Nobody ever reads it, but my previous post about COVID-19 got way too long after several updates, and to go post chapter THIRTY-SEVEN I decided to start a new post. (The entire series, under the tag COVID.)

1._Drosten

On May 12, 2021, the genius known under the name of Christian Drosten said: “Those who do not get vaccinated will inevitably become infected.” He clarified, in an interview given to the German broadcaster NDR: “The entire population of Germany will become immune to the coronavirus in the next year and a half. This will happen through vaccination or natural infection. This virus will become endemic, it will not go away. And anyone who actively decides against getting vaccinated now will inevitably become infected. Nothing can be done about that, because measures will be relaxed over time.”

Not necessarily wrong per se, but this guy is the same nincompoop who, at the beginning of March 2020, declared: “Well, simply said, there are many mild cases. COVID is a mild disease. Primarily, it is a common cold, a common cold that is mostly affecting the lower respiratory tract. So in principle it won’t be a problem for the individuals. If you catch a common cold virus, you won’t just survive it, but usually only notice little of it. So the question is: what are we actually worried about?” Two weeks later, a 180° turn: “But it’s clear, one corona party, should this term exist, could make a whole town sick within several weeks. It doesn’t even take weeks, but rather days. Having parties is so irresponsible, and those who attend those parties might kill their own parents that way.” How can anyone still trust such a person? I never trusted him since I saw him being “a denialist”; and little could have he done to change that, short of an honest public apology that never came.

I was reminded of that by Dr. Simon Goddek, in a Twitter thread. Now, I wouldn’t go that far as to suspect Drosten of fraud, for having been the one who developed the first PCR COVID-19 test while managing to get peer-reviewed with lightning speed. But Dr. Drosten is a fraud, no matter how you’re looking at the facts. He should have hidden under a rock since last March!

But what scientific evidence has led to a “harmless cold” becoming a “parent killer” within 2 weeks? Dr. Goddek has some answers, mostly hinting at incompetence. It must be said that Drosten did develop a PCR test for the original SARS-CoV, and one for the H1N1 swine flu, but his religious preaching of the RT-qPCR mass testing is more of a pro domo action than something based on a reliable protocol. Apparently, in 2009-2010, PCR testing for H1N1 almost caused a pandemic to be declared; however, “The pandemic of influenza strain H1N1 has not yet manifested itself as the pestilence of biblical proportions that many had anticipated.” Back in 2014, in the times of MERS, Drosten gave an interview in which he said there’s no need to worry about MERS when visiting the Middle East, but “Contact with camels should generally be avoided – especially contact with young camels, which seem to be particularly affected.” Then, regarding the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), he added: “The method is so sensitive that it can detect a single molecule of this virus. If, for example, such a pathogen flits across a nurse’s nasal mucosa for a day without her falling ill or noticing anything else, then she is suddenly a MERS case. Where previously deathly ill people were reported, now mild cases and people who are actually perfectly healthy are suddenly included in the reporting statistics.” Wow. But it doesn’t end here; according to Drosten, “Our body is constantly attacked by viruses and bacteria. However, they often fail at barriers such as the skin or the mucous membranes in the nose and throat. There they are successfully warded off before they can do any harm. The immune defense system only develops antibodies against pathogens that seriously attack our body. If antibodies are present, it means that the person has actually had an infection. Such an antibody test would greatly facilitate the differentiation between scientifically interesting and medically relevant cases.”

To summarize: in 2014, Drosten said: don’t test those who are asymptomatic, as they and those with mild symptoms are unlikely to be spreading the disease, and don’t use PCR tests, as they can be deceptive, so don’t count those PCR-positive to the statistics. Since 2020, Drosten and his friend Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus have quite the opposite message!

Antigen tests, not antibody tests, should be trusted (see the difference here and here). Antigens show that you’re currently infected, and they disappear once the infection is gone. Antibodies might not yet be present at the beginning of an infection, and they last after the infection ended. That’s why the various types of PCR tests, while complex, only give very confusing information. Switching from PCR tests to antigen tests in Austria produced this dramatic change:

The rapid tests that are now largely available even in most supermarkets in Germany are antigen tests. They might be less sensitive and miss ~5% of the positive cases, but they give the relevant information: only the currently infected people are those able to spread the disease, not those who had the disease!

2._Goddek

Most of the above info comes from the aforementioned Dr. Simon Goddek, who likes to be called Dr. Simon. I don’t know what to make of him, but I don’t like first names. It works for kings and emperors, but otherwise it’s non-standard, and sometimes rude. So it’s gonna be Dr. Goddek to me.

I don’t give a flop on aquaponics; I don’t know what biofloc, maraponics and haloponics are, and I don’t fucking care. I am among the few people who detest hydroponics, and I also hate made-up words and words that don’t correspond to their semantic value. Here, only aquaculture is what it means, and hydroponics doesn’t have anything to do with hydro-, except that all plants also use water, as in the plain old agriculture, which however isn’t called hydroculture. All this is to say that I couldn’t care less of Dr. Goddek’s passions, likes and dislikes, and I happen to believe that NOBODY can be unbiased; what I wanted to know regards his intellectual honesty.

So far, he’s not necessarily a conspiracist, despite having written that “The person who declared COVID a pandemic is Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Ethiopian director of the WHO, who is accused of genocidal crimes.” In fact, he mentions no less than an article in The Times from Dec. 14, 2020: Tedros Adhanom: WHO chief may face genocide charges:

An American economist nominated for the Nobel peace prize has called for the head of the World Health Organisation to be prosecuted for genocide over his alleged involvement in directing Ethiopia’s security forces.
David Steinman accused Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, 55, who took over at the WHO three years ago, of being one of three officials in control of the Ethiopian security services from 2013 to 2015.
Dr Tedros was the country’s health minister from 2005 to 2012 and its foreign minister until 2016, when his Tigray People’s Liberation Front party was the main member of the ruling coalition.
Mr Steinman, an economist and campaigner nominated for the peace prize last year, lodged the complaint at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
He claimed that Dr Tedros “was a crucial decision maker in relation to security service actions that included killing, arbitrarily detaining and torturing Ethiopians”.
Dr Tedros has risen to international prominence as the leader of the UN’s health body during the coronavirus pandemic. He is the organisation’s first leader without medical qualifications.

In his complaint, Mr Steinman pointed to a 2016 US government report on human rights in Ethiopia that found the “civilian authorities at times did not maintain control over the security forces, and local police in rural areas and local militias sometimes acted independently”.

The complaint also alleged that Dr Tedros oversaw the “killing, and causing serious bodily and mental harm to, members of the Amhara, Konso, Oromo and Somali tribes with intent to destroy those tribes in whole or in part”.
Mr Steinman claimed that during the four years Dr Tedros “co-led” Ethiopia’s government, the regime “was marked by widespread or systematic crimes against humanity by subordinates”. …
Mr Steinman, a former consultant to the US National Security Council, was a senior foreign adviser to Ethiopia’s democracy movement for 27 years until its victory in 2018 under Abiy Ahmed Ali, the current prime minister.

True or not, I agree that “A person who committed such hideous crimes is capable of anything.” And a person who accepts such a high office without having the required competencies, i.e. at least a medical school, is a criminal.
But it makes sense: such are the people who nowadays dictate everywhere. Take another fraud, the abject Christine Lagarde: Chair and Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) 2011-2019, and since then, President of the European Central Bank, she’s a lawyer by education, not having attended any school of economics or of finance! She was several times Minister in a number of French governments, so she’s “one of them, the political scumbags,” having zero competencies in anything relevant.

But what bothers me at Dr. Goddek is his Open Letter to the Real Covidiots, who starts with “Dear #ZeroCovid fanatics,” which nullifies almost everything else. I’ve written about Zero Covid in my previous post on COVID-19 (sections FOURTEEN and TWENTY). I know, watching at the way things evolve, it’s impractical to hope for any success on that, but that’s precisely because of the “classical” Covidiots! It is my strong belief that:

  • The entire pandemic only happened because the planet is populated by stupidly criminal people who couldn’t help but behaving as usual, gathering together, staying too close to each other in various circumstances, talking and laughing too loud and while being too close to one another, thus practically spitting on each other. They couldn’t understand that SARS-CoV-2 is not like SARS-CoV, that one can be unaware that they’re infected, and that the only way to stop the spreading were to behave responsibly!
  • The entire pandemic only happened because the planet is populated by idiots who said: “it’s only a minor cold” and “the overall mortality is lower than for flu,” ignoring facts such as the perfidious way of getting infected by people who don’t even sneeze, and the apparent randomness of one’s immune system’s reaction. Life and death in a COVID-19 infection seem as random as if decided by Stalin.
  • The entire pandemic only happened because the planet is ruled by morons who didn’t close the national borders! When Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 2010 and aircraft were grounded, life didn’t end on Earth; but aircraft didn’t get grounded in 2020, so that the disease could spread worldwide.
  • The entire pandemic only happened because the cretinoids on Planet Earth just can’t live without taking a plane to the other end of the planet, for business reasons (oh, wait, there’s Skype, and Teams, and Zoom, and so many other solutions?) or for pleasure. The number of airline passengers more than doubled between 2004 and 2020 (i.e. between SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2), and this was an important factor in the creation of this pandemic.
  • The pandemic could have been easily ended in the first months of 2020, should every single affected country have established a TRUE LOCKDOWN, a total 6-8 weeks lockdown “the Wuhan way”: except for real medical emergencies, only people working at the power plant and other vital services, plus those who make the bread, etc., plus couriers and a number of other services being allowed to leave their homes, but then they wouldn’t return home and they’d sleep on the premises (or e.g. in tents close to the factory; this happened in Wuhan); couriers would leave the shipments at gates or barriers, without interacting with the recipients; generally, a severe lockdown, not the ridiculous, albeit very hindering versions of partial lockdown that were imposed in the West. Instead of 6-8 weeks of sacrifices and responsibility, we have destroyed lives, families, the mental health of many, and economies, while living unnatural lives for too long a period (and it’s not ended yet).
  • The containment of the pandemic and the inconsistent “yo-yo-like” measures taken by the authorities have been further hampered by the idiots who invented all kind of conspiracies, from “it’s a pretext to establish a world dictatorship” (go screw yourself, you moron: there wasn’t any true democracy anywhere on Earth!) to “vaccines are a way for Bill Gates to inject us with 5G chips”!

So don’t defend the criminals, Dr. Goddek!

The only scientific issue where he seems to be right concerns Vitamin D.

https://twitter.com/goddeketal/status/1392436589645729794

I didn’t read his study (Vitamin D3 and K2 and their potential contribution to reducing the COVID-19 mortality rate) at the time, and I wasn’t aware of the role allegedly played by Vitamin K, but on April 22, 2000, I was writing, under “Preventative or self-administered, to increase one’s chances of having a proper immune response, these adjuvants might help:”, the following first item:

Vitamin D (it has to do with the cytokines much more than vitamin C and the zinc), especially when one is self-quarantined.

There are many other studies, and I’m not a specialist (Dr. Goddek is!), but I’m happy to learn I understood it correctly.

Now, there’s a problem concerning the dosage:

I tend not to trust just about anyone and everyone. I don’t trust the “medical authorities” who rushed into insisting that “Vitamin D doesn’t help, it’s an American hoax, don’t take it!”, but at the same time there isn’t a consensus on the normal-time daily requirements of Vitamin D intake: depending on whom you trust, anything between 400 and 4,000 IU goes for an answer.

In normal times, I’d have trusted the conservative recommendation of 800 IU/day, and there were sustained release (or so they said) weekly pills of 5,600 IU or 7,000 IU, and daily pills with 1,000 IU. Since the pandemic started, those dietary supplements manufacturer topped the offer with pills containing 1,800 IU, 1,900 IU, 2,000 IU, 2,200 IU, 2,500 IU per day!

Either the manufacturers didn’t trust the powers that be, or they expected the population to prefer a safer bet and increase the intake. Vitamin D won’t kill you (since I was a kid, I avoid overdosing Vitamin A).

3._Didier, part I

Back to my controversial hero. There is this so-called study, Chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine for prevention and treatment of COVID‐19 (doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD013587.pub2), with a quick summary: Is chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine useful in treating people with COVID-19, or in preventing infection in people who have been exposed to the virus?

As you can expect, the answer is negative. But there are three things to be considered:

  1. This study is not a real study, but a meta-study, or an aggregate one. Some people stayed in front of their computers, and they analyzed 14 previous studies, just to come up with a different way of presenting the results, in different habits or packaging, if you want. This is not a study, this is Excel work!
  2. As Didier Raoult once said, “fiddling with data or with methodological and mathematical analyses to make something look effective is very trivial.”
  3. As with previous studies that denied any usefulness to HCQ (so basically it’s the case with the 14 studies analyzed here), the approach wasn’t an honest one, and I’ll detail this below.

The hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) has the following particularities that seem to have been disregarded on purpose and from the beginning, in an orchestrated effort to denigrate it, just because in America it was recommended by a country doctor who was supported by Trump, and because in France the Establishment only wanted to admit centralized protocols and nothing coming from any other level:

  • HCQ is known (with chloroquine) for about 80 years, and it has been administered to more than 2 billion people. It’s one of the safest drugs and one included in the WHO List of Essential Medicines, which lists “the most efficacious, safe and cost-effective medicines for priority conditions.” Recommended under “29.2 Disease-modifying agents used in rheumatoid disorders (DMARDs),” it made a career in preventing and treating malaria; it’s also used in autoimmune diseases such as lupus.
  • The normal dosage is 100 mg chloroquine, 150 mg chloroquine phosphate or sulfate, or 200 mg hydroxychloroquine sulfate per day for rheumatoid disorders (as per the above WHO list), and 200-300 mg chloroquine or 400-500 mg chloroquine/HCQ phosphate/sulfate per week to prevent malaria (starting 2 weeks before the travel to a risky area). Only for lupus, the dosages can reach 400 mg HCQ per day.
  • Its effect on countering the proinflammatory cytokines has been proven undeniably, and the severe inflammation of the lungs experienced by some COVID-19 patients is due to an explosion of cytokines. It’s criminal not to try to counteract this process.
  • As Didier Raoult has always said, but common sense would say the same, HCQ is to be administered from the onset, not when the patient is in a critical condition! It also has to be associated with an antibiotic such as azithromycin. Recent protocols that include antivirals or other treatments can be associated too.
  • As with any other drug, including e.g. aspirin, ibuprofen, paracetamol, and most drugs, there can be adverse reactions, and specific contraindications exist. The latter should be observed.

Instead, what is it that they did?

  • France was one of the countries where the HCQ was an OTC drug before January 15, 2020 (see my post from March 25, 2020). Well, they made it prescription-only, and they also forbade the “town doctors” (as opposed to hospital doctors) to prescribe it! One could only get HCQ in a hospital… where they refused to prescribe it to COVID-19 patients!
  • Nobody was prescribed HCQ when it could have had a positive influence, i.e. preventatively (like it’s used against malaria!) and on the first symptoms! People were left at home without other treatment than paracetamol, and they were rushed into the hospital only when their lungs were already destroyed, without any chance, and definitely not in a condition that could be repaired by HCQ!
  • The studies that have been conducted about HCQ in COVID-19 patients have been designed to fail: patients received 1,200 mg/day (six times the normal dosage!), and those with contraindications, including heart conditions, have been given the drug too! (See e.g. my post from April 22, 2020.) Such studies also enrolled severely ill patients, to which the HCQ is too late administered to be of any use.

Bad faith, that’s all it was. I don’t know how much was pure idiocy, how much was stupid bureaucracy, and how much was the hope of Big Pharma to come with something new and expensive instead of letting people prevent dying by using a classic molecule, but these were the realities.

Read in section TWELVE here how the the Agenzia Italiana del Farmaco (AIFA) was forced by il Consiglio di Stato to reintroduce the HCQ in the list of Farmaci utilizzabili per il trattamento della malattia COVID-19; the list includes heparin, azithromycin, darunavir/cobicistat, lopinavir/ritonavir, hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, corticosteroids.

So I believe the aforementioned meta-study doesn’t hurt Prof. Didier Raoult, with all his faults, but it denaturates the truth and harms public health. Even as I write this, I know of a recent COVID-19 patient here in Baden-Württemberg that has severe symptoms with high fever, but she’s left at home with paracetamol and ibuprofen simply because the pulse oximeter says her lungs are still fine! This is exactly the criminal approach responsible for most of the deaths in France and possibly in Lombardy in 2020, mitigated however by the fact that now people are using oximeters to know when their lungs are starting to fail. But even in the common flu, when the fever doesn’t decrease under 38 °C after two days of paracetamol, antibiotics (and possibly steroids) must be used, because it’s usually a sign of a strong bacterial infection added to the viral one!

Even the German health care system isn’t to be trusted. By the way, since Angela Merkel took her Pneumococcal vaccine last year (the one that put her in quarantine because her doctor was positive), the said vaccine wasn’t available anymore to the regular public. I still can’t have any COVID-19 vaccine for myself, but not even the Pneumococcal one? What the fuck is this huge bureaucracy paid for?!

At IHU Méditerranée Infection Marseille, patients are still treated with HCQ+azithromycin, and the mortality is 0.22% (15 out of 6863 patients having been given this treatment between Jan. 1 and April 26, 2021), so it works.

4._Didier, part II

In his weekly video of May 11, Effet des vaccins & Corruption, Prof. Raoult talks about the efficacy of the vaccines in real terms, not as reported by the positivist propaganda. There is no such thing as COVID-95 vaccines being 95% effective, although they might avoid more than 95% of the deaths; but this isn’t the definition. The definition is “the measure of the decrease in patients with severe symptoms aka symptomatic patients,” but “severe” and “symptomatic” are not objective terms and therefore no figure is reliable.

At IHU Marseille, among those who came to be tested, those who were vaccinated (both doses or only one, regardless of the vaccine) had an incidence of positivity of about 50% compared to those who weren’t vaccinated. That’s good, but that’s what to be expected, not 95%, as the public is made to believe.

Say, for AstraZeneca, one can get a 70% protection against symptomatic forms of the infection with the UK variant in the UK, and 30% protection against asymptomatic forms.

Then, he criticized three studies, two in The New England Journal of Medicine, and one in The Lancet:

The problem with these studies (and most such studies) is that the abstract doesn’t match the contents! The abstract is meant to sound overly optimistic, which in my opinion is intellectual and scientific fraud.

Now, even as we know that, we can read in the first study: “Estimated effectiveness in preventing death from Covid-19 was 72%,” which is far from being great! Vaccination is good, but not miraculous.

Unless you like fries and burgers, that is:

5._Didier, part III

Here’s a controversial tweet:

I have to admit that the mentioned study, Reverse-transcribed SARS-CoV-2 RNA can integrate into the genome of cultured human cells and can be expressed in patient-derived tissues (doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2105968118), is too much for me. I have a decent comprehension of some fields of medicine (with a strong focus on the medical conditions that affected my family in the past), a better knowledge of pharmacology than many pharmacists, and enough common sense to know that virologists are those who know something, while epidemiologists are just Excel users; but genetic things are not my forte.

Now:

  • In vivo is not the same as in vitro (“Integration of SARS-CoV-2 Sequences into the DNA of Host Cells in Culture.”).
  • The study still doesn’t say that the mRNA in the vaccine might change the human cells, or that SARS-CoV-2 could add random DNA sequences into cells, despite the confusing verbiage (“We investigated the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 RNAs can be reverse-transcribed and integrated into the DNA of human cells in culture and that transcription of the integrated sequences might account for some of the positive PCR tests seen in patients. In support of this hypothesis, we found that DNA copies of SARS-CoV-2 sequences can be integrated into the genome of infected human cells. … Because we have detected only subgenomic sequences derived mainly from the 3′ end of the viral genome integrated into the DNA of the host cell, infectious virus cannot be produced from the integrated subgenomic SARS-CoV-2 sequences.”)
  • This study is considered by some as being of very poor quality (read the entire Twitter thread).

The study might have improved between the submission and the publication, but it’s still to be taken with a pinch of salt. Professor Raoult’s mentioning of it, without a detailed interpretation, is unfortunate and inappropriate. (We know he refused to say whether he got vaccinated or not, which means he didn’t, but trying to instill doubts about vaccines is not the right thing to do.)

6._Conspirationists, take I

There are still all kind of idiots when it comes to COVID-19, some of them educated ones. I still cannot forget Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, which I discussed in section THIRTY here. But it can be much worse than that.

Take this shit of a site, d.p.h.free.fr/covid19, which includes the product of the sick minds of these individuals: Professeur Jean-Bernard FOURTILLAN, Docteur Serge RADER, Docteur Christian Tal SCHALLER, Didier ROCHARD, Frédéric CHAUMONT.

Jean-Bernard Fourtillan is not a Professor anymore, he’s a pharmacist, he announced in April 1994 to have “received the divine revelation” of a hormone that he calls valentonin, and he’s that scumbag to have claimed last November (in the conspiracy film Hold-up, not very different from Plandemic) that the Pasteur Institute “manufactured” the SARS-CoV-2 virus in 2004 before disseminating it, so that it could market a vaccine that was more dangerous than the virus. The website includes French (PDF) and English (PDF) editions of such aberrant claims.

The 88 pages in French and 86 pages in English “document” the whole process, including the patents on viruses (oh, yeah), and… Bill Gates and his 5G plans!

Seriously, how are such people NOT IN JAIL, nor in a madhouse?! “The Institute Pasteur just has to stop letting go to stop the pandemic.”

These are fucking people with higher studies, yet they’re a million times more stupid than my cat! And plenty of people on social networks relay such messages!

7._Conspirationists, take II

How about these twits who inform about a second Nuremberg tribunal that is in preparation, with a class action lawsuit being set up under the aegis of thousands of lawyers worldwide behind the American-German lawyer Reiner Fuellmich, who is prosecuting those responsible for the Covid-19 scandal manipulated by the Davos Forum.”

Their incoherence goes that far: the first point of the “Status of the Covid-19 Committee investigation” reads: “a. Covid-19 as a diversionary tactic by corporate and political “elites” in order to shift market share and wealth from small and medium enterprises to global platforms such as Amazon, Google, Uber, etc.

The degree of harm of what Dr (in Law) Reiner Fuellmich and his friends are doing is difficult to evaluate, but it distroys our society. Also, how comes that YouTube still allows channels such as Corona Ausschuss – Ausweichkanal? I’m not sure the freedom of speech should apply to things like International Legal Offensive – Part 1 and International Legal Offensive – Part 2.

8._Honest questioning of masks in public spaces

To cut the crap short: I never questioned the usefulness of face masks (there’s a long tradition of wearing them in Japan and other Asian countries, either for when people are having a cold or the flu, or when the pollution reaches some levels), once we agree that:

  • COVID-19 being a respiratory disease, and SARS-CoV-2 being a coronavirus (the common cold is produced by a coronavirus), it gets transmitted through the droplets issued by an infected person while they exhale, talk, laugh, cough, or sneeze.
  • Surgical masks mostly protect the others, not the persons wearing them. Their outbound protection is much higher than their inbound one.
  • KN95/FFP2/FFP3 masks are also offering a decent level of protection to those who wear them.
  • Only an idiot would say “but the virus is so tiny it passes through all such masks”; the virus doesn’t travel in itself, it’s carried away by the aforementioned droplets, which are retained to a satisfactory degree by face masks.
  • Scarfs, shawls, bandanas, and other tissues are useless, and only the most inept authorities could have allowed them as “protection” at some point in the past.
  • Indoors, a good aeration is even more important than wearing a mask, the idea being, don’t breathe other people’s air.
  • Therefore, wearing face masks in buses, trams, trains, and in all indoor public spaces makes a lot of sense.

This being said, there seems to be an excessive obsession with the mandatory wearing of masks in open public spaces such as on streets, in parks, etc., combined or not with useless and humiliating curfews. Why are such measures still a thing?

Take a look at this summary on regulations on mask-wearing in the EU, valid as of May 8 (some countries have eased the restrictions shortly after):

Austria: Surgical FFP2 masks required when using public transport and when at other public spaces.

Belgium: Masks must be worn in every place where social distancing cannot be observed including busy streets, public transport and indoors.

Bulgaria: To be worn in indoor public spaces as well as outdoor spaces where social distancing cannot be practiced.

Croatia: Mandatory in shops, restaurants, healthcare settings and on public transport. No penalty for breaches applies though.

Cyprus: Compulsory in all indoor and outdoor public spaces, on pain of a €300 fine.

Czech Republic: Mandatory in all public places, except, from Monday, outdoors when there are only two people present.

Denmark: Only recommended in public premises if one is infected with COVID-19, at higher risk of infection, when visiting care homes, at large gatherings and where close face-to-face contact is unavoidable for 15 minutes or more at a distance of less than one metre.

Estonia: Must be worn in all public indoor spaces.

Finland: Required on public transport in large cities and recommended where it is difficult to maintain social distance.

France: Must be worn outside by anyone over the age of six.

Germany: FFP2 or KN95 masks obligatory on public transport and in shops. Masks are also compulsory in certain city centres or at highly frequented public places.

Greece: Mandatory in all public places indoors and outdoors. Fines for those caught in breach.

Hungary: Must be worn by anyone over six both indoors and outdoors in all public spaces. Fines or exclusion from travel for those who violate rule.

Ireland: Must be worn on public transport, in shops, shopping centres and some other indoor settings as well as in banks, posts offices and credit unions.

Italy: Mandatory in indoor public places as well as outdoors except where people who do not live together are isolated.

Latvia: Must be worn in all indoor public places when there is more than one person. Children up to 13 years are exempt except on public transport, where the rule applies to anyone over seven. 

Lithuania: Mandatory in public indoor spaces. Recommended at private parties or when socialising with members of other families or households.

Luxembourg: A must in all indoor public places, on public transport and for any gathering of more than four people, whether in a closed area or in the open air.

Netherlands: Required in indoor public spaces and on public transport. 

Poland: Required in all public spaces except in forests, parks, green squares, botanical gardens, historic gardens, family community gardens and on beaches as well as while travelling by private car. The country plans to remove mandatory mask-wearing in outdoor public places on May 15 if the infection rate is less than 15 cases per 100,000 people.  

Portugal: Masks are mandatory in all public spaces. 

Romania: Masks are mandatory in all public spaces.

Slovakia: Mandatory in all indoor public spaces and on public transport. Masks are not obligatory outdoors if people can maintain five metres distance or if they live in the same household. A mask must be worn at an outdoor dining area, unless eating and drinking.

Slovenia: Mandatory in all indoor public spaces, public transport, in personal vehicles and open public spaces if a distance of 1.5m is not maintained. 

Spain: Mandatory in all public places where people are unable to maintain a distance of 1.5 metres from others. Like Malta, Spain has dropped original plans to make masks obligatory on the beach.

Sweden: Mask use recommended on public transport.

This is beyond ridiculous. Imagine a world in which, depending on where you were, you’d have either 2+2=4, or 2+2=3, 2+2=3.98, 2+2=3.99, 2+2=4.1, 2+2=5.

There are countries where you should wear a face mask even you’re alone on a street, in a park, or in an entire city. That’s the law.

There are countries where you cannot get out to take a stroll and get a bit of fresh air, or to walk your dog, etc., especially not at nighttime, when the streets are empty, because a curfew is in place. Why is that so? (The last time I questioned the curfews was here, in sections THIRTEEN and THIRTY-SEVEN).

Have a recent article from the English edition of EL PAIS: Top-level scientists question obligatory use of face masks in open air and with social distancing.

Wearing a face mask outdoors and then putting it into your pocket when you enter a bar is like wearing a helmet to go for a walk and taking it off when you get on a motorbike. Despite this, it is common to see this paradox in many countries such as Spain, where it is mandatory to wear a face mask outside, but there are exceptions for indoor spaces such as restaurants and offices. But a growing number of leading experts have begun to question these contradictory measures, including Marc Lipsitch, the head of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard University in the United States. “I am generally a hawk about maintaining rules with a clear benefit. Outdoor masking has notable costs and really no evidence of benefits,” he wrote on Monday in a message on Twitter.

The same could be said of curfews. And the costs are underestimated: when the population believes that such measures are absurd, they tend not to trust anything that comes from such a government. Such people would then believe they’re in the Résistance and gather to have illegal parties, and so on.

Back to the article:

A study of 318 coronavirus outbreaks in China, carried out at the beginning of the pandemic, found that 317 took place in indoor spaces. Only one of the 318 outbreaks happened outdoors when a 27-year-old man presumably caught the coronavirus in a town talking outside to a person who had recently arrived from Wuhan, where the virus was first identified. The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) only recommends that masks be worn in confined spaces, but “can be considered in crowded outdoor settings.However, in Spain, face masks are mandatory even if a person is going for a walk by themselves in a park.

Yeah, that’s why everyone despises the powers that be. To tone that down though,

“It is only necessary to wear a mask outdoors when we are doing strenuous exercise, such as running if we pass very close to someone, for example, on a sidewalk,” says Greenhalgh. “For everything else, it is not necessary to wear a face mask outdoors, because the virus quickly dissipates in the air. But if I breathe in the air you have just exhaled, I am at risk.”

When the authorities have ZERO TRUST in the people they rule over, they shouldn’t be amazed that the feeling is mutual.

More than 100 Spanish experts signed an open letter on March 25 calling on authorities “to reconsider the recommendations for prevention,” given that “the likelihood of contagion outdoors is at least 20 times lower than indoors.” One of the scientists who signed the letter, chemist José Luis Jiménez, from the University of Colorado, explains that the letter avoided saying face masks were not necessary outdoors and with social distancing, because some public health experts feared the message could be misinterpreted as masks are never needed.

Ah, that level of trust…

When is this going to end, if ever?

9._Conspirationists, take III

That’s a German thing. Trending the morning of May 18, on Twitter:

The first hashtag means “We don’t let our kids get vaccinated”; but the #DiviGateGate…

Please use an automated translation (to English, which seems more reliable) for the German texts. In brief: no, the intensive care numbers were not manipulated!

Since we are on the topic of the bed occupancy rate, how about the deaths, for which the rather serious magazine TELEPOLIS had this article on Jan. 21: Wer zählt als Corona-Toter? (Who counts as dead from Corona?) It’s the old question of “Dead of/from Corona” vs. “Death with Corona” and the fact that this is really a tough problem. Nobody dies “of/from Corona”; people die of lung failure following bilateral pneumonia, they die of cardiorespiratory arrest, etc. etc., but what would be a correct count? What causes of death should be considered as having been 100% a result of a COVID-19 infection, rather than unrelated to COVID? A heart attack in a person who’s COVID-positive isn’t necessarily caused by the infection. However, in some cases even people who died in a car crash have been counted as “COVID deaths”… because they were positive!

This being said, look at India: people really die, so it’s not all a huge conspiracy. I’d only have counted as “COVID deaths” those who experienced a shortage of breath or more severe symptoms related to the lungs, but it’s not me the one who sets the standards in health care.

10._The conspiracy theory that might be true!

I didn’t believe I’d end by saying that, but the theory that the SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab in Wuhan has now more circumstantial proofs to support it!

Here’s the recent article (May 5, 2021) in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists by science journalist Nicholas Wade that makes a persuasive argument that COVID-19 did, in fact, escape from a lab: The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?

It’s very long and not easy to digest, but here’s an even longer analysis of it, in the left-wing magazine Current Affairs (May 14, 2021): The Stakes of Finding COVID-19’s Origins.

I simply cannot make an abstract of such a long argumentation (Nathan J. Robinson can be long at times), but I’ll extract tiny ideas:

  • The US National Institutes of Health (NIH), through its National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), did fund a project in Wuhan that “set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells.”
  • The Wuhan institute’s project did have the “goal of making bat coronaviruses infectious to humans,” and in 2015, a paper published in Nature (co-authored by Wuhan researchers) caused a controversy because it involved creating a new bat coronavirus that could infect humans.
  • Even if SARS-Cov-2 wasn’t created in the lab, COVID-19 could be of “natural” origin and still have come from the Wuhan virology lab. The WHO’s report on COVID’s origins notes that “the Wuhan CDC laboratory moved on 2 December 2019 to a new location near the Huanan market,” and “such moves can be disruptive for the operations of any laboratory.”
  • Accidental escape is not some insane conspiracy. It doesn’t require any “conspiring.”
  • Wuhan was an odd place for the virus to show up, because it’s an urban metropolis that doesn’t have much of a bat population… except the hundred ones from the CDC lab! The Huanan Seafood Market didn’t sell bats—although it does sell other species that could potentially have been intermediate hosts between bats and humans.
  • From last year’s The Non-Paranoid Person’s Guide to Viruses Escaping From Labs, in Mother Jones: «Using 2010 data from the CDC, one expert estimated that somewhere in the United States, “a breach of containment happens about twice weekly.” Some have involved deadly agents including anthrax, avian flu, and Ebola. Most incidents are minor, but not all. Take two examples at lower-risk labs: In 2009, a researcher at the University of Chicago died after being infected by a weakened strain of plague. In 2012, a postdoc at San Francisco’s VA Medical Center came down with meningitis from his lab. While having dinner with friends, he began to feel dizzy. The next day, he was covered in a rash and was taken to the hospital, where he died. An investigation by USA Today, published in 2015, found that more than 100 high-security labs in the United States had suffered “the most egregious safety or security breaches.” The pressurized “space suits” worn by researchers ruptured 37 times in American BSL-4 labs from  2013 to 2014. Rats were found making nests out of biohazard bags and used lab supplies outside a UCLA lab. A Texas A&M University researcher stuck himself with a needle while handling a mouse carrying Lyme disease bacteria, then a week later (while still taking a round of antibiotics to deal with the first incident) was bitten by another mouse carrying the same bacteria. On multiple occasions, mice carrying either SARS or H1N1 flu escaped from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers.»
  • A person of interest is Peter Daszak, head of an NGO who has worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology for years and is listed as the project leader on the NIH proposal to study the “spillover potential” of bat coronaviruses. His organization received $3.7 million from the NIH to study bat coronaviruses, of which $600,000 went to the Wuhan Institute.
  • Daszak is the only U.S. member of the WHO’s team investigating the origins of COVID-19, and has been appointed by top medical journal The Lancet to chair its team investigating the origins of the virus. Daszak would have a natural bias and even an interest to think and say that the work he funded could not and did not cause the problem. However, most news outlets, including The New York Times, the Times, the Guardian, failed to note his obvious conflict of interest!
  • Also, Daszak’s “investigating method” appeared to be like asking murder suspects if they killed the victim! He just asked the staff in Wuhan, the staff said “nothing happened,” and that was all!

This might be enough. Everything is possible, such as this pandemic being Wuhan’s Chernobyl, funded with US Government’s money.

LATE EDIT: The same Nicholas Wade, with a much shorter article, in The Telegraph: Did Covid leak from a Wuhan lab, after all?

11._Once again, the Bundesregierung is killing the businesses!

I am one more time appalled by the idiocy and the lack of logical coherence of the Federal Government. In Merkel-land (although I live in Kretschmann-land, the State of the only Green politician who’s pro-industry and even pro-trucks, and that, since 2011), the cautious relaxation is made by rules that lack any coherence.

As it was the Saturday before the Whit Monday, more people than usual were in supermarkets, and we too were later than usual at shopping. Supermarkets don’t observe the “one customer per 40/20/10 square meters” limitations, the only requirement being a face mask, but today I literally got claustrophobia! A huge number of idiots behaving like mentally retarded people! This happens at the same time with:

  • The rest of the stores (the “non-essential ones,” they say; somehow, this time books and flowers were deemed “essential”) operate on strict client limitations rules, plus pre-appointment (Click&Meet), plus a daily COVID-19 negative test!
  • Restaurants and bars operate similarly (and you leave your personal data, luca app or not!), and I’ve seen on boards the hashtags that translate to “vaccinated, recovered or tested”:

So I cannot fucking go in a practically empty retail store that doesn’t sell food without a COVID-19 test made in less than 24 hours, but I can legally go in a crammed supermarket with almost no precaution but a face mask!

I’m wearing an FFP2 mask which might help me breathe less of the air expired by the next moron, but the legal requirement is just like a year ago: a surgical mask. Note that in public transport, FFP2 masks are mandatory, but not in grocery stores!

That’s insane. The retail and the hospitality will continue to collapse; although people seemed to go to bars and restaurants, so I suppose some get the pain to get tested. But this is the most stupid legal requirement still in place in the Federal Republic of the Idiotic Teutons!

12._We seem to be needing some germs

Il Post had a feature starting from the idea that germs also made good things: “Constant disinfections, distancing and new sociocultural habits could in the long run do more harm than good, some studies on the human microbiota argue.” The constant sterilization of everything has reduced our exposure to germs, with unpredictable effects, especially as our microbiome is sort of a second genome. On April 23, the NYT published this opinion: Can We Learn to Live With Germs Again? “The health of our bodies and microbiomes may depend on society’s return to lifestyles that expose us to bacteria, despite the risks.” The daily cleaning protocol of the New York subway uses UV light, various disinfectant solutions, and electrostatic induction nebulizers. This seems a good thing, except that it might have undesired side effects. And this is overkill anyway, as per CDC, who states that surface transmission is not the main route by which SARS-CoV-2 spreads, and the risk is considered to be low.

There’s also this study, The hygiene hypothesis, the COVID pandemic, and consequences for the human microbiome.

Not only “the old normal” is forever gone and “the new normal” looks already creepy, but we might be killing ourselves through overzeal.

13._The senile Luc Montagnier

Having had received a Nobel Prize more than 20 years ago, and dozens of other prizes, orders, and whatnot, doesn’t mean you can’t be senile now. Luc Montagnier, the guy who discovered the HIV, is not at his first controversy. I cannot tell anything about his being at odds with Big Pharma over the treatment of the Lyme disease, but before declaring in 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 has been created by the Chinese starting from HIV (read also this), he had a long series of deranged ideas.

In 2009, he declared that a good immunity, boosted by antioxidants, would protect you from AIDS. In 2010, he supported the old theory of water memory, to which you can find here a quick rebuttal in Nature vol. 334, 28 July 1988. Needless to say, he also supports homeopathy (the real one, where what’s left is either water or sugar).

Now he says that the new SARS-CoV-2 variants are a cause of the COVID-19 vaccination! Seriously, he and the other retard, Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche (see section THIRTY here) should go fuck themselves. Why didn’t he say that the flu vaccine is causing a more virulent strain of the flu virus? Back in 2009, he was all for vaccinating the youngsters against the flu, to prevent a cytokine storm in the unvaccinated! When was his mind still functioning?

14._The new KZ system

KZ stands for Konzentrationslager, and to this respect the Jewish associations who say “stop using the Nazi comparison when talking of the vaccination passport are right. It cannot stand comparison. And yet, it can, even if the new marking is called Digital Green Certificate in the EU. Let me see, what was green meant to indicate?

Oh, right, Berufsverbrecher, meaning professional criminal or career criminal. Makes sense, except that the professional criminals are the EU and the national politicians, not those who are “vaccinated, recovered or tested”! But to us, those who couldn’t get a jab, what color should be assigned? Black, as for Asozial in the above table?

15._The new surge of the “Indian” B.1.617.2 variant

It looks like the 4th wave is around the corner, at least there’s a rising B.1.617.2 crisis in Britain, even without international travel. Growing fast, they say, but everyone elsewhere is busy vacationing and traveling. We’re going to need to learn to love the coronaviruses.

As for the efficacy of the vaccines, Her Majesty’s Government dixit:

The study found that, for the period from 5 April to 16 May:

• the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was 88% effective against symptomatic disease from the B.1.617.2 variant 2 weeks after the second dose, compared to 93% effectiveness against the B.1.1.7 variant

• 2 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine were 60% effective against symptomatic disease from the B.1.617.2 variant compared to 66% effectiveness against the B.1.1.7 variant

• both vaccines were 33% effective against symptomatic disease from B.1.617.2, 3 weeks after the first dose compared to around 50% effectiveness against the B.1.1.7 variant

16._Dominic Cummings vs No 10

This inept Euronews attempt at a story, Dominic Cummings: Ex-PM advisor says UK COVID-19 strategy was ‘out of control’, is pathetic. We only find that Boris Johnson considered COVID-19 as a swine flu-like scare story in February 2020, that his strategy in March 2020 was indeed based on a herd immunity acquired through getting sick “because Johnson believed the British public would never accept a lockdown,” and that he said that he was willing to let “bodies pile up in the streets” rather than take the UK into a third lockdown.

You should rather read this 65-tweet thread started by Dominic Cummings here:

Or you can have the 65 tweets on a single page here.

A few ideas from this long thread:

  • Lockdowns work, especially when applied consistently, like in Taiwan.
  • Learning from East Asia would have been important.
  • In Sweden, despite no official lockdown, the public behavior changed enormously, and this helped as much as it could.
  • Pseudo-lockdowns without serious enforcement are hopeless: the economy goes down the drain, while people die anyway.

Well, then it gets complex, read it yourself.

17._The puzzled censors

From the article:

Anyone posting claims that Covid-19 was “man-made or manufactured” could have seen their posts removed or restricted, and repeatedly sharing the allegation could have lead to a ban from the site entirely.

On Wednesday, the company said: “In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of Covid-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that Covid-19 is man-made from our apps. We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.”

The change follows a Wall Street Journal report that US intelligence sources believe there is some evidence to warrant further investigation of the “lab leak” theory. According to the newspaper, three staff members at the Wuhan Institute for Virology sought hospital treatment for flu-like symptoms in November 2019. Others have criticised the reporting, noting that it still relies on circumstantial evidence and speculation.

Facebook is keen to ensure that a change in one rule doesn’t lead to a free-for-all for Covid misinformation. On the same day that it lifted the ban on lab-leak theories, it tightened up restrictions on users who “repeatedly share misinformation on Facebook”.

The report about the three people from the Wuhan Institute for Virology seems to me less persuading than Nicholas Wade’s stuff I mentioned in section 10, but hey, the powers that be are immensely stupid, and the censors even more so.

18._Ivermectin, the remake

I have already expressed my skepticism regarding the Ivermectin. There is no reasonable mechanism that could explain its possible effect on SARS-CoV-2, unlike in the case of the hydroxychloroquine, which does modulate the cytokine response!

Nonetheless, if we read the blog of a random medical doctor who rebukes the hydroxychloroquine (Hydroxychloroquine for covid: Lifesaving or useless?), we’ll find that he believes the Ivermectin works: Update on ivermectin for covid-19. For once, let’s assume I have no opinion whatsoever about this “miracle drug” designed to kill head lice, scabies, heartworms, and giant roundworms. We just want to read some studies first, right?

Well, one of the studies mentioned by our M.D., Ivermectin as an adjunct treatment for hospitalized adult COVID-19 patients: A randomized multi-center clinical trial (DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-109670/v1), has this very nice history:

  • November 24, 2020: Posted
  • Status as of May 30, 2021: Posted, Prescreen

They simply ignored it for more than 6 months! No review, no rejection, no publication, nothing! This is the worst kind of scientific censorship!

When “they” act this way, people will start to believe that Ivermectin actually works, despite being tremendously toxic in comparison with the normal dosages of hydroxychloroquine.