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Pandemic: We need to be smarter than China (and Italy)

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**This article has been amended in light of the ongoing situation in Italy.  It was originally posted to dredles.com.

Dr J Edward Les is a Pediatric Emergency Physician practicing in Calgary.

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In the winter of 2017 two 17-year-olds with a 3-D printer created a little spinny thingy called the Fidget360 and promoted it on social media.

Fidget spinners quickly went viral.  And because there was no patent, dozens of companies hurried to produce knockoffs.

By May of 2017 the little gadgets accounted for 17% of all online toy sales and had spun their way into every nook and cranny of the globe.  Every kid I tended to in the emergency department of my hospital was spinning one of the plastic gizmos—and more often than not, so were their parents.

But then—just as quickly as it started—it was over.  By September of 2017 fidget spinners had vanished, consigned to trash bins and forgotten corners of toy rooms and closets.

There’s a word we use to describe this sort of phenomenon, where something spreads quickly throughout an entire country, continent, or the whole world and affects an exceptionally high proportion of the population before burning itself out.

That word is pandemic, of course.  We use it to describe massive outbreaks of disease, typically, not outbreaks of fidget spinners.

It’s a scary term—one that conjures up images of the Spanish flu, which wiped out up to 100 million people in 1918 (five percent of the world’s population); or of the bubonic plague, which ravaged the globe in the 14th century, killing half of Europe’s people and knocking the world population down to 350 million from 475 million.

Not all pandemics are as lethal as the Black Death or the Spanish flu, mind you.  The H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009, for instance, killed approximately half a million people—a big number, but roughly on par with the death toll extracted by the seasonal flu each year.

Another pandemic—COVID-19—now threatens the world.  This time the viral assassin is a novel coronavirus that originated in China.

How much danger we are in remains a matter of intense debate.  Death toll predictions run the gamut from the ridiculous to the obtuse, from epic eradication of mankind on the scale imagined by novelist Stephen King in The Stand, all the way to: “Nothing to see here, folks, keep calm and carry on.”

Rampant misinformation, relentless spin, and wacky thinking amplified by social media hasn’t brought clarity, suffice it say.  U.S. President Donald Trump labeled the coronavirus a Democratic conspiracy.  Paranoid wing-nuts blather on about Chinese bioweapons.  Some people blame a vengeful God; others warn shrilly (and wrongly) of the risk of mail from China or of the danger of eating in Chinese restaurants.

I wrote about the coronavirus outbreak on February 20, seemingly an eternity ago.  At the time I wasn’t overly stressed—just a bit fidgety.  Twelve thousand people were infected and 250 were dead, pretty much all in the epicentre of Hubei province in China; but it seemed like a drop in the viral bucket compared to the seasonal flu, which takes out up to 600,000 people globally per year.

Plus, after initially dismissing the virus as a threat, the Chinese had reacted with unprecedented measures, locking down Wuhan and a slew of other cities, cordoning off Hubei province, shutting down mass transit, closing airports, and confining 60 million people to their homes—berating those who dared to venture outside with government drones.

It seems to have worked for the Chinese.  Epidemiologic data show that the virus continued to spread post-lockdown, but primarily among families already infected pre-quarantine.  Community spread was stopped in its tracks.

The number of cases in Hubei province ultimately crested at around 67,000, with 2900 dead.  (Just a smattering of new cases are being reported.)

By the time the Chinese instituted their draconian quarantine measures, of course, the viral dandelion had gone to seed: infectious spores of coronavirus had already blown around the world.

Still, the worst-case scenario for Canada, I surmised, surely couldn’t be worse than what Hubei endured.

Applying Hubei’s experience—a population infection rate in that province of only 0.11% (67,000 divided by 60 million) and a case fatality rate of 4.3%— to Canada’s population of 37 million would mean roughly 41,000 cases and 1750 dead in Canada.

Bad enough—but seasonal influenza kills 3500 Canadians every year; traffic accidents kill 2000 people.

So not a huge deal, right?

But here’s the problem: Canada is not China.  Neither is the U.S., or any of the other countries where coronaviral spores have taken root.

In one sense, at least, that’s a good thing: our air is much cleaner, and far fewer of us smoke cigarettes, leaving us with lungs presumably less hospitable to invading coronavirus.

However, we are not going to quarantine entire Canadian cities and provinces (it’s too late for that now anyway).

We’re not likely to close airports and shut down mass transit.

We’re not going to chase our citizens with drones.

We’re not going to mandate that entire city populations stay in their houses for weeks or months on end.

And we’re not likely to be as good at keeping infected patients alive—not because we lack the know-how, but because we lack adequate space, supplies, ventilators, and personnel.

The WHO’s Bruce Aylward, commenting on the case fatality rate observed in China, had this to say about the regime’s efforts:

“That’s the mortality in China — and they find cases fast, get them isolated, in treatment, and supported early. Second thing they do is ventilate dozens in the average hospital; they use extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (removing blood from a person’s body and oxygenating their red blood cells) when ventilation doesn’t work. This is sophisticated health care. They have a survival rate for this disease I would not extrapolate to the rest of the world. What you’ve seen in Italy and Iran is that a lot of people are dying.”

Canada may do better than Italy and Iran.  But our hospitals are already stuffed to the gills (and people won’t stop suffering from heart attacks and strokes and trauma and cancer just because COVID-19 is kicking around).

We can’t, like the Chinese, build enormous hospitals almost overnight specifically for coronavirus patients.  (We can’t even build a pipeline in this country.)

Does all of the above mean we’re screwed?

Not at all.

Certainly, we can’t do what the Chinese did.  Nor should we try.  The Italians are trying, and their country is descending into unmitigated chaos.

We must adopt a radically different strategy.

First, we must acknowledge that stopping this virus is like trying to stop the wind.

We must acknowledge what any seasoned epidemiologist can tell you: viral pandemics burn themselves out—but only after millions of people get sick and recover, freshly equipped with powerful antibodies to the virus.  The resulting collective population immunity—called herd immunity—prevents the virus from hopping from person to person to person with epidemic speed, and the pandemic dies out.

There are no other options.  Well, there are two, but neither are on the near horizon: complete eradication of the virus (as mankind did with smallpox), or the development of an effective vaccine.

We must let this pandemic burn itself out.

But just as importantly we must control how that happens.

The novel coronavirus has an R0 value of 2.2, which means that each person can infect 2.2 others.  The case fatality rate across all of China was 2.3% (it’s higher in Wubei province and outside of China—it’s over 4% in Italy, for example).  Those numbers, ominously, aren’t much different from the Spanish flu.

Knowing that most of the world cannot replicate China’s totalitarian lockdown to control viral spread, epidemiologists estimate that between 30-60% of the world could end up infected with coronavirus.

Wait a minute, you say:  Hubei province had a population infection rate of only 0.11%. That’s a far cry from 30%.

Sure.  But the Asian elephant in the room is that China, by its draconian quarantine measures, prevented community spread—which also very likely prevented the development of herd immunity.

When Wuhan and her 15 sister cities are re-opened; when the stranglehold on Hubei province is released; when the airports re-open and the trains start running and commerce restarts:  we may see a second wave of infection in China.  The virus is not gone, and because the Chinese prevented community spread from continuing for two months, most of their population is probably not immune.

It was the second wave of the Spanish flu, remember, that killed most of the people in that pandemic.  And China could be on the cusp of a second wave of COVID-19.

We must not allow this to happen globally with COVID-19.

If epidemiologists are correct even at the low end of their estimates—30% of the world’s population infected and a case fatality rate (also at the low end) of 2.3%—that means 53 million dead: roughly 255,000 of them in Canada (73 times the death toll of the seasonal flu).

Horrific stuff.  But the achilles heel of the coronavirus is that it primarily kills old people.  And we can exploit that.

The Spanish flu killed across demographics, disproportionately killing those in the age categories of 20 to 40, over 65, and younger than five. The high mortality in healthy people was a unique feature of this pandemic – as was the case with the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.

But that’s not the case with COVID-19: it kills mostly the elderly and the infirm.  The mortality rate in those over 80 is 15%; in those over 70, eight percent; and in those over 60 it’s just under four percent.  In Italy, where the death toll stood at 366 as of Sunday, the average age of those who have died is 81.

At younger ages the mortality rate drops off dramatically – the vast majority of younger people, especially kids, recover without incident, most of them with mild or no signs of illness.

But—and this is key—even though children (and healthy adults) may be completely symptomatic or have only mild symptoms after they acquire coronavirus, they still carry the virus: they are vectors, much like the rats that spread the bubonic plague in the 14thcentury.

We are not going to exterminate the children as we did the rats—but we can take real steps to mitigate the risk of viral spread.

Those most vulnerable to the deadly effects of this virus—the elderly and the medically compromised—should self-quarantine while we judiciously allow the virus to do what it does among the rest of us.

That means that we all continue to protect ourselves sensibly, just as we do from the flu: wash our hands, cough into our elbows, stay home if we are sick, learn the “Ebola handshake”, and stay away from hospitals and clinics unless truly necessary.

In an earlier version of this piece I wrote: “We must not close the schools, the airports, the theatres, the restaurants.”

I’m no longer so sure.

This is a fast-moving epidemic, and it is imperative—imperative—that we pay close attention to what is happening elsewhere as this virus marches around the world.

Reports out of Italy are deeply sobering: the elderly are dying, and they are sickening at a furious rate.  Hospital resources have been completely overwhelmed.

The Italians were utterly unprepared for the sheer volume of critically ill patients requiring intensive care all at once.

And so is Canada.

We need to slow the virus down.  We need to impede the rate of its spread to the elderly.

It may be prudent, as COVID-19 establishes a foothold in Canada.  to proactively close schools and universities, and to cancel concerts and conferences and other mass gatherings.

Messaging is key.  School closures should not incite fear and alarm.  The risk to the young and healthy remains very low—whether or not we close schools and cancel concerts doesn’t change that.

But we must do whatever we can to slow the dissemination of virus to the elderly and medically compromised, to as much as possible lessen the strain on our health care resources.

It is far easier for hospitals to deal with a crush of infected, critically ill patients over a four month period than over a four weekperiod.

We must, in the language of disease, “flatten the epidemiologic curve”.

We must sequester the elderly and the medically compromised away from the rest of the population.  They should avoid crowds, travel, and children—likely until August or later.

We cannot do this by decree—that will never work.  But we must shout this message of self-quarantine from the rooftops loudly and repeatedly so that the elderly and medically compromised understand that if they do not comply, they stand a high risk of dying.

At the same time, it is essential that we protect heath care workers and those who are medically at-risk in hospitals: we must enact systems of external triage (a.k.a. drive-through emergency medicine), external treatment sites, telemedicine, mobile treatment teams, and so on.

These measures are critical to to lessen the coming unprecedented demands on our health care system, to reduce the death rate and to buy time until we either have herd immunity or an effective vaccine.

Our politicians and medical leaders have dropped the ball on this.  They’ve been fidgeting while this virus burns, spinning confused and garbled messages of half measures and wrong measures.

It’s time to stop the fidgeting, to do away with the spin, and to lead with strength and clarity.

We must not allow the world to succumb to chaos.

We must not allow the economic infrastructure of the world to be destroyed, and society completely upended, by a viral pandemic that targets primarily the elderly and medically compromised.

LISTEN: My date with self-isolation amid the Covid 19 scare – J’Lyn Nye Interview

There is no need to panic.

We should remain calm and carry on.

But nor should we keep our head in the sand.

As Bruce Aylward put it:

“Get organized, get educated, and get working.”

After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

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Ontario doctor punished for questioning COVID response plans appeal to Supreme Court

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Ontario pediatrician Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Elon Musk has said he would help Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill financially in her fight against the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario.

Ontario pediatrician Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill, who is embroiled in a legal battle with a medical regulator for her anti-COVID jab and mandate views on social media, is looking to take her case to Canada’s Supreme Court with financial help from Elon Musk and a leading freedom-fighting lawyer.

Libertas Law, which is representing Gill, said in a press release sent to LifeSiteNews on Monday the canceled doctor “filed an application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada” her case against the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO).

“The growing overreach of regulators into monitoring the speech of professionals on social media has become a matter of national concern to the public, which loses the benefit of hearing a variety of opinions when professionals’ speech is chilled out of fear of punishment,” Libertas Law attorney Lisa Bildy said. “We hope that the Supreme Court of Canada will use Dr. Gill’s case to restore the historic role of the courts as guardians of the constitution.”

The application follows Gill’s unsuccessful judicial review of the “cautions-in-person ordered against her in 2021” by a CPSO committee concerning her Twitter comments in August 2020 that criticized multiple levels of governments COVID mandates and policies.

The orders against Gill were made despite her “providing the College with ample evidence in 2020 to support her position against catastrophic lockdowns,” Libertas Law noted.

Musk, the billionaire Tesla and X owner, pledged in March to back Gill financially.

The application to Canada’s highest court comes after her application for leave to appeal to the Ontario Court of Appeal (ONCA) “was denied” on October 3.

“The infringement of Dr. Gill’s freedom of expression and conscience, guaranteed under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, was barely mentioned by the committee when it issued the orders for cautions in-person (which Dr. Gill has not yet received),” Libertas stated in its press release.

According to Libertas, the CPSO had placed on its website in 2020 a warning to doctors to provide “an opinion that does not align with information coming from public health or government.”

“Yet the Divisional Court declined to quash the orders, finding that the committee was sufficiently alert to the Charter infringement of Dr. Gill’s speech, such that its decisions were within the range of reasonable outcomes,” the legal firm said.

Last May, LifeSiteNews reported that Gill had vowed to fight with appeals with the help of her Musk-backed legal team after she lost a court battle.

One of Gill’s “controversial” posts she made in 2020 read, “If you have not yet figured out that we don’t need a vaccine, you are not paying attention. #FactsNotFear.”

The Divisional Court decision against Gill dated May 7 concluded, “When the College chose to draw the line at those tweets which it found contained misinformation, it did so in a way which reasonably balanced Dr. Gill’s free speech rights with her professional responsibilities.”

“In other words, its response was proportionate,” the ruling stated.

In Monday’s press release, Libertas Law noted that due to an unrelated recent court ruling relating to Charter Rights, Gill will argue the same reasonings to fight her censorship in her appeal to the Supreme Court.

Canceled doc’s legal battles against medical regulator ongoing for months

Gill’s court challenge against the CPSO began earlier this year, with Bildy writing at the time that the “decisions were neither reasonable nor justified and they failed to engage with the central issues for which Dr. Gill was being cautioned.”

She argued that Gill had a “reasonable scientific basis” for her posts, noting that the previous decision made against Gill targeted her for opposing the mainstream COVID narrative.

Gill is a specialist practicing in the Toronto area and has extensive experience and training in “pediatrics, and allergy and clinical immunology, including scientific research in microbiology, virology and vaccinology.”

Last September, disciplinary proceedings against her were withdrawn by the CPSO. However, Gill was ordered last year to pay $1 million in legal costs after her libel suit was struck down.

The CPSO began disciplinary investigations against Gill in August 2020.

COVID vaccine mandates, which came from provincial governments with the support of the federal government, split Canadian society. The mRNA shots have been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects in children.

In an interview with LifeSiteNews at its annual general meeting in July 2023 near Toronto, canceled doctors Mary O’Connor, Mark Trozzi, Chris Shoemaker, and Byram Bridle were asked to state their messages to the medical community regarding how they have had to fight censure because they have opinions contrary to the COVID mainstream narrative.

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US House COVID report vindicates lab leak theory but tries to defend ‘success’ of the jabs

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From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

“the federal government supported dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China without adequate transparency or oversight, and that former White House COVID adviser and National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci “played semantics with the definition of gain-of-function research” to deny it

The U.S. House Oversight & Accountability Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has released its long-awaited After Action Review on COVID-19 and the government response, which affirms the verdict that COVID most likely originated in a lab through gain-of-function research and broadly condemns the lockdowns of personal freedom and economic activity but attempts to walk a far finer and sometimes contradictory line on the COVID vaccines.

Worked on for almost two years, the 520-page report is billed as the “single most thorough review of the pandemic conducted to date,” according to a press release from the committee.

“This work will help the United States, and the world, predict the next pandemic, prepare for the next pandemic, protect ourselves from the next pandemic, and hopefully prevent the next pandemic. Members of the 119th Congress should continue and build off this work, there is more information to find and honest actions to be taken,” said Republican Rep. Brad Wenstrup of Ohio, the chairman of the subcommittee. “The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a distrust in leadership. Trust is earned. Accountability, transparency, honesty, and integrity will regain this trust. A future pandemic requires a whole of America response managed by those without personal benefit or bias. We can always do better, and for the sake of future generations of Americans, we must. It can be done.”

The report concludes that COVID most likely “emerged as the result of a laboratory or research related accident,” that the federal government supported dangerous gain-of-function research (that entails intentionally strengthening viruses to better study their potential effects) in Wuhan, China without adequate transparency or oversight, and that former White House COVID adviser and National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci “played semantics with the definition of gain-of-function research” to deny it, as well as prompting creation of the controversial “Proximal Origins” paper to attempt to discredit the lab-leak theory.

It further found that officials within NIAID actively attempted to flout Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for documents on the matter, such as by intentionally misspelling various names and terms so they would be harder to find in word searches.

The report goes on to conclude that the enormous sums of money the government doled out in the name of COVID relief was rife with waste and abuse, including more than $191 billion in unemployment fraud, $64 billion worth of fraud in the Paycheck Protection Program, and the loss of $200 billion due to the Small Business Administration failing to implement proper oversight and controls.

Meanwhile, the infamous “social distancing” guidance for people to stand at least six feet apart was based on “no scientific trials or studies,” but despite admitting as much, Fauci declined to push back because, in his words, it was “not appropriate to be publicly challenging a sister organization.” Face masks were similarly unsupported by the science and ultimately proven to be ineffective at limiting COVID’s spread, and widespread lockdowns of businesses and public gatherings caused significant harm to the economy, to physical and mental health, and to children’s education and social development far outweighing whatever good they may have done.

On the subject of the controversial COVID vaccines, however, the report is far more deferential. It acknowledges that the shots “had adverse events that must be thoroughly investigated,” and discusses various shortcomings in the government’s reporting systems for adverse vaccine events but still concludes that, overall, the vaccines were “largely safe and effective,” and credits them with saving “millions” of lives.

Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration initiative to develop vaccines for COVID in a fraction of the time vaccines usually take, “was a tremendous success,” the subcommittee says, and the resulting vaccines “undoubtedly saved millions of lives by diminishing likelihood of severe disease and death.” It even faults President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who were running against Donald Trump for the White House at the time, for “question(ing) the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccinations” before they were released.

“COVID-19 vaccines were tremendously important in reducing the severity of COVID-19 symptoms and were extremely effective in doing so,” the report claims. “However, the Biden Administration oversold the power of these vaccines. On more than one occasion, President Biden himself overstated the vaccine’s ability to prevent infection and transmission. These false statements likely contributed to Americans’ confusion about COVID-19 vaccines and reduced overall vaccine confidence.”

The subcommittee report largely reiterates and aligns with a wealth of previous findings on the failures of lockdowns and forced masking, as well as the origins of COVID-19. On the subject of the vaccines, however, it neglects a large body of evidence of far more widespread harm.

The federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports 38,068 deaths, 218,646 hospitalizations, 22,002 heart attacks, and 28,706 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of October 25, among other ailments. U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) researchers have recognized a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.

An analysis of 99 million people across eight countries published February in the journal Vaccine “observed significantly higher risks of myocarditis following the first, second and third doses” of mRNA-based COVID vaccines, as well as signs of increased risk of “pericarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis,” and other “potential safety signals that require further investigation.” In April, the CDC was forced to release by court order 780,000 previously undisclosed reports of serious adverse reactions, and a study out of Japan found “statistically significant increases” in cancer deaths after third doses of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines and offered several theories for a causal link.

In Florida, an ongoing grand jury investigation into the vaccines’ manufacturers is slated to release a report on the safety and effectiveness of the COVID vaccines, and a lawsuit by the state of Kansas has been filed accusing Pfizer of misrepresentation for calling the shots “safe and effective.” The findings of both efforts are highly anticipated.

All eyes are currently on returning President Trump, and whose health team, which will be helmed by prominent vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as his nominee for Secretary of Health & Human Services, has given mixed signals as to the prospects of reconsidering the shots for which he has long taken credit, and has nominated both critics and defenders of establishment COVID measures for a number of administration roles.

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