A Sensible and Compassionate Anti-COVID Strategy

IMPRIMIS a publication of Hillsdale College ^ | October 2020 | Jay Bhattacharya

[imardmd1]

Jay Bhattacharya is a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, where he received both an M.D. and a Ph.D. in economics. (21 words)

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4. Where to Go from Here

Last week I met with two other epidemiologists—Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University—in Great Barrington, Massachusetts . . . we had arrived at the same view—the view that the widespread lockdown policy has been a devastating public health mistake. In response, we wrote and issued the Great Barrington Declaration, . . . online at www.gbdeclaration.org. (105 words)

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The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. (49 words)

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Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing. We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. (31 words)

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Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. (37 words)

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My final point is about science. When scientists have spoken up against the lockdown policy, there has been enormous pushback: “You’re endangering lives.” Science cannot operate in an environment like that. I don’t know all the answers to COVID; no one does. Science ought to be able to clarify the answers. But science can’t do its job in an environment where anyone who challenges the status quo gets shut down or cancelled. (72 words)

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[imardmd1]

He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and director of the Stanford Center on the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.

He says the current implementation of lockdowns and other methods limiting commerce and personal interaction will be far more deadly than the virus itself, and greatly endanger our economy in sustainiing life and well-being.

One of his purposes in this article is "to present some facts about how deadly the widespread lockdowns have been; and fourth, to recommend a shift in public policy."

[HighSierra5]

Number one: Get rid of all commies.

[imardmd1]

Bhattacharya says:

o In other words, when the World Health Organization said back in early March that three percent of people who get COVID die from it, they were wrong by at least one order of magnitude. The COVID fatality rate is much closer to 0.2 or 0.3 percent.
o Even worse, it continues to sow fear and panic, because the perception of too many people about COVID is frozen in the misleading data from March.
o It still seems to be a common perception that COVID is equally dangerous to everybody, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. There is a thousand-fold difference between the mortality rate in older people, 70 and up, and the mortality rate in children.
o This year, in the United States, more children have died from the seasonal flu than from COVID by a factor of two or three.
o Whereas COVID is not deadly for children, for older people it is much more deadly than the seasonal flu.
o Those who dare to talk about the tremendous economic harms that have followed from the lockdowns are accused of heartlessness.
o science can’t do its job in an environment where anyone who challenges the status quo gets shut down or cancelled.
o Even when we come up with a vaccine, we will be relying on herd immunity as an end-point for this epidemic.
o The vaccine will help, but herd immunity is what will bring it to an end.

[CodeJockey]

But we have a vaccine now. We don’t need a strategy.

[Ann Archy]

It’s all a POWER GRAB!! And it’s getting WORSE! How manu FLU deaths have we had....NONE!

[imardmd1]

That won’t get rid of the virua or the fools who are administering the lockdowns, masking, social distancing, church services, or senior outings for their mental state.

[imardmd1]

That is not true. There have been death from other seasonal influenza, but no one is using them as a club to control us with.

[imardmd1]

Other data from Johns Hopkins as reported here show that the overall deaths has not changed from that typical of other years. It’s only that the increase in reported COVID deaths has been almost exactly the unexpected decline in other usually fatal disease. In this case, the vaccine will not make any difference. It will only enrich those who have used their technical skill to make it, and the administrators and con men who seduce us to receive (pay) for it and control us by enforcing our exclusion from the community if we don’t take it. In fact it may cause more deaths than it prevents, applying the logical outcome of the observations of the writer of this article.

[imardmd1]

You are right. The true message is not being emphasized by the socialistic controllers and their media. The true message is that if you go out in the public life without mask or "social distancing" and with normal hygeine, you pmost probably won't get the COVID virus, but if you do, it is very unlikely that you weill die from it, even if you're an oldster. The same can be said for other risks one takes, like driving around in your car or getting into an argument.