Phil Kerpen
@kerpen
Replying to @kerpen
United States Influenza testing, MMWR week 6.

CDC flu view. https://cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm

Five-year average: 12,066 cases; 25.38% positive
Last year: 18,193; 31.96%
This year: 17; 0.04% //

Aaron Ginn
@aginnt
On one hand, COVID continues to spread because of COVID law disobedience.

On the other, flu disappears because NPI compliance is so high.

🙄
Not a single case of flu detected in England this year
independent.co.uk //

It appears that the window for detecting the flu using the standard PCR-type test is incredibly small.

Hence, if the huge influx of COVID-19 tests labs have been dealing with caused any kind of delay in how quickly influenza tests were processed, that by itself could easily explain why basically all of the latter are coming back negative. //

All the more so given that, for some reason, the COVID-19 PCR tests appear to be plagued with the opposite problem of yielding positive results long after the infection has passed.

American Airlines and Delta Air Lines have taken two very different approaches to the pandemic.
Delta has been blocking middle seats since April 2020 while American never embraced the policy.
I took three flights on both airlines in 2021 to see how the two were handling social distancing in the skies.

Dr. Fauci has become the face and voice of the virus, with dozens of pronouncements over the past year on what Americans should and shouldn’t do. Many of his statements have been contradictory to the point that I (and probably many others) am confused about official virus-related policies from the federal government. Accordingly, I have a few simple questions to put to him that would clarify matters bigly:

Daily Caller
@DailyCaller
BIDEN: "Just over four weeks ago, America had no real plan to vaccinate most of the country. My predecessor, as my mother would say, 'failed to order enough vaccines,' failed to mobilize the effort to administer the shots... That changed the moment we took office." //

Even the WaPo acknowledged this in a fact check of Kamala Harris, after she told a similar lie.

The Trump administration in September had asked states to develop individual plans for vaccinating citizens, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention worked with the states to refine and develop those plans. A 75-page playbook was published and then updated at the end of October.

When even the WaPo has to concede it’s a lie, you know the lie is pretty darn obvious. But Biden still keeps saying it and he’s not called on it on the networks when he does so. He knows he’s unlikely to be checked by anyone in the networks so they keep it up because they know they think they can hoodwink Americans.

You can watch the rest of the interview, but I’ll save you the time; he never answers the Florida vs. California question. Not because he doesn’t know the answer but because answering it would undercut the ruthless aggrandizement of power at the expense of American citizens now underway under the cover of the “pandemic.” //

If we had a press worthy of the name, every public health necromancer that appears on any program would be forced to answer the very simple question of why data do not show any benefit to mask mandates lockdowns.

A lengthy report from New York state Attorney General Letitia James also found the Cuomo administration undercounted the COVID-related deaths in nursing homes by as much as 50 percent.

Chris Stigall
@ChrisStigall
There it is. Even after you get the thing we’ve all been waiting on to return to normal, you’ll never be allowed to return to normal.

Daily Caller
@DailyCaller
PSAKI: "Even after you’re vaccinated, social distancing and wearing masks will be essential." //

This is stupidity of politicians as a whole. The Biden administration has no ability to grasp the unintended consequences of their statements so you get stuff like this, with the president’s press secretary giving edicts from on high and just assuming they’ll be followed. Of course, there’s also the fact that masks simply don’t work. I’m not sure how much more evidence of that we need. The correlation between spread and mask wearing simply doesn’t exist, and in fact, we see the inverse at times, furthering showing their ineffectiveness.

I’ll end by noting that some of this is simply about power as well. Politicians love to throw their weight around, especially Democrat politicians. The expansion of government authority over the last year has been massive, and it’s going to take a lot to take that back. That’s mostly going to come in the form of just ignoring them and living your life.

Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection

Approximately 9 months of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavius-2 (SARS-CoV-2 [COVID-19]) spreading across the globe has led to widespread COVID-19 acute hospitalizations and death. The rapidity and highly communicable nature of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak has hampered the design and execution of definitive randomized, controlled trials of therapy outside of the clinic or hospital. In the absence of clinical trial results, physicians must use what has been learned about the pathophysiology of SARS-CoV-2 infection in determining early outpatient treatment of the illness with the aim of preventing hospitalization or death. This article outlines key pathophysiological principles that relate to the patient with early infection treated at home. Therapeutic approaches based on these principles include 1) reduction of reinoculation, 2) combination antiviral therapy, 3) immunomodulation, 4) antiplatelet/antithrombotic therapy, and 5) administration of oxygen, monitoring, and telemedicine. Future randomized trials testing the principles and agents discussed will undoubtedly refine and clarify their individual roles; however, we emphasize the immediate need for management guidance in the setting of widespread hospital resource consumption, morbidity, and mortality.

Database of all HCQ COVID-19 studies. 237 studies, 171 peer reviewed, 195 comparing treatment and control groups. Submit updates/corrections below. HCQ is not effective when used very late with high dosages over a long period (RECOVERY/SOLIDARITY), effectiveness improves with earlier usage and improved dosing. Early treatment consistently shows positive effects. Negative evaluations typically ignore treatment time, often focusing on a subset of late stage studies.

According to a report from National Review, Team Biden has been insisting through press conferences and administration talking heads that there was no vaccine plan to speak of when they entered the Oval Office, and they’ve been forced to start from scratch to achieve their goal of vaccinating 100 million people in 100 days. //

[P]er vaccination data from Bloomberg, the U.S. has now hit 1 million vaccinations for four days in a row, with a rolling seven-day average of 1.2 million. And on Monday, Biden himself said he hoped to raise the threshold to 1.5 million soon.

The new administration’s ability to hit its daily target immediately after the benchmark was set is evidence that they inherited a workable plan from the Trump administration, according to current and former officials.

“We provided the Biden team over 300 transition meetings, including the very first one on Warp Speed which I kicked off myself,” former Health and Human Services chief of staff Brian Harrison told National Review. “The idea that they’re walking in, having no clue what was going on, is absolutely preposterous.”

When we look at COVID-19 death stats from the U.S. or anywhere else, the immediate object of awareness — the sense-datum, as we called it back in my days as a philosophy professor — is just some very disturbing bookkeeping. And it’s an open question whether that bookkeeping reflects an equally disturbing reality or, instead, is merely an artifact of CDC accounting practices that created the illusion of something momentously awful.

Why would the CDC engage in such deception? //

As RedState reader and statistician, Kurt Schulzke notes in a soon-to-be-released bombshell report of his own:

The CDC’s original 2020 budget of ~$8 billion grew six-fold, to ~$46 billion in 2020, all in response to perceived Covid-19 mortality. //

Back in 1994, AIDS cases actually declined. But any effect this might have had on the CDC’s bottom line was averted by a timely expansion of “the surveillance case definition” of AIDS, which the CDC itself admitted would result in at least a completely bogus 75% increase in cases and others have claimed the CDC’s own data shows wound up, in the event, more than doubling them. //

As an outfit called Children’s Health Defense noted way back in July,

On March 24th, the CDC decided to ignore universal data collection and reporting guidelines for fatalities in favor of adopting new guidelines unique to COVID-19. The guidelines the CDC decided against using have been used successfully since 2003.

Up until COVID hit in 2020, neither WHO nor the CDC had ever considered a single positive PCR test sufficient for diagnosing viral infection. //

So, no matter how you slice it, the policies we’ve been following at WHO director-general, Tedros and Anthony Fauci‘s behest were guaranteed to create a phony pandemic from now till the end of time—as both of them had to know all too well.

And, of course, if we return to the policies we’ve always followed in the past, as WHO now recommends, COVID-19 case and death numbers will start precipitously dropping just as Joe Biden takes office.

Some coincidence, huh?

CBS’ Catherine Herridge is dropping some intriguing information from the U.S. State Department. They’ve come out with a fact sheet with previously unknown facts about the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

What immediately catches your attention is this incredible passage:

1. Illnesses inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV):

The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection” among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.

Accidental infections in labs have caused several previous virus outbreaks in China and elsewhere, including a 2004 SARS outbreak in Beijing that infected nine people, killing one.

The CCP has prevented independent journalists, investigators, and global health authorities from interviewing researchers at the WIV, including those who were ill in the fall of 2019. Any credible inquiry into the origin of the virus must include interviews with these researchers and a full accounting of their previously unreported illness.

Sometime in the early 2000s, a young Canadian filmmaker by the name of Brent Leung found himself struck by a number of facts:

The media and education establishment had instilled an obsessive fear of HIV and AIDS—not just in him—but in his entire generation.
He didn’t have a clue about the difference between HIV and AIDS or even whether there was one or, for that matter, what either is even precisely supposed to be.
Neither did virtually anyone else.
It is, of course, very unlikely that Monsieur Leung was the first to recognize this all-too-common gap between the general public’s certainty about some topic and their paucity of any actual knowledge that might warrant it.

Be that as it may, Leung’s proactive response to his befuddlement certainly was unique.

He went to the trouble of contacting all the major experts on HIV and AIDS and somehow got every single one of them to appear on camera as he asked the most basic questions about what those two acronyms represent and the relation between them.

The result of Leung’s dogged determination to get to the bottom of this disease he’d been taught to obsessively fear is about the most fascinating, can’t-stop-watching-even-if-you-want-to, 90-minutes of video that you’re likely to encounter.

That would be so even if the massive worldwide upheaval we experienced in 2020 had been nothing more than an awful bad dream.

University of Miami Miller School of Medicine researchers led a unique and groundbreaking randomized controlled trial showing umbilical cord derived mesenchymal stem cell infusions safely reduce risk of death and quicken time to recovery for the severest COVID-19 patients, according to results published in STEM CELLS Translational Medicine in January 2021.

When asked if people who take melatonin are less susceptible to the virus because they are getting better sleep or because of the supplement itself, Cheng said researchers don’t know the “exact mechanism” yet.

“But more and more data comes out that support our hypothesis,” he told KIRO 7, adding that studies increasingly show melatonin also can help regulate the immune system. //

Other studies also have shown that melatonin reduces chronic and acute inflammation, the station reported.

But with Operation Warp Speed, a unique combination of public and private partnership, he made it happen, at truly historic speed.

According to Nature, the fastest that any vaccine had previously been developed from viral sampling to approval was four years, for mumps in the 1960s.

Nothing beats a picture for really getting a topic and here’s one Nature did that shows how remarkable this all is.

According to David Marcus at The Federalist, during a recent interview with the New York Times, Fauci admitted that he fudged the numbers on how many people would need to take the vaccine in order to achieve herd immunity:

This quote, which has been rightfully making the rounds, really tells the whole tale. Asked why he changed his mind about how much vaccination would result in herd immunity, Fauci said, “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent … Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here …. We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”

This is a problem. Fauci is clearly admitting that he was not simply telling the American people what he believed to be true, he was instead trying to manipulate us into behaving how he wants. And it’s not the first time. Back in March, Fauci told Americans not to wear masks. He now claims he did so largely because he feared a shortage. So, once again, instead of just giving us the unvarnished scientific truth, as he understood it, he told us only what he thought it was good for us to know.

Marcus’s point about Fauci’s willingness to lie in order to cause Americans to alter their behavior is the most important.

Clearly, Fauci doesn’t mind hiding truths from us or giving us more accurate data in order for the American people to make well-informed decisions. Fauci clearly believes that we should be acting a certain way and, as a result, decided to use his platform to feed Americans information for the purposes of manipulation.

Fauci has proven that he can’t be trusted to deliver facts.

One of the most striking features of the disease is the disproportion between its severity and the simplicity of the cure. Today we know that scurvy is due solely to a deficiency in vitamin C, a compound essential to metabolism that the human body must obtain from food. Scurvy is rapidly and completely cured by restoring vitamin C into the diet.

Except for the nature of vitamin C, eighteenth century physicians knew this too. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this happened is a striking demonstration of the problem of induction, and how progress in one field of study can lead to unintended steps backward in another. //

Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world—depression, autism, hypertension, obesity—will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious? //

But the villain here is just good old human ignorance, that master of disguise. We tend to think that knowledge, once acquired, is something permanent. Instead, even holding on to it requires constant, careful effort.