Heathrow boss John Holland-Kaye warns that ‘social distancing’ measures would never work at airports because queues to board flights would be a kilometer long.
The British public has been repeatedly told that even after the lockdown ends, they will have to practice ‘social distancing’ – standing two meters away from the nearest person – for months or even years into the future.
This is practically impossible in many situations, most notably London’s transport system, which is notoriously crowded virtually all the time.
Now the CEO of Heathrow Airport has poured cold water on the idea that ‘social distancing’ could be practiced inside airports.
“Forget social distancing, it won’t work in aviation or any other form of public transport, and the problem is not the plane, it is the lack of space in the airport,” wrote Holland-Kaye in the Daily Telegraph.
“Just one jumbo jet would require a queue a kilometer long,” he added.
Given that the largest A380 passenger plane seats 500 people, the notion that all those people could keep two meters distance as they board the plane just isn’t feasible.
Holland-Kaye is calling on Prime Minister Boris Johnson to come up with a “common international standard” of alternative solutions that would be ready to be implemented by the summer.
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In England, the South Yorkshire Police Department has apologized for ordering a family out of their own garden. Video of the encounter shows a police officer telling a couple and their two children they had to stay inside their home because of the coronavirus. “The virus does not stop on your front gardens,” she warned. “A thousand people died yesterday, a thousand people.” In fact, the nation’s shelter-in-place rules explicitly allow people onto their yards, gardens and out buildings. A police spokesman described the officer as “well-intentioned but ill-informed.”
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In England, the South Yorkshire Police Department has apologized for ordering a family out of their own garden. Video of the encounter shows a police officer telling a couple and their two children they had to stay inside their home because of the coronavirus. “The virus does not stop on your front gardens,” she warned. “A thousand people died yesterday, a thousand people.” In fact, the nation’s shelter-in-place rules explicitly allow people onto their yards, gardens and out buildings. A police spokesman described the officer as “well-intentioned but ill-informed.”
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Goldman Explains Why Sweden’s Coronavirus Success Simply Can’t Be Replicated In Europe & The US
Even Americans and Brits who are actively trying to filter out information pertaining to the coronavirus pandemic have probably heard something about how Sweden has managed to keep its economy operating at close to full capacity while avoiding the devastating lockdowns seen in the US and parts of Europe.
In a column we ran yesterday, 21stCenturyWire’s Patrick Henningson argues that Sweden has already “won the policy debate” on how to best tackle the coronavirus. Many epidemiologists have argued that comparatively successful testing regimes might obviate the need for lockdowns, though Sweden’s testing has been far less comprehensive than many might expect.
But in a research note published Monday, a team of analysts at Goldman Sachs confronts the question of whether Sweden is truly a viable model for other EU member states – and particularly the “EMU-4” – Italy, Spain, France and Germany.
In the report, the team concludes that unfortunately, Sweden’s approach likely can’t be easily replicated by the rest of the world.
* * *
Sweden has imposed significantly less strict measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus compared with other major European economies (left panel, Exhibit 1). While legal factors might have played a role – the Swedish constitution does not allow for a state of emergency in peacetime – the Swedish government has put the emphasis on citizens’ self-responsibility.
Although gatherings of more than 50 people are banned and distance learning in high schools has been introduced, these measures are much less stringent than elsewhere in Europe.
Some commentators have suggested that Sweden is aiming for herd immunity, although this is not official government policy. As a result of the less stringent measures, high-frequency proxies suggest activity in Sweden has slowed by less than in other economies in Europe.
This also is true when looking at Norway and Denmark, which are more similar in nature to Sweden in terms of demographics and economy.
Despite a less aggressive response than in the EMU-4, Sweden has experienced slower growth of confirmed cases of coronavirus and one of the lower fatality rates than other European countries. However, a striking comparison arises between Sweden and Norway: Sweden has more confirmed cases than Norway despite a lower testing rate, which, all else equal, suggests that the number of undetected cases in Sweden could be even higher (Norway has performed 31,835 tests per million inhabitants, while the figure for Sweden is 11,833). Taking the numbers at face value, our previous work suggests that one reason for this gap in the number of confirmed cases in Norway and Sweden is Sweden’s more lenient approach to containment measures, which have been effective at limiting the spread of the coronavirus.
While Sweden and Norway have broadly similar demographic characteristics, there are likely a number of idiosyncratic factors that sets these countries apart from other major European economies. Focusing on Sweden, there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that Swedes practise social distancing of their own accord, without fines or binding legislation. For example, newspaper reports suggest that public transport usage has fallen by 50% and streets are about 70% less busy than usual in Stockholm.
Sweden also has more favourable geographic and demographic factors relative to the EMU-4 which are likely to slow the spread of the virus: its population density is about half that of Italy, and Sweden has a high proportion of single-occupancy households (left panel, Exhibit 3), and a relatively low proportion of multi-generational households.
Beyond testing capacity, another factor that will likely play an important role in shaping re-opening is the ability to contain the human cost in terms of fatalities. Germany, for example, has a lower fatality rate than other economies and its health system is well-equipped to cope with the coronavirus pandemic (right panel, Exhibit 3). To assess countries’ likely ability to contain fatalities from the coronavirus, we therefore estimate a simple model to quantify the importance of demographic and health factors (left panel, Exhibit 4). The model is estimated on a cross-section of 22 European economies.
As explanatory variables, we include the proportion of single-occupancy households (which reduce transmission risks and are a proxy for younger households), the share of the population aged 65 and older, hospital beds per million inhabitants as a measure of health system capacity, and confirmed cases per million.
Despite its simplicity, the cross-sectional fit of the model is good, with an R-squared of 0.90 (right panel, Exhibit 4).
The Swedish experience is therefore not vastly different from other economies: the factors that explain fatality rates elsewhere also have explanatory power in Sweden. However, Sweden’s success in limiting fatalities might be hard to reproduce in other countries: while Sweden does have lower hospital capacity, demographic factors appear to counteract this.
While the model predicts a broadly similar fatality rate in Sweden and Denmark, it suggests that the Swedish fatality rate would be about a third lower if it had the same hospital capacity as Norway. We conclude that Sweden is not particularly suited as a reference point for the coronavirus response of other countries, as our analysis suggests that lower infection rate is likely to reflect in part less testing, while demographic and healthcare factors may help explain the fatality rate. In our view, the Swedish experience therefore can not be extrapolated to support a swift reopening elsewhere. That said, our analysis suggests that Germany could be in a better position to lift containment measures than southern Europe.
An economic cataclysm has been unleashed upon the world by Western politicians and bureaucrats. Unbelievably, economic activity in the West has slowed to a creep, as entire populations have been confined to their homes for weeks, if not months. As a result, millions have had their lives turned upside down. Most entrepreneurs and self-employed persons have had their livelihoods jeopardized.
The EU economy may shrink by 5 percent according to the European Central Bank (ECB), and similar figures have been forecast for the US. The economic devastation wrecked upon Western economies by governments will have consequences for many years to come.
It will inevitably lower European and US citizens’ quality of life for a long time, impacting their health as well.
It is important to understand that this disaster is not the result of the coronavirus pandemic, which is a public health problem, but of overzealous government officials reacting to the pandemic. A growing number of researchers and health professionals are suggesting that the total number of cases is far higher than previously thought, which means that COVID-19 is far less deadly than the media and government advisors insist. These revised death rates put COVID-19 fatalities in many places at a rate similar to that of the flu, which kills hundreds of thousands of people every single year globally, without provoking any notably large political reaction.
This raises a question: Why the enormous and extreme reactions to the virus from Western politicians, bringing the entire economy to its knees and severely curtailing the fundamental individual freedoms of millions of citizens?
Of course, there is the usual incompetence and herd behavior in the political leadership of many countries to be reckoned with.
But other reasons exist for this disastrous and irresponsible behavior.
Here are some.
First, politicians have generally little understanding of how markets work. Steeped in administrative and policy thinking, most politicians have never worked in the private sector or studied market economics. They neither understand nor appreciate the complexity of markets which make our high standard of living possible. This complexity includes an unfathomable number of daily exchanges, myriad commercial relations, and never-ending adaptation to surrounding conditions. The logic of politics, however, dictates that politicians cannot be seen as “doing nothing,” so they seek always intervention in markets. This is not new; it has always been a typical trait of politicians and bureaucrats. The political reactions to the coronavirus pandemic have just dramatically confirmed this truth yet again.
Secondly, politicians naturally make political calculations. Having reelection constantly in mind, they do not want to be held responsible for anything that goes wrong. In a crisis, they always prefer to act than not to act—all else being equal, to show that they tried something. At least then—in their minds—they cannot be accused of idleness, negligence, shortsightedness, or callousness. However deleterious their actions, politicians generally are not held accountable and can present themselves as heroically standing firm in dangerous times, acting forcefully and with determination. President Roosevelt’s harmful economic policies during the Great Depression and World War II are an example of this.
Thirdly, politicians sometimes rely too much on scientists, who generally have no training in social matters at all. Even more so than politicians, scientists often have great difficulty in grasping the concept of the spontaneous order of the market, not surprising given that they are followers of the rigorous scientific process. Albert Einstein’s frankly embarrassing economic proposals are a famous example. Whereas the politician is at least fully aware of the subtle gray shades in policymaking and the fine balancing act of satisfying various stakeholders, the scientist generally means well but sees the world in black and white.
Thus, if a scientist is asked how to stop the spread of a pandemic, he or she would probably answer that the best and most efficient way is to order the strict confinement of the entire population to their homes for weeks. This is what the France’s influential “Conseil Scientifique” has recommended, and it may well be true from a purely scientific point of view (although that is open to debate now). The problem arises when politicians enthusiastically follow such opinions without considering them in the light of their political and economic consequences. The first two reasons mentioned above may explain why politicians tend to place excessive trust in scientists: politicians are not familiar enough with market economics to fully grasp the consequences of acting on purely scientific advice, and it may be in their interest to act on such advice, since to do something—anything—is key.
A fourth reason why politicians have acted so recklessly to counter the spread of COVID-19 is certainly the political pressure that they are under. In times of (perceived) crisis, they are looked up to for guidance, if not for orders to follow, by an unwitting and politically uneducated electorate. But the pressure comes not only from the people, which perhaps is normal in a democracy, but also from foreign politicians. No leader wants to be outdone by his foreign colleagues and be left with the weakest plan to address the crisis. In this case, the UK‘s Boris Johnson reversed his policies, and Sweden‘s Stefan Löfvén has been slowly bowing to precisely this external pressure to act.
But the strongest pressure on governments probably comes from the media, in particular in the current times of pervasive internet and social media. Politicians are now constantly scrutinized and held responsible in a way that just a generation ago they were not. Further, mass media is prone to dramatize and exaggerate events, as this makes for better ratings, but also because journalists are not virologists. Mainstream media often tends to misinterpret and simplify the facts, inadvertently or not. An example of this is the mortality rate of COVID-19, which is constantly reported to be much higher than it is, because only declared cases are used (case fatality rate (CFR)). More generally, the prevailing attitude from the media is that everything must be done to save a small minority of the entire population today, even if that comes at the price of future economic pain for tens of millions of people. This is the classic socialist and interventionist dilemma: Where does it stop? In a world of scarce resources, how much taxpayer money should the state spend to save one life?
Finally, it is necessary to entertain a darker and more cynical explanation for the political reaction to the pandemic: power in a time of crisis. The state never misses a chance to increase its power. Crises are considered great political opportunities, and have thus been used countless times in history by rulers. This was the case during and after World War I and World War II, as well as after 9/11, with the passage in Congress of the PATRIOT Act (Providing Appropriate Tools to Restrict, Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act). But this is also true of smaller crises, such as the current panic. The economic stimulus packages that are now being proposed will again benefit corporatist bankers, as happened during the financial crisis. This is why the big banks have been the first to call for and cheer more “economic stimulus.” They stand to immediately benefit from such “government aid.”
That most Western governments have now decided to emulate the Chinese dictatorship in imposing a severe lockdown of society should be a wake-up call for those innocent souls who still think, even after the show trial of Julian Assange, that the West still protects individual freedom. A dangerous and frightening political evolution is on the way in an already fragile political and economic system. The political consequences of the generalized confinement of millions of people in Europe will be of long-lasting consequence to the balance of power between state and society. Though the Western “liberal democratic” order was never really one except in name, it is clear that a decisive step has now been taken away from it.
This politically triggered economic crisis could then also lead, hopefully, to a clearer understanding among the population that constitutional changes are due in many countries, in order to limit the powers of executive branches everywhere. Let us hope that this will be the lesson learned by the millions confined to their homes by the arbitrary will of the state.
Mayor Of Nice Demands “Health Passports” To Enter/Leave France
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared a new antibody test from diagnostics giant Roche Holding AG on Sunday, who is expected to flood the Western world with more than 100 million tests by the end of 2020, will determine if individuals have already been exposed to COVID-19 and presumably have immunity from it.
What the antibody test is, is a precursor to “immunity cards” or, as some call it “health passports.” Already, even before the tests are rolled out, some countries have suggested that health passports could be next. France is the latest country to call for new travel rules during the pandemic that would firmly restrict movement in the country, reported RT News.
The Mayor of Nice urged French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe last week to introduce new travel controls by using health passports in regions of France that border other countries.
Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice, posted a letter on Facebook one day after Philippe unveiled plans to ease stay-at-home restrictions for the country that would start in May, these rules could limit a person’s travel distance to 62 miles from their home.
Philippe said people need to adjust to a post-corona world where they must “learn to live with the virus” as restrictions are lifted.
Estrosi said the new passport would show the bearer tested negative for COVID-19 in the past 48-hours before travel. The proposal comes as severe lockdowns introduced on March 17 are being relaxed. He said health passports are likely the only method in fully relaxing lockdown measures.
France is not the only country that has spoken about introducing health passports. Other countries in Europe, such as Italy, Greece, Germany, and the UK, have also talked about the new travel rules. Even in the US, Bill Gates has pushed for immunity passports and the erection of the surveillance state to combat the virus.
Last month, we noted with the global economy in freefall as global cases surged to new highs, the suggestion by Western government officials to open crashed economies was through immunity passports.
We have raised several questions with immunity passports: First, nobody knows how long immunity lasts, and second, antibody tests are not ‘sufficiently accurate’. And a third issue we brought attention to are concerns over the social implications of immunity passports.
The proposal of immunity passports across the Western world is a sign that governments will seize greater control over people’s lives. And just what happens when someone is not considered immune? The government denies them a passport? Which means they would be out of work and can’t travel. But, oh yes, that’s why universal basic income will become a more concrete thing.
A condition in which hostages develop a psychological alliance with their captors during captivity.
Lockdown Stockholm Syndrome:
A psychological state of mind that causes its sufferers to come to love seeing their economies and liberties being destroyed, whilst simultaneously being incapable of accepting that Sweden kept its society going without resorting to such measures.
I continue to be baffled by those who cannot bring themselves to admit that Sweden has carried out a relatively sensible policy on Covid-19, whilst the response of so many other countries has been authoritarian and frankly unhinged. The idea of quarantining millions of perfectly healthy people and stopping them from doing normal, healthy things is something that has apparently never occurred to any national leaders in the past, or at least if it did, they presumably never enacted it for fear of revolt.
No such fear today. It is simply staggering to see how so many people have not only come to accept the inevitable destruction of the economy and curtailment of civil liberties as a price worth paying to deal with an illness which is killing numbers on roughly the same levels as a bad flu season, but have actually become cheerleaders for the giant social experiment being done to them. It reminds me of the chilling and dispiriting line at the end of 1984: “He loved Big Brother.” Today, for reasons that are not at all clear to me, many appear to “Love Lockdown” — that is, they appear to be absolutely fine with having their liberties taken away from them; absolutely fine with having the right to do lawful work taken from them; and absolutely fine with having the right to do normal, healthy things taken away from them. If anyone has an explanation, do be sure to let me know.
But it gets worse. Not only do they seem to be perfectly willing to go along with these things, but they are appear to be utterly oblivious and even apathetic to the economic train wreck headed their way because of the policy they support. Why? What will shake them out of that apathy and complacency? Will it be when they hear about the Great Depression-era unemployment levels coming on us? No! Even that doesn’t do it. The chart below is one of the most genuinely frightening I’ve ever seen, showing as it does US unemployment rising by over 30,000,000 in just seven weeks to levels not seen since the 1930s. And yet when I show it, many just airily dismiss it with a shrug of the shoulders as if it’s irrelevant. Perhaps it will only be if they lose their own jobs and can’t pay the rent or can’t get stuff in the shops like they used to that it’ll hit home! Who knows?
If you try to show such people that it didn’t have to be this way, comparing the UK with Sweden, or Sweden with other countries, or Sweden with what the Imperial College model might have predicted, they either dismiss it, or get angry, or ignore it. It’s a thought they don’t want to entertain, presumably because they have thoroughly convinced themselves that “lockdown” is the only policy that can possibly work, and any data that shows that this is not the case must either be wrong or ignored (for those who want to see a real expert thoroughly debunk the idea that lockdown was or is necessary, I recommend this interview with Professor Knut Wittkowski).
Despite studying the data for a number of weeks, I have yet to find any discernible evidence that the Swedish policy has hurt that country in anything like the way the doom-mongers predicted. Just as importantly, I have been unable to find any discernible evidence that destroying your economy and wrecking civil liberties — which is what the policy of “lockdown” is — was necessary.
For instance, the chart below shows two countries with a very different policy — Sweden and the UK — by daily deaths per million population (note, the UK figures are somewhat skewed on 29th April, as the Government decided to count deaths in care homes on that day ((extraordinary that these were missed off before)). What is actually clear is that Sweden has in fact fared better than the UK, with total recorded deaths at 256.6 per million, compared to 419.1 per million for the UK, as at 3rd May:
Or we could look at weekly recorded deaths for 13 European countries, plus the US. Interestingly, in all cases (except the UK because of that care home spike on 29th April), the numbers of deaths are now clearly falling and — it would seem — beginning to peter out — including Sweden:
Or here’s a cumulative way of looking at the same data:
What I have noticed, however, is the more Sweden’s figures have failed to shoot up into the stratosphere, the more some people have ground their teeth, digging in and claiming that because Sweden’s death numbers are worse than Denmark’s, Finland’s and Norway’s, this somehow proves the point that they messed up big time. Does it? Here’s another way of looking at it.
As of today, the country has seen just short of 2,700 deaths. This is:
Approximately 265.62 deaths per million population
Approximately 0.0265% of their entire population.
This is not even close to what the doom-mongers were predicting.My own very conservative estimate of what Imperial College’s model might have predicted for them, under the measures they have taken, came out at approximately 32,500 deaths (approximately 3,250 deaths per million). However, a study carried out by Sweden’s Uppsala University in April applied the Imperial College model to Sweden and came out with far bigger numbers than my conservative estimate. According to their projections, if Sweden continued its current response:
It would pass 40,000 deaths shortly after 1st May
This would continue to rise to almost 100,000 deaths by June.
But let me again remind you: so far, Sweden has had just under 2,700 deaths, and we’ve now passed 1st May. That’s many orders of magnitude below what the Imperial College model would have predicted for it.
I think we can safely say (if we didn’t know it already) that the Imperial College model overestimated deaths from Covid-19 by a huge margin. Bit like their estimates for Mad Cow Disease. And Swine Flu. And H5N1 Bird Flu. In fact, perhaps the question we should ask is if anyone knows of an instance when Neil Ferguson’s team have got their predictions right — or at least within say a few tens of thousands at least?
And yet here’s the thing: not only is the UK Government’s draconian policy based on these faulty predictions, but many have taken to these draconian measures based on faulty so-called science like ducks to water. I find it extraordinary. I’d love to know why. Any one?
Since late in January the world has undergone staggering changes which in many cases may be irreparable. We have given decisions over every aspect of our lives to the judgment of tests and to the projections of computer models for the coronavirus first claimed to have erupted in Wuhan China, now dubbed SARS-CoV-2. With astonishing lack of transparency or checking, one government after the other has imposed China-model lockdowns on their entire populations. It begins to look as if we are being led like sheep to slaughter for corrupted science.
The Dubious COVID Models
Two major models are being used in the West since the alleged spread of coronavirus to Europe and USA to “predict” and respond to the spread of COVID-19 illness. One was developed at Imperial College of London. The second was developed, with emphasis on USA effects, by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle, near the home of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. What few know is that both groups owe their existence to generous funding by a tax exempt foundation that stands to make literally billions on purported vaccines and other drugs to treat coronavirus—The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In early March, Prof. Neil Ferguson, head of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London issued a widely-discussed model that forecast possible COVID-19 deaths in the UK as high as 500,000. Ferguson works closely with the WHO. That report was held responsible for a dramatic u-turn by the UK government from a traditional public health policy of isolating at risk patients while allowing society and the economy to function normally. Days after the UK went on lockdown, Ferguson’s institute sheepishly revised downwards his death estimates, several times and dramatically. His dire warnings have not come to pass and the UK economy, like most others around the world, has gone into deep crisis based on inflated estimates.
Ferguson and his Imperial College modelers have a notorious track record for predicting dire consequences of diseases. In 2002 Ferguson predicted that up to 50,000 people in UK would die from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, “mad cow disease”, possibly to 150,000 if the epidemic expanded to include sheep. A total of 178 people were officially registered dead from vCJD. In 2005, Ferguson claimed that up to 200 million (!) people worldwide would be killed by bird-flu or H5N1. By early 2006, the WHO had only linked 78 deaths to the virus. Then in 2009 Ferguson’s group at Imperial College advised the government that swine flu or H1N1 would probably kill 65,000 people in the UK. In the end, swine flu claimed the lives of 457 people. Ferguson and his Imperial College group have a notoriously bad track record for predicting disease consequences.
Yet the same Ferguson group at Imperial College, with WHO endorsement, was behind the panic numbers that triggered a UK government lockdown. Ferguson was also the source of the wild “prediction” that 2.2 million Americans would likely die if immediate lockdown of the US economy did not occur. Based on the Ferguson model, Dr Anthony Fauci of NIAID reportedly confronted President Trump and pressured him to declare a national health emergency. Much as in the UK, once the damage to the economy was begun, Ferguson’s model later drastically lowered the US fatality estimates to between 100,000 to 200,000 deaths. In both US and UK cases Neil Ferguson relied on data from the Chinese government, data which has been shown as unreliable.
Neil Ferguson and his modelling group at Imperial College, in addition to being backed by WHO, receive millions from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Ferguson heads the Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium at Imperial College which lists as its funders the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Gates-backed GAVI-the vaccine alliance. From 2006 through 2018 the Gates Foundation has invested an impressive $184,872,226.99 into Ferguson’s Imperial College modeling operations.
Notably, the Gates foundation began pouring millions into Ferguson’s modelling operation well after his catastrophic lack of accuracy was known, leading some to suggest Ferguson is another “science for hire” operation.
University of Washington—Gates too…
More recently, the forecast models being used to justify the unprecedented lockdown measures across the United States have been developed at the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle.
Its COVID-19 model forecasts deaths and the use of hospital resources such as hospital beds, ICU beds and ventilators. At the end of March the model from IHME also “predicted” up to 2.2 million American coronavirus deaths unless drastic lockdown measures were followed. By April 7 IHME models revised that down to up to 200,000 deaths. Their last down revision puts deaths at just over 60,000. The claim is that the down revisions are informed by actual data. Yet the wildly inaccurate projections were the ones used to impose catastrophic social and economic restrictions across the USA.
Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter questioned the IMHE model:
“Aside from New York, nationally there’s been no health system crisis. In fact, to be truly correct, there has been a health system crisis, but the crisis is that the hospitals are empty,” he said. “This is true in Florida where the lockdown was late, this is true in southern California where the lockdown was early, it’s true in Oklahoma where there is no statewide lockdown. There doesn’t seem to be any correlation between the lockdown and whether or not the epidemic has spread wide and fast.”
IHME claims its revisions are result of the lockdown taking effect even though that would take weeks to show up.
Like Neil Ferguson at the Imperial College London, the University of Washington’s IHME is another project of the Gates Foundation. It was created in 2007 with a major grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In May 2015 IHME and the World Health Organization signed a major agreement to collaborate on data used to estimate world health trends. Then in 2017 IHME got an additional $279 million from the Gates Foundation to expand its work over the next decade. That, in addition to another a $210 million gift in 2016 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund construction of a new building to house several UW units working in population health, including IHME. In other words, IHME has been a crucial piece of the Gates global health strategy for more than 13 years.
They have been turning out highly inflated models for state-by-state emergency room demands. Those inflated projections, from New York to California and beyond have wreaked havoc on the entire health care system. When one IHME model predicted need for 430,000 intensive care beds across the US in March, states went into panic mode from New York to California to Pennsylvania and beyond. By the third week of April the reality was that hospital beds were empty and untold numbers of other operations had been canceled to make room for covid19 patients who never materialized.
Faulty Tests
The wide variety of different tests that are supposed to tell whether one is infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus have added a crucial element to the perfect dystopian storm that is raging globally. Simply put, the tests are not that reliable.
A leading German laboratory reported in early April that, according to WHO recommendations, Covid19 virus tests are now considered positive, even if the specific target sequence of the Covid19 virus is negative and only the more general corona virus target sequence is positive. This can lead to other corona viruses such as cold viruses also triggering a false positive test result. That means you can have a simple cold and you are deemed coronavirus positive. Little wonder that the tally of coronavirus “infected” is exploding over the past weeks. But what does that number really mean? We simply don’t know. Yet our politicians are glibly shutting down entire economies and causing inconceivable social damage based on false model projections and WHO’s dodgy testing guidelines.
In Germany the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the government agency leading the COVID19 response, has deliberately refused to list the actual daily number of persons tested despite requests. Prof. Christopher Kuhbander, author of a detailed study states,
“The reported figures on new infections very dramatically overestimate the true spread of the corona virus. The observed rapid increase in new infections is almost exclusively due to the fact that the number of tests has increased rapidly over time. So, at least according to the reported figures, there was in reality never an exponential spread of the coronavirus. The reported figures on new infections hide the fact that the number of new infections has been decreasing since about early or mid-March.”
Yet the uncritical media presentation of endless statistics from the head of the RKI have fostered unprecedented anxiety and fear in the population of Germany.
Californian physician Dr. Dan Erickson described his observations regarding Covid19 in a press briefing. He stated that hospitals and intensive care units in California and other states have remained largely empty so far. Dr. Erickson reports that doctors from several US states have been “pressured“ to issue death certificates mentioning Covid19, even though they themselves did not agree. In Pennsylvania the state was forced to remove some 200 “coronavirus” deaths after doctor autopsy revealed death from pre-existing causes such as heart or lung diseases.
The more that actual facts are emerging around this pandemic and its consequences, it is becoming clear were are being told to commit economic and social suicide based on wrong methods and wrong information.
Democrat ‘Disinfo’ Group Using DARPA-Funded Tech; Will Pay Shills To Target Pro-Trump Accounts
An anti-Trump political action committee will use DARPA-funded artificial intelligence and network analysis to map discussion of President Trump’s claims over social media and target pro-Trump accounts during the 2020 election.
The PAC, advised by retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, will deploy the technology originally developed to counter propaganda from the Islamic State, according to the Washington Post.
The group, Defeat Disinfo, will use artificial intelligence and network analysis to map discussion of the president’s claims on social media. It will seek to intervene by identifying the most popular counter-narratives and boosting them through a network of more than 3.4 million influencers across the country — in some cases paying users with large followings to take sides against the president. –Washington Post
Spearheaded by Curtis Hougland – who says he received initial funding for the technology from the Pentagon’s shadowy research arm; the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) – the initiative raises questions over whether taxpayer funds were being repurposed for political purposes, notes Fox News‘ Greg Re.
In a statement to Fox News, DARPA outright rejected the Post’s reporting, and said that Hougland was misrepresenting their work.
“Hougland’s claim DARPA funded the tech at the heart of his political work is grossly misleading,” DARPA tweeted. “He advised briefly on ways to counter ISIS online. He was not consulted to design AI or analysis tools, nor certainly anything remotely political. DARPA is strictly apolitical.”
Hougland’s claim DARPA funded the tech at the heart of his political work is grossly misleading. He advised briefly on ways to counter ISIS online. He was not consulted to design AI or analysis tools, nor certainly anything remotely political. DARPA is strictly apolitical.
“Hougland had a tertiary consulting role advising an agency program on how to explore new and better ways to counter America’s adversaries online,” a DARPA spokesperson told Fox News, adding “He was not consulted for technical expertise designing artificial intelligence or network analysis tools, nor certainly any research that was remotely political. … Unequivocally, DARPA funding did not help advance the technology with which Hougland now works any more than does his use of other agency technologies like the internet or mobile phone.”
Meanwhile, Hougland’s PAC will pay influencers to convey their messaging, according to the Post – a tactic which Mike Bloomberg’s campaign took heat for earlier this year.
“I have no trepidation about paying content creators in seeking out and amplifying the best narratives.”
McChrystal told the Post that while the operation might appear unseemly, it’s necessary.
“Everyone wishes the Pandora’s box was closed and none of this existed, but it does.”
Even in California, a heavily socialist, overbearing tyrannical nanny-state, people are standing up for their rights. Human beings were never meant to be caged by a few elitists and people have finally gotten sick of their enslavement to the political overlords.
Protests raged all over the United States over the weekend as millions of people begged the very government that enslaved them to free them. Obviously, that’s not how it works, but the fact they are realizing no other human has a higher claim over them is at least, a step in the right direction.
People have finally grown tired of obeying the commands of the ruling class, and they have taken to disobeying orders to imprison themselves in their homes so they won’t spread a virus that even by government’s exaggerated numbers is still no worse than the flu.
The primary threat to freedom and justice is not greed, or hatred, or any of the other emotions or human flaws usually blamed for such things. Instead, it is one ubiquitous superstition that infects the minds of people of all races, religions, and nationalities, which deceives decent, well-intentioned people into supporting and advocating violence and oppression. Even without making human beings one bit more wise or virtuous, removing that one superstition (the belief in authority, that some have the right to command, and others have to obey) would remove the vast majority of injustice and suffering from the world.
The solution to these lockdowns has been with us the whole time. We outnumber the police state and politicians by “orders of magnitude.”If we decide to live our lives as the free human beings we were meant to be, there’s nothing the ruling class can do to stop us short of trying to make an example of a handful of people. But once we stick together and disallow them to make examples of those people, we will be free.
There is no need for violence or begging. Being free is our birthright and we should disobey any command that imprisons us and harms ourselves or others. We all need to realize it’s time to do the right thing, not the “legal” thing.
If you’re afraid of getting sick, stay in your home. If you don’t want to open your business, don’t. But it’s the height of privilege to look down on those who are simply living their lives free of the chains the ruling class is desperately trying to force them into. People all over are finally realizing that they were not born to be slaves to the elite few and the “order followers” such as police and the military need to take a hard look at themselves and what they are enforcing.
Cops and military: your children will have to live the world you are enforcing. If you want them to bow to a totalitarian police state, by all means, keep “enforcing” the will of tyrants on free people. But if you crave liberty, and want your children to have a life free from slavery, it’s time to stand up and say so.
This has become black and white. You are either free, or you are not. You either enforce tyranny or you do not. It’s not a gray area.
To those few cops who have stood up and refused to violate the rights of people, it’s appreciated. Now stand with those who want freedom, or align yourself with enslavement and tyranny. There’s no middle ground.
This all ends when WE say it does. I’ve said this from the beginning. They cannot enslave us once we all realize it’s our birthright to be free and we go about our lives in defiance of their orders, and peacefully coexist with each other. We are more powerful than they will ever allow us to know, and all we have to do is realize it.
This is just the beginning of humanity getting off its knees. It started when the government attempted to force falsified data about a virus down our throats, and it ends when we say it does. Take their power away by being uncontrollable. Take your mind back from the mainstream media, and never again allow yourself to be enslaved.
If you want to hear an uplifting message about why it’s important to speak truth to power and take your power back and just live as the free human you are, watch the video below. It’s long, but just the first few minutes are positive and will help you realize you are more powerful than any politician, tyrannical police state enforcer, or elitist. You just have to realize it.
This is the truth the “cabal” doesn’t want you to know:
“The universe is not working in humanity’s favor right now, because humanity has externalized its power to other entities. And everything that happening…everything that’s happening right now on the planet is…because of humanity’s ignorance.” –Ralph Smart
It’s time to wake up and be free as we were all meant to be. You don’t need the government, the elitists, or the cops permission to be free. That’s what the ruling class doesn’t want you to know.
