OffGuardian/globalresearch.ca, 3/25/20); Pfc. Sandoval, S. Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
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12 Experts Questioning the Coronavirus Panic
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| Police watch protest (Jeff Gritchen/OCR) |
1. Dr. Bhakdi
Germany's Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi is a specialist in microbiology. He was a professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and head of the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hygiene and one of the most cited research scientists in German history.
- [Coronaviruses are common, and this one is not that virulent and certainly not that deadly -- not like SARS, Ebola, Zika, MERS. So this is an unwarranted panic fanned for some other purpose(s), and we can see "police state" clampdowns taking advantage of the fear of flu. American Dr. Drew Pinsky said the same thing on KROQ radio, and a bag of hammers was dropped on his head until he retracted and groveled to be allowed to continue to be famous.]
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| Ready to smash heads (Jeff Gritchen/OCR) |
The consequences on medical care are profound. Already services to patients in need are reduced, operations cancelled, practices empty, hospital personnel dwindling. All this will impact profoundly on our whole society.
All these measures are leading to self-destruction and collective suicide based on nothing but a spook.
2. Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg
Dr. Wodarg is a German physician specializing in pulmonology [the study of the lungs], a politician, and former chairman of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. In 2009 he called for an inquiry into alleged conflicts of interest surrounding the EU response to the [overblown] Swine Flu pandemic.
What does he say? Politicians are being courted by scientists... who want to be important to get [government grant] money for their institutions. Scientists who just swim along in the mainstream and want their part of it... And what is missing right now is a rational way of looking at things.
We should be asking questions like, “How did you find out this virus was dangerous?” “How was it before?” “Didn’t we have the same thing last year?” “Is it even something new [novel]?” That’s missing.
3. Dr. Joel Kettner
Dr. Kettner, MD is professor of Community Health Sciences and Surgery at Manitoba University, former chief public health officer for Manitoba province, and medical director of the International Centre for Infectious Diseases.
What does he say? I have never seen anything like this, anything anywhere near like this. I’m not talking about the pandemic, because I’ve seen 30 of them, one every year. It is called influenza. And other respiratory illness viruses, we don’t always know what they are. But I’ve never seen this reaction, and I’m trying to understand why....
I worry about the message to the public, about the fear of coming into contact with people, being in the same space as people, shaking their hands, having meetings with people. I worry about many, many consequences related to that....
In Hubei, in the province of Hubei [the part of China where Wuhan is located], where there have been the most cases and deaths by far, the actual number of cases reported is 1 per 1,000 people, and the actual rate of deaths reported is 1 per 20,000. So maybe that would help to put things into perspective.
4. Dr. John Ioannidis
Dr. Ioannidis is professor of medicine, of health research and policy, and of biomedical data science at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a professor of statistics at the Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences. He is director of the Stanford Prevention Research Center and co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS).
He is also the editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Clinical Investigation. He was chairman at the Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine as well as adjunct professor at Tufts University School of Medicine.
As a physician, scientist, and author he has made great contributions to evidence-based medicine, epidemiology, data science, and clinical research. In addition, he pioneered the field of meta-research. He has shown that much of the published research does not meet good scientific standards of evidence.
What does he say? Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future.
Testing a closed population
The one situation where an entire closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship and its quarantined passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher....
Could the Covid-19 case fatality rate be that low? No, some say, pointing to the high rate in elderly people. However, even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses that have been known for decades can have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect elderly people in nursing homes....
If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average.
– “A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data” (Stat News, March 17, 2020).
- A Fiasco in the Making? As the Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold, We Are Making Decisions Without Reliable Data
5. Dr. Yoram Lass
Dr. Lass is an Israeli physician, politician, and former director general of the Health Ministry, who also worked as associate dean of the Tel Aviv University Medical School and, during the 1980s, presented the science-based television show Tatzpit.
What does he say? Italy is known for its enormous morbidity in respiratory problems, more than three times any other European country. In the U.S. about 40,000 people die in a regular flu season, and so far 40-50 people have died of the coronavirus, most of them in a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington....
In every country, more people die from regular flu compared with those who die from the coronavirus....
…[T]here is a very good example that we all forget: swine flu in 2009. That was a virus that reached the world from Mexico, and until today there is no vaccination against it. But what? At that time there was no Facebook or it was in its infancy. The coronavirus, in contrast, is a virus with PR (public relations).
"Whoever thinks that governments end viruses is wrong."
– Interview in Globes, March 22, 2020
6. Dr. Pietro Vernazza
Dr. Vernazza is a Swiss physician specializing in infectious diseases at the Cantonal Hospital St. Gallen and professor of health policy.
What does he say? We have reliable figures from Italy and a work by epidemiologists that has been published in the renowned science journal Science, which examined the spread in China. This makes it clear that around 85 percent of all infections have occurred without anyone noticing the infection. And 90 percent of the deceased patients are verifiably over 70 years old, 50 percent over 80 years.…
In Italy, 1 in 10 people diagnosed die, according to the findings of the Science publication. That is statistically one out of every 1,000 people infected. Each individual case is tragic, but often – similar to the flu season – it affects people who are at the end of their lives.…
If we close schools we will prevent children from quickly becoming immune.… We should better integrate the scientific facts into the political decisions.
Dr. Vernazza is a Swiss physician specializing in infectious diseases at the Cantonal Hospital St. Gallen and professor of health policy.
What does he say? We have reliable figures from Italy and a work by epidemiologists that has been published in the renowned science journal Science, which examined the spread in China. This makes it clear that around 85 percent of all infections have occurred without anyone noticing the infection. And 90 percent of the deceased patients are verifiably over 70 years old, 50 percent over 80 years.…
In Italy, 1 in 10 people diagnosed die, according to the findings of the Science publication. That is statistically one out of every 1,000 people infected. Each individual case is tragic, but often – similar to the flu season – it affects people who are at the end of their lives.…
If we close schools we will prevent children from quickly becoming immune.… We should better integrate the scientific facts into the political decisions.
– Interview in St. Galler Tagblatt, March 22, 2020
7. Frank Ulrich Montgomery
Montgomery is a German radiologist, former president of the German Medical Association and deputy chairman of the World Medical Association.
What does he say? I’m not a fan of [the] lockdown. Anyone who imposes something like this must also say when and how to pick it up again. Since we have to assume that the virus will be with us for a long time, I wonder when we will return to normal. You can’t keep schools and daycare centers closed until the end of the year, because it will take at least that long until we have a vaccine.
Italy has imposed a lockdown and has the opposite effect: They quickly reached their capacity limits but did not slow down the virus spread with the lockdown.
What does he say? I’m not a fan of [the] lockdown. Anyone who imposes something like this must also say when and how to pick it up again. Since we have to assume that the virus will be with us for a long time, I wonder when we will return to normal. You can’t keep schools and daycare centers closed until the end of the year, because it will take at least that long until we have a vaccine.
Italy has imposed a lockdown and has the opposite effect: They quickly reached their capacity limits but did not slow down the virus spread with the lockdown.
– Interview in General Anzeiger, March 18, 2020
- Source: OffGuardian
8. Prof. Hendrik Streeck
Prof. Streeck is a German HIV researcher, epidemiologist, and clinical trialist. He is a professor of virology and the director of the Institute of Virology and HIV Research at Bonn University.
What does he says? The new pathogen is not that dangerous . It is even less dangerous than SARS-1. The special thing is that SARS-CoV-2 replicates in the upper throat area and is therefore much more infectious because the virus jumps from throat to throat, so to speak.
But that is also an advantage: Because SARS-1 replicates in the deep lungs, it is not so infectious. But it definitely gets in the lungs, which makes it more dangerous.…
You also have to take into account that the SARS-CoV-2 deaths in Germany were exclusively old people. In Heinsberg, for example, a 78-year-old man with previous illnesses died of heart failure, and that without SARS-2 lung involvement. Since he was infected, he naturally appears in the Covid-19 statistics. But the question is whether he would not have died anyway, even without SARS-2.
– Interview in Frankfurter Allgemeine, March 16, 2020
9. Dr. Yanis Roussel et. al.
A team of researchers from the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection, Marseille and the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Marseille
conducted a peer-reviewed study on coronavirus mortality for the government of France under the "Investments for the Future" program.
What do they say? The problem of SARS-CoV-2 is probably overestimated, as 2.6 million people die of respiratory infections each year compared with less than 4,000 deaths for SARS-CoV-2 at the time of writing.…
This study compared the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 in OECD countries (1.3%) with the mortality rate of common coronaviruses identified in AP-HM patients (0.8%) from January 1, 2013 to March 2, 2020. A chi-squared test was performed, and the P-value was 0.11 (not significant).…
…[I]t should be noted that systematic studies of other coronaviruses (but not yet for SARS-CoV-2) have found that the percentage of asymptomatic carriers is equal to or even higher than the percentage of symptomatic patients. The same data for SARS-CoV-2 may soon be available, which will further reduce the relative risk associated with this specific pathology. – “SARS-CoV-2: Fear versus Data,” International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, March 19, 2020.
10. Dr. David Katz
Dr. Katz is an American physician and founding director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center.
What does he say? I am deeply concerned that the social, economic, and public health consequences of this near-total meltdown of normal life — schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned — will be long-lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself. The stock market will bounce back in time, but many businesses never will. The unemployment, impoverishment, and despair likely to result will be public health scourges of the first order.
– “Is our fight against coronavirus worse than the disease?” (New York Times, March 20, 2020).
11. Prof. Michael T. Osterholm
Prof. Osterholm is regents professor and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
What does he say? Consider the effect of shutting down offices, schools, transportation systems, restaurants, hotels, stores, theaters, concert halls, sporting events, and other venues indefinitely and leaving all of their workers unemployed and on the public dole. The likely result would be not just a depression but complete economic breakdown, with countless permanently lost jobs, long before a vaccine is ready or natural immunity takes hold.…
[T]he best alternative will probably entail letting those at low risk for serious disease continue to work, keep business and manufacturing operating, and “run” society, while at the same time advising higher-risk individuals to protect themselves through physical distancing and ramping up our health care capacity as aggressively as possible. With this battle plan, we could gradually build up immunity without destroying the financial structure on which our lives are based.
– “Facing COVID-19 reality: A national lockdown is no cure” (Washington Post, March 21, 2020).
12. Dr. Peter Goetzsche
Dr. Goetzsche is professor of clinical research design and analysis at the University of Copenhagen and founder of the Cochrane Medical Collaboration. He has written several books on corruption in the field of medicine and the power of big pharmaceutical companies.
What does he say? Our main problem is that no one will ever get in trouble for measures that are too draconian. They will only get in trouble if they do too little. So our politicians and those working with public health do much more than they should do.
No such draconian measures were applied during the 2009 influenza pandemic, and they obviously cannot be applied every winter, which is all year round, as it is always winter somewhere. We cannot close down the whole world permanently.
Should it turn out that the epidemic wanes before long, there will be a [line] of people wanting to take credit for this. And we can be damned sure that draconian measures will be applied again next time. But remember the joke about tigers:
“Why do you blow the horn?”
“To keep the tigers away.”
“But there are no tigers here.”
“There, you see!”
– “Corona: an epidemic of mass panic,” blog post on Deadly Medicines, March 21, 2020.
The original source of this article is OffGuardian and reprinted here and in GlobalResearch.ca with firsthand video evidence (copyright © OffGuardian, 2020).
- Coronavirus – The Aftermath. A Coming Mega-Depression… April 9, 2020
- Coronavirus Disease 2019 vs. the Flu, April 7, 2020
- COVID-19 Coronavirus “Fake” Pandemic: Timeline and Analysis, April 7, 2020
- Fake Coronavirus Data, Fear Campaign. Spread of the COVID-19 Infection, April 6, 2020
- A Swiss Doctor on Covid-19, April 5, 2020
- How Deadly Is the Coronavirus? It’s Still Far from Clear, April 4, 2020
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