Twenty Months of Covid

A good discussion on the devastating consequences of Fauci's covid policies and what could and should have been done instead.

 

Robinson:
What happened? And what should have happened?

What happened:

December 31 2019.
The World Health Organization announces that it's tracking a cluster of pneumonia cases from an unknown source in Wuhan, China.

January 11 2020.
The first novel Coronavirus death is reported in China.

January 21.
The first American case of COVID is confirmed in Washington State, March. On the advice of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, which includes Dr. Anthony Fauci, states in this country began to issue stay at home orders. Late March and early April, the entire nation has locked down, schools are closed, economic activity collapses.

March 24.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya publishes a piece in The Wall Street Journal, quote, "If it's true that the Coronavirus would kill millions of people, without shelter in place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified, but there's little evidence to confirm that premise," close quote.

The whole nation has shut down and Jay Bhattacharya pipes up and says, "Hey, fellas..."

Explain yourself, Jay.

Bhattacharya: Sure. So I actually have to go back a few years for that.

Robinson: A few years?

Bhattacharya: Yeah, in 2009. I'd done some research during the h1n1 flu epidemic—

Robinson: Also originated in Asia?

Bhattacharya: It's I mean, it's unclear exactly, but in any case, it's an epidemic that's hitting the United States. And everyone's worried about what the death rate is from it. I did some research on the spread of the disease, but I'd been reading the literature on how deadly it was. So the first reports for h1n1 were really high—4%, 5% mortality, and I noticed in the literature, there were a whole series of seroprevalence studies, studies essentially of antibodies, and what they found was that for every case of h1n1 there were 50, 100 people that had it that ... never got counted. They don't turn themselves in at the doctor's office or the hospital. So h1n1 goes from 5% mortality, 4% mortality, which is what the World Health Organization was saying the time, to 0.01% mortality on that disease.

...

So it was on the top of my mind when I saw the World Health Organization 2020 say that we have a 3% mortality rate. They were very cagey about what they meant, but I knew what they meant, that three out of 100 people that have been identified with COVID died from it. They're looking at Chinese data, they're looking at Italian data. And the first thought I had was, well maybe this is like h1 if it's a respiratory disease, respiratory virus. It spreads very, very easily, obviously. It seems likely that many more people have had it than have been identified. Our testing resources weren't all that good at the time. So that was what motivated me in that piece was, we don't know the mortality rate, because we don't know how many people actually had been infected. I wanted to know the denominator.

Robinson: And then you at some point in these early weeks, you and a couple of colleagues here at Stanford, as I recall, correct me on this because I'm going from memory, conducted what was one of the earliest, or perhaps the first seroprevalence study in this country. Is that correct?

Bhattacharya: Yeah, it's one of the very first. Yes.

Robinson: And you learned ??

Bhattacharya: So we did two actually. We did one in Los Angeles County, and we did one in Santa Clara County, which is where Stanford is. We learned that in both LA County and Santa Clara County, there were 40 or 50 infections per case identified. 40 or 50 per case.

Robinson: So it was h1n1 one all over again.

Bhattacharya: Yeah, it's—but it's more deadly than h1n1. So instead of something like 0.01, 0.02% infection fatality rate, the numbers were that we got more that it was 0.2%. So two out of a thousand mortality rate.

Robinson: But it was parallel to the h1n1 case in the following sense. The World Health Organization said it was maybe a whole order of magnitude more deadly than your study suggested. Is that correct?

Bhattacharya: That's correct.

 

Robinson: ... So on the basis of your test, again, I'm a layman correct me, you discover 1) it's not nearly as deadly as the public health authorities are at that point letting on, 2) it's already everywhere. It's already . . .

Bhattacharya: Well, it wasn't quite so—

Robinson: Again, correct me.

Bhattacharya: —it was about—. In LA County it was 4%, and in Santa Clara County is about 3% to 20% in Santa Clara county—

Robinson: But still many thousands of people, right? Way too late for tracer tests.

Bhattacharya: That's the key point. That is exactly the key point. I mean the mortality rate is important. But the key point is the strategy used to control the disease. Up to that point, the strategy—the idea was, that if we could find all the cases of it, test enough, isolate the people that have it so they don't pass the disease on, then we'll suppress the disease down to zero. That worked I think with SARS-1, it worked with Ebola, it has worked in the past with other diseases.

Robinson: It's not a crazy idea.

Bhattacharya: No, it's not a crazy idea. The problem is that if you have a situation in mid April 2020, where 3, 4 percent of large metro centers have had evidence of the disease already—you know the disease is very, very infectious—that's a strategy that cannot work. It's at that point what folks should have realized, including folks like Fauci, and the CDC should have realized, as a strategy to stop the disease from spreading down to zero was not possible.

Robinson: Over a year ago.

Bhattacharya: Yeah.

 

Robinson: All right. I continue this timeline.

October 4 2020. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of public Medicine at Stanford, I'm repeating your credential for a reason, joins Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford in issuing the Great Barrington Declaration, which you named after the town in Massachusetts in which the three of you drafted the document. It happens to be called Great Barrington. You weren't saying the declaration is great—well, there are those who think it probably was. Quote, I'm quoting from the declaration, "As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists, we—" that is the three of you, "—have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies." That is to say, of shutting down our countries, the United States, and Suneta Gupta is in the United Kingdom. We have grave concerns "and recommend an approach we call focused protection," close quote. The three of you recommend an alternative. You call it focused protection.

Explained focused protection.

Bhattacharya: Sure. So the main idea behind it, there's two main ideas. One is that there's a huge gradient in the risk. It's not that everyone is equally at risk from this disease. If you're older, you're much more likely to die upon infection than if you're younger. I mean, thank God, children are relatively well protected against the disease just by the nature of their immune response to it.

Robinson: Do we know why? Is this unusual among such diseases? I mean, among viruses, or was it unique to this virus?

Bhattacharya: They're still working out why ... but we knew that early. So you look at the Chinese data, the Italian data, it was older people that were dying from this disease...

Robinson: Can you quantify? So how much more likely is a 75 or 85 year old to die of the disease than a five year old?

Bhattacharya: So it's more like a 1000, 2000 fold increase in the risk for the eight year old and the five year old.

Robinson: Okay. Huge, huge, huge difference.

Bhattacharya: Just to give you some sense of this: There's now a whole bunch of these seroprevalence stuies that have been done that replicate from around the world what we found. The typical finding in these seroprevalence studies for people that are under the age of 70, there's a 0.05% mortality risk. So 99.95% survival after infection for people under 70. For people over 70 it's 5% mortality, so 95% survival. A huge difference. It essentially changes smoothly with age. So roughly speaking, I'm 53. My infection fatality rate from these studies is something like 0.2%, 99.8% survival if I get infected. That's before the vaccine. Every seven years of age below and above you double it.

Robinson: I see. So the gradient is like this.

Bhattacharya: It's very steep.

Robinson: So, back to focused protection.

Bhattacharya: Right. So the obvious thing is we know who's vulnerable. Older people, people with certain chronic conditions, move heaven and earth to protect them. Right? So we outlined a whole bunch of ideas for this ... The other thing is that the lockdown harms are devastating. 100 million people have been thrown into poverty worldwide as a consequence of the economic harms caused by lockdown. People skipped cancer treatment, people skipped heart attack treatments people skipped diabetes management care, the psychological harm is on a scale—in June of 2021, one in four young adults reported the CDC that they had seriously considered suicide in the United States. So the harm—the public health harm of these lockdowns—I just can't overstress how harmful these lockdowns were to the population at large for public health planning.

Forget about the economics.

Just in terms of health outcomes. There was a study that suggested—we closed schools down, right?

Robinson: Yes.

Bhattacharya: There's a study done, published in JAMA Pediatrics, ... that ... estimated how just closing the schools for a couple of months in May or April, May, what would what effect would it have on the lives of these children?

Because it turns out that closing schools down it, you get learning loss that echoes throughout a kid's entire life. They live in shorter, poorer, less healthy lives. So the estimate was five and a half million life years lost just from that school [closing].

Robinson: Alright, so focused protection says move heaven and earth to protect the older and do what with everybody else?

Bhattacharya: End the lockdown, because the lockdown is causing devastating harm for them.

Robinson: Old people should be protected. Everybody else should go about their lives.

Bhattacharya: Yes.

 

Robinson: Take a moment and really lean into herd immunity, because that is a term that even now is getting used again and again and again. And I confess I don't quite know what—it seems to mean different things as different people use it.

Bhattacharya: Yeah, so I think he's using it as a synonym for zero COVID. COVID is gone away because enough people are infected. COVID is a Coronavirus, the other coronaviruses that are in common circulation in human populations produce colds, and they're controlled by herd immunity.

They're not always increasing exponentially so that everyone gets it. What happens is they rise and fall with the season. Enough people get it, and what herd immunity means is, when one person has the infection, they spread it to one or fewer additional people.

Robinson: So you don't get an exponential growth.

Bhattacharya: Right. You get, you see declining cases, for instance.

Robinson: All right. So when a population achieves herd immunity, it is not entirely immune to said infection. It simply experiences that infection in a relatively minor con—I don't to want to say controlled—but in a relatively minor way. There isn't exponential growth. That's all it means is that correct?

Bhattacharya: Yes, it just means that there's not a growth in the number of cases. A new person gets it and they pass it on to one or fewer additional people. So whenever the case counts are coming down, we're in herd immunity in some tactical sense. Since this is seasonal, when it's in season, the number of people that need to have immunity to this needs to be very high, because it passes much more easily. When it's out of season, you can have a relatively few people with immunity and you won't see it growing. So herd immunity is not a synonym for zero COVID.

...

The other thing about herd immunity, with these diseases, it was clear in October of 2020, and even more clear now, that if you are infected, you actually gain substantial protection against reinfection. So there was a study that was just just released actually recently, that a verifies a whole long line of studies, that one year, this is out of Italy, at one year after infection, 0.3% are reinfected. So you're infected, you recover from COVID, and within the context of the full year, three out of 1000 get reinfected, and almost always, it's less severe than the first time because your body still remembers how to fight it off.

 

Robinson: Again, you issue the Great Barrington Declaration on October 4 2020. ... On October 15, Dr. Anthony Fauci is asked about the Great Barrington declaration in a call with reporters and quoting his response, quote, got to get this one word for word, Dr. Fauci. "I'll tell you exactly how I feel about that. If you let infections, rip, as it were, and say, let everybody get infected, that's going to be able to get infected and then we'll have herd immunity, quite frankly, that is nonsense. And anybody who knows anything about epidemiology will tell you that that is nonsense and very dangerous." Close quote.

Okay. I will let you address the substance of the argument but this layman cannot avoid observing that Dr. Fauci gave the back of his hand to the three of you who signed the Great, Great Barrington declaration. It turns out that your own specialty is not epidemiology. But Martin Kulldorff is an epidemiologist at Harvard. And Suneta Gupta is an epidemiologist at Oxford. They're both published in journal after—and I mean that it doesn't even make sense.

Bhattacharya: I've been practicing epidemiology for 20 years.

Robinson: Oh, yeah. Okay. So alright. So he gives you the back of his hand, ask anybody who knows anything about epidemiology, and he'll so say those three people are crazy. Stanford, Harvard, Oxford. You're not crazy.

Bhattacharya: Yeah. And also 10s of 1000s of other scientists signed on. Doctors signed on. The substance of [Fauci's response] is a piece of propaganda by Fauci. He said in that quote you read, that we were calling for the virus to rip through society. But we've just been talking about what we actually proposed. We were arguing for focused protection of the vulnerable.

He wanted to—in order to justify the strategy that he's adopted, which is lockdowns, he wanted to contrast this with something he would call a 'herd immunity strategy,' a 'let it rip strategy', right.

The effect of the lockdowns had been essentially to 'let it drip'. We would let the virus drip through all of society—just extended the time without protecting the vulnerable.

Robinson: ...The difference between the Great Barrington declaration and Fauci's position, aside from the massive costs that Fauci's position imposed, is simply a matter of speed. That is to say the virus is going to spread. If we locked down it'll spread a little bit more slowly, maybe quite a lot more slowly, but that but it will still spread. Is that correct?

Bhattacharya: Yeah. I don't actually think it spread all that much more slowly.

What it did is it protected a certain class of people, the people who could afford to lock down, the people who didn't lose their jobs because they could do their job from home during lockdown. It protected them.

So I'll just give you a statistic from LA County. The age adjusted death rate from COVID in LA County ... for rich neighborhoods, there was 1/3 The death rate from COVID than in the poor neighborhoods in LA County. So essentially, the policy that Dr. Fauci espoused said, look if you're in—we called it 'essential work.' It's like a weird, Orwellian term—if you're 'essential' and 60, well, go out and work. It doesn't matter that you have to go out and earn a living. If you're 25 and a non essential [and] you're not gonna lose your job because you can do it from home, we're gonna protect you.

...

It was it was almost a reverse focused protection. Instead of protecting the vulnerable, who we know to be vulnerable, older populations, we exposed the vulnerable and protected the relatively well to do young.

 

Great Barrington Declaration and Petition

 

https://davidkatzmd.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/totalharmminimization-2020-04-08.pdf

 

A poem I wrote in April of 2020:

Uncle Sam, he went to see
Doctor Fauci in D.C.
"Doc, it seems I've caught a chill.
Can you help? Have you a pill?"

More politics than medicine,
The D.C. Deep State denizen,
Responding to our Uncle's prayer
Approached the pulpit to declare,

"Destitution. Poverty.
House arrest for all (but me).
If you'd be healed, bow the knee
Till I decide to set you free."

Uncle Sam, he scratched his head,
Shrugged his shoulders, then he said,
"You're the doctor. This will be
Our epidemiology."

Listen, Uncle Sam. Think twice.
Scrutinize D.C.'s advice.
Ere resign to cures severe,
Second—THIRD—opinions hear.

 

With the approval of your monarch.