The Corona Pandemic Panic: Is Some Skepticism Warranted?

First, and perhaps worst: ‘Denmark’s parliament on Thursday night unanimously passed an emergency coronavirus law which gives health authorities powers to force testing, treatment and quarantine with the backing of the police’, March 13, 20210, thelocal.dk [They’ve changed the title since yesterday which had included mandatory vaccination]

“The Ministry of Health will now work with the Ministry of Justice on the details of how the police will work with health officials to enforce their demands.

As well as enforcing quarantine measures, the law also allows the authorities to force people to be vaccinated, even though there is currently no vaccination for the virus.”

How many other nations will follow suit with laws for Forced Vaccinations?  Will citizens have any civil rights in the end?  Will the most draconian laws and protocols sunset eventually, or be covertly extended for other purposes?  Israel, for instance, is using counter-terrorism protocols cell phone data to monitor the movements of citizens who’ve tested positive for the virus.

Right on cue:  ‘First vaccine trial for Covid-19 has begun – WHO’, 18 Mar, 2020, RT.com

“In a media briefing on Wednesday, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the trial had commended “just 60 days after the genetic sequence of the coronavirus was shared.”

Tedros paid tribute to the “incredible achievement” of researchers around the world “who have come together to systemically evaluate experimental therapeutics.”

He said that “multiple small trials with different methods” may not result in the clear and strong evidence needed about which treatments save lives. The WHO and its partners are therefore organizing a large study across many countries to compare some untested treatments.

The study will be called the ‘Solidarity trial’ to reflect its unified nature.

“The Solidarity trial provides simplified procedures to enable even hospitals that have been overloaded to participate,” Tedros said, adding that countries including Argentina, Bahrain, Canada, France, Iran, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland and Thailand have already joined.” [snip]

“There are now more than 200,000 cases of the novel coronavirus worldwide, and over 8,000 deaths, with Europe taking over from Asia as the epicenter of the pandemic. Europe’s death toll from the virus is currently around 3,421, surpassing the 3,384 recorded deaths in Asia.”

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the second largest contributor to the WHO, and Jacob Levitch has said that Bill had personally seen the new director appointed.  You may remember Levitch’s ‘The Real Agenda of the Gates Foundation’ by Jacob Levich’, wd. caucus99percent.com, March 18, 2018 and Gates’ Philanthrocapitalism, most especially using Africans as guinea pigs for vaccines and other questionable Big Pharma products and programmable birth control chips.

From Nov. 6, 2019: ‘Pandemic simulation exercise spotlights massive preparedness gap;  Event 201, hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, envisions a fast-spreading coronavirus with a devastating impact’, “For Event 201, hosted in collaboration with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the experts added a new layer of realism by reaching beyond government and NGOs to leaders in the private sector and business community. Participants included representatives from NBCUniversal, UPS, and Johnson & Johnson.

“Very few people have included the private sector in pandemic preparedness, but that’s where most of the resources are,” Toner says.

That’s particularly true when it comes to vaccine development. The CAPS virus—which Toner describes as a cousin of SARS, “but slightly more transmissible, like the flu, and slightly more lethal”—was presented as resistant to any existing vaccine, as scientists scrambled to come up with one. Citizens, meanwhile, were rioting over scarce access to the next best thing: a fictional antiviral known to treat some CAPS symptoms.

That scenario, Toner says, is utterly realistic. “We don’t have a vaccine for SARS, or MERS, or various avian flu viruses that have come up in the past decade,” he notes. “That’s because vaccine development is slow and difficult if there isn’t an immediate market for it.”

In the simulation, CAPS resulted in a death toll of 65 million people within 18 months—surpassing the deadliest pandemic in history, the 1918 Spanish flu.

From the discussions Event 201 inspired, the Center for Health Security plans to release a set of formal recommendations within the coming weeks.”

(with this highlights reel, 11:45)

‘2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV): estimating the case fatality rate – a word of caution’,  07.02.2020, Swiss Medical Weekly

“By definition, the case fatality rate is the number of deaths divided by the total number of confirmed cases, which appears to be what the W.H.O. did to arrive at its rate.

Is 3.4 percent a misleading number? We spoke to a number of experts in epidemiology, and they all agreed that 1 percent was probably more realistic (the W.H.O. has also said the number would probably fall). But they also said evidence about the spread and severity of the disease was still too new and spotty to know for sure.

The fatality rate is a key figure that public health officials use to respond to disease outbreaks. The more deadly a disease, the more aggressive they’re willing to be in disrupting normal life. But current data allows scientists to measure only a crude statistic called the case fatality rate, which is based on reported cases of an illness. Eventually, they hope to have a more comprehensive number called the infection fatality rate, which includes everyone who is infected with the virus.

“It’s essential for understanding how big our response should be,” said Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard. “All responses have costs. If we think the risk is higher, then we should be willing to tolerate bigger costs, more inconvenience and the mental health loss from social distancing.”

There are several reasons we still don’t know the right number. Insufficient testing, for example, may be making the fatality rate look larger than it actually is — but deaths where a coronavirus infection was never diagnosed could make it look smaller. These are the key biases that epidemiologists and public health officials think about when looking at the case fatality estimates so far, and how they might change in coming weeks and months.

Not enough people have been tested

The fewer people you test for a disease, the fewer infections you are going to measure. In the United States, until this week, the only people being tested for the disease were those who had traveled to China or were known to have had contact with other ill people. Those strict standards were driven in part by a shortage of reliable tests. But we now know that there were many infected people in the country who weren’t being counted.”

‘One chart shows how many coronavirus tests per capita have been completed in 8 countries; The US is woefully behind’, businessinsider.com, March __, 2020

I’d also wondered if all coronavirus test kits are equal, and found:

‘Some coronavirus test kits shipped around US are flawed, CDC claims’, February 13, 2020, nypost.com

Do any tests result in false positives?  Are those made in China better?  I’ve read they’ve created fast-track tests down to 15 minutes.  And earlier today I’d read that coronavirus deaths there have topped out at 3,245, with 70,420 recovered, no new inside China cases reported, so they must be doing something right.

Eager to try to catch up, and the devil will be in the details: ‘Trump invokes defense production act to fight against coronavirus and lack of medical supplies’, 18 Mar, 2020, RT.com

“Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, Trump announced that he would be activating the Defense Production Act of 1950. The act, written at the outbreak of the Korean War, gives the federal government power to instruct manufacturers to make much-needed equipment, in this case protective masks and ventilators.

“Every generation of Americans has been called to make shared sacrifices for the good of the nation,” Trump said, comparing the efforts to beat the COVID-19 coronavirus to the mass mobilization seen during World War II.

Trump also announced that two hospital ships would be deployed to house coronavirus patients, one moored in New York and another on the west coast. The Empire state has the biggest number of cases so far.”

Now how the CDC had come up with the magic number of 50 as ‘large crowds’, I can’t say.  Nor do I know in either France and Greece what their lockdowns, shutdowns, entail, but 50 or so shopkeepers who hadn’t closed down have been arrested, in France just fined so far.  Whether or not it’s about the US or pan-global (sources differ), Jeff Bezos is kindly adding 100,000 jobs to his Amazon workforce of 800,000 to serve the shopping/dining vacuum or whatever.

In Colorado. Gov. Jard Polis is using the Magic Number 10 as a crowd, shutting down everything, really.  He’s deployed the National Guard to Denver and ‘mountain towns’, and so on, to aid coronavirus testing.  The Cortez Journal is reporting that in San Miguel County (which includes mega-gentrified Telluride and servants, the head official of the County Health Dept. will test every single citizen in the county, whether they want it or not.  Not just a simple swab test either, but a freaking blood test, which will be repeated every 2 weeks. So part-time residents are being advised to leave the county, go back to their primary residences in Hollywood, Malibu, wherever.  Whooosh.

In our little town, all restaurants, the library, scheduled performances, have closed, save for take-out food orders.  Dunno what’s on the shelves at the county seat’s grocery stores, but as we just got 8 inches of snow overnight, Mr. wd’s not bout to sally forth to check out which paper products, etc. are being…rationed X to a customer.  My Kingdom for some bogroll and tissues!

What’s closed in the Bay Area, or California in general?

Coronavirus has been weaponized against China and Iran, as we know, but wouldn’t it be lovely if the US Empire would end the egregious sanctions on VZ and Iran so they had more money to fight the virus?  The IMF refused VZ’s request for a $5 billion loan for that purpose because…they didn’t know who should receive it: Maduro or Juan Guaido.

Will Jeanine Añez’s usurper government in Bolivia cancel the nation’s May elections because: coronavirus?

(cross-posted at caucus99percent.com)