‘Lockdown Is More Harmful Than COVID’ – Stanford Professor of Medicine
By
Arjun Walia
In Brief
- The Facts:
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University recently gave an interview stating "there is more harm from the lockdown than there is from COVID." He's one of many experts who feel this way, and explains why.
- Reflect On:
Should the government use force on their citizenry to comply, or should they simply recommend safety measures and explain why they do?
What Happened: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University recently gave an interview explaining why he believes lockdown measures are more harmful than COVID-19. At the beginning of the pandemic, Bhattacharya along with Dr. Eran Bendavid, another Professor of Medicine at Stanford, published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Is the coronavirus as deadly as they say?”
They made it quite clear that if the projections given by the World Health Organization are correct, then “the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified.” But they also made it clear that “there’s little evidence to confirm that premise – and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.”
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“Fear of Covid-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate – 2% to %4 of people with confirmed Covid-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others. So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, two million to four million could die. We believe that estimate is deeply flawed. The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases.”–Dr. Eran Bendavid and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
He is not alone in his thoughts. A report published in the British Medical Journal has suggested that quarantine measures in the United Kingdom as a result of the new coronavirus may have already killed more UK seniors than the coronavirus has during the peak of the virus.
Bhattacharya goes into a great discussion and provides his reasoning in the interview below.
The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM) at the University of Oxford is one of many organizations who opposed the WHO estimates, they estimated the CFR globally at 0.51% quite early on in the pandemic, and estimates are even lower now.
The CDC also released new infection/fatality estimates that also has many people and experts calling into question the severity of the virus, this was well after John P. A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University has said that the infection fatality rate is close to 0 percent for people under the age of 45 years old. It turns out he was right.
Many scientists and doctors in North America are also expressing the same sentiments. For example, The Physicians For Informed Consent (PIC) recently published a report titled “Physicians for Informed Consent (PIC) Compares COVID-19 to Previous Seasonal and Pandemic Flu Periods.” According to them, the infection/fatality rate of COVID-19 is 0.26%. You can read more about that and access their resources and reasoning here.
The point is, many health professionals and experts believe that COVID-19 is not as dangerous as it’s being being made out to be, or has been made out to be. There are thousands of them, and many have experienced censorship and ridicule simply for sharing their research and opinions. Since the beginning of this pandemic, on perspective/perception has constantly been beamed out by mainstream media, and any opposing narrative, no matter how sound and how credible the source, seems to receive a harsh reaction from the citizenry.
A group of Canadian doctors in the province of Ontario have come together and written an open letter to Ontario premier Doug Ford. The letter is signed by 20 doctors and professors of medicine from faculties at the University of Toronto, McMaster University and the University of Ottawa and from hospitals such as Sick Kids. The letter was sent to ford on September 27th, and it argues against a return to lockdown measures as a way to tackle rising COVID-19 cases. You can read more about that here.
Ronald B. Brown, Ph.D., from the School of Public Health and Health Systems at the University of Waterloo recently stated that the COVID-19 fatality rate is the “worst miscalculation in the history of humanity.” Brown is currently completing his second doctorate degree, this time in epidemiology at the University of Waterloo. Not long ago, Brown published a paper in Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, titled “Public health lessons learned from biases in coronavirus mortality overestimation.”
Below is a statement Brown recently gave to John C. A. Manley, a journalist who was the first to cover the story:
The subject of this article is disruptive, to say the least, although it is not as obvious from the title. The manuscript cites the smoking-gun, documented evidence showing that the public’s overreaction to the coronavirus pandemic was based on the worst miscalculation in the history of humanity, in my opinion. My manuscript underwent an intensive peer-review process. You are the first media guy who has responded to my invitation.
Dr. Brown added that CDC and WHO documents show that the case fatality rate for influenza was similar to the coronavirus, implying that the lockdowns were pointless. His paper questions why the 2017-2018 influenza season in the United States did not “receive the same intensive media coverage as COVID-19.”
More than 500 German doctors & scientists have signed on as representatives of an organization called the “Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee” to investigate what’s happening on our planet with regards to COVID-19. They are also confused at what’s going on. You can read more about that here.
Above are a few of many examples I’ve written about over the past few months that I usually mention in most of my article dealing with COVID. I’m just trying to get the point across that you’re clearly not crazy at all if you think lockdown measures are un-called for and unnecessary.
Was Edward Snowden right? Are governments capitalizing on COVID to take away more of our rights and instal permanent measures that will remain in place as they did after 9/11?
The Other Side of The Coin: According to Facebook fact-checker Health Feedback,
The claim that the COVID-19 pandemic response has been unwarranted has taken many forms. Some involved misleading comparisons with other respiratory diseases like the flu and tuberculosis, while others relied on misinterpretations of COVID-19 mortality reports and unsupported accounts of fabricated COVID-19 test results. In September 2020, numerous Facebook posts making the same claim emerged (see examples here and here), this time highlighting the age-specific infection mortality ratio (IFR) that was added to the website of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on 10 September 2020 (see archive of website with the update note). These posts have gone viral, receiving more than 37,000 shares.
They note that a low IFR does not equate to a virus that is not dangerous, and in fact point to the exact opposite.
They go on to explain that
Scientists have observed that some survivors suffer from damage to various organs, including the lungs and heart, as well as the nervous system. Such damage could lead to chronic health problems, as this news article in Science reported, although it is currently unclear exactly how long such damage persists and how often it occurs. However, the long-term health effects of COVID-19 can be so severe that physicians and researchers are preparing to provide rehabilitation services to patients to facilitate their return to a functional life[2,3].
Finally, even a small IFR can translate into a large number of deaths if the virus spreads among a large group of people. Indeed, in spite of COVID-19’s relatively small IFR, the U.S. has recorded more than 200,000 COVID-19 deaths at the time of this review’s publication while there have been more than 1 million COVID-19 deaths worldwide, according to the Coronavirus Resource Center by Johns Hopkins University.
You can read their full post here.
The Takeaway: How is it that there are so many health experts and professionals in the field completely divided in what they believe? Why can’t opinions be shared openly, transparently and receive the same amount of attention as an opposing view? What is going on here? Should we be forced to act in ways our government requires us too, or do these actions do more harm than good? Should the government have the authority to mandate actions that they’ve been able to mandate? How can we change our health industry so that it’s not completely dominated by big pharmaceutical interests?
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