are being reported is growing by the day. As of this writing the CDC’s VAERS database shows some 5,000+ deaths and it wildly under reports so some are estimating that we may be running as high as 50,000 deaths from the vaccines. The Swine flu vaccination in the Fort Dix incident was stopped after some 362 cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome and a small number of deaths.
The most rational analysis in my view is that by Prof. Bhakdi, who says simply that with an IFR of 0.05% for people under 70, you simply could not prove to the point of statistical significance that the vaccines reduce risk – simply put, the risk is too small to make a difference. So the target group should be the over 70, with comorbidities, but again, those were excluded from the safety studies, so Bhakdi’s recommendation is to complete proper safety and effectiveness evaluations for that group first. In short, there is no case for vaccination. Mike Yeadon broadly agrees with that same reasoning. As of this writing there are several petitions going around to halt vaccinations for children, or even for anyone under 30. CDC is having emergency meetings about the cardiac events (myocarditis) in young, predominantly male, patients.
In short, the vaccine may be another case of “just doing something,” and the cure may turn out to be worse than the disease. Remember that Covid affects mainly older people, with comorbidities, so in terms of years of life expectancy lost, that is a low number, but the vaccine is now burdening a growing number of young people with lifelong hart problems. Several prominent physicians are now saying this campaign is the biggest medical failure in the history of medicine, just like the lockdowns were the biggest public health fiasco ever.
Prophylaxis and Early Treatment
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That’s the old saying that applies here in spades. Again, the minimalist approach is to focus on prevention and early treatment, but even there we may risk overdoing it.
Several courageous doctors have proposed and implemented early treatment regimes, and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons has been the conduit for a lot of this information, such as their Home-based treatment guide. Evidently several doctors have had significant success in this area, but what has been lacking is comprehensive research, most likely because there is more money in new drugs, including vaccines, than in old drugs, such as HydroxyChloroquine and Ivermectin and others. One standout is the reports that deficiency in vitamin D is a clear contributor to worse Covid outcomes, and that is easy to fix, but the official channels mostly ignore it, probably because there are many ambivalent study results also. However, if you preactice Whole Foods, Plant-Based nutrition, you would be supplementing vitamin D and B12 regularly anyway, so that should be automatic. There seems to be a good track record that some of these early treatment regimes have kept people out of hospitals. We should be thankful to these courageous doctors who have stimulated the pursuit of these treatment options.
What is overwhelmingly clear however is the prominent role played by comorbidities is the real issue, and from that standpoint the principles of Lifestyle Medicine are more important than ever, beginning with a Whole Foods, Plant-Based diet. The American College of Lifestyle Medicine has a powerful section on Covid-19 on their website. We can go deeper than that however, beyond the war stance that results from our materialist medicine and the germ-theory of diseases, towards a holistic view in which the immune system is not primarily a defense against foreign invaders, but rather, is the body’s fuse box, which is giving us an opportunity to rest and repair and heal. When a fuse blows, you have the opportunity to figure out why the circuit was overloaded, or if there is a wiring fault. You fix that problem before you turn the circuit back on. The best I have encountered along those lines was the lifestyle medicine protocol of Dr. Nandita Shah of Sharan-india.org.
I listened to Dr. Shah’s presentation on the Sharan Covid19 protocol recently and was very impressed by it. The total emphasis here is of working with the body, and not against it. The emphasis on germ theory tends towards a mental attitude of fighting disease. The Sharan view emphasizes on listening to your body and the realization that you catch a virus when your immune system is down, and this is your body’s fuse box, that simply triggers a first stage disease that forces you to slow down and have lots of rest. Probably fasting is a good idea. In my own case, I survived mostly on fruit and lots of liquids during the 4/5 days when I was symptomatic and then my appetite bounced back as my body was getting over it. But green smoothies might have been a good option to load up on nutrients when the body needed it most, without the burden of solid food. They clearly recommend against fever reducers like Tylenol etc. pointing out that the fever is your body’s way of burning out the virus, and stopping replication. Fever should not be concerning, unless it is above 104F.
One final note on their approach, they recommended sleeping on your stomach because your lungs are more towards the back of your chest cavity. I would not have thought of that one. in their protocol they also address the hypoxia issue and it turns out that that also can be healed naturally in most cases, unless it is really severe. In all, SHARAN-India offers the type of natural medicine that I was raised with. The challenge is finding the doctors who confidently practice these types of approaches. In the USA in general your best bet is a Lifestyle Medicine doctor, because it is based on rock solid nutritional science and that is better than half the battle. Once your attitude shifts towards working with your body, not fighting it, hopefully you can also find the doctors who will give you adequate support. The resulting healthcare approach is minimalist on the interventional approaches and maximizes prevention and healthy habits, which support a strong immune system.
The upshot is, this phony pandemic is a wonderful demonstration of where our spiraling inflation of healthcare costs comes from. It is the direct result of our materialistic medical paradigm which always immediately attacks the symptoms, without stopping for a moment to address the cause. In the presentation of SHARAN, they clearly focus on these first stage diseases/disorders like fever, diarrhea, headaches and others as the body’s way of creating an opportunity to heal and if all you do is to knock out the traffic light and continue on your merry way, you will have a more serious accident later, e.g. 2nd order diseases, the typical chronic illnesses of which most people in the industrialized world are now dying and which are an absolute boondoggle for the pharmaceutical industry, as they are medically incurable.
Fully 86% of healthcare spending (pre-rona) is on medical treatments for those 2nd stage illnesses, the “incurable” chronic illnesses. The only realistic answer is a shift towards lifestyle medicine: prevention, nutrition and lifestyle. In our Western model, we simply keep pouring more and more money into more and more illness that results directly from our symptom suppression model of medicine. In other words, you are better off just having Covid-19 and recovering naturally, by supporting your body in healing, rather than having the vaccine, or even knocking it out with heavy drug regimes. Looking though this lens, you can see how Dr. Zev Zelenko focused on the “high risk” patients – older and with comorbidities – and his regime made a difference in that population, but it really becomes a Pyrrhic victory, for it merely allows those folk to continue the unhealthy lifestyles that set them up for a bad course of Covid-19 in the first place. With lifestyle medicine, these “comorbidies”are all largely or wholly preventable or reversible, and not learning that lesson merely sets you up for even worse disease later on.
It seems to me that the whole interventionist ‘rona episode is a lesson in how over reacting invariably increases the damage, but politicians tend to fall for the histrionics of “doing something.” As far as medicine is concerned, it reminds me of my father’s saying:
If you’re ever stuck at a traffic light and have an allopathic physician in the passenger seat, he will loan you his little hammer to go and knock out the red light. He will subsequently profess utter ignorance about the cause of the accident, but will gladly patch you up and send you a bill.
Reinoud Fentener van Vlissingen, Psychiatrist at Rotterdam, ca, 1960
Lastly… a view on our dystopian reality we are living in today… Eric Clapton in conversation with Robin Monotti.