November 6, 2023
Covid 19 Post Mortem
As you all know, after reading countless articles that I have posted about COVID and the policies that were put in place by "well meaning" bureaucrats, I have been highly critical of the events that took place and the US Government's failure on so many fronts.
There are two seminal articles that have been written on these topics to date: 1) COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan Lab, 2) COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure. A key lesson of the pandemic. 3) The third and equally critical article that remains unpublished is the story of the Standard American Diet and its direct connection to death from Covid.
Where you lived in the country dictated in many ways your mental health, school access and general well being. That is the story of a federalist system that looks to the states as incubators of innovation and understanding of policy. In this Covid post mortem, blue states and especially the Democratic dominated large cities suffered from poor public policy decisions and the influence of teachers unions not seeing the greater picture as it related to children. School systems abandoned their primary responsibility, the child and their entire well being. For me, that meant that children who had limited resources should have but did not receive school based education, safe environments to learn from and nutrition for the body and mind. That responsibility was completely abandoned by all states for 2 months, too many for part of the fall of 2020 and a select group who really broke out and maintained lockdowns for almost 18 months. What happened as a consequence? Thousands upon thousands of children were lost to the school system and it's safety net. According to the Nocera article, that number was north of 230000 lost kids in the 21 states looked at. I shutter to think of the ramifications of these decisions in 10 years. Lost education is a direct pathway to mental health and poverty cycle struggles which invariably tip children to behaviors that are not good for society. We are very aware that these 230000 kids were not from well to do homes. Those kids went to or switched to private schools, switched states, had proper online ability and generally thrived save for the mental health struggles of the lockdown isolation. Thus, yet again, we see the rich get richer, my children included, and the kids in poverty suffer. This is not OK. The COVID 19 pandemic playbook has to be the blue print on how to not to handle an infectious outbreak from the eyes of child welfare.
My ideas for the next infectious concern:
1) Do not close schools - period! Unless it is crystal clear from the science that doing so will prevent the spread and save many lives. This was the initial lockdown story which made sense. After 2 months, it was clear that this was a bad decision. Reverse course and move on.
2) The NIH and CDC should immediately study masking effectiveness of various pathogens in current circulation to have a baseline for any future event. Masking children will never work under 8 years of age, maybe even 10 years old. Stop the madness of thinking that it is possible to keep a child masked "effectively" for any length of time. Adults mostly cannot do it properly.
3) Supply chain issues for PPE and pandemic preparedness concerns should be a national priority now, not when the next issue presents itself.
4) The CDC should be open and transparent about all therapies for any given illness, study what is potentially possible to aid the fight and refrain from calling long used medicines like Ivermectin "horse medicine" when it is clearly used in humans for many reasons. Whether it works or not is what should be studied not anything else.
5) The CDC should report death and morbidity rates based on any demographic that would help an individual make an informed decision regarding their personal health. For example, reporting that most deaths were occurring in people with 4 diseases (high BP, diabetes, obesity, CVD) should have been front page news everywhere with a set of guiding principals of health to help folks protect themselves.
The lab leak theory is Katherine Eban's master work. I highly encourage everyone to read and or reread this article. It is quite incredible the stories that were told to us and the censorship that followed this topic. It was just unbelievable for a democratic modern society. I remember sitting at a restaurant bar in Isla Mujeres, Mexico in April of 2021 debating the SARS2 origins with a few family members and some random bar flies. The debate was lively as one could imagine. I was clearly believing that it made Occam's razor type sense that the virus leaked from a BSL4 lab 1 mile from the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan China as opposed to a bat cave 700 plus miles away where a similar but not the same virus was found years before. And, oh by the way, the US government was indirectly funding the UNC Chapel Hill and the Wuhan Institute of Virology's work on gain of function mutations that were the exact mutations that made the ancestral strain of SARS2 so infectious and devastating to a naive human species.
From the Eban paper: "As the BSL-4 lab there became one of the nation’s most exalted scientific showpieces, Shi’s research grew in importance and scope. In a 2015 research paper, Shi and a University of North Carolina virologist named Ralph Baric proved that the spike protein of a novel coronavirus could be used to infect human cells. Using mice as subjects, they spliced the spike of a novel SARS-like virus from a bat into a version of the 2003 SARS virus, creating a new infectious pathogen. The virus manipulation was completed at Baric’s BSL-3 lab in North Carolina. This gain-of-function experiment was so fraught that the authors essentially put a warning label on it, writing, “scientific review panels may deem similar studies…too risky to pursue.”
In March 2018, Shi partnered with Baric and a longtime collaborator, Peter Daszak, on a $14 million grant proposal to genetically manipulate bat coronaviruses to see how they might cause pandemics. The proposal called for possibly enhancing the viruses with something called a furin cleavage site to boost their entry into human cells. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) rejected the grant proposal for not adequately assessing the risks posed by a supercharged virus. It is not clear whether WIV scientists continued the research on their own. Shi and Baric did not offer comment. In his response to our request for comment, Daszak did not address the DARPA grant. He said that he had not reviewed the Senate report and instead pointed to another report, which he recently coauthored in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that “strongly indicates” a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2." (Eban et. el. 2022) The crazy thing was that Peter Danzak led the group that went to China to assess the origin of the outbreak. Can you say conflict if interest? (Crowe J. 2021)
It is so weird to look back now almost 3 years later and see the reality that was the debacle of the COVID19 Pandemic. Thank God SARS2 has mutated itself into a very very mild illness. Those at risk now appear to be only those with metabolic damage from years of processed food abuse and toxin exposure, i.e. those with significantly advanced cardiovascular disease, obesity and diabetes.
Next week I will take a deeper dive into this reality as the final post mortem of Covid 19.
You all are very aware of my critical stance of Dr. Anthony Fauci. From the Nocera piece, they write appropriately: "One such person was Anthony Fauci. In August 2022, Fauci announced that he planned to retire at the end of the year. Over the next few months, he made the rounds to discuss how the country had fared during the pandemic. Invariably, he was asked whether he regretted his forceful advocacy of lockdowns, especially given its effect on children. At one forum, he said, “Sometimes when you do draconian things, it has collateral negative consequences … on the economy, on the schoolchildren.” But, he added, “The only way to stop something cold in its tracks is to try and shut things down.” What he could never acknowledge was that “shutting things down” didn’t stop the virus, and that keeping schools closed didn’t save kids’ lives. Then again, to understand that, you had to be willing to follow the science." That last statement is emblematic of the entire Fauci debacle. For a career scientist, he abandoned it all in his final years on the job whether it was the lockdown, masking, social distancing, ivermectin, etc... So frustrating for someone who believes that science is the only non biased arbiter of truth. To see it so blindly pushed aside for political purposes is so sad. But then again, we still feed our children scientifically proven metabolically damaging food in school daily. Oh well. There is hope. We can still try and love our kids, feed them and care for them at home where policies cannot interfere because we have a layer of control.
Your home is your castle,
Dr. M
