Category: COVID-19

For the first time in our history, medical treatment is a political issue. However, before I rant on that topic, I need to admit that my theory about SARS-CoV-2 has been proven wrong. My theory was based on the conviction that our government couldn’t react quickly and decisively to get ahead of a virus, regardless of who was in office. The virus became less lethal because Mother Nature forced its attachment points to return to their original configuration.

Ultimately, I could still be proven right, but I lost confidence in my theories because SARS-CoV-2 is no longer acting as I predicted it would. For three months, the pandemic conformed to my predictions almost to the letter, but it isn’t now, so I was wrong.

So what now? It’s time for the new set of facts, and here they are copied from a post I can’t find at the moment, so I can’t credit the author. It is now time to come to terms with the fact that;

1. I am probably going to get COVID-19 at some point,

2. I am almost certainly going to survive it, and

3. I might very well give it to someone else.

My new assumption is that this is a year-round virus that’s eventually going to infect 100 million people and kill roughly 1/4 of one percent of those infected. I’ve accepted those numbers. Unfortunately, millions of others have not. Many people have no sense of where this is headed, and I understand why. They’ve been betrayed by a hysterical media that insists on covering each new reported case as if it were the first case.

The McAllen/Edinburg area of South Texas has been experiencing an outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, which has filled the hospitals, filled the morgues, and has resulted in the deployment of U.S. Army medical teams to help us cope. I now know several COVID-19 patients, all of whom were OCD about mask wearing and hand washing. As we can see from Holland’s example, masks are not the answer; avoiding the three C’s — confined spaces, crowded places, and close contact —seems to be much more critical. We have known that since the pandemic began, only Japan has incorporated the 3 C’s into its social policy.

The increase in cases comes from mass mobile testing at various sites around the Rio Grande Valley. The sudden increase in deaths is not a mystery because we now know morbid obesity is a real problem with COVID-19. McAllen and Edinburg combined to win the dubious distinction of the fattest metro area in the country in 2019. When it comes to comorbidity, we are number 1!

Added to the mix is the fact that this area is tightly controlled by democrats and the hospital systems rely on federal funding because they are Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), which means they get access to cash that the rest of the country kicks in because of reasons.  Most doctors here follow the “Fauci Strategy,” which is “to keep early infected patients quarantined at home without treatment until they develop a shortness of breath and have to be admitted to a hospital. Then they would be given hydroxychloroquine. The Food and Drug Administration cluelessly agreed to this doctrine, and it stated in its hydroxychloroquine Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) that “hospitalized patients were likely to have a greater prospect of benefit (compared to ambulatory patients with mild illness).”

The other problem with the South Texas outbreak is that we are told nothing about it. We hear how many test positive, and we get a daily COVID-19-related death count. There is no context, no explanations about why we are experiencing deaths at a much higher rate than the rest of the country. There is also zero coverage of the false positive problem and zero coverage of the inflated death count problem. But this is Texas, so we get news about the state going after unemployment fraud, rampant in the age of COVID-19.

Richard Cortez, an elected Hidalgo County judge who was (reportedly) a great CPA before he went on the bench, has issued back-to-back shelter-in-place orders that not one person in this county is following. The gyms remain open, as do the few restaurants that have not yet closed. My friends at the veteran-owned and operated 5×5 Brewery are watching four years of hard work. Every penny they’ve ever earned slips away because the town of Mission, TX, decided they were not an essential business.

We the people are no longer listening to the “experts” who have impinged on our lives and destroyed our economy. But ignoring them is all we can do, for those of us who have lost our businesses and livelihoods, there is always the ballot, but down here, if you’re not voting democrat, your vote counts for nothing.

Adding fuel to the fire is our controlled media, which labels the Sturgis motorcycle rally a “super spreader” event while ignoring the tens of thousands of BLM protesters who assemble nightly to burn, loot, rage, and attack police officers. Completing our new circle of misery, we have the Biden campaign. Joe Biden is obviously experiencing a severe mental decline, and that process appears to be accelerating rapidly.

I remain concerned that the controlled media narrative is so far removed from observable reality that it cannot be sustained. Yet here we are, August of 2020, and we are still in semi-lockdown over a disease that 99.9% of the population has no problem beating, especially if they are fortunate enough to have a doctor who prescribes HCL, zinc, Z-packs, and steroid inhalers.

This is worse than a bad Twilight Zone episode, but how does it end? The elites have been unmasked as petty partisan scum with inaccurate models. When questioned, they respond with petulant arguments from authority (a well-known logical fallacy). They, along with the media, have forfeited our trust in them, and at some point, there will be a reckoning. Inshallah, that reckoning will take the form of the rule of law being applied to elites in the same way it is being applied to small businessmen and women who are trying to make a living despite arbitrary, politically motivated tyranny from elected democrats across the land.

A few weeks ago, a Black Lives Matter protest occurred in downtown McAllen, Texas. They did not get far before being confronted by a local man with a chainsaw. The man was screaming racial slurs, which he, uncharacteristically for these parts, helpfully translated into English for those who are a little rusty with the lingua franca.

The man was arrested after scattering a handful of over-socialized, under-educated, upper-middle-class white kids who were protesting in support of Black Lives Matter. Black lives are not a thing in South Texas, where blacks are less than 1% of the population.

So, while the rest of you are dealing with riots and cancel culture, we are dealing with an outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 that is threatening to overwhelm our hospitals. As is expected with democratically declared emergencies, nobody knows any SARS-CoV-2 patients, the local hospitals are still laying people off, and hemorrhaging money. Despite a total lack of any evidence other than news people droning on about increased numbers, Hidalgo County Judge Richard F. Cortez decreed that as of midnight tonight (19 June), masks must be worn in all businesses, at all times in the Rio Grande Valley even when you are working out in a gym.

I do not believe the new COVID numbers for the Rio Grande Valley, nor should you. Dellridge Health & Rehabilitation Center in Paramus, New Jersey, leads the nation in nursing home deaths according to the Federal Center for Medical and Medicaid Services (CMS). CMS reported that Dellridge had 753 deaths (in a 96-bed facility, mind you). The facility had reported 16 deaths of patients who tested positive for COVID-19.

We know that the media and the CDC have grossly inflated COVID-19 numbers, and it is not a mystery why. Any attempt to verify an increase in COVID numbers at local hospitals in McAllen is thwarted by armed guards and recalcitrant public affairs officers. There is no way to know what the hell is going on because trusting the government or media to tell us what is happening is for knaves or fools.

As is the case in every progressive district across the land, our judiciary is dangerously unaccountable and mostly a validation mechanism for the imposition of elite opinion. Elite opinion is Orange Man Bad, and they have been engaged in a systematic campaign to undermine the President since before he was elected.

The SARS-CoV-2 response is the most blatant example of expert class arrogance and media malfeasance in modern history. Quoting from this piece by Stacey Lennox:

Economies across the world were shut down based on a model that was blatant panic porn built on shoddy code. Even more maddening is the fact expert Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College had a history of getting almost every prediction he ever made completely wrong.

What is now at stake are the reputations of the scientific expert class, the Federal bureaucracy, the media, and virtually every big-money interest, from the pharmaceutical industry to Silicon Valley to Hollywood. If President Trump gets four more years, those special interests will suddenly not be so special.

Where was the first place you heard about hydroxychloroquine? President Trump’s COVID-19 update, where he mentioned it, stood by his belief, based on reporting by frontline physicians, that it worked. Just last week, the authors of a study published in the medical journal The Lancet, which stated that treating coronavirus with hydroxychloroquine could be fatal, retracted their findings.

Hydroxychloroquine costs $3.00 per treatment. Remdesivir, which doesn’t even work well, costs $1,400 per treatment, and it has a patent. Do you believe big Pharma was not behind the coordinated assault on the effectiveness of a drug that was proven to work on SARS-CoV-1, which has identical modes of attachment with SARS-CoV-2? Maybe it was all a coincidence, what do I know?

I know that the doctors in the Rio Grande Valley are using (but have run out of) Remdesivir. Our government designates hospitals in the RGV as “Hispanic Serving Institutions,” which entitles them to numerous federal grant funds. They are rule followers to the nth degree, and despite knowing that hydroxychloroquine and zinc will work, they are not about to do anything that might jeopardize grant monies. So they use Remdesivir, but have run out of the stuff and are now using Tylenol.

Welcome to the revolution. On one side are the American people who believe in our founding principles that guarantee every American has equal opportunity for success. We’ll call them the Ameri-cans. On the other side are Americans who believe in the French Revolution’s concept of equal outcomes for all. We’ll call them Ameri-can’ts. The Ameri-cant are rioting, claiming the country is inherently racist and all the ” Four Olds” must go. Have you ever heard of the four Olds before? Here’s a quick reminder:

The last crew to use the four olds killed millions of their citizens. In America, that is not going to happen because the one thing that democrat progressives cannot do is export their organic lunacy and blatant anarchy outside the urban centers they control. Unlike China (or any other country), we have the 2nd Amendment. You want to defund the police and place the responsibility for my security on me? I have no problem with that at all.  I am an American, and most of us are well-armed.

My prediction is that the President will win by a landslide this November. This country is still majority Ameri-can’s and we bend our knee to no man.  The remaining weeks running up to the election are going to be painful to watch, given the media’s continuing encouragement of rioting.

If my prediction is wrong, then we will experience what happens when you try to force “equality in outcomes” (Jacobinism to the historically literate) in a country founded on the principle of equal opportunity for all. A country where the citizens are armed and where trampling on individual liberties is not tolerated. I don’t think that will work, so I hope for the best while not fearing the worst.

As COVID Anxiety is turning into COVID rage, I am putting my streak of forecasting exactly how the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic will play out on the line with another bold prediction. As this comes to pass, remember you heard it here first (unless you listen to the No Agenda podcast). The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is over; the number of new infections may increase, but the number of those patients requiring ICU treatment or dying from the virus will continue to plummet. This is because the virus was manipulated for gain-of-function experiments, and once it got out of the lab and into nature, Mother Nature, recognizing a freak when she sees one, is forcing the virus back to its original state, which is an annoyance to humans, not a death-dealing pathogen.

I am making this prediction based on the work of Chris Howard, PhD (Biochemistry), and his wife, Lynn Howard, MD (Pathogenic Microbiology and Infectious Disease Specialist). The paragraphs below are my notes from their presentation, which can be found here. 

Coronaviruses are found in most animal species, including humans. There are over 100 different variants of coronaviruses. Historically, they are nothing more than an annoyance; they cause viral sinus infections or common colds. They have a distinct ability to penetrate epithelial cells, your first line of defense in the immune system, so when you find a virus that penetrates that epithelium and activates to enter a host cell, then you pretty much have an annoyance, and it’s usually a respiratory issue.

Coronaviruses have never been that virulent until the SARS 1 epidemic in 2001 -2002. We were told initially SARS 1 was found in bat caves, but if you look at the genetic sequence of SARS 1 RNA and compare it to SARS found in bats, there are many similarities; however, they are not identical. The assumption is that it made a zoonotic leap from the bat to the human and in doing so mutated.  That sounds reasonable until you look at the sequence themselves and realize what has changed is not your typical zoonosis mutation. If you dig deeper you’ll discover that many years ago (80’s and 90’s) we were manipulating viruses to learn more about them, and by manipulating them we made them more transmissible, more infectious, and more virulent. This supposedly teaches scientist and epidemiologist epidemiological behavior of potential pathogens and this type of study is called gain of function research.

When virus’s mutate and jump from to a different species or change hosts the main driver of those changes is evolutionary pressure to be able to bind better. Viruses themselves do not change; they are around for one thing; to make more viruses. When a virus finds a good mode of attachment, you will see less change in the virus. Both SARS 1 and the SARS 2 have identical modes of attachment from the ACE 2 inhibitor binding to S1. S1 splitting to the TMPRSS 2 binding site which opens the virus leading to exocytosis into the cell.  There’s no difference between SARS 1 and SARS 2 in that respect except for the internal dynamics of the virus’s which means it was man-made.

SARS COVID 2 (the etiological agent is for the disease state) is a chimera which by definition is made in a lab. Chimera’s take a target virus, incorporate other characteristics from other viruses to create something different.  A pertinent example of gain of function would be to use a COVID virus to create an HIV vaccine. HIV is a retrovirus and they don’t have that ability to penetrate epithelium. Vaccinating someone for HIV is not possible so scientists are trying to  find a way  to carry a vaccine (or antigen in this case) through the epithelium.

When the genome of SARS COVID 2 was uncoded there were four subsets that are identical to portions of the genome of HIV. That impossible in nature, it could not have happened to the COVID virus in a laboratory..

For viruses’ evolutionary pressure usually is based on the binding; it doesn’t change the internal RNA or DNA strands of viruses. With chimeras as they reproduce you get a shift back towards the original, natural type of virus. As a chimera goes through patient after patient and population after population mother nature recognizes it to be a freak. When you hear there are now 30 strains of CVOID 2 there are not really 30 different strains (they all have identical binding site) it’s same virus changing enough to revert back to the original wild virus which is, to humans, an annoyance, not a life or death threat.

Lynn and Chris Howard practice what is known as precision medicine. Precision medicine is a catch phrase for using your genetics and using epigenetics to take a very precise approach to optimizing your health. This is high end medicine targeting wealthy, high end clients like professional athletes and I imagine that is why their research is not receiving more attention from our know-nothing press.

If you look at how the SARS COVID 2 pandemic has progressed it is clear (to me at least) the Howard’s have articulated the Occam’s Razor solution. It is the simplest of competing theories and thus (most likely) the closest to the truth.  Mother Nature does not take kindly to the release of genetically manipulated organisms into the wild. She recognizes them and eliminates them with the same pitiless certainty she applies to all her creatures that are unable to respond to evolutionary pressures only she knows and understands.

With each passing day the evidence that the lockdowns were a massive waste of time and money accumulates. In South Texas where the wearing of face masks has been optional for a week I often am the only person in the local HEB not wearing a mask. Masks do not protect you from viruses nor do they prevent you from spreading a virus if you have one. Mask wearing is Kabuki theater just like TSA checkpoints in our airports. We have been victimized by politicians and medical “experts” who have been wrong about every aspect of this pandemic. When confronted with the conflicting facts from the ground they have doubled down with unreasonable, unconstitutional, ineffective actions that terrorize the uninformed and are destroying our economy. For this they will pay. Inshallah.

What it is ain’t exactly clear; and that’s an understatement—in the past, national emergencies brought the country together, at least for a while. From the reaction to 9/11 to the legions of people conducting water rescues after Houston flooded a few years back, we have always come together to face a threat. When the COVID-19 virus was discovered, it appeared to be an existential threat. Based on modeling by epidemiological experts, we initially expected millions, then hundreds of thousands, and subsequently tens of thousands of deaths, with the extreme lockdown measures included in the modeling.

The models were not only wrong but also far from accurate. Based on COVID-19 antibody testing in California, Boston, and Iceland, the infection fatality rate (IFR) is approximately 0.1 to 0.3 percent. The more testing we do, the lower the IFR drops as the number of positives (the denominator) increases.

Last week, a trio of Silicon Valley legends (T.J. Rodgers, Joe Malchow, and Yinon Weiss) conducted a regression study to determine if the rate of lockdown in each state had a statistically significant effect on the number of reported cases. They found the correlation coefficient on early vs. late (or no) lockdowns was 5.5%. That number is so low that there is no correlation. The lockdowns did not affect the outcome in each of the 50 states.

One of the most eminent Professors of Epidemiology, Medicine, and Population Health, John P.A. Ioannidis, MD, DSc, has again warned that we are making high-stakes decisions without reliable data. Yet the narrative marches on, with the media and authorities using the case fatality rate (CFR), not the infection fatality rate (IFR), to justify their caution.

So what now?

Unfortunately, there is no ‘what now’; instead, the population has a deeper, polarizing division. Most of the population would agree with my timeline and assessment. But it is also apparent that a large percentage of Americans believe there is a deadly virus out there that will scythe through the population if we lift the various lockdowns affecting 43 of the 50 states.

There is no way forward if we cannot agree on or define the threat as a nation. The problem now is that limiting the threat threatens the reputations of the leading scientists running our public health system, powerful academic institutions such as Johns Hopkins and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, influential philanthropists like Bill Gates, and the legacy media.

According to physicians on the front line, the failure to adapt to the virus as it has presented itself is costing lives. John Hinderocker from the Powerline blog explains the details in this post. He quotes from Dr. Paul Marik, Chief of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School, Critical Care COVID Management Protocol.

It is our collective opinion that the historically high levels of morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 is due to a single factor: the widespread and inappropriate reluctance amongst intensivists to employ anti-inflammatory and anticoagulant treatments, including corticosteroid therapy early in the course of a patient’s hospitalization. It is essential to recognize that it is not the virus that is killing the patient, rather it is the patient’s overactive immune system. The flames of the “cytokine fire” are out of control and need to be extinguished. Providing supportive care (with ventilators that themselves stoke the fire) and waiting for the cytokine fire to burn itself out simply does not work… this approach has FAILED and has led to the death of tens of thousands of patients.

As Powerline further notes:

The systematic failure of critical care systems to adopt corticosteroid therapy resulted from the published recommendations against corticosteroids use by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the American Thoracic Society (ATS) amongst others.

The most effective treatment for COVID-19 is a combination of very inexpensive, readily available drugs. This will prove catastrophic for the reputations of those who continue to insist that mass testing and a proven vaccine, or an effective drug targeting the virus, such as remdesivir, the antiviral medicine from Gilead Sciences, are required before lockdowns can end.

The lockdowns are going to end soon. Shelter-in-place orders have proved an incredibly destructive policy, and the harm has not been distributed evenly across the United States. Some people are suffering much, much more than others.

Yet the lockdown continues here in Texas with the Kabuki theater’s partial openings. Restaurants cannot turn a profit when they are forced to run at 50% capacity. I’m not sure why you would open movie theaters but keep gyms closed, given the comorbidity associated with the lifestyles of the large and lethargic.

Public health officials should encourage the population to get outdoors and enjoy fresh air and sunshine to bolster their immune systems through exercise. However, they are pretending they can calibrate the economy to limit exposure to a nasty bug, although science, in the form of epidemiological studies and regression analysis, would tell you these steps are not helping—they are hurting.

As Texas and other states emerge from lockdown, there will likely be an increase in positive test results, as more tests are conducted. What we will not see is a giant wave of critically ill patients needing ICU beds. That hasn’t happened yet and won’t happen now or in the future.  When what is not going to happen, happens, what are the elites, the press, and all the politicians who have been crying wolf for months now going to do? Who knows? Owning up and admitting their mistakes is not part of their DNA, so we can rule out being honest.

The great and powerful Texas historian T.R. Fehrenbach once wrote that: America is a land so great that even fools cannot destroy it. We are currently testing his thesis. Let’s hope he was right.

It is now obvious that the modeling driving the COVID-19 response was wrong. They caused the nation to overreact, and now that we realize COVID-19 is not the threat we were told it was, what do we do? What the Trump Administration just did, right in front of you, was disappear the models, switch data sets, and start talking recovery. It was awesome to watch, made more so by the fact that not many people realized what they were seeing.

During Thursday’s Coronavirus Task Force press conference, all mentions of modeling were removed, replaced with slides from the US Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network.

The death rate from this virus is expected to be lower than the number of flu deaths from the 2018-2019 flu season. Through antibody testing, we are learning that the China Flu bug arrived earlier than thought and has already passed through a good percentage of the population.

This is fantastic news, but we’re not celebrating, relaxing the lockdown, or restarting the economy.

In Texas, our governor appointed a commission to examine how to reopen the state. When he announced the commission members, he included Ross Perot, who died a year ago, which is suspicious. We are weeks away from spring football practice, and instead of acting on facts, the governor is appointing deceased individuals to commissions. That is not very Texan-like, and I wish we had a better leader like one of the seven governors who were not bullied into economic suicide by hysterical progressive elites.

On the day Governor Abbot announced his strike force, Governor Inslee of Washington State launched a tweetstorm of unhinged ad hominem attacks on the President. He is convinced that Wuhan will mow down millions if we dare break the protocols established to flatten a curve that never came, predicted by models that were never accurate.

The insistence of progressive politicians in believing the obviously flawed models of elite academics is going to, without question, kill Americans. And we don’t need models to know how many. Citizen Journalist Betsy McCaughey points out:

No model or guesswork is required to foresee the deadly impact. Job losses cause extreme suffering. Every 1% hike in the unemployment rate will likely produce a 3.3% increase in drug overdose deaths and a 0.99% increase in suicides according to data provided by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the medical journal Lancet. These are facts based on experience, not models. If unemployment hits 32%, some 77,000 Americans are likely to die from suicide and drug overdoses as a result of layoffs. Scientists call these fatalities deaths of despair.

The impact of layoffs goes beyond suicide, drug overdosing, and drinking. Researcher Michael French from the University of Miami points out that the death rate for an unemployed person is 63% higher than for someone with a job. The unwarranted and unnecessary lockdowns come with a price tag larger than the COVID-19 threat.

Why can’t our leaders see this? Dozens of pieces are coming out daily pointing out the same thing, yet the narrative continues as if the pandemic is performing as predicted. 

After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, our country went through a spasm of federal government action to “make us safe”. What came of that was the TSA. The TSA is in the business of ‘Security Theater’; it fails security tests over 95% of the time. They routinely allow weapons and ammunition to be unintentionally carried onto aircraft, something I’ve done myself. No security professional mistakes the TSA as anything other than Kabuki Theater. If you want safe air travel screening, you need to do it like the Israelis do, but we won’t do that because of Muh Racism.

The Kabuki theater will continue to require social distancing and mask-wearing. As Dr John Lee, joining hundreds of other reality-based front-line physicians like Keith Rose and Jonathan Greach, points out, there is no direct evidence that the lockdowns are working. The argument that social distancing and mask wearing slow the spread of the Wuhan virus makes sense, but then again, so does the argument for developing herd immunity.

It is impossible to evaluate scientific data when the credentialed experts working with the data disagree on its meaning. Occam’s Razor is a solid approach, and it was the reason I said at the start of the Pandemic that we were too slow and the bug had long ago escaped into the population. I had no way of knowing it would prove mostly benign, but it did, and here we are.

The truth about the COVID-19 threat is evident. Progressive Democrats’ reluctance to accept that their academics, experts, and pundits were wrong is fascinating to watch, but this isn’t funny. Lives are now in jeopardy due to continued forced unemployment and forced asset loss on the part of local and state governments. If this does not end quickly, we will lose more than the 2020 NCAA football season.