By Douglas V. Gibbs
Author, Speaker, Instructor, Radio Host
On Today’s Constitution Radio with Douglas V. Gibbs on KMET 1490-AM (the podcast will be available Sunday Morning), Dennis Jackson, one of my co-hosts, brought up an interesting point; a point that I believe to be the most shocking revelation we have exposed on our radio program yet about the coronavirus, and how far off the mark the liberal left, and the so called experts, have been leading us.
While I have been questioning if sacrificing liberty for promised safety from getting sick with what is turning out to be a pretty nasty coronavirus (for those who get it and are symptomatic) is necessary, I have also been indicating that:
- 82% of those who contract the virus are either asymptomatic, or have mild symptoms
- Less than 20% of those exposed actually become positive with the coronavirus
- The mortality rate, if you use estimated number of cases, is less than 0.3%, and could be as low as 0.01%
- The incredible surge of deaths being expected has not occurred
Along with the fact that:
- The global progressives and media have been padding the numbers to make it seem more deadly
- The shutdown is killing the economy, and could send us into a serious economic depression
- The authoritarians wish to make getting sick a criminal offense, or at least an excuse to increase the size of the surveillance state
In past weeks another of my co-hosts, Alex Ferguson, has been saying that the shelter-in-place laws are setting us up for totalitarianism, and that the best course would have been to let the COVID-19 disease takes its course, count your losses, but keep the economy and system of liberty intact.
On our latest program, Dennis shared an article that not only agrees with Alex, but says that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s recommendations of sheltering in place has made the disease worse in the long run.
Dr. Wittkowski, the former longtime head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at the Rockefeller University in New York City, made his comments in an interview with The Press & The Public Project (PPP) at the start of the month.
Wittkowski maintained “that the coronavirus could be ‘exterminated’ if we permitted most people to lead normal lives and sheltered the most vulnerable parts of society until the danger had passed.”
“With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity,” Wittkowski told the PPP. “About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won’t even have recognized that they were infected, or they had very, very mild symptoms, especially if they are children.”
This is not conjecture. For example, consider that among 60 blood donors in one northern Italian town, 40 tested positive for Wuhan virus antibodies — meaning, they’d contracted the disease but had no symptoms and are now immune. Moreover, one study holds that half of Britain was already infected with the virus in late March already.
“So, it’s very important to keep the schools open and kids mingling to spread the virus to get herd immunity as fast as possible,” Wittkowski continued, “and then the elderly people, who should be separated, and the nursing homes should be closed during that time, can come back and meet their children and grandchildren after about 4 weeks when the virus has been exterminated.”
Wittkowski said earlier in the interview that children should “keep going to school and infecting each other.” This may sound odd. But it’s precisely what’s done, purposely, at “infection parties” — events where parents purposely expose their children to, let’s say, a chicken pox-infected kid — to develop group immunity and avoid more serious disease-related issues later in life.
When “the percentage of people who’d been infected, recovered, and gained immunity got high enough, there would no longer be enough carriers for it to spread. So even those who hadn’t acquired biological immunity nonetheless would become protected through herd immunity.”
Wittkowski also claimed that, insofar as combating the disease at the society-wide level goes, “social distancing” won’t be effective because you can’t completely stop the spread of a respiratory disease. “It will go slowly, and so it will not build up herd immunity, but it will happen,” he warned. “And it will go on forever unless we let it go” (i.e., take its course).
Asked about our common policy of “containment” or “sheltering in place,” Wittkowski said that people are trying to “flatten the curve.” “I don’t really know why,” he continued. “But, what happens is if you flatten the curve, you also prolong, to widen it, and it takes more time. And I don’t see a good reason for a respiratory disease to stay in the population longer than necessary.”
But “why” may be simple: Some health experts admitted early on that the lockdowns wouldn’t stop the disease. The idea was to slow the spread — and thus prolong the outbreak by design — so that our hospitals wouldn’t be “overwhelmed.”
The problem is it also enables government more time to use the disease as an excuse to put in place draconian laws, and set us up for the authoritarian society ruled by leftist elites they have been dreaming of.
The whole policy of “locking down” the nation — which threatens to collapse our economy and, ultimately perhaps, our civilization — was based on flawed models and flawed ideas.
Despite this, Dr. Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, insists that there won’t be a turning point until we develop a vaccine. This is the man who not long ago was dismissing the idea that the Wuhan virus even was a threat (and also a man with Clinton and Obama connections). And then, when you really look a the whole scenario, I have to ask, which would be more deadly in the long run? The disease, or whatever it is that they put into the vaccine.
Besides, some experts say that a vaccine won’t help. “‘If we’re putting all our hopes in a vaccine as being the answer, we’re in trouble,’ Jason Schwartz, an assistant professor at Yale School of Public Health who studies vaccine policy, told me,” wrote the Atlantic’s James Hamblin in February.
“The best-case scenario, as Schwartz sees it, is the one in which this vaccine development happens far too late to make a difference for the current outbreak,” Hamblin continued.
The reason? Viruses mutate, and Hamblin states that the Wuhan flu, being in the single-strand-RNA virus class, is likely to do so.
Hamblin also quotes Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch, who, agreeing with Wittkowski, says of the virus, “I think the likely outcome is that it will ultimately not be containable.” So where does this leave us?
It perhaps should leave us with the herd immunity strategy.
And if this thing becomes an annual illness, I am not prepared to lockdown each year.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary