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ANALYSIS

May 19, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — Mainstream media reports of surging COVID-19 case levels in India over the last few weeks reignited a wave of fear due to a supposed “far more deadly” variant. Hospitals are reportedly overwhelmed with patients, parking lots are turned into massive cremation sites, broad anger flares against the government due to a shortage of oxygen, and calls are increasing to lock down a nation of 1.4 billion people.

One hint that we may be encountering a dose of media sensationalism occurred when a New York Post article stating in the title, “footage shows people dead in the streets” featured a picture of a suffering woman lying at a curbside from an incident later identified to be a May 2020 gas leak in Andhra Pradesh.

Much of this dynamic is reminiscent of many headlines that encouraged the same alarm early last year, such as “A man lies dead in the street: the image that captures the Wuhan coronavirus crisis,” or “DISASTER ZONE Coronavirus leaves Wuhan a ‘zombieland’ with people collapsing in streets and medics patrolling in hazmat suits.”

As observed in the Daily Expose, after a year of observation such “scenes have not been replicated anywhere else, confirming that it was all a lie and propaganda.” Now, however, “they are playing the same game, but this time with India.”

While there is certainly some level of tragedy happening in India, distinctions have to be drawn between the actual effects of COVID-19, and other contributing factors, many of which will be familiar to those in the west who have been close observers over the last year or so.

Vast majority of “cases” asymptomatic, reasonable doubts regarding PCR test results

According to Yohan Tengra, “a political analyst and healthcare specialist based in Mumbai,” and a co-author of a report titled “How the Unscientific Interpretation of RT-PCR & Rapid Antigen Test Results is Causing Misleading Spikes in Cases & Deaths,” the statistical foundation of media reports touting record cases of COVID-19 in India is fundamentally flawed.

“We will never know statistically if the infections have really increased. To be certain, we would need data of symptomatic people who have tested positive with either a virus culture test or PCR that uses 24 cycles or less, ideally under 20,” he stated in the Bangladesh publication NewAge.

As has been documented elsewhere, many scientists have criticized the way PCR tests have been used for the purpose of identifying COVID-19 cases calling their administration “useless” and “flawed science.”

Tengra agrees and illustrates in his research how using these tests at 35 cycles or above, which he reports is the setting in India, will produce a false positive rate of 97% to 99.9%. Therefore, the more testing is done, the more false positives are produced.

In another interview, he reported how the government has been aggressively increasing testing, including even forcing healthy people on the street to submit to tests. Tengra said this is happening in Mumbai where the local government is required to meet a daily target of 45,000 tests each day and individuals must accept the test or be charged under the Epidemic Diseases Act.

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As a result, the vast majority of identified “cases” from positive PCR tests are asymptomatic. “For example, in Mumbai, they declared two days back that of total cases in the city, 85 per cent were asymptomatic. In Bangalore, over 95 per cent of cases were asymptomatic!” Tengra exclaimed.

Even the World Health Organization (WHO) in January warned against diagnosing an individual as having COVID-19 merely because of a positive PCR test when they lacked any symptoms of the virus. The WHO also raised concerns about the “risk of false positive” tests, which happen as a percentage. Thus, the more tests are administered, the more false positives will naturally result, raising legitimate questions about the efficacy and purpose of testing asymptomatic individuals.

Many western consumers of alternative media will also be familiar with the important fact that there is very little, if any, evidence for asymptomatic transmission of viruses, including COVID-19. Having emphasized this reality as well in his report, Tengra believes the data presenting high numbers of “cases” which are dominated by asymptomatic individuals can be reasonably doubted given the malleability of how the PCR tests are administered and interpreted.

Financial incentives to “boost the number of positive cases” and admit patients to hospitals

As was the case in the United States, at least last year, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) provided what some called “perverse incentives” establishing government COVID-19 “relief funding,” which awarded significantly more compensation to hospitals if patients were classified as COVID-19 positive ($13,000) or put on a ventilator ($39,000).

Somewhat of a similar dynamic is present in India, as well.

As Tengra explained, like in other countries, people in India have been subjected to significant media propaganda causing them to greatly fear the virus. They are thus highly motivated to get early treatment in order navigate the infection successfully.

Tengra further explained, “The medical system itself works to boost the number of positive cases. Even with a negative PCR test, they are using CAT scans and diagnosing people with Covid. These scans are not specific to SARS-CoV-2 at all. I personally know of people who have been asked to be hospitalised by their doctors just based on a positive test (doctors can get a cut of the total bill made when they refer a patient to a hospital). This also happened to a Bollywood celebrity, who was asked to be admitted by his doctors with no symptoms and just a positive PCR.”

According to Tengra, the combination of faulty PCR tests, financially incentivized misdiagnoses, and frightened patients with the mildest of symptoms being admitted to the hospital, quickly brings to capacity a health care system where beds are often, even in the best of times, on the brink of scarcity.

Noxious air pollution, common respiratory diseases, and slanted death certificate policies

In addition to general dietary challenges with a prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in India, also contributing to the numbers of hospital admissions and reported deaths, along with many of the media’s alarming images of suffering, is the fact that Delhi “has the most toxic air in the world which often leads to the city having to close down due to the widespread effects on respiratory health,” writes Jo Nash, a long-term resident of India (see here, here, and here). In fact, the air quality is so noxious that for a nice indulgent break one may wish to patronize a local “oxygen bar” in Delhi and enjoy some deep breaths of healthy air for a modest fee.

And in a nation where “respiratory diseases including COPD, TB, and respiratory tract infections like bronchitis leading to pneumonia are always among the top ten killers,” these conditions are severely aggravated by the air pollution especially on a seasonal basis when the weather is changing as it does this time of the year (“April/May”).

During these seasonal peaks, oxygen supplies can run low, and with this year’s addition of a “pandemic of panic” instigated by alarmist media coverage, some patients may be reluctant to go to government hospitals out of fear of catching COVID-19, while doctors themselves may not fulfill their normal duties for the same reason, resulting in an increase of life-threatening complications.

Combine these factors with policies that have been common in many other countries, including the U.S., where according to Tengra, India’s death certificate guidelines are structured to easily facilitate the labeling of individuals as having died from COVID-19 merely due to a positive PCR test, or general symptoms, and it becomes somewhat difficult to determine who actually died from the virus, and who was altogether misdiagnosed and misreported as a COVID death.

In summary, former Pfizer vice president and chief science officer Dr. Michael Yeadon told LifeSiteNews via email, “They’re misusing mass testing such that a positive result isn’t meaningful. This ‘over-reading’, coupled with the way ‘Covid19 death’ is defined now (places way too much emphasis on PCR & not enough on symptoms) means that Covid19 deaths are greatly exaggerated. Worse, people are encouraged to get treatment even if they’re well & have no symptoms. This crowds the hospitals and makes treatment for other than Covid19 problematic.”

When compared to population, even reported deaths are insignificant

However, even if taking the high reported COVID-19 numbers at face value, when compared to the overall population of India they remain underwhelming.

Jo Nash observes that the media presents case and death counts in whole numbers without placing them in context of India’s enormous population of 1.4 billion people. Thus, by way of comparison, he shows how India’s current daily death rate reports of 2,600, would be equivalent to 126 reported deaths per day in the U.K., which is far below any peak they experienced and approximately what is reported recently. To demonstrate this point, he offers the following graph from Johns Hopkins University Resource Center showing the relatively small impact of reported COVID-19 deaths as compared to other nations.

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Political negligence, more deaths from diarrhea than COVID, diverted attention during elections

As is the case elsewhere, politics plays a significant role in these reports. According to Nash, government negligence in addressing “urgent public health issues including access to clean water, sanitation, clean air, and treatments for other communicable diseases” is an ongoing problem avoided by both major political parties.

In fact, for perspective on the problem, Nash reports how even with a reported “peak” of alleged COVID deaths, “more people die of diarrhoea every day in India and have done for years, mostly due to a lack of clean water and sanitation creating a terrain ripe for the flourishing of communicable disease.”

And with the noxious air quality in Delhi remaining “a political football,” Nash asserts that both major political parties are happy to blame “the soaring respiratory problems that require oxygen on a COVID surge” as this diverts attention from their ongoing neglect of this important issue during this time of “high stake assembly elections.”

Successful treatments interrupted by experimental COVID-19 vaccine campaign

One place Nash reports the government has problematically diverted significant resources leaving important priorities neglected, is with massive experimental COVID-19 vaccine procurement for the purpose of facilitating the “world’s biggest” injection drive.

This appears to be a curious initiative given how serological studies earlier this year revealed that 55% of the country’s large population may have already been infected with the virus, including 56% of the capital, New Delhi, which indicated three-and-a-half months ago that they would soon be approaching herd immunity through natural infection.

And as affirmed by Dr. Peter McCullough, there is “no scientific, clinical or safety rationale for ever vaccinating a COVID-recovered patient.”

Yet given the high prevalence of the virus in the population, India has also experienced a low mortality rate, which according to current reported numbers remains at only around 11% per capita of fatalities in the United States. Further, despite the media hysteria, recent national level serosurvey testing has revealed an infection fatality rate of approximately 0.05%.

As is the judgment of many, such success in dealing with the virus is attributed to India’s early embrace of effective treatments. While debates raged in the United States early last year over the merits of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) following President Donald Trump’s endorsement of the drug, India had already recommended it in its national guidelines affirming it “should be used as early in the disease course as possible … and should be avoided in patients with severe disease.”

Following the June 2020 discovery of ivermectin’s efficacy in treating the virus, along with significant subsequent testing, the largest state in their nation, Uttar Pradesh (UP) (pop. 230 million), announced in August that it was replacing their HCQ protocol with ivermectin for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.

According to TrialSiteNews, “By the end of 2020, Uttar Pradesh — which distributed free ivermectin for home care — had the second-lowest fatality rate in India at 0.26 per 100,000 residents in December. Only the state of Bihar, with 128 million residents, was lower, and it, too, recommends ivermectin.”

However, this general tranquility was oddly disrupted in correlation with experimental COVID-19 vaccine uptake. Though the massive injection campaign was scheduled to launch on January 16, it didn’t hit its stride until late February.

When the goal of vaccinating 300 million people by August 2021 neared its midpoint, however, the reported number of COVID-19 cases unexpectedly surged, as broadly reported. The graph below displays this anomaly.

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As observed by Dr. Mathew Maavak, “Not only had India’s COVID-19 cases surged in tandem with increased vaccination, the trajectory of infections and inoculations can be neatly superimposed as the following graph suggests.”

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While correlation does not necessarily demonstrate causation, evidence for this same effect would include the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recent acknowledgement that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed polio vaccine was actually the cause of a polio outbreak in Africa.

And currently we find that the island of Seychelles, which is the “most vaccinated” country in the world, re-imposed lockdown measures similar to those implemented in 2020 after reporting a surge of infections.

Though at least 62.2% of the population has received two doses of an experimental COVID-19 vaccine (Sinopharm or AstraZeneca’s Covishield), almost one third of new cases on the island come from this “fully vaccinated” demographic.

The Covishield AstraZeneca and the Covaxin (Bharat Biotech) experimental vaccines, which are used in India, may have caused a similar effect.

In addition, Dr. Harvey Risch, a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, recently reported how clinicians have “estimated that more than 60% of the new cases that they are treating — COVID cases — have been people who have been vaccinated.”

The Daily Expose offers a visual to summarize the correlations between the use of ivermectin, the experimental vaccines, and the death toll in India.

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They also offer a similar dramatic example of how the correlation between experimental vaccine reception and the COVID-19 death toll was reflected in Mongolia. Indeed, such results of a “fully vaccinated” COVID-19 pandemic appears to be an international trend.

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Variants: “The triple mutant stuff is pure theatre,” “global health risk claim, it’s frankly a lie”

Regardless of how the new surge of reported COVID-19 deaths in India came about, the mainstream media’s reporting “has clearly been governed by a global approach to messaging that appears to aim at ramping up fear of ‘new variants’ and coerce compliance to vaccination during a period of increasing resistance, both in India and abroad,” according to Nash.

The WHO recently classified an apparently more contagioustriple mutant Covid variant” in India as a “variant of concern” at the global level.

In early April, Dr. Yeadon explained in detail that none of the variants identified in the world are anywhere near being able to escape the immunity enjoyed by those who have already, for example, passed through natural infection. Therefore, there is no need for a greater level of fear or “concern” in their regard.

In response to the WHO’s recent classification, Dr. Yeadon told LifeSiteNews, “The triple mutant stuff is pure theatre. You’ll notice they’ve presented no data whatsoever on its properties or ability of our immune systems to recognize it.

“I have no doubt that the ‘global health risk’ claim — it’s frankly a lie. No doubt such a variant exists, but the difference from the original virus will be far too little to matter.”

Rosemary Frei, a Canadian medical writer and journalist with a master’s degree in molecular biology, analyzed the only two studies which have been produced to propose the so-called “higher transmissibility” of the “India variant.”

“The first was published May 3, and it was just a purely theoretical paper just sort of using experimental equipment to look at binding between the virus (the variant) and cells, or between the variant and antibodies to the virus. So, it is completely theoretical [and] … very far removed from real life, particularly in humans, and from showing whether it affects morbidity or mortality in humans,” she said. “And neither does the second study which is on 18 hamsters (!) (reflect real life).”

The good news: India reemphasizes safe and effective treatments, to encouraging results

In response to the sharp discontent in the nation over the rise of infections, the national government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a move to regain control of the virus by quietly changing its treatment guidelines in late April to include ivermectin and HCQ.

While Uttar Pradesh and other states used ivermectin with astounding success, the Indian Council of Medical Research declined a national recommendation last October citing — as has been typical in the U.S., as well — the need formore data.”

But that policy has now changed, and India has become the largest country in the world which has officially recommended ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19.

As reported by TrialSiteNews, with the issuing of this authorization the stock prices of ivermectin producer Bajaj Healthcare rose 6.32% as they began to initiate massive production and distribution efforts. While these events were “reported around India,” few mentions could be found elsewhere “as Western press are under order to blackout ivermectin news unless it’s neutral to negative,” the news outlet asserts.

Soon after this change went into effect, daily new cases, active cases, and some regional mortality rates began to plunge in the nation.

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Though establishment media mock HCQ and ivermectin as “two drugs that conspiracy theorists say cure COVID-19 and that scientists say are useless at treating the disease,” there are 219 peer-reviewed studies demonstrating the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment and prophylaxis against COVID-19. And 54 peer-reviewed studies show the effectiveness of ivermectin as treatment and prophylaxis against COVID-19, according to the COVID blog.

In describing such studies at a Senate hearing last December, Dr. Pierre Kory, a founding member of Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), mentioned the “mountains” of evidence that demonstrate the miraculous effectiveness of ivermectin.

“When I say ‘miracle’ I do not use that term lightly,” he stated. “[T]hat is a scientific recommendation based on mountains of data that has emerged in the last three months.”

In a recent study, the authors found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality and recovery time in addition to “significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin.”

The study also cites many examples of “ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality,” prompting them to conclude that as an oral agent, ivermectin is “effective in all phases of COVID-19,” and thus it should be “globally & systematically deployed” as a treatment for the novel virus.

Many find the suppression of these treatments in the U.S. and many other countries by establishment media and governmental agencies to be equivalent to “murder with malice.”

According to Dr. Joel S. Hirschhorn, the continued calls for yet more studies by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the FDA, and the World Health Organization is “sheer nonsense.”

“Has the profit-seeking drug industry in India and elsewhere pushed the use of vaccines and knocked out wide use of cheap generics?” he asked.

“The U.S. government should learn from the proper but belated action by the India government. Too many Americans have suffered and died needlessly. With over 570,000 COVID related deaths and more every day, the blocks to using ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine should be removed,” Hirschhorn concluded.

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