Disclaimer
I post this in order to add to the overall dialogue surrounding ‘The Virus’, I don’t necessarily agree with everything said or share the speakers conclusions.
Right?
Right. 
Hi Spike. I agree these voices should be heard.
I haven’t got to the conclusions yet but I will…in the first third or so Lee Merritt says about the amplification of the testing, which inflates the number of cases. That’s just been picked up in another thread, ‘Excess Deaths’.
Technocratic control is a very interesting angle, a new one for me on the increasing control measures. Though I haven’t conceded on the masks issue, there are others - social distancing looks like it might outlast the real threat, and cashless shops and collapsed economies suddenly make the fabric of society look vulnerable. Vaccinology (I made that word up) could well be an additional strand, and it’s technocratic control too of course - but Merrit’s point was that if there was to be a quick slide towards authoritarian control, with medicine playing a key role then doctors would need to be controlled too and dissident doctors are already being treated roughly - in other words shown who’s boss.
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Thanks spike! Another arrow to add to the quiver. Eventually we’ll have enough (disparate, competing) arrows in there to be able to get some idea of what the real truth might be. Necessary to keep trawling and collecting, eclectically.
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So I’m sorry to say that I was pretty unconvinced by this talk. I’m only half way through and giving up for now.
She got me interested initially by talking about the rise and rule of the technocracy. On that point I think she’s dead right, and the recent power moves by Dominic Cummings align precisely with this idea. A theme for a different post when I have some time, as I really think it’s highly relevant to our current shit storm.
However… It was all exponentially downhill from there.
- All her statistics about how dangerous covid is are misleading. She knows it too, because she quotes the correct number for smallpox, and (in honour of the late David Graeber) bullshit numbers for covid. You don’t judge the fatality rate of an illness by dividing how many people died by the entire population of the country. You divide by the number of people who got infected. An example. The plague is supposed to be 90-100% fatal. I disagree. 1 person died of plague in China this year, so using her method to judge fatality, it should be
1 / 1.5 billion = 0.00000007% deadly
So nothing to worry about if the plague comes sweeping through. It’s about 1 million times less deadly than the flu.
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Her chart of cases and deaths in the US turns out to be very premature. Deaths started going upwards in the US almost as soon as she finished talking. To be fair I’m not sure when the video was recorded, so it might very well not be her fault that she couldn’t predict the future after all. Although other experts in infectious diseases (Prof Osterholm, for one) did predict the rise in deaths, so it wasn’t impossible. He was saying it for ages, so she could have just asked someone like him…
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Her notion of what a case is seems strange to me. A case surely doesn’t only happen when a patient is physically sick. Some patients are asymptomatic and need to be tested for the illness to be discovered. Not just for covid. Chlamydia can often be asymptomatic, and 70% or more of women who have it don’t know they have it. Should we stop testing for it, or refuse to call someone who tests positive for Chlamydia a “case”? Bizarre. Of course that doesn’t negate the problems with PCR but surely a case is someone who had been infected by the virus, symptoms or not?
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Her discussion of masks ignores a lot of relevant information, in my opinion. The primary purpose of masks as a public health measure is to reduce the chance that an infected person will spray droplets containing virus particles onto another person. It’s not to stop aerosolised particles, or individual virus particles (how does an individual virus particle even get out to spread?). The size of the virus is irrelevant in this instance. It’s the size of the droplet that counts. She also spends time looking at scientific articles that show masks don’t work for 'flu. It’s known that perhaps as much as 50% of flu transmissions happen by aerosolised particles, which are indeed too small to be affected by masks. What is that number for the coronavirus? We don’t really know yet (I think… Could be wrong) but it’s definitely not clear whether it’s as much spread by aerosolised particles as by droplets, for which masks can work.
I’m not sure what her conclusions are going to be, but if any of them are based on points 1-4 above, then I’m less than convinced at this point…
Cheers
PP