January 11 draft essay
This essay draft was previously only published at pp. 36-38 of the PDF of 2020 Covid journal, posted at the Wordpress archives.
Drafting began with intent to publish as paid advertisement in Centre County Gazette. Decided to run ad for letterpress printmaking services instead.
I am also very concerned about our local governmental and school district handling of the Covid pandemic.
My research and critical thinking about the pandemic has led me to believe that while Covid is one of a group of coronaviruses that can cause serious respiratory illness in humans, the immune systems of most healthy people under the age of 60 are well-equipped to fight it off, even those whose systems need up to three months to recover from the “long-haul” symptoms, and that it is most dangerous to people over the age of 80 and people with one or more comorbidities, who are at or near the statistical end of their lives anyway.
I believe that the “cure” of heavy-handed governmental authoritarianism and totalitarianism has been far worse for human populations than the disease. The first two-week pause to “flatten the curve,” enable rebalancing of medical resources, and collect more information was morally and clinically justifiable. Every governmental measure imposed unilaterally since mid-April 2020 has been unethical, tragic, reckless and criminal, in my view.
I do not believe respiratory viruses can be eliminated from human experience, nor can we conquer death itself. I do not believe asymptomatic spread is a statistically significant risk. As a direct result, I do not believe masking, social distancing, reduced occupancy of restaurants and other small businesses, or lockdowns of healthy people do anything to mitigate viral spread.
I believe that quality of life matters, that terrorizing and coercing people of any age to isolate from each other -- rather than allowing them to make their own health and risk-benefit decisions -- is cruelty, and that blocking people from being with loved ones at the end of life, and from being with others to grieve the dead, are crimes against humanity.
I believe that RT-PCR testing is totally unfit for the purpose of identifying “cases,” especially with cycle thresholds over 35, resulting in massive false positive figures intended and used to terrify the public and “justify” extra federal government payouts to hospitals based on inflated case numbers misclassifying normal deaths from heart disease, cancer, and other diseases as Covid deaths.
I believe annual all-cause mortality for 2020, in Centre County and in most regions around the world, are within or slightly above annual average ranges for recent decades, given our aging populations and the mild winter of 2018-2019, which left more frail elderly people alive and susceptible to Covid as it made its way around the world in late 2019.
I believe the pandemic as such was over by the end of May in the northeastern United States, and that it then became and remains endemic - one of many respiratory viruses in general circulation that most people successfully fight off, and some people die from, especially during winter “cold and flu” season in the northern hemisphere.
I do believe regular handwashing is a good idea, just as general hygiene. I think federal paid sick leave for all workers is a good idea too, so that all workers have the ability to stay home when sick without missing a paycheck.
I believe that American hospitals in crisis are in crisis due to staffing cuts caused by intentional corporate furloughs and layoffs enacted early in the pandemic as all non-Covid medical treatments were delayed or suspended, and concomitant reductions in staffed bed capacity which has not yet been restored while healthy nurses and support staff are unemployed or home for 14-day quarantines after false-positive RT-PCR tests.
Therefore, I’ve seen no evidence that I find credible, supporting any of the “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs) imposed on healthy populations this past year by governments and school districts, such as masking, social distancing, reduced occupancy in public and private spaces, Plexiglass barriers, or lockdowns.
Further, I think the rushed Big Pharma “vaccines” are ineffective and dangerous, providing pharmaceutical corporations with massive profit windfalls and no legal liability for harms, without demonstrably reducing infections, severity, transmission, or mortality and with no long-term safety data.
Meanwhile corrupt politicians have sidelined or outright banned clinical use of cheaper, safer treatments such as ivermectin, Zinc, Vitamin D, doxycycline, azithromycin and hydroxychloroquine, despite strong long term evidence of safety and efficacy at reducing severity of disease course and mortality.
This would not be a problem if there were no harms associated with those practices, but I think there is a huge amount of credible evidence that the NPIs have caused and continue to cause severe damage in terms of unemployment, poverty, business destruction, weakening immune systems, bacterial pneumonia, depersonalization, social isolation and atomization, mental illness, suicide, child abuse, domestic violence, educational regression, political and scientific delegitimization and other psychological, educational, economic and social harms. Cutting, eating disorders, drug and alcohol addiction and abuse, catastrophic loss of trust in institutions of law, science, government, public health. Homelessness, malnutrition, starvation, hunger, food insecurity, homicide, divorces.
Woodstock happened during Hong Kong flu
No informed consent given, yet we are test subjects in a massive nonconsensual psychomedical experiment. More to life than avoiding germs.
Freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of movement.
Yet here we are, in the middle of a mass hysteria event, with our kids out of school most of the time, staring at Zoom screens if they bother to attend at all, and when they’re in school, they’re smothered by masks and kept from being close to each other, learning to regard themselves and all other humans as mortal threats. These are, I believe, more crimes against humanity. I want the so-called “health” authorities and school districts to stop abusing our kids and making us, as parents, complicit in the abuse.
If SCASD’s leadership decides to continue with these harmful policies, I am interested in connecting with like-minded parents to set up a small learning group of 6-10 high school students, establish a curriculum of courses the parents are interested in teaching, and directly hire interested SCASD teachers to teach other core subject areas, for voluntary, risk-tolerant, in-person, mask-free, non-socially-distant in-home learning.
(Subjects I could teach include independent investigative “follow-the-money” journalism, critical analysis of mainstream media, legal research and writing, and linocut and letterpress printmaking.)
Please contact me if you are a parent or teacher interested in exploring this idea further.
For those interested in independent research into the basis in data and analysis for the views outlined above, a useful aggregator website is LockdownSceptics.org, and useful keyword names include Michael Yeadon, Joel Smalley, Clare Craig, Sunitra Gupta, Martin Kulldorff, Malcolm Kendrick, Carl Heneghan, Michael Levitt, Jay Bhatacharya, Thomas Binder, Howard Steen, Ivor Cummins, Kulvinder Kaur, Kevin McKernan, and others.
