On COVID-19 vaccines and treatment, June 2021

Quote-quote pod tang C.S Lewis usahay… kay basin himuon mandatory ang vaccinations

I do not like the pretensions of Government — the grounds on which it demands my obedience — to be pitched too high. I don’t like the medicine-man’s magical pretensions nor the Bourbon’s Divine Right… I believe in God, but I detest theocracy. For every Government consists of mere men and is, strictly viewed, a makeshift; if it adds to its commands ‘Thus saith the Lord’, it lies, and lies dangerously.

On just the same ground I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They ‘cash in’. It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science. Perhaps the real scientists may not think much of the tyrants’ ‘science’– they didn’t think much of Hitler’s racial theories or Stalin’s biology. But they can be muzzled.

I am a democrat [proponent of democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man.

I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government.

The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. … I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost. Much less a nation. …

The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

— C.S. Lewis on Democracy

If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?

—Frédéric Bastiat

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

— Thomas Sowell

… top down control fails because those at the top can never have enough knowledge to coordinate the activities of millions of people, not even with all the supercomputers in the world. And even when they try, the results have been some of the worst cases of human suffering in history. The only other option is to let people plan their own lives as long as they don’t hurt people or take their stuff. Trust that these individual plans will come together into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, and that none of us knows as much as all of us.

— Matt Kibbe

1. John Ioannidis on corona vaccines, April 2020

During the early days of the pandemic (April 2020), Dr. John Ioannidis gave this caution about corona vaccines in an interview:

(35:00)

I would like to be optimistic that we should be able to regain much of our functional life before vaccine becomes available, if ever a vaccine becomes available because, as we discussed, there is all these caveats about the ability to get a vaccine done and get it out there in massive production.

… Vaccines are one of the greatest contributions of science to the humans. There are great success stories. We have several vaccines that are wonderful success stories. This doesn’t mean that necessarily we will have a success story with the vaccine for corona virus. We have some experience from the past, from efforts to develop vaccines for the other corona viruses that we were aware, and they were not very successful.

One concerning observation is that in some cases vaccines were developed for animal models of corona viruses because we have corona viruses that infect cats and other animals, and they caused more damage than not giving them at all, because they led to a hypersensitivity response. So when the animal was exposed to the corona virus it overreacted to the virus. And that actually could even lead to death and worse outcome compared to not having been vaccinated at all.

We need to understand what is the exact mechanism that is leading to severe outcome in humans and death, and we need to understand whether it is the virus itself, or is it the immune response to the virus that is doing more damage in different cases. If it is the virus, and the problem is that we don’t get enough of an immune response, then we need to have a vaccine. If the problem is that it’s the overreaction of our immune system, that eventually leads to accidentally to destroying our own cells like lung cells, then a vaccine may actually be a bad idea. Bottom line: a vaccine needs to be very thoroughly tested. We need to have solid evidence that it works, solid evidence that it makes things better, solid evidence that it will save lives. And this cannot be done overnight.

I wish that we could do it very fast, and I want to see these studies done, and I know that lots of brilliant scientists are working on this front, and I want to remain optimistic. But it’s unlikely that we will be able to wait for 12 or 18 or 24 months to get a vaccine, and even more so under such uncertainty. I don’t think that we can remain in lockdown states for so long and not just destroy ourselves, destroy our communities, destroy our societies, create huge problems for health, for unemployment, for out economy, for our society, that are much worse than even the worst and most pessimistic scenario of what corona virus can do.

2. Pierre Kory on COVID-19, June 2021

A few days ago (June 2021) I heard this from Dr. Pierre Kory, in his interview with Bret Weinstein:

(The video, “COVID, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century: DarkHorse Podcast with Pierre Kory & Bret Weinstein”, was removed from youtube last June 12, 2021. You can view that same video on BitChute. Audio is available on Apple Podcasts)

(14:40)

What was recognized early on is that it was a disease of phases. So it started out as a general viral syndrome — most people recovered, self-limited, it was like a cold. Sometimes a little bit more severe than a cold.

But everyone quickly realized that around day five, seven, eight, there was a proportion of patients who suddenly started dropping their oxygen levels, and basically their lungs were inflamed. And we now know that it’s a cell called a macrophage, which gets activated and literally attacks the lungs. And so you have this sort of immune response that is attacking the lungs, and the lungs start to fail… It causes a lot of inflammation, and so that inflammation injures the lung, and so you could see the lungs starting not to work. And so it’s predominantly a severe lung disease.

And what I will never forget in my life is those early months because (and i’m going to go back to that steroid thing) we saw patients just this disease marching straight to the ventilator, and so many people were landing on ventilators. And you remember people were running out of ventilators and there was two reasons for that. One is because the entire health care community, globally, said this is a viral disease so supportive care only — you’re talking about tylenol and fluids. And as they did supportive care only — because there was no randomized controlled trials… like, everyone talks about evidence based, I’m always like what about experience based medicine; I’ve been doing this for 30 years why can’t I do what my experience tells me to do. I don’t have randomized controlled trials, but to do nothing was leading to ventilator shortages…

…

… It’s incorrect to say that they were dying of the virus. We knew relatively early on by the time they get to the ICU, and they’re that sick, there’s not a lot of viral replication going on. In fact you can’t culture virus after about day seven or eight. And so it’s actually disease of inflammation, not viral invasion. In fact in autopsy series only 20 percent do they find what’s called cytopathic changes from the virus into the lung. And so you didn’t have to go after the virus at that point. You had to actually check the inflammation.

I don’t really know some of the terminologies used in those statements — tylenol, cytopathic changes, etc. But considering only those statments that we, laypeople, can understand, and analyzing them, what do you hear them saying?

I would just like to note that Dr. Pierre Kory and Bret Weinstein are not against the use of the COVID-19 vaccines. They are just saying that Ivermectin have been proven to be safe, while we do not yet know of the long-term effects of the vaccines. Also, that they don’t understand why many health officials are against the use of Ivermectin.

Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying think that the push against Ivermectin is because of this “Emergency Use Authorization” thing.

By not doing the relevant large-scale clinical studies on Ivermectin and thus it not being approved by the FDA for use in covid, that opens the door for EUAs (Emergency Use Authorizations) for the vaccines that we are now living with.

Or maybe it’s because of this thing pointed out in an article from FEE.org:

“The FDA [in the US] has an incentive to delay the introduction of new drugs because approving a bad drug (Type I error) has more severe consequences for the FDA than does failing to approve a good drug (Type II error),” economics professor Alex Tabarrok has explained. “In the former case at least some victims are identifiable and the New York Times writes stories about them and how they died because the FDA failed. In the latter case, when the FDA fails to approve a good drug, people die but the bodies are buried in an invisible graveyard.”

… don’t know…

Update: John Ioannidis seems to trust the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines, February 2021

In an article, “Stanford’s Professor Ioannidis Weighs In on Coronavirus Vaccines”, from the Greek Reporter last February 19, 2021, Dr. John Ioannidis said this:

The development of effective vaccines for COVID-19 was a major scientific achievement.

The numbers of events for these severe outcomes are probably so small, however, that the uncertainty around these estimates is huge. In all, we can think positively that vaccines will be as effective as they seem to be (or even more), but we need to be very cautious, avoid over-promising and carefully collect long-term data for both effectiveness and safety, when these vaccines are widely used in the community.

Update: John Ioannidis is against mandatory vaccination for COVID-19, June 26, 2021

In his talk, “COVID-19 epidemiology: risks, measures, and ending the pandemic”, time 1:25:45, he said this:

… Tell people what are the risks. Allow them to decide. I’m not in favor of compulsory vaccination for something that has Emergency Use Authorization. We don’t have full licensing. Tell people that we need to push for vaccination; and those who are vulnerable, this is a higher priority, a much higher priority; and I think then they can decide on whether they want to do it for their children or not.

Prof. Manuel Schabus, the host of that video linked to above, pinned his comment on that video’s page:

Let me contribute to the discussion and the 2 most controversial points here. To my best knowledge Ivermectin has pretty weak evidence to date and there are no good randomized trials to suggest that it saves lives; to my understanding that is also what John tried to emphasize. Dexamethasone and tocilizumab have the strongest evidence for saving lives in COVID-19 so far.

I think John generally remains optimistic on vaccines, but of course agrees that we need to continue to collect data on duration of effectiveness and on frequency of harms. I think it is safe to say that both of us clearly remain against mandatory vaccination. For healthy people below 40 or so, I think the difference in risks and benefits is very small, because both quantities are small. For children & adolescents the risks definitely outweigh the benefits! Check https://qcovid.org/ and see what e.g., the risk for hospitalization is for a 19 year old with asthma: 1:40.000 (!!!). Let‘s collect that, and objectively (!) discuss and follow what we learn from it!

… to which comment, Anastas Spartan responded with:

Interesting, but my doctor says that since she began using ivermectin, she has lost zero patients. Also, a dozen of my friends who’ve caught covid, lost their taste and smell, had taken Ivermectin and within 24 hours, their ability to smell and taste returned. Perhaps you should do a trial specifically on Ivermectin.

Pierre Kory & Bret Weinstein also talked about solutions/treatments in the video

01:27:31 Will vaccines work against variants? Ivermectin Vs vaccines
01:32:01 Dosage of ivermectin for prevention, exposure, and treatment
02:20:55 Post vaccine syndrome and ivermectin

This video by Mobeen Syed also talks about Ivermectin dosage, side-effects and contraindications: Ivermectin Dose For COVID (Prophylaxis, Acute Disease, Long Haulers)

Other interesting inteviews by Bret Weinstein:

Vaccination and ivermectin by Dr. John Campbell

There is this part in the video where Dr. John Campbell talks about “Ct>30”, or cycle threshold level of more than 30, being used in the Ivermectin study from Israel. He said,

The greater the Ct value the lower the level of the virus… If someone has heavy infection then they will test positive with lower Ct values.

This gives me an idea in case we be tested using PCR test. We should ask the tester to test us using Ct=1 so that we will all test negative, and we can cross borders. Just joking.

Also found an interesting comment regarding that:

Comment: Interesting that the paper says Ct>30 is a NON-infections level. Especially considering that the world wide PCR testing started with Ct=40 and eventually got down to Ct=33. Though Ct=30 vs Ct=33 is a HUGH difference (it is exponential). It more or less correlates with the French paper that showed a Ct of about 28 had only 20% of infectious virus in the samples, so 80% of the samples were non-infectious. You can also call it 80% false positive, if you decide that you want to actually detect active/”alive”/transmissible viral load, which I would say is what the PCR test should be used for as there is no point in forcing a person with inactive viral particles to quarantine if he cannot transmit disease. — Rikk Show

Also found this comment from another youtube video:

PCR does NOT detect infection or determine whether someone has disease neither can it determine infectiousness.. It, with amplification can detect RNA sequences which may be part of but not definitely [from] Sars Cov2 or any other coronavirus. Corman Drosten picked sequences from Genbank and admitted in their paper that it was not a diagnostic test, nor was it specific to Sars Cov2. PCR does NOT detect nor has it ever detected viral “infection”. It detects viral material. At a CT of 18 or below we can assume enough viral material that some may be viable and in adequate quantity to cause disease in a contact. Above CT 20 the test results are pretty irrelevant. In a population,6-7 percent of people will test positive by PCR for coronavirus as it’s an endemic virus — Phloxy Rock

Also this, from the COVID Call to Humanity website:

“The PCR technology used in tests to detect viruses cannot distinguish between viruses capable of infecting cells and viruses that have been neutralized by the immune system and therefore these tests cannot be used to determine whether someone is contagious or not. RNA from viruses can often be detected for weeks (sometimes months) after the illness but that does not mean that you are still contagious.”

And this, by Jeff Deist:

… the tests themselves are almost laughably unreliable in producing both false positives and negatives. And what is the point? Are we going to test people again and again, every time they go out to the grocery or bump into a neighbor? Second, detecting virus particles or droplets in a human’s respiratory tract tells us very little. It certainly does not tell us they are sick, or transmitting sickness to anyone.

Take a perfectly healthy person with no particular symptoms and swab the inside of their nose. If the culture shows the presence of staphylococcus aureus, do we insist they have a staph infection? When someone drives to work without incident or accident, do we create statistics about their exposure to traffic?

— A virus is not a disease. Only a very small percentage of those exposed to the virus itself — SARS-CoV-2 — show any kind of acute respiratory symptoms, or what we can call “coronavirus disease.”

Sometimes (or maybe most of the times), when we try to control things we are not supposed to control, we are actually making things worse.

We who favor liberty over lockdowns don’t pretend to have all the answers. We don’t pretend to know exactly how a more free society would deal with COVID-19. If we did, we would be just as epistemically arrogant as the central planners we criticize.

But one thing we definitely know better than even the most scientifically knowledgable lockdowner is how little any one of us knows about such a complex challenge.

Thus, we also know that the response of free people to complex emergencies like COVID-19, whatever it may be, will be better informed and better for us all than anything scientific central planners can come up with.

— Dan Sanchez, “Why Most Fell for the Lockdowns, While a Few Stood for Liberty: Central planning, science, and the pretense of omniscience”, FEE (Freedom for Economic Education )

… The problem here is not that public health officials are wicked. Let’s assume they are all noble and well-meaning. The problem is that they are bound to maximize a certain kind of safety, to the neglect of other goods…

… putting medical specialists in charge of nations – or the whole globe – is asking for overly cautious and even oppressive policies. These experts tend to become fixated on the single malady in front of them, to the exclusion of any other concern – with tragic results for us…

— from “COVID-19: the tyranny of experts” of Acton Institute

Public health officials certainly have a role to play, but they themselves are not experts at everything. By definition, they do not fully understand the other consequences and considerations that must be weighed and balanced, and they, of course, are lacking in the local dispersed knowledge needed to make such decisions. Yet that does not stop them from making declarations dripping with arrogance…

The phenomenon of the learned ignoramus can be seen in every field and at all levels of intellectual life and popular punditry. However, the current crisis reveals the damage such “experts” can wreak upon civilization itself.

— from an article from Mises Institute

← Previous Post Next Post →