The purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
–Theodore Dalrymple
***
The Annals of Internal Medicine just published a comprehensive new study on how contagious the COVID-19 virus is. And I’m sorry to report that the case for a number of popular new practices that seem to have filled some spiritual need a lot of Americans have for self-abasement just completely collapsed.
The list of practices no longer having any conceivable rationale includes:
Closing down schools.Closing down gyms, barber shops, or any other businesses.Limiting the number of patrons allowed in restaurants or other businesses at one time.Mass testing for the COVID-19 virus.Putting healthy people in quarantine.Keeping a distance of 3, 6, or some other arbitrary number of feet away from healthy individuals.Healthy individuals with no criminal intent wearing masks when it’s not Halloween.
Likewise for any other humiliating rituals state and local officials plan on forcibly enacting to keep you safe from the scourge of COVID-19 that their own sense of self-worth precludes participating in.
Cuomo in Atlanta today with Savannah Mayor Johnson. He’s there as part of his national wear a mask campaign. pic.twitter.com/yeQMdwE1YI
— Denis Fitzgerald (@denisfitz) July 22, 2020
Not that all that stuff wasn’t already totally bonkers in response to a virus that’s got a median fatality age of 80.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and his buddies pushing this propaganda campaign that would have made our old communist enemies in the Soviet Union rise up and applaud in admiration know perfectly well that the virus they’ve trained most of the public to obsessively fear is basically harmless unless you’re old or seriously ill.
We haven't beaten COVID19 yet. As cases drop around the world, they're going back up in America. As contact tracing and testing capacity expands, please continue to wear masks and observe social distancing.
We cannot give up on fighting this pandemic.https://t.co/vUIeANWMJe
— Rep. Nadler (@RepJerryNadler) June 19, 2020
It’s precisely because they don’t believe any of the BS they’re peddling that those most insisting we jump through hoops for our own safety decline to do so themselves.
Democratic U.S. Representative for New York's 10th Congressional District Jerry Nadler out enjoying lunch – No Mask! Don't you see folks…it's all a Scamdemic!@RepJerryNadler pic.twitter.com/xqby5RykQO
— Green Diplomacy (@GreenDiplomacy) August 5, 2020
Does anyone really believe they care more about our lives than their own?
It’s not Trump people freaking out about masks🤦♀️
Oh and look at the great Fauci with opening baseball. Not social distancing or wearing his mask. Y’all need to come to terms this is political and covid is not what the media tells you pic.twitter.com/9EiD5K6yxJ— Erika (@BreakingRidges) July 26, 2020
Besides which, as the latest addition to Trump’s COVID-19 team, Dr. Scott Atlas, pointed out way back in April, the virus isn’t going away ’til a sufficient number of us become immune to deprive it of the carriers it needs to reach the rest.
Ergo, since neither wearing masks nor any of the rest of this mishigas has any effect on COVID’s threshold for herd immunity, assuming the rules we’ve been told to religiously follow even do have any purpose besides turning us into “an easily controlled society of emasculated liars,” they can only be designed to prolong the problem.
Amazing that Dr. Tadaro takes 16 tweets to educate us on Tcell response to Covid and herd immunity, and the fact that masks prolong the virus cycle to reach herd immunity and you still want to wear a mask. Servile people are major problem in this country.
— Rick Murray (@murray_rick) August 10, 2020
Given the results of that new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine, however, even if COVID-19 weren’t so totally harmless to healthy people, any measures apart from protecting the elderly and antecedently ill would still be ludicrous.
The researchers kept track of 3410 people in Hubei China who had close contact with someone infected with the COVID-19 virus to see how many wound up catching it. They also kept track of the degree to which the infected individuals had any symptoms.
Of the 305 people who had close contact with someone who had the virus but never showed symptoms…
wait for it…
only 1 person caught it.
Which is why we need to follow Europe and stop testing asymptomatic students. No public health gain and tremendous public health detriment. Can't the CDC come out and say this? Sure the media will call them "killers," but so what? We need to be led by the science, not by fear.
— Dave Rogers (@iahphx) August 18, 2020
Given that any test is going to generate a significant number of false positives, there’s a good chance that one person didn’t even really have it either.
FDA says the the PCR false positive rate is around 3%. That's around 24,600 false positives per day. https://t.co/HRB6tgAHbq
— Naoki (@hanzawaru) August 4, 2020
And, remember, we’re talking about people who were in close contact with each other. Almost a third of the subjects in the study were in the same household as the infected party.
Not that I didn’t already believe masks are useless but doesn’t this make it clear that masks on healthy people in public – not close contact – are idiotic?
If its 1 in 305 in close contact, what is it walking by once in Costco?
— RJDJR (@rjdjr_dot_com) August 18, 2020
But it gets better. Even people with symptoms turn out to be not very contagious.
- Mild symptoms: Only 19 of 576 or 3.3% who had close contact wound up infected.
- Moderate symptoms: Only 82 of 1469 or 5.6% who had close contact wound up infected.
- Severe symptoms: Only 5 of 155 or 3.2% who had close contact wound up infected.
- Critical symptoms: only 11 of 105 or 10.5% who had close contact wound up infected.
All that stuff we were told about how super-contagious COVID-19 is was just as much BS as the garbage about its unprecedented deadliness. In fact, if Anthony Fauci and CDC director Robert Redfield wanted us to know the facts rather than to scare us out of our wits and the press weren’t so corrupt and incompetent, we all would have known the former way back in March just like the latter.
The first official U.S. case of COVID-19 wasn’t diagnosed until she developed pneumonia a week after returning from China. Her husband, who hadn’t accompanied her, was hospitalized 8 days later and then diagnosed with it as well.
As you might expect, the CDC went to extraordinary lengths to track down anyone who came into contact with either.
As you ought to know darn well since nothing about this was reported by the press, it turns out they wound up infecting very few others, whether before or after symptoms appeared.
In fact, neither passed the virus on to anyone else at all.
And for the record, this Lancet study (from March!) looked at our first patient in US. She also had hundreds of contacts, and only infected one person–her spouse–while she was symptomatic.https://t.co/1NYej1UqcP
— Maria Romanetti (@WriterRomana) August 18, 2020
Of the 372 people the CDC found who had contact with her in the week before she was hospitalized or with him in the 15 days he was out and about, not a single one contracted the virus. The only person she transmitted it to was the man with whom she lived.
And he transmitted it to no one else at all.
Moreover, despite the fact that they lived together as husband and wife, even he didn’t become infected till she started showing symptoms.
So the results from last week’s Annals of Internal Medicine Study showing that those infected with the COVID-19 virus who never show symptoms aren’t contagious would appear to apply to those who will show symptoms but haven’t yet as well.
Not really. pic.twitter.com/1VTklTedLK
— Maria Romanetti (@WriterRomana) August 18, 2020
But, the fact that it’s so darn hard to transmit the COVID-19 virus to others wouldn’t, itself, be surprising if there weren’t something else very important that Fauci and Redfield aren’t telling you.
You see, it turns out that an extraordinary number of people have pre-existing and often very long-lasting “crossover immunity” to the COVID-19 virus from having been infected with older strains of coronavirus, many of which cause nothing worse than a common cold.
3/ While antibodies against COVID-19 may only last months, T cell immunity can remain protective for years.
In a study of 23 people who survived SARS in 2003, every single one had memory T cells that recognized the SARS virus 17 years later. (Nature)https://t.co/4LCjGcj8u9
— James Todaro, MD (@JamesTodaroMD) August 10, 2020
In fact, it looks like around half of us were already immune to the COVID-19 virus (i.e., SARS-CoV-2) even before it ever existed.
5/ In the same study, in 37 persons with no history of SARS or COVID-19 (negative serology and/or samples taken before COVID-19), over 50% had SARS-CoV-2 specific T cells.
This is not surprising because there are at least 4 strains of coronaviruses that cause the "common cold".
— James Todaro, MD (@JamesTodaroMD) August 10, 2020
7/ This finding was confirmed in yet another study published in Cell in June 2020 showing that 40-60% of unexposed individuals had T cell recognition of SARS-CoV-2.
The authors hypothesized that crossover immunity came from “common cold” coronaviruses.https://t.co/v2boTH9xVa
— James Todaro, MD (@JamesTodaroMD) August 10, 2020
And the same factors that explain crossover immunity would also explain why this new strain of coronavirus is much more deadly to the elderly than the flu yet much less deadly to the young.
11/ …With an understanding of T cell immunity, it makes sense that the elderly are more affected by COVID-19.
It is well known that persons in advanced age and/or who are immunocompromised lose T cells.https://t.co/v7qaTpMuAO
— James Todaro, MD (@JamesTodaroMD) August 10, 2020
Finally, if half of us turn out to have pre-existing immunity to COVID-19, the claim bandied about that we won’t achieve herd immunity till 2/3 have become infected turns out to be just as much garbage as the scare-mongering about how uniquely deadly and contagious COVID-19 is.
13/ Adding the 50% who already had T cell immunity from common cold viruses to the newly infected 10-20% equals about 60-70% immunity.
Not coincidentally, 60-70% is the percentage epidemiologists project is necessary for herd immunity with a respiratory virus.
— James Todaro, MD (@JamesTodaroMD) August 10, 2020
So it turns out that the very same factors which make COVID-19 much less deadly to the young or generally contagious than we’ve been led to believe also mean we’re likely a lot closer to herd immunity than we’ve been told as well.
As Sir Walter Scott famously observed, deception weaves a tangled web of discordant elements.
But as Bengali painter, poet, and musician, Rabindranath Tagore taught, though the facts are always many, the truth is organic and always one.
