Monthly Archives: November 2021

COVID Has A Lower Mortality Risk To Children Than The Flu, Car Accidents, Suicide & More

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By Arjun Walia

Source: The Pulse

The risks of severe illness and death from COVID for children has not been put in context of other risks. Right now, many parents are stricken with fear and worry about their child contracting COVID. Putting COVID in the context of other risks may help change the perspective of parents and also question whether or not making COVID vaccines mandatory for children is the right decision.

When it comes to morality risk to children, COVID-19 has a lower annual mortality risk than car accidents, influenza, and for 5-14 year olds, suicide (Leonhardt, 2021). In fact, the survival rate of COVID for people under the age of 19 according to recent pre-print study by two Stanford scientists is nearly 100 percent.

Seroprevalence data from eight locations around the world: England, France; Ireland; Netherlands; Spain; Atlands, USA; New York, USA; Geneva, Switzerland show the infection fatality rate for 0-9 year olds to be less than 1 in 200,000 (less than 5 in 1 million) and 1/55,000 for 10–19-year-olds.

Even the risk of hospitalization as a result of a COVID infection is quite low. If infected with COVID-19, children ages 0-9 have on average a chance of 0.1% or 1/1000 of being hospitalized and, for ages 11-19 a 0.2% or 1/500 chance of being admitted to the hospital
(Herrera-Esposito, 2021).

In Canada, as of May 28, 2021, there were 259,308 confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections in Canadians 19 years and under. Of these, 0.48% were hospitalized, 0.06% were admitted to ICU, and 0.004% died. According to this data, seasonal influenza is associated with more severe illness than COVID-19.

Given Canada’s numbers, the discussion around “keeping children safe at school” is not a policy concern if it was not one for the seasonal flu. Yes, children may be a source of transmission, but they are not at risk of COVID by being at school.

While many studies suggest pre-symptomatic/asymptomatic spread may comprise > 40% of vertical transmission, numerous large observational population studies show that children are POOR COVID-19 spreaders. This includes studies from Ireland, Iceland, Italy, France, and Australia. For a link to a more complete reference list, see Washington University Pediatric & Adolescent Ambulatory Research Consortium.

In comparison to the vaccine, a study out of the University of California shows that the risk of myocarditis is greater after two doses of the Pfizer vaccine than being hospitalized for COVID for boys ages 12-15. The research was led by led by epidemiologist Dr. Tracy Høeg, an epidemiologist studying COVID in kids.

There have been multiple reports of death from myocarditis following COVID vaccination, including a 13-year-old Michigan boy who died June 16, three days after he received his second dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine. Preliminary autopsy results indicated that following his vaccination his heart become enlarged and was surrounded by fluid. As of August 7th, there were 106 reported incidents of myocarditis/pericarditis in Ontario, Canada in people under the age of 25.

Pfizer BioNTech study included 2,260 children and adolescents, 12-15 years of age, 1,131 of whom received the vaccine. This is a very small number of adolescents and does not permit an evaluation of rare but serious side-effects, such as effects that may happen in only 1:5,000 adolescents. Furthermore, with most of the adolescents followed for only 1 or 2 months after their 2nd dose, there is no data to support long-term safety.

Furthermore, the science regarding waning vaccine immunity and the science regarding natural immunity is something to consider as well, as well as the data showing that the vaccines offer a very low absolute risk reduction.

On the 22nd of September, Høeg gave her testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives providing an excellent summary regarding the latest data on COVID and kids. In it she cites data illustrating that drowning, vehicle accidents, homicide, cancer, cardiovascular disease, flu, and suffocation are all greater threats when it comes to mortality for children.

She also touches upon concerns like long COVID, and the Delta variant, and other affects the pandemic and health policy is having on the mental and physical health of children.

She outlines how the delta variant has resulted in increased case numbers in children, but the severity of the disease per case does not appear to have increased. When it comes to long COVID, a recent report from the Office of National Statistics (ONS, 2021) in the UK that she sites, the prevalence of persistent symptoms 12-16 weeks after COVID were no different between those with a COVID infection and controls.

I feel that our country’s failure to do a risk-benefit analysis as well as good scientific studies of the interventions we imposed upon children to mitigate one disease has created numerous additional and avoidable public health crises in our youth. For a disease that relatively spares them, this generation has suffered an incredible amount during the pandemic and, unfortunately, the effects of this will likely travel with them for the rest of their lives.

Høeg.

Sunetra Gupta, an infectious disease epidemiologist from the University of Oxford, Carl Heneghan, an NHS urgent care doctors and Professor of Evidence Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, as well as Alberto Giubilini, senior research fellow in infectious diseases at Oxford, make their position on vaccinating children quite clear below. They published an opinion article in the European Journal of Medical Ethics in July 2021, explaining why children should not be required or encouraged to take the COVID-19 vaccine.

The risks of COVID-19 for children and young people are minimal. For example, ‘[i]n the USA, UK, Italy, Germany, Spain, France and South Korea, deaths from COVID-19 in children remained rare up to February 2021 (ie, up to the time the study had available data about), at 0.17 per 100 000 population’.7 The long-term risks of the novel COVID-19 vaccines on a population of millions of children are at the moment unknown, given that the clinical trials involved a few thousands of subjects over a few months period.

Vaccinating children would be a way of treating them as mere means to serve other people’s interests or some form of collective good. We already did this through indiscriminate lockdowns and other restrictions, such as school closure. Using children as means or even mere means in this way is not necessarily wrong, but it can only be justified if the cost imposed is sufficiently small and the benefit sufficiently large.7 Unfortunately, currently available COVID-19 vaccines do not meet either condition, given our current state of knowledge. Not only would vaccinating children pose risks on them without any substantial direct benefit.

Also, vaccinating children can only offer collective good if this reduces infection levels in the community. However, while COVID-19 vaccines almost certainly will provide long-term protection against severe disease and death, their infection blocking effects are incomplete and very likely to be transient. This means there is actually no collective benefit to trade off against individual harm to children, unless we perform mass vaccination on a regular basis, for example, annually. But this would compound the potential harms.

Is the Tide Finally Starting to Turn on Covid as an American Biowarfare Attack?

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By Ron Unz

Source: The Unz Review

During the last eighteen months, I think I’ve stood nearly alone on the Internet in arguing that the late 2019 Covid outbreak that began in Wuhan, China was probably the result of an American biowarfare attack conducted by rogue elements of our own national security establishment.

The individual articles in my long series have been viewed some 350,000 times, but with rather few exceptions almost no one has publicly endorsed such an extremely controversial hypothesis, and almost as few of the multitude of readers have even been willing to acknowledged its existence.

However, that unfortunate situation may now be starting to change. Just a couple of days ago, an influential MAGA/Trumpist website called The Conservative Treehouse published a 1,400 word piece strongly suggesting that America’s “Fourth Branch of Government,” namely our intelligence services, were quite possibly responsible for the Covid epidemic, and even concurring with me that former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo seems the individual most likely to know who was really responsible.

The motives suggested are somewhat different from my own, with the alleged goal being to help ensure Trump’s defeat for reelection, and other details are also at variance with my analysis. But these are secondary matters of little importance compared to general agreement on the overriding question of “Who Did It?” and I have anyway never claimed much certainty in my speculations about “Why?”

To the extent that America’s enormous number of still-fervent Trump supporters begin moving in the direction suggested by this piece, the likelihood of our being able to firmly answer both “Who?” and “Why?” will be greatly enhanced. Given the deaths of so many hundreds of thousands of American citizens and the severe disruption to the daily lives of our entire population, these seem very important questions to be asking.

With fortuitous timing, I had recently created a separate section on our website Sidebar providing convenient access to all my major Covid/Biowarfare articles as well as freely downloadable eBook containing them, and I append the contents below:

Major Covid/Biowarfare Articles

Based upon excess death totals, the Covid epidemic has probably killed more than 15 million people worldwide, and also greatly disrupted the lives of many billions more. For these reasons, it probably already ranks as the most important global event since World War II, with an impact easily exceeding the collapse of the Soviet Union or the 9/11 Attacks and the Middle Eastern wars they unleashed.

Since April 2020 I have published a long series of articles arguing the the Covid outbreak was due to an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), and have been almost unique in publicly taking this extremely controversial position. I have also placed it within the context of the hidden history of America’s longstanding biological warfare programs.

Taken together, these articles run more than 50,000 words and have been viewed some 350,000 times, while provoking almost 9,000 comments totaling more than 1.2 million words. Aside from being available on this website, they have also been collected into a freely downloadable ebook, available both in EPub and Mobi/Kindle formats.

Although the articles make a lengthy and detailed case for my remarkable claims, some of the strongest evidence may easily be summarized in just the following few paragraphs, extracted from these much longer works:

But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious, elements within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month, an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report, while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a few days later, Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its several government sources.

It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires.

According to these multiply-sourced mainstream media accounts, by “the second week of November” our Defense Intelligence Agency was already preparing a secret report warning of a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak taking place in Wuhan. Yet at that point, probably no more than a couple of dozen individuals had been infected in that city of 11 million, with few of those yet having any serious symptoms. The implications are rather obvious. Furthermore:

As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China’s own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hatred Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.

Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran’s top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?

Main Articles in the Series

American Pravda: Our Coronavirus Catastrophe as Biowarfare Blowback?
The Unz Review • April 21, 2020 • 7,400 Words
American Pravda: Covid-19, Its Impact and Origins After One Year
The Unz Review • March 15, 2021 • 8,700 Words
American Pravda: “The Truth” and “The Whole Truth” About the Origins of Covid-19
The Unz Review • May 10, 2021 • 6,400 Words
American Pravda: George Orwell’s Virus Lab-Leak
The Unz Review • May 31, 2021 • 5,200 Words
The Covid BioWeapon: Made in the USA, Aimed at China
The Unz Review • June 15, 2021 • 4,400 Words • Interview by Mike Whitney
American Pravda: Covid Epidemic as Lab-Leak or Biowarfare?
The Unz Review • July 12, 2021 • 13,100 Words
American Pravda: Waging Biological Warfare
The Unz Review • August 9, 2021 • 7,500 Words