COVID-19 may go down as history’s most devastating example of expert arrogance and media malfeasance. When the history of the pandemic is written, both of these items need to be highlighted. It should also shake our faith in trusting our future to the expert class. And this is exactly the class former President Barack Obama assured us will be running the country in a Joe Biden presidency.
Bad Models Lead to Bad Decisions
Economies across the world were shut down based on a model that was blatant panic porn built on shoddy code. Even more maddening is the fact expert Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College had a history of getting almost every prediction he ever made completely wrong.
You would think with such a doomsday scenario, a responsible media would have checked the professor’s credentials. The only commentator I heard point this out was Steven Crowder. Yet our health experts based all their advice to President Trump on this man’s work.
The Pandemic Arrives
As the pandemic was moving toward U.S. shores, we had limited information on COVID-19 other than it was a strain of coronavirus with a high degree of similarity to the one that caused SARS. China was hiding information and Italy was drowning in cases and a collapsing healthcare system.
Doctors were told to be prepared to treat a huge number of severe viral pneumonia cases. The president invoked the Defense Production Act to produce ventilators and distributed the ones in our strategic stores. To make sure the country was taking appropriate steps to care for those who fell ill, do you think one of our national experts might have reviewed the history of the SARS pandemic?
It doesn’t appear so. After the first cases appeared in New York, doctors took to YouTube and Facebook to alert each other that their patients were not typical viral pneumonia cases at all. Some even wondered if ventilators were hurting their critically ill charges.
What We Should Have Known
It should infuriate us to learn that the medical and research community knew what was killing people with SARS in 2003. It wasn’t viral pneumonia. It was their own immune systems in overdrive.
The researchers aren’t just worried that SARS might make a comeback – although that is still a real possibility. They are concerned because it seems to have killed people by triggering a runaway release of inflammatory chemicals called cytokines, in a so-called “cytokine storm” that can be more deadly than the virus itself. This is how numerous diseases kill, from pneumonia to flu, making it one of the hottest topics in infectious disease research right now. And it has proved maddeningly hard to treat, with average fatality rates topping 50 per cent in full-blown “septic shock”, as the clinical condition is known.
It was speculated at the time that any virus that migrated from animals to humans had this potential. Do you think a virus that had 80% overlap with the original SARS might? Apparently, that never occurred to our experts and we proceeded to put elderly patients on vents for a pneumonia they likely didn’t have.
The focus should have been keeping them off ventilators. To do that, the cytokine storm needed to be addressed. Not the virus. Yet all the focus was on anti-viral medications that would do nothing to address the immune system dysfunction once it started. One seriously has to wonder how many fatal cases under 60 could have been treated successfully if our experts had any recall at all.
Safer at Home
The experts told us COVID-19 was terribly contagious. So contagious it seems some still think it can pass through car windows. We would be able to get it from everyday surfaces and we were safer at home washing our hands and cleaning shared surfaces like a nation full of people with OCD. So, we went home. Beaches and outdoor spaces closed. The roads were empty. And lots of jobs disappeared.
We were encouraged to order needed items online and cautioned even the boxes our orders came in could transfer the virus. Just another bucket of nonsense it appears. Now the experts at the CDC say transmission requires close contact and time. Like most viruses.
Federal agency research also shows that sun and heat drastically reduce the COVID-19 half-life. Oh, and vitamin D, which our bodies produce naturally in the sun may help ward off the virus. We actually all would have been better off hanging out at the beach or the local park. And it’s highly likely there would be fewer dead in Wuhan if the government hadn’t barricaded people in their home with an ill family member.
Close the Schools
Did you know the entire idea of closing schools during a pandemic was hatched by a 15-year-old’s science fair project in 2006? You really can’t make this up. However, the experts are telling us they are not sure opening schools in the fall is safe and universities may do well to continue distance learning. This is despite the fact the virus rarely has a serious impact on children and young adults.
In fact, children severely affected by COVID-19 almost always have a preexisting condition. Even then, mortality is near zero. Also, countries that didn’t close the schools have not had a significantly more severe experience with COVID-19 than those that did.
Experts are telling us it is too soon to assess the role of children in spreading the disease. Yet there is zero compelling evidence children are passing it on to family members in significant numbers. Still, experts hedge their bets like this:
“Children almost certainly DO transmit COVID-19,” Munro, a clinical research fellow in pediatric infectious diseases at University Hospital Southampton, said on Twitter on Thursday, adding: “Growing evidence suggests children are less susceptible to infection, have milder infection, and are infrequently responsible for household transmission.”
Well that’s clear as mud. They can but they rarely do. Great. Send them back to school.
Thank the Experts
So, as America sits in the wreckage of the COVID-19 pandemic, we can thank those vaunted experts for the economic, educational, personal and fatal results. Might it have been smarter to tell working age adults and children to go about their business? It sure seems so. However, if they resided with an at-risk individual. perhaps other arrangements for housing needed to be made until the medical experts got a handle on effective therapy.
Which they could have done, with better outcomes, if they had reviewed what they knew about SARS and applied it to COVID-19. Instead doctors who actually treat patients were ignored and their opinions were suppressed. Even as they were figuring it out in real-time.
As we head into November, it is incumbent on every single voter to consider if the expert class is really the group we want running our lives. Especially when the only experts we hear are the ones who agree with the preferred path forward of the Democrat party activists in the corporate media.
Because Obama has assured us this is exactly what will happen in his effective third term.
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