Forget the lab leak story and gain of function research on bat coronaviruses, forget the wet market story, forget the pangolin story, forget Koch’s postulates, forget 5G beam weapons. I don’t want to know anything fancy about covid, I just want to know if this shit is real.
As far as I can tell, it isn’t. There hasn’t been a single instance I’ve read of someone succumbing to covid who didn’t have like blood cancer, diabetes, atherosclerosis, fatty liver, hyperparathyroidism, chronic kidney disease, everything, all of it, every major cause of death, on top of being old as hell. I’ve never heard of a single instance of someone dying solely of covid.
Even Colin Powell was said to have been a “covid death” despite having been an 84 year old man with multiple myeloma, prostate cancer, Parkinson’s disease, etc.
Is Covid real? Do you know anyone who was healthy but perished after contracting covid? If the majority of deaths have significant, life-threatening comorbidities wouldn’t this disqualify the covid pandemic from any position of seriousness?
Yes, Covid is real, and so is the flu, but the "you're-falling-into-conspiracy-theory-just-trust-the-science" unsubscribers are being a) uncharitable and b) obtuse. The question, which was obviously asked *in earnest* and not as a troll, was intended to invite anecdotal, real-life testimony not as "validation" but rather as points of comparison to the pervasive and often hysterical media narrative.
For those with poor reading comprehension, here is a translation of Sotonye's question: "Do you think the global response to real-Covid was overblown, and/or do you think the phenomenon of real-Covid was grievously and perhaps ruinously inflated by the coincident phenomenon of unreal-Covid?" Anyone reading this blog might at least grant its author a minimal benefit of the doubt, no? I mean, how did you end up here in the first place?
Moving on: I have some sympathy for our host's confusion, because, on a personal level, I've directly felt and had to deal with the profound and far-reaching effects of "Covid response" (prevention, testing, masks, isolation, anxiety, travel shutdowns, school closures, familial dysfunction, society-at-large going haywire, etc.), to a *much* greater extent than the disease itself. Indeed, real-Covid has played a relatively minor role in the last 20 months of my life. Of the people I know who actually caught the virus, i.e. tested positive at some point or another, the vast majority experienced Covid (which is indeed real) as little worse than a bad flu, and many hardly noticed it at all. That said (and here's the anecdotal stuff I think Sotonye was after): one person I know who contracted it early (March 2020) got pneumonia and had to spend a night in the hospital, but made a full recovery; another person (late 70s) had a really rough couple nights but didn't go to hospital and made a full recovery; another (mid-60s) had a weeks-long struggle with it and eventually succumbed, but she had severe asthma and some other long-term health issues; another (late 70s) recovered but also went in with various co-morbidities, including congestive heart failure, and for months afterward required supplemental oxygen. For context, these people lived, variously, in NYC, the UK, Spain, and the mid-Western US. Only one human I knew personally—who was more acquaintance than friend, but nevertheless I had great affection for her—actually died of Covid.
Yes, the above is strictly anecdotal, but direct, real-world experience *matters*! Not to settle scientific questions, but to situate ourselves sanely in our day to day lives. It's impossible to say definitively what the real-Covid would have been like without the unreal-Covid, whether it would have felt like a really bad flu season, or not even, or something much worse, but it's absolutely a thing worth pondering, for anyone who still cares about reality and its representations.
Never met anyone or heard of anyone who died from Covid, except for one guy who was super obese. I knew another super obese person who died from getting a flu or something a few years back, before Covid. If it weren't for the masks and my phone, I'd have no idea there was a pandemic.
I’ve had an otherwise healthy 40-yr old coworker die after 8 days of the disease. A close friend of mine has had his 50-yr aunt sie (no know comorbidities). This shit is real.
you are missing the point, first defining real itself is more difficult than defining anything else therefore you are not defining covid asking that but eventually making the definition less precise. the question is another, is this dangerous? can be cured? (the question nobody does and nobody research about, we just allowed to "prevent")
the answer is yes, can be cured very easily, have been done in large numbers in Italy (atm total of 60000 ppl in Italy, soon report to be published), and so the question follows, why world isn't curing it mandating mostly wrong cures removing debates on the matter and imposing on any way going totally out of constitutional legality boundaries a so called "gene therapy" vaccine first tested on humans in 2019 (https://twitter.com/DARPA/status/1093271789529108480)?
the answer is you can make anything "real" if you just believe it and act as if it, or at last the difference won't be detectable, here exactly making that "real" definition totally shallow and useless
Obviously, the virus itself is real. But it's obviously not as dangerous as many had hoped.
Prior to the 'pandemic', every public health 'official' had been tasked with developing a gameplan for a global pandemic, the likes of which sci-fi authors had only dreamt.
@balajis, a dude I respect beyond words, captured this in his much-cited tweet from 1-30-20:
And so news starts coming from China, and no one really knows how much to believe when it comes to news from China. And no one has a clue how to respond. No one wants to 'go first'. Ignore it and be ridiculed forever, sound the alarm and be ridiculed forever.
Donald Trump, a man who seemingly avoided the bitchening that happens as society trains you into conformity, says 'I'll go!' and shuts down air travel.
Public officials look at each other, shrug, and say 'I guess we're doing this!".
[I'm not a story-teller, so I'll get to the point.]
Can you imagine being a military leader, or a soldier for that matter, that gets to play with the most advanced weapons in this part of the galaxy, but has to put them back on the shelf at 5pm each day because they have no battle that warrants the usage of the weaponry?
Public health officials must feel the same thing. The advanced weaponry they get to play with is the ability to shut down the fucking world, aka a 'pandemic'.
"IS THIS THE MOMENT? DO WE FINALLY GET TO USE THE PANDEMIC?! HOLY SHIT I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENING."
Except this virus didn't fulfill the prophetic pronouncements that preceded it. Its performance was disappointing, to say the least. But once you unleash the pandemic, there's no putting it back on the shelf
Can you say 'False alarm, we're sorry, you can go back to your lives now...' after (1) the world has been locked down, (2) the economy effectively paused/destroyed, (3) the media has offered to spread whatever message you want [as long as its terrifying], and (4) you are now the most powerful group of people in world history?
The obvious answer is yes. But your closest cousin is the chimp, and your second cousin is a lizard, and the instincts you inherited from your shared ancestors can exert a powerful effect in situations like this. If your reasoning skills are out of shape and your humility unprepared, good luck.
The pandemic was unleashed. No one could put it back in the bag. Criticism is usually seen as an ally in science, but it quickly becomes literally Hitler. Officials franticly search for evidence to support their theories, but then realize they don't need any. This weapon is crazy and takes on a life of its own. Ironically, it becomes the virus that had been warned about.
Prophecies are difficult to decipher. The tendency is to take them literally, at least at first. But prophecies cannot be accurate because no one can predict the future. But everyone believes in prophecy, so we gotta try to understand what the prophets meant. And so we switch from literal interpretation to figurative:
'Ohhhhh, wow. I understand it now. They weren't talking about a virus in the traditional sense. It's a mind-virus that infects entire societies.'
Okay I have to wrap this up, unfortunately. My point: no one understood the weapon and its power.
The virus is real, but is laughable in comparison to a pandemic.
AND THIS IS NOT A CONSPIRACY. Conspiracy theories give way too much credit to 'elites'. The elites in our world are not organized and competent enough to pull off a pandemic.
But a pandemic doesn't need 'pulling off', it just needs to be unleashed.
I think that most public health officials are good people, well-intentioned. They signed up to help humanity and they're still trying to help. And most of them were not involved in unleashing the pandemic - most were mid-level paper-pushers with little awareness of what their bosses were being thrust into.
The pandemic has obviously touched every inch of society. I have no idea where things go from here, and neither do you.
Yes COVID is real and yes it will kill you on its own IF you don’t understand how to treat it or for that matter WHY it is so lethal in the first place. First off it is lethal for exactly the same reason that the Swine/Spanish Flu AND MERS as well as the Avian Flu were in the past, they ALL have a zoonotic origin from four animals that ALL share a unique COMMON trait. Take a step forward and take a look at ALL the COVID comorbidity deaths listed above and please know they ALL share another COMMON trait that relates to the first. Do your own research, what do bats, pigs, camels ands birds ALL have in common that could contribute to the lethality of a RESPIRATORY virus? WHAT “common factor” could seniors, diabetics, and people that suffer from obesity, heart and kidney disease, stroke, cancers and all those identified neurological disorders possibly have in common that relates to the “caged” Wuhan Market bats that did in fact start ALL this. I am sure the answer will surprise you because they won’t find it in a microscope.
I'm pretty sure I had it in Jan 2020--all the symptoms, which were not publicized at the time, but I took note because the sequence was odd and I had never lost taste/smell before. Felt fine 2 weeks later, despite having uncontrollable hypertension and being in my late 50s.
My 83 year old aunt, who had been in hospice care in a nursing home since December 2019, tested positive in April 2020 but never developed symptoms. We were prevented from seeing her from March 2020 until her last 12 hours of life in June 2020. She died of congestive heart failure and this was fully expected (hospice!). I will never forgive those who enforced the separation of loved ones with the excuse that it was good PH.
I also know a woman in her late 50's, excellent health, who was briefly hospitalized with acute heart inflammation after Pfizer, then died of a brain aneurysm 2 months later. One month later, her 60-year-old husband died of causes yet unknown--likely a heart attack, but autopsy results are pending. Other health events of which I have direct knowledge of that followed vaccination but may be merely coincidental: 50 year old healthy man had a stroke and lost power of speech; 8-month breastfeeding infant developed bleeding throughout GI-tract two days after 31-year old mother received first dose; 67 year old man developed severe eczema on his hands; 83 year old woman in excellent health developed hives over her entire body (never had any allergic reactions before this).
I view the response to the declared pandemic as an opportunistic infection of weak societies.
From pretty early on I've been considering all of the precautions that I've been taking to be largely for the purpose of protecting the elderly, and those with serious comorbidities. The reason why you see articles about young healthy people dying from covid in the news is because it's newsworthy, i.e. it doesn't happen very often.
Now that everyone in high-risk categories who wants a vaccine has one, the persistent restrictions are looking more and more like the expansion of the security state after 9/11. They arguably served a purpose at one point, but once they were put in place there was no incentive to remove them, which is why we all now need to arrive at the airport 2hr in advance and God forbid we leave a tube a of toothpaste in our bags.
Yes, Covid is real, and so is the flu, but the "you're-falling-into-conspiracy-theory-just-trust-the-science" unsubscribers are being a) uncharitable and b) obtuse. The question, which was obviously asked *in earnest* and not as a troll, was intended to invite anecdotal, real-life testimony not as "validation" but rather as points of comparison to the pervasive and often hysterical media narrative.
For those with poor reading comprehension, here is a translation of Sotonye's question: "Do you think the global response to real-Covid was overblown, and/or do you think the phenomenon of real-Covid was grievously and perhaps ruinously inflated by the coincident phenomenon of unreal-Covid?" Anyone reading this blog might at least grant its author a minimal benefit of the doubt, no? I mean, how did you end up here in the first place?
Moving on: I have some sympathy for our host's confusion, because, on a personal level, I've directly felt and had to deal with the profound and far-reaching effects of "Covid response" (prevention, testing, masks, isolation, anxiety, travel shutdowns, school closures, familial dysfunction, society-at-large going haywire, etc.), to a *much* greater extent than the disease itself. Indeed, real-Covid has played a relatively minor role in the last 20 months of my life. Of the people I know who actually caught the virus, i.e. tested positive at some point or another, the vast majority experienced Covid (which is indeed real) as little worse than a bad flu, and many hardly noticed it at all. That said (and here's the anecdotal stuff I think Sotonye was after): one person I know who contracted it early (March 2020) got pneumonia and had to spend a night in the hospital, but made a full recovery; another person (late 70s) had a really rough couple nights but didn't go to hospital and made a full recovery; another (mid-60s) had a weeks-long struggle with it and eventually succumbed, but she had severe asthma and some other long-term health issues; another (late 70s) recovered but also went in with various co-morbidities, including congestive heart failure, and for months afterward required supplemental oxygen. For context, these people lived, variously, in NYC, the UK, Spain, and the mid-Western US. Only one human I knew personally—who was more acquaintance than friend, but nevertheless I had great affection for her—actually died of Covid.
Yes, the above is strictly anecdotal, but direct, real-world experience *matters*! Not to settle scientific questions, but to situate ourselves sanely in our day to day lives. It's impossible to say definitively what the real-Covid would have been like without the unreal-Covid, whether it would have felt like a really bad flu season, or not even, or something much worse, but it's absolutely a thing worth pondering, for anyone who still cares about reality and its representations.
Never met anyone or heard of anyone who died from Covid, except for one guy who was super obese. I knew another super obese person who died from getting a flu or something a few years back, before Covid. If it weren't for the masks and my phone, I'd have no idea there was a pandemic.
I’ve had an otherwise healthy 40-yr old coworker die after 8 days of the disease. A close friend of mine has had his 50-yr aunt sie (no know comorbidities). This shit is real.
unsubscribed. Nonsense questions like this are disgusting, trust science, trust doctors and stop feeding conspiracy theories and damage our society.
you are missing the point, first defining real itself is more difficult than defining anything else therefore you are not defining covid asking that but eventually making the definition less precise. the question is another, is this dangerous? can be cured? (the question nobody does and nobody research about, we just allowed to "prevent")
the answer is yes, can be cured very easily, have been done in large numbers in Italy (atm total of 60000 ppl in Italy, soon report to be published), and so the question follows, why world isn't curing it mandating mostly wrong cures removing debates on the matter and imposing on any way going totally out of constitutional legality boundaries a so called "gene therapy" vaccine first tested on humans in 2019 (https://twitter.com/DARPA/status/1093271789529108480)?
the answer is you can make anything "real" if you just believe it and act as if it, or at last the difference won't be detectable, here exactly making that "real" definition totally shallow and useless
Obviously, the virus itself is real. But it's obviously not as dangerous as many had hoped.
Prior to the 'pandemic', every public health 'official' had been tasked with developing a gameplan for a global pandemic, the likes of which sci-fi authors had only dreamt.
@balajis, a dude I respect beyond words, captured this in his much-cited tweet from 1-30-20:
"What if this coronavirus is the pandemic that public health people have been warning about for years?" (https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1222921758375927808)
And so news starts coming from China, and no one really knows how much to believe when it comes to news from China. And no one has a clue how to respond. No one wants to 'go first'. Ignore it and be ridiculed forever, sound the alarm and be ridiculed forever.
Donald Trump, a man who seemingly avoided the bitchening that happens as society trains you into conformity, says 'I'll go!' and shuts down air travel.
Public officials look at each other, shrug, and say 'I guess we're doing this!".
[I'm not a story-teller, so I'll get to the point.]
Can you imagine being a military leader, or a soldier for that matter, that gets to play with the most advanced weapons in this part of the galaxy, but has to put them back on the shelf at 5pm each day because they have no battle that warrants the usage of the weaponry?
Public health officials must feel the same thing. The advanced weaponry they get to play with is the ability to shut down the fucking world, aka a 'pandemic'.
"IS THIS THE MOMENT? DO WE FINALLY GET TO USE THE PANDEMIC?! HOLY SHIT I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENING."
Except this virus didn't fulfill the prophetic pronouncements that preceded it. Its performance was disappointing, to say the least. But once you unleash the pandemic, there's no putting it back on the shelf
Can you say 'False alarm, we're sorry, you can go back to your lives now...' after (1) the world has been locked down, (2) the economy effectively paused/destroyed, (3) the media has offered to spread whatever message you want [as long as its terrifying], and (4) you are now the most powerful group of people in world history?
The obvious answer is yes. But your closest cousin is the chimp, and your second cousin is a lizard, and the instincts you inherited from your shared ancestors can exert a powerful effect in situations like this. If your reasoning skills are out of shape and your humility unprepared, good luck.
The pandemic was unleashed. No one could put it back in the bag. Criticism is usually seen as an ally in science, but it quickly becomes literally Hitler. Officials franticly search for evidence to support their theories, but then realize they don't need any. This weapon is crazy and takes on a life of its own. Ironically, it becomes the virus that had been warned about.
Prophecies are difficult to decipher. The tendency is to take them literally, at least at first. But prophecies cannot be accurate because no one can predict the future. But everyone believes in prophecy, so we gotta try to understand what the prophets meant. And so we switch from literal interpretation to figurative:
'Ohhhhh, wow. I understand it now. They weren't talking about a virus in the traditional sense. It's a mind-virus that infects entire societies.'
Okay I have to wrap this up, unfortunately. My point: no one understood the weapon and its power.
The virus is real, but is laughable in comparison to a pandemic.
AND THIS IS NOT A CONSPIRACY. Conspiracy theories give way too much credit to 'elites'. The elites in our world are not organized and competent enough to pull off a pandemic.
But a pandemic doesn't need 'pulling off', it just needs to be unleashed.
I think that most public health officials are good people, well-intentioned. They signed up to help humanity and they're still trying to help. And most of them were not involved in unleashing the pandemic - most were mid-level paper-pushers with little awareness of what their bosses were being thrust into.
The pandemic has obviously touched every inch of society. I have no idea where things go from here, and neither do you.
Thanks.
Yes COVID is real and yes it will kill you on its own IF you don’t understand how to treat it or for that matter WHY it is so lethal in the first place. First off it is lethal for exactly the same reason that the Swine/Spanish Flu AND MERS as well as the Avian Flu were in the past, they ALL have a zoonotic origin from four animals that ALL share a unique COMMON trait. Take a step forward and take a look at ALL the COVID comorbidity deaths listed above and please know they ALL share another COMMON trait that relates to the first. Do your own research, what do bats, pigs, camels ands birds ALL have in common that could contribute to the lethality of a RESPIRATORY virus? WHAT “common factor” could seniors, diabetics, and people that suffer from obesity, heart and kidney disease, stroke, cancers and all those identified neurological disorders possibly have in common that relates to the “caged” Wuhan Market bats that did in fact start ALL this. I am sure the answer will surprise you because they won’t find it in a microscope.
I'm pretty sure I had it in Jan 2020--all the symptoms, which were not publicized at the time, but I took note because the sequence was odd and I had never lost taste/smell before. Felt fine 2 weeks later, despite having uncontrollable hypertension and being in my late 50s.
My 83 year old aunt, who had been in hospice care in a nursing home since December 2019, tested positive in April 2020 but never developed symptoms. We were prevented from seeing her from March 2020 until her last 12 hours of life in June 2020. She died of congestive heart failure and this was fully expected (hospice!). I will never forgive those who enforced the separation of loved ones with the excuse that it was good PH.
I also know a woman in her late 50's, excellent health, who was briefly hospitalized with acute heart inflammation after Pfizer, then died of a brain aneurysm 2 months later. One month later, her 60-year-old husband died of causes yet unknown--likely a heart attack, but autopsy results are pending. Other health events of which I have direct knowledge of that followed vaccination but may be merely coincidental: 50 year old healthy man had a stroke and lost power of speech; 8-month breastfeeding infant developed bleeding throughout GI-tract two days after 31-year old mother received first dose; 67 year old man developed severe eczema on his hands; 83 year old woman in excellent health developed hives over her entire body (never had any allergic reactions before this).
I view the response to the declared pandemic as an opportunistic infection of weak societies.
From pretty early on I've been considering all of the precautions that I've been taking to be largely for the purpose of protecting the elderly, and those with serious comorbidities. The reason why you see articles about young healthy people dying from covid in the news is because it's newsworthy, i.e. it doesn't happen very often.
Now that everyone in high-risk categories who wants a vaccine has one, the persistent restrictions are looking more and more like the expansion of the security state after 9/11. They arguably served a purpose at one point, but once they were put in place there was no incentive to remove them, which is why we all now need to arrive at the airport 2hr in advance and God forbid we leave a tube a of toothpaste in our bags.