It’s been five years ago that we had the beginnings of the COVID pandemic. In March 2020, we were seeing borders closed, assortments of lockdowns, and really right across the whole world. Now, as it turns out, the beginnings of it were actually probably in October or November 2019 in Wuhan, China. Most people don’t want to think too much back about it, and I get that—we want to be moving forward in our lives, and it was a hard time for a lot of people. Unfortunately, if we don’t learn the lessons of history, we are doomed to repeat them.
Ah.
And there are some lessons to be learned. And that’s not about necessarily revisiting the past, but it is about saying: what did we do right, and what did we do wrong? And a lot was done wrong. And a lot was done wrong, not because people didn’t know. There’s this argument: well, you know, we did our best, we didn’t know. People did know, and they still did the wrong thing, and we’ve seen evidence of that with various officials who said you’re not allowed to leave your house, and these same officials were caught in the act of partying, going out to restaurants, visiting their mistresses—you know, the list goes on. Which basically says that either they didn’t believe what they were saying or they knew that the threat was not as great as they were making it out to be, and in reality, it never was.
A couple of interesting points. Number one, it did leak from a lab, and it has emerged that intelligence authorities in America, the UK, and Germany had identified this and were told to suppress it. Why? We haven’t got an answer to that one, but I think that’s a very good question, and that question cannot be let go. We need to know why authorities were told—intelligence authorities were told—to suppress what they had found out.
In a very, very interesting turn of events, Doctor Jay Bhattacharya, who was one of the lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration and who was labelled a “fringe epidemiologist” by Anthony Fauci, has been confirmed as the new head of the NIH, the National Institutes of Health in the United States. So essentially, Bhattacharya has now got Fauci’s old job. And for reasons best known to himself, former President Joe Biden gave Fauci a pardon going back 10 years. And I think the question could reasonably arise: why does he need a pardon, and why does it need to go back 10 years? And I don’t think—in some respects—I don’t think it’s helpful to speculate, but we do know—this is all on the record—that gain-of-function research that was being conducted in the Wuhan lab had been banned by Barack Obama as president. And we also know that Fauci found a way around this by funding EcoHealth Alliance, and EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, sent money to the Wuhan lab to do gain-of-function research.
And it could be coincidental—I’m not convinced that it is—that the paper published in March 2020 under the direction of Fauci came out saying the virus came from a bat or a wet market or basically came from nature. And that paper was done by people from the EcoHealth Alliance. Fairly massive conflict of interest, which was not disclosed until over a year later. This is serious stuff. People suffered significantly and unnecessarily.
So. As the COVID-19 pandemic—and I’m quoting now, we’ll put the link in the description—paralysed much of the world, 289 million people in Europe lost nearly 17 million years of life, according to a new study. Again, it goes into a lot of analysis. The number of years lost in each country varied with GDP, poorer countries seeing more years lost. And the number of years in 2022, including deaths, was largely due not to COVID. So that’s the loss of income, that’s the delays in cancer diagnosis, that’s the non-treatment of ongoing conditions. The list is a very long one. The increase in mental health problems and the non-treatment—there are a lot of issues there, and that’s just Europe. It doesn’t include, obviously, America, Australia, and a whole lot of other countries.
And certainly, the impact was disproportionate in that those people who live in the proverbial goat cheese circle and could work on their laptop from home or anywhere were not anywhere near as much affected. They could do their work from home. In fact, for some of them, they quite liked it. The efforts to get people back into the office have proved problematic. Dodge, under Elon Musk in the United States, is telling federal bureaucrats they need to come back to the office, and some of these people are having literal conniptions that they have to come back to the office. Do some work.
Dear me. If you were a barista making coffee for these very same people, you could not do that from home. You had to go to work. If you’re a bricklayer, you have to go to work. If you were emptying the garbage—again, for these people living in the goat cheese circle and working on their laptops—you had to go to work. If you were working in the supermarket, you had to go to work. None of this could be done from home. And guess what? Most of these jobs do not get paid as well as you know, bureaucrats, academics, and a whole lot of other, you know, inverted commas, people in the knowledge economy.
So the people who cheered the loudest for lockdowns were the people who were least affected by it. Doesn’t seem quite right when you think about it. And to this day—I’m yet to see, and please, if I’ve missed it, I’m happy to stand corrected—to this day, I’ve not seen any apologies. OK, one writer, Doctor Nick Coatsworth, who was the deputy chief health officer in the early days, did actually come out and make a form of apology. Credit to him. But of course, he’s not in any official position anymore. So nobody in officialdom has actually said sorry. Maybe sorry is the hardest word. I don’t know.
This is major stuff. And this argument that we didn’t know is completely destroyed by the fact that Jay Bhattacharya and his associates, including Martin Kulldorff, wrote the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020 and called for focused protection, which is exactly what we do every year with flu. If you’re not well, don’t go and visit Granny. Vaccination is most useful for people who are most at risk. People who are not at risk can certainly get a flu shot, but their risk of getting the flu and complications is much lower than people who are older, typically over the age of 65. Again, even then, people are different, or who may have chronic conditions, particularly respiratory conditions, so risk is not equal.
We were never all in this together because everybody’s risk was somewhat different. So the notion of focusing protection on those who need it and leaving everybody else to get on with their lives was not a particularly new or radical concept. It was a well-established concept that had been used for, you know, decades and continues to be used in terms of influenza.
And COVID was never—and this was seen in the early days, and John P. Ioannidis wrote about this—was never a particularly fearsome disease. For some people, it was. And those were people who were at risk—the elderly and particularly those over 80. And the median age for loss of life from, as against with, COVID—in other words, if you got run over by a truck and you tested positive for COVID, it wasn’t the COVID that killed you, even though it got listed as “you’ve died with COVID.” Was it? So for those people who actually died of COVID, its complications, it was about 83 years old, which in Australia is the average life expectancy.
So look, if you’re otherwise fit, well, and healthy, then sure—it’s sad if an overwhelming infection of some description gets you. But that does happen literally, you know—not every day—but it is not a new phenomenon. And there are ways of protecting people who are most at risk.
And as I’ve said before, so what’s the bottom line here? Accountability needs to be taken by those who knew and, despite knowing, still made recommendations that had no basis. And that includes the notion of a metre and a half or 6-foot distancing, which Fauci admitted to Congress was a made-up figure. A made-up figure.
There’s no data that shows masking everybody—and in particular, children—had any effect. And there’s plenty of data around that comparing jurisdictions that did and didn’t put in mask mandates.
And we know that we weren’t all in this together. That risk did vary. And forcing everybody, regardless of their level of risk, to have a vaccine that did not stop transmission and didn’t even stop you getting the virus was wrong. It should have been offered to everybody. Absolutely—offer it to everybody. But only those who wanted to take it should have taken it.
It’s not difficult. It’s established protocols. We moved away from it. We need to know why. And those who orchestrated this still need to be held to account and issue apologies.
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Source: Pandemic Lockdowns Made the World Ruder – Reason.com
Dr Joe Kosterich – Doctor, Health Industry Consultant and Author
Doctor, speaker, author, and health industry consultant, Joe is WA State Medical Director for IPN, Clinical editor of Medical Forum Magazine, Medical Advisor to Medicinal Cannabis company Little Green Pharma and Course Chair, and writer for Health Cert. He is often called to give opinions in medico-legal cases, has taught students at UWA and Curtin Medical schools and been involved in post graduate education for over 20 years.
A regular on radio and TV, Joe has a podcast – Dr Joe Unplugged, has self- published two books and maintains a website with health information. He has extensive experience in helping businesses maintain a healthy workforce.
Past Chairman of Australian Tobacco Harm Reduction Association, current Vice President of Arthritis and Osteoporosis WA, Joe previously held senior positions in the Australian Medical Association and has sat on numerous boards.
