Help Dr. Paul Alexander continue his vital work: LifeFunder
(LifeSiteNews) – It is clear now that the COVID-inspired lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, and all of the COVID-19 pandemic restriction policies societies were subjected to over the last two and a half years have all failed catastrophically.
Our societies were decimated with lockdown policies that were crushing, and the shocking reality is that none worked. Even the efforts to mislead societies about the superiority of natural immunity over vaccinal immunity failed and the science was disregarded.
Governments enacted devastating and restrictive COVID policies on their societies with irrational, illogical, unscientific, specious, and unsound arguments which were often lacking any evidentiary basis.
It has been estimated that it will take decades to recover from what our governments did. The costs have been staggering in terms of damage to mental health, the consequential rise in hunger and poverty, the crushing effects on economies, the loss of education, escalated costs to healthcare and the delayed and cancelled care for non-COVID illnesses, and the impact on crime.
Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands (and potentially millions) were denied treatment for other medical conditions, and the excess-mortality data is indicating the catastrophic effects of this. The same number again were also denied early outpatient treatment that was known to be safe, effective, not cost prohibitive, and already approved by the regulators.
Lockdowns did not protect
Lockdowns did not protect the vulnerable but harmed them, shifting the morbidity and mortality burden to the underprivileged who could not afford to “shield.” We instead locked down the healthy while at the same time failing to properly protect the actual group that lockdowns were proposed to protect, the high-risk vulnerable and elderly. We shifted the burden to the poor (women, minorities, children) and caused catastrophic consequences for them as they were in the least position to lock down. Those in the “laptop, zoom, caffé latte” class seemed unperturbed by the larger societal ills and consequences and called for more, longer, “harder” lockdowns.
In a sense, what we have done is perverse and sickening, with calls (then and even now) from those more affluent groups to maintain lockdowns as they have “settled” into a comfortable cadence and flow, a more “structured” life now fulfilled with Uber and Amazon. They can walk their dogs, tend to the garden, and go for coffee as they wish. They could slip in a mini-vacation when they wanted.
Wealth disparities placed those who were more vulnerable economically in a difficult position in terms of sheltering from the pandemic. It left them highly exposed, and COVID decimated them. The coronavirus emerged early on to be a disease of great disparity, and we learned a few weeks out that it was amenable to risk stratification, and that baseline risk was prognostic on severity of outcomes and mortality. A steep age-risk curve emerged, and this underpinned our calls for a “focused” protection.
Lockdowns badly harmed the elderly, leaving them confined in their nursing homes, and extending the window of exposure to the virus for them. And they were subject to repeated exposure from staff who brought the pathogen into the confined settings which drove hospitalizations and deaths.
Lockdowns thus reduced the movement of younger, low-risk persons (who were most able to handle the pathogen immunologically) to the same level of movement and mobility as the elderly, higher-risk persons, and thus equalized the chance of infection between the low-risk and high-risk, the young and the old. But while lockdowns equalized the risk, the way out was to maintain a risk differential as we protected the vulnerable. Failing to do so was catastrophic as it denied movement toward population immunity in most instances.
The lockdowns were really the key feature of global governments’ COVID pandemic actions and really worked to disable and crush societies. They turned out in all locations and nations to have been counterproductive and unsustainable. They were meritless and unscientific. There was no good reason, no sound justification, to harden lockdowns and to keep them going after we quickly learned in the spring of 2020 how to manage COVID and who was the at-risk group.
Data that should not be ignored
These unparalleled policy actions were enacted for a virus whereby the median/mean age of death began in February 2020 at about 82 to 83 years of age and has remained so until September 2022. This was similar to, or greater than, the typical life expectancy of approximately 79 to 80 years in most nations. If you were high-risk and did succumb to COVID-19, you were at an almost 100 percent chance of having lived past your national life expectancy. COVID-19, despite what the media want you to believe and have stated for 30 months now, has not shortened lives in general.
Do we have sound evidence of risk? Well, the reality is that there was so much societal damage for a virus with an infection mortality rate (IFR) roughly similar (or likely lower once all infection data are collected) to seasonal influenza. Stanford University’s Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis identified 36 studies (43 estimates) along with an additional 7 preliminary national estimates (50 pieces of data) and concluded that among people under 70 years old across the world, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00 percent to 0.57 percent, with a median of 0.05 percent across the different global locations (with a corrected median of 0.04 percent). The rate of survival for those under 70 years is 99.5 percent.
Moreover, the IFR has been shown to be near zero for children and young adults. Evidence showed us early on that while anyone is at risk of being infected, “there is more than a thousand-fold difference in the risk of death between the old and the young.”
Omicron presents as a common cold to most
Thus, omicron sub-variants BA.4 and BA.5 present as a common cold to most. While recognizing that it could be challenging to the high-risk elderly (as are common colds and flu), commonsense precautions need to be taken. We argue that the pandemic is over, and therefore the emergency declarations must be ended. These include all mandates and all restrictions.
Omicron is mild enough that most people, even many high-risk persons, can sufficiently cope with the infection. As mentioned, omicron infection is no more severe than seasonal flu, and generally less so. We have learned much about the utility of inexpensive supplements like vitamin D to reduce disease risk, and there is a host of good therapeutics available to prevent hospitalization and death, should a vulnerable patient become infected. And for younger people, the risk of severe disease – already low before omicron – is minuscule.
No reason now for keeping state of emergency
Given that omicron, with its mild infection, is running its course to the end, there is no justification whatsoever for maintaining the emergency declaration status. The lockdowns, personnel firings and shortages, and school disruptions have done at least as much damage to the population’s health and welfare as the virus.
The state of emergency is not justified now, and it cannot be justified by any fears of a hypothetical recurrence of some more severe hypothetical infection at some unknown point in the future. If such a severe new variant were to occur – and it seems unlikely from omicron – then that would be the time to discuss a new declaration of emergency. However, caution is urged. This pandemic could have ceased and settled into an endemic phase with mild seasonal circulation.
However, with the use of non-sterilizing, non-neutralizing, antigen-specific vaccines that induce vaccinal antibodies that do not eliminate the virus (which have become largely resistant to the potentially neutralizing vaccinal antibodies), we could see the maintenance of the pandemic with the selection of infectious variant after infectious variant. This is an ongoing concern given the emergence of viral immune escape, antibody-dependent enhancement of infection (ADEI) and disease (ADED), as well as original antigenic sin (immune priming, immune fixation, prejudicing to the initial prime), we could be maintaining this pandemic.
The Vaccine is driving infection in the vaccinated
The evidence is now clear that it is the COVID gene injection vaccine platform that is driving massive infectious pressure in the midst of sub-optimal vaccinal antibodies that do not cut the chain of transmission. It is the vaccine that is driving infection in the vaccinated. This continues to be a recipe for disaster and either the infectious pressure must be cut or the injection must be stopped (and if used, targeted only for the high-risk vulnerable).
For additional reading, please refer to Liu et al. “An infectivity-enhancing site on the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein targeted by antibodies” and Fantini et al. “Infection-enhancing anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies recognize both the original Wuhan/D614G strain and Delta variants. A potential risk for mass vaccination?
The pathway forward
What is the pathway forward? What are the suggested steps required to end this now and make sure nothing like this happens again? How do we emerge?
1) Never again should we use a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach; instead, encourage an age-risk stratified “focused” protection approach, targeting only those who are at risk. Leave the rest of society alone, and definitely leave our healthy children alone who can effectively handle the virus (and most if not all pathogens) immunologically, especially with their potent (developing) innate immune system (innate antibodies and natural killer cells).
2) We need to ensure double and triple down protections of the elderly high-risk and vulnerable persons in society (those with underlying medical conditions, obese persons to protect themselves) in nursing homes, long-term care facilities, assisted-living facilities, care homes, in private households, etc.
3) Allow physicians to exercise their best clinical judgements in how they can best treat their patients without the threat of discipline and punitive actions for not following the approved political line on matters of natural immunity and vaccine safety. Medical license boards (State boards as well as the Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons in Commonwealth nations e.g. Canada, U.K., Australia, New Zealand, etc.) around the country and the world have threatened countless medical providers with punitive actions for informing patients as well as treating them early. The doctor-patient relationship used to be sacrosanct but that has been taken away. This has resulted in a neglect of early sequenced multi-drug treatment (combinations of antivirals, corticosteroids, and anti-thrombotic, anti-clotting drugs). There must be no ex-cathedra over-reach by technocrats or bureaucrats in terms of how a doctor is to treat his or her patient.
4) There must be urgent public service announcements on vitamin D supplementation, on reducing obesity (maintaining a healthy body weight), as well as on the positive impact of the reduced risk to pathology due to healthy lifestyles, nutrition, exercise, etc.
5) Message to the population that we are not all at equal risk of severe outcomes or death if infected (we never were), such that there is a 1,000-fold difference in risk between children and older adults: 10-year-old Johnny who is in good health is not at the same risk of illness if exposed or infected as an 85-year-old grandma who has 2–3 medical conditions.
6) There must be no mass testing of asymptomatic persons, only testing of symptomatic, ill/sick persons, including where there is a strong clinical suspicion. With this, stop contact tracing where the virus has already spread extensively as it confers no benefit; this tracing has actually been harmful.
7) There must be no isolation/quarantine of asymptomatic persons, only isolation of symptomatic ill/sick persons, including where there is a strong clinical suspicion. No isolation of asymptomatic persons at borders; these have been very harmful.
8) There must be no mask mandates, no mask use in school children, no mask use outdoors (it is nonsensical), and use of a mask is to be made on case-by-case decisions based on risks of the prevailing pathogen (the prevailing epidemiology).
9) There should be no school closures, no university closures, nor forced quarantine of people in contact with those who test positive for the virus.
10) There must be no lockdowns whatsoever, no business closures, and we must move to keep society open fully and immediately. The crushing harms and devastation from lockdowns, as we have seen, far outweigh any benefits and the harms are most pronounced among the poorer in society who are least able to afford the restrictions.
The lockdown itself kills people, destroys families, prevents education of our children. Child abuse was missed by closed schools (and remote schools) and the lockdowns promoted child abuse. Lost jobs cause stress in the household. There is near zero risk to children from COVID and we are harming (and did harm) them by school closures; it was one of the most devastating misapplications of public policy. Most of the decisions made by the governments and their medical advisors were irrational, specious, and for the most part reckless, causing far greater harm. When schools were closed in America, millions of children went with no food as they get their only meals in the school setting.
Countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Trinidad and Tobago of the Caribbean are test case examples of all that goes wrong with the nonsensical government-led responses and policies with unqualified, illogical, and irrational COVID advisors, ministries of health officials and leaders, medical officers of health, and a corrupted media running interference.
The leaders of these nations should be fired from office for exacting an unbearable toll on their citizens through the ineptitude of their uninformed, irrational, and near-dictatorial actions which had no scientific basis. This has played out now fully by the massive accumulated data. They devastated their people and left them in a state of constant lockdown and reopening with no end in sight. They are incompetent because they failed to read the science or understand the lockdown data or evidence over two years, which is that it does not work in any manner and resulted in the mass suffering of the people. Business owners laid off employees, and school children could not take the anxiety and losses and depression and committed suicide due to the lockdowns.
11) Always allow (in such situations unless we are dealing with a pathogen with an elevated risk of death etc.) the vast majority of society (the healthy persons, the young, e.g., children, teens, young adults, middle-aged adults, older adults), the healthy, and those with no underlying illnesses, to continue normal daily life with reasonable common-sense precautions. In other words, we do not impede the low risk of becoming infected and we leave them largely unrestricted with common sense safety precautions. We heighten their risk of transmission, increasing the probability of infection among the younger and low-risk persons, especially our healthy children. At the same time, we secure the high-risk-of-illness persons so that infection risk is reduced for them. This ensures that natural immunity emerges and we get closer to population-level herd immunity. We strongly mitigate the chance of infection in the high-risk. We create a risk differential of contracting the virus that is skewed towards the young and healthy. And we do this harmlessly and naturally.
12) Mandatory vaccination by a nation or setting is and was a non-starter; there is no place for such mandates in societies that are free. No vaccinations for persons under 70 to 75 years of age (it is not needed and contra-indicated once there is no risk); COVID injections are to be offered, never mandated; no vaccinations for children as the vaccine offers (offered) no opportunity for benefit and only an opportunity for potential harms; no vaccination of pregnant women or females of child-bearing age, no vaccination of COVID recovered persons (they have already cleared the virus and are now immune) or suspected COVID recovered persons. We never ever inject a biologically active agent into a pregnant woman, originally evidenced by the FDA which, knowing this, thus precluded them from the registrational trials. However, the same FDA then allowed pregnant women to be vaccinated. This was a catastrophic failure and the implications shall emerge in time.
If vaccines are used in persons over 70–75 years old as suggested, they must only be used after shared decision-making with their clinicians, whereby patients can make informed decisions and provide informed consent.
13) Those advocating for vaccinations must also have risks on the table. Thus, pharmaceutical companies, vaccine developers, and governments, along with the FDA, must remove the liability protections.
No liability equates to no trust from the public, and certainly not from parents. Manufacturers must come to the table and, if they stand by these vaccines in that they are safe, then they (all involved in the manufacture and the advocating and mandating of these vaccines) must remove the liability protections that they benefit from. They must have direct skin in the game and be liable if there are harms as a result of the vaccinations.
14) No vaccine passports (or immunity or antibody passports) must ever be developed in these circumstances as they are a violation of privacy, liberties, and personal freedoms. Such mandates constrain the rights of citizens under the questionable guise of safety; the vaccines as designed did not and do not protect an individual by the provision of “sterilizing immunity.” By sterilizing immunity we mean that there are neutralizing antibodies and there is no further prospect of either getting infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus after a vaccination nor of passing along the virus to others. The evidence is and was very clear that the vaccines do no such thing and have failed especially against the omicron variant, prompting even the CDC to state that the vaccinated and unvaccinated carry near equal virus and can spread alike.
A seminal and transformational Israeli study by Gazit et al. clued us in and revealed that natural immunity conferred longer-lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity. Vaccinees who had not been previously exposed to the virus had a 13.06-fold (95 percent CI, 8.08 to 21.11) increased risk for breakthrough infection with the delta variant compared to those previously infected. A massive trove of evidence has emerged to show that the vaccinated and unvaccinated carry the same risk of infection and potential transmission.
15) The FDA and the CDC with vaccine developers must immediately implement proper safety surveillance systems for these COVID (and any subsequent) vaccines. This must include data safety monitoring boards post-vaccination, critical event committees, and ethics review committees, which at this time (1.5 years after vaccine rollout), still do not exist. With this, a committee to review the existence and proper administration of ethical and fully informed consent by vaccine candidates should be established.
16) Make clear that a “case” is when someone has symptoms and is sick; an “infection” is not a “case” and this effort to deceive the public with the reporting of “cases” must stop immediately so that the public understands the accurate parameters of the emergency.
17) Implement immediate testing for antibody and T-cell immunity before vaccinating the designated group. If we are vaccinating the higher-risk persons we do not vaccinate persons who have active infection or who have recovered from infection, the same way if your child gets the measles infection and displays the rash and fever, etc., You do not then vaccinate them after they have recovered, you send them to school for they are now immune; use that same logic with COVID-19.
18) Cease the illogical, irrational, inaccurate, and nonsensical absurdity that COVID-19 vaccine immunity is superior to naturally acquired immunity when the science is clear that natural exposure immunity is broad, robust, durable, mature, long-lasting, and similar to if not way superior to the narrow and immature immunity conferred by the COVID vaccines. An article by Scott Morefield at the Brownstone Institute reveals the ridiculousness of the CDC and NIH on this point.
Just look at the data from Israel on infection if previously infected and recovered versus if double vaccinated and it essentially destroys the negation of natural immunity or need for vaccination or vaccine passports in toto.
“More than 7,700 new cases of the virus have been detected during the most recent wave starting in May, but just 72 of the confirmed cases were reported in people who were known to have been infected previously – that is, less than 1% of the new cases. Roughly 40% of new cases – or more than 3,000 patients – involved people who had been infected despite being vaccinated. With a total of 835,792 Israelis known to have recovered from the virus, the 72 instances of reinfection amount to 0.0086% of people who were already infected with COVID. By contrast, Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection, with over 3,000 of the 5,193,499, or 0.0578%, of Israelis who were vaccinated getting infected in the latest wave.”
Moreover, this seminal piece by Alexander et al. published by the Brownstone Institute on natural immunity shows the robust and complete nature of natural immunity.
19) It is way past time to throw away the masks for our children as they have provided no benefit yet can cause harm to the growing child emotionally, socially, and in their health and well-being. The masks are toxic, especially to our children. Unshackle your children, allow them to play freely outside with their friends, to breathe the fresh air; allow your children again to live naturally with their environments. Allow their immune systems (their natural innate immunity system, their mucosal immunity) to be taxed and tuned up daily, challenged by the outdoors, by mingling and socially interacting, by living as normally as possible.
We are potentially creating a disaster and have likely set our children up for immunological disaster by the lockdowns, the masking, and school closures that have weakened their developing immune systems. Moreover, the COVID injections can potentially devastate their developing innate immune system (subvert and sideline it).
20) The public must shift toward the use of nasal-oral hygiene washes that have been shown to be highly effective in not just eliminating the COVID virus but also a range of pathogens. These include povidone-iodine (PI) 10% solution (can be purchased over-the-counter) and diluted as well as hydrogen peroxide when PI is not palatable. These must be diluted and never swallowed but used to clean out the oral and nasal passages of pathogens, especially if there was a high risk of exposure (e.g. you have been in crowded settings). These are so very effective that they can help minimize even the use of sequenced multi-drug early treatment (combinations of anti-viral, corticosteroid, and anti-platelet therapeutics) and we have now inserted it into the second row just beneath self-quarantine at home in our advisory guidelines.
Conclusion
In closing, the medical experts and the COVID Task Forces have been wrong. Every decision in the U.S., Canada, U.K., etc. has proven disastrous and they have caused far greater suffering and death from the collateral effects of the lockdowns and restrictions. The medical experts who informed governments should have broadened the scope of advice and allowed other voices to be heard. They failed to do so and, in return, caused crushing harms by inept and unsound decisions.
If it is all about the science, medical decision-makers must follow the data and science and to use it and use critical analysis of the data. These decision-makers must now come to understand the catastrophic impact of their policies and that stopping COVID at all costs (so-called “zero COVID”) is not a policy and it is – and certainly was never – attainable. If a policy is based on an unattainable goal, pursuing it by every means causes greater harm to the population. Our decision-makers failed to understand this and this resulted in serious harms and needless deaths in our populations, beyond what any virus did.
The path forward begins with immediately obliterating COVID restrictions that include all mandates, all mass vaccination strategies, and a move to re-establish as normal a life as possible. We can begin by considering these points laid out above and adding, as well as implementing, those that you think could be beneficial to making the society as whole as possible.
Help Dr. Paul Alexander continue his vital work: LifeFunder