Significant numbers of people in the world today now believe that a sickness akin to the Black Death is stalking the planet. They believe that if you catch this disease, you will very likely die a horrible death and if you survive you will be faced with permanent disability, which is labelled as “long COVID”.
For a start, what are the actual death statistics around the world? If this COVID “thing” was anything like the Black Death, surely we’d see bodies everywhere and hear the non-stop sounds of ambulance sirens? If we are to believe the media, that’s what was happening in 2020. But what do the statistics show?
In Hong Kong there was little. Nada. The needle did not move. In Malaysia, mortality for 2020 dropped a few percentage points. No matter how good the measures against a pandemic, one would not expect greater than 100 percent effectiveness!
Looking at national all-cause death statistics in the UK as an example, we see that there was a small increase in weekly all-cause-mortality raw numbers (based on the 5-year average) around April 2020 for a few weeks, then the numbers dropped back to the 5-year average until October 2020. Interestingly, the raw numbers then increased again but only AFTER the UK brought in mask mandates. Hmmmm…
In 2020 as a whole, we can see from ONS (UK’s Office for National Statistics) numbers that the UK had about 72,000 more deaths (raw numbers, from ANY cause) than the average of the previous 5 years. Yet Worldometers website tells us that there were 73,609 Corona Virus deaths in the UK up to Dec 31, 2020, which clearly is intended to suggest that all deaths above the 5-year average MUST have been caused by COVID-19. Arguments such as these, assuming causality with no evidence in support, are simply not defensible.
By not bringing nuance and information such as this front and center for people to understand and digest, but rather pushing daily raw “infection” numbers and horror stories, the media are guilty of mass misinformation.
A related issue is that, while the raw mortality numbers showed some increases in the UK, we should really be looking at deaths per million i.e. a ratio, not a raw number. Nobel Prize Winner Michael Levitt, a biophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford University, has done the analysis for Sweden and demonstrates very clearly that Sweden only had excess deaths in 2020 of 290 per million i.e. 0.029 percent. Again, I stress, this is ALL CAUSE MORTALITY – not death from COVID per se. This analysis was done by Levitt to make a point about how numbers should be used, and holds true as a matter of principle.
Importantly, a peer reviewed paper published Oct. 12 2020, using data of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, highlighted the fact that "only 6 percent of 161,392 COVID fatalities had no mention of any comorbidity. This calculates to approximately 9,684 total fatalities in the US directly due to COVID-19". (https://jdfor2020.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/adf864_165a103206974fdbb14ada6bf8af1541.pdf)
The remaining 151,708 people who died by that date had an average of 2.4 serious comorbidities (serious conditions that would soon most likely lead to death) meaning that COVID-19 should never have been recorded, and subsequently publicized as, the cause of death.
Surely, if the media had presented numbers with proper context provided, there would never have been the panic – the global terror – that we see all around us today.
Importantly, there is a very dangerous sleight-of-tongue trick used by the media to further build panic and fear. Dutifully, the media would give daily updates of the number of people testing positive for COVID-19. We were told that, based on this testing, we were facing new “waves” of infection that would be crashing upon the shores, causing more death and mayhem.
And this is where the deception or misinformation occurs. The message being communicated via the context alone is that if you test positive for SARS-CoV-2, then you are sick and that you are a danger to others, because even though you are symptom free you can pass this deadly disease to others. And so we are shown images of people being forced into quarantine. Which is an unnecessary dramatization that totally ignores the reality of actual mortality numbers discussed above.
The PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) test used to identify COVID-19 infections is, at best, the wrong tool for the job.
To start with, the inventor of the PCR test – Karry Mullis – at a panel discussing HIV and PCR in 1993, stated very plainly that the PCR test is a MANUFACTURING TECHNIQUE, and it should never be used for diagnosing illness. His exact words were: “PCR is just a process that you use to make a whole lot of something out of something. It doesn't tell you that you're sick, and it doesn't tell you that the thing you ended up with was really gonna hurt you or anything like that.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=rXm9kAhNj-4)
Reactions to people drawing on the Mullis quote to question the current usage of PCR testing to identify “cases” in itself provides clear evidence of media bias. Fact Checkers have been out in force stating that people were mis-quoting Mullis, and that he did not say PCR can’t be used in virus detection. That point is true. And that was not what Mullis said. This assertion by fact checkers is itself inaccurate, sidestepping what Mullis actually did say. He said the PCR can manufacture anything if just one molecule is present.
PCR testing works by “searching” for a specific genetic sequence, and upon finding that sequence it then doubles the material it has found. This doubling can be done for as many times as you like. Each doubling is called a cycle.
Again, in Mullis’ own words “if you can amplify one single molecule to something that you can really measure, which is what the PCR can do, then… there's very few molecules that you don't have one single one in your body…. that could be thought of as a misuse of it, to claim that (the PCR Test) it's meaningful.” (sic)
And, in that statement we understand another major problem. Whether or not one can measure the genetic material, and thereby conclude that one “has” a virus, is purely a function of the number of doublings.
What we must know is that at 60 cycles (260), 100 percent of people test positive for having genetic material that is the same as the SARS-CoV-2 sequence. At 40-45 cycles, from magnifying the available genetic material 35,184,372,088,832 times, something over 90 percent of people testing positive do NOT have a COVID-19 infection.
And, of course, the more tests you do the more people will test “positive”, with the majority of those having ZERO presence of live virus, or only minor amounts of live virus, with zero symptoms.
Every day the media have been telling us how many more infected people there are compared to the day before, selling us on the notion that the next wave of destruction was on the way. All based on what turns out to be mostly false positives. Clearly, this very important idea of false positives, and the problems with the PCR test, never got past MSM (Mainstream Media) censorship. And so, the deception continues to hold sway in people’s minds.
The other part of the problem is the very idea of asymptomatic transmission. A study done in Wuhan, China after the COVID-19 outbreak there, sampling nearly 10 million people, demonstrated that in that population “asymptomatic transmission” was not a thing.
A nature article which reported the Wuhan study stated: “In summary, the detection rate of asymptomatic positive cases in the post-lockdown Wuhan was very low (0.303/10,000), and there was no evidence that the identified asymptomatic positive cases were infectious.” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w)
What we should be aware of here, of course, is that “asymptomatic positive cases” need to be evaluated using our understanding that the PCR test can generate many false positives, and it cannot diagnose sickness. Getting a positive PCR test, and not having symptoms, should never have been measured and reported as a case.
In December 2020 four researchers from the University of Florida Department of Biostatistics in a meta-analysis of 54 studies with 77,758 participants found no evidence of asymptomatic transmission. (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2774102)
On January 28 2020, at a White House briefing in the US dealing with the COVID19 pandemic, the White House’s Chief Medical Adviser, Anthony Fauci stated: “Even if there is some asymptomatic transmission, asymptomatic transmission has never in history been a driver of pandemics”. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6koHkBCoNQ&t=2642s) (44:02 mins)
So, pre-COVID science told us that asymptomatic transmission was NEVER a thing, and post-COVID research in China shows us “no evidence of asymptomatic transmission” of COVID-19.
It is true that subsequently Dr Fauci went on record to say that asymptomatic cases were “driving a new phase of coronavirus”, but a careful reading of reports about these statements do not have any clear scientific evidence in support. Fauci simply claimed: “When you have community spread, it's much more difficult to get your arms around that”. (https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic-08-03-20-intl/h_5b6d32b4c95ac8a2b02c12c98b323242)
To simply report statements from officials such as Dr Fauci, without asking them to comment on published research that tells a different story, or for clarification about what appear to be contradictory positions at different points in time, the media have done a massive disservice to the world’s population.
By not bringing nuance and information such as this front and center for people to understand and digest, but rather pushing daily raw “infection” numbers and horror stories, the media are guilty of mass misinformation.
So, where have we arrived at? Clearly, from ACTUAL science we know that COVID-19 was not a deadly pandemic anything like the Black Death. We know that numbers pushed in our faces every day by the media do not, and never did, in any way reflect the real risks being faced due to COVID-19. Raw numbers presented with emotional framing, in a way that does not allow for rational risk assessment is NOT science. Ignoring the specifics around important measuring approaches such as the PCR test is NOT science. Pushing a narrative about asymptomatic transmission in the face of evidence to the contrary is NOT science.
For over a year we have been inundated with staged-for-effect nonsense that only serves to scare a population who have never been trained in the scientific method. Those who have been trained in the scientific method have tried valiantly to share their knowledge and experience, only to find themselves cancelled on both social media and in the mainstream. And so, we see global panic for something that is akin to a seasonal flu in terms of its impact.
Sadly, the Mainstream Media have been front and center pushing this fake narrative on the world, creating massive destruction to people’s livelihoods worldwide. For what purpose? Was all this simply click bait for ratings? It might well have been. Or, is there possibly another process at work? We should all be asking that question.
The author is a psychologist, linguist, educator, entrepreneur, dialogue facilitator and corporate advisor with over thirty years’ experience doing business in Asia. He is the creator of the Kungfu English mobile self-learning system, author of "The Third Ear" and "How to Learn Any Language in 6 Months" (in Chinese), and his TEDx talk on Language Learning is one of the top 10 TEDx videos of all time.