Did you know? There is hope for a sensible, sustainable and non-controversial way to address the coronavirus threats. We think you may be as glad we were to discover some new reports and suggestions--from three sources.
If you only have five minutes for this, you could spend it listening to what a pathologist, Dr. Roger Hodkinson, told government officials in Alberta, Canada during a Zoom conference call, explaining that the current coronavirus crisis is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.” Dr. Hodkinson’s 5-minute YouTube recording (audio only) is a concise statement of this perspective: https://youtu.be/uEo3rnU12jw (You can read the transcript here.)
Next, for a sobering and calm statement of the realities of what we are facing, you could read a brief paper: “A Sensible and Compassionate Anti-COVID Strategy.” This is the link: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/sensible-compassionate-anti-covid-strategy/. The author, Jay Bhattacharya, is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, where he received both an M.D. and a Ph.D. in economics. One of the facts he notes is that the COVID fatality rate is in the neighborhood of two-tenths of one percent. He also highlights the fact that that the coronavirus is not equally dangerous for everybody. If you are a family with young children, the following paragraph may the the most important to you:
"There is a thousand-fold difference between the mortality rate in older people, 70 and up, and the mortality rate in children. In some sense, this is a great blessing. If it was a disease that killed children preferentially, I for one would react very differently. But the fact is that for young children, this disease is less dangerous than the seasonal flu. This year, in the United States, more children have died from the seasonal flu than from COVID by a factor of two or three."
He explains why the widespread lockdowns that have been adopted in response to COVID are, in and of themselves, deadly. "In effect, what we’ve been doing is requiring young people to bear the burden of controlling a disease from which they face little to no risk. This is entirely backward from the right approach."
Dr. Bhattacharya’s concluding remark is that “We’re at a place where our civilization is at risk, where the bonds that unite us are at risk of being torn. We shouldn’t be afraid. We should respond to the COVID virus rationally: protect the vulnerable, treat the people who get infected compassionately, develop a vaccine. And while doing these things we should bring back the civilization that we had so that the cure does not end up being worse than the disease.”
And third and last, have you heard about the Great Barrington Declaration? Dated 10/4/2020, it is a statement by health professionals that “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.” You can read it (in many languages), and see the names of its signatures at https://gbdeclaration.org/ More than 43,000 medical and public health scientists and medical practitioners have signed it so far.
This news comes from medical professionals who are specialists in this aspect of disease and of disease prevention and containment. They are not government bureaucrats or politicians. Many of them are persons who are on the front lines, caring for patients. When they tell us that a mask and six-foot distancing requirements cannot protect anyone from catching this virus that has the thickness of one one-hundredth of a human hair’s diameter, a virus that travels at great velocity, it would seem prudent and wise to give them an ear--and to pass the word.
