A Big Picture Look at the Disastrous Public Health Response to COVID-19
By Carla Peters and David Bell
Brownstone Institute
An underlying principle of public health is, or was, to provide the public with accurate information so that they can make good health choices for themselves and their community.
The past 3 years have seen this paradigm turned on its head, with the public’s money being used to deceive and coerce them, forcing them to follow public health dictates. The public has funded their own incarceration and impoverishment through their taxes, with public funds driving the unprecedented nonpharmaceutical, and then pharmaceutical, response to a virus that kills mainly old sick people near the end of their lives.
Children have had their education downgraded, and economies have been mangled, ensuring future generations will also pay. So, what did the public actually pay for?
COVID-19 was not novel, but a variation on previous respiratory disease.
Most healthy people infected with SARS-CoV-2 recover without any intervention, gaining natural immunity which, in the absence of vaccination, generates a more robust and long-lasting protection with less risk for reinfections as compared to individuals protected by vaccination alone. Globally, the infection fatality rate (IFR) of SARS-CoV-2 is about 0.15% and comparable to seasonal influenza (IFR 0,1 %). The IFR of those under twenty years was only 0.0013 %, and highest for those beyond 70 years. The IFR of COVID-19 among community-dwelling elderly is lower than previously reported in elderly overall.
A higher IFR was found in countries with many long-term care facilities, perhaps because exposure tends to occur through other immune-suppressed elderly, rather than immune-competent children with lower viral loads. An aging population goes through the process of immunosenescence and increased incidence and severity of infectious diseases is expected.
Severe COVID-19, or COVID-19 Associated ARDS, is a syndrome within the known ARDS spectrum. Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) and associated cytokine storm has been recognized for more than 50 years. It occurs when a diverse array of triggers causes acute, bilateral pulmonary inflammation and increased capillary permeability leading to acute hypoxemic respiratory failure.
Although supportive care improved the prognosis, mortality and disabling complications in survivors in intensive care are still high, and have remained relatively unchanged in the last 20 years. In 2013 an estimated 2.65 million deaths worldwide were attributed to Acute Respiratory Tract Infection.
As with other ARDS etiologies, people suffering from (COVID-19) ARDS are mostly elderly people with comorbidities including being overweight, hypertension, Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, often using multiple medications. Other restrictions on the immune system, such as vitamin D deficiency, put people at increased risk.
As of July 2022, WHO reported over 601 million confirmed cases and over 6.4 million deaths associated with COVID-19 globally. More than half (3.5 million) died after the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines, though 67.7 % of the world population has received at least one vaccination. The WHO estimates a total of 14.9 million excess deaths in 2020-2021 associated with COVID-19 directly due to the disease or indirectly due to the impact of the public health response on health systems and society.
Footing the bill for the disposal of orthodox public health
Since COVID-19 was recognized in Western countries in early 2020, expenditures on public health in many of them have more than doubled, imposing over $500 billion in monthly costs on the global economy. Some trillions more have been spent on compensation and stimulus packages for those left without income due to the public health response, whilst economies, and therefore future employment opportunities, have been heavily damaged. This is nearly all funded by taxpayers, or borrowed to be funded with interest by the taxpayers of the future.
Politicians and various experts have claimed that the coercive COVID-19 public health policies are the only way to curb COVID-19, though such measures were advised against by the WHO in its pandemic influenza guidelines of 2019. They would increase poverty and inequality, whilst having (still) unproven efficacy.
Citizens have paid the bill via taxes for novel nonpharmaceutical interventions (lockdowns, mask mandates and frequent testing) and repeated vaccinations of immune people with rapidly waning vaccines, whilst seeing their own incomes reduced. The increase in the money supply to cover relief for forced unemployment has driven inflation, contributing to increased food, water, energy, health and insurance costs. These responses have disproportionately harmed low income families.
Governments take over medical management
Early in the pandemic it became clear that intubating a COVID-19 patient could increase long-term harm and mortality. Unfortunately, many hospitals continued a low threshold for the use of ventilators for the fear that other methods of oxygenation would spread the virus. In 2020 the US spent billions of dollars stockpiling unused ventilators.
In many countries a relatively new antiviral drug, remdesivir, developed with State funding, became the first choice of treatment for hospitalized people with COVID-19. The safety and toxicity of the expensive remdesivir was widely disputed. Yet even after the first results of the WHO’s Solidarity study found little or no effect on reducing hospital stay or Covid deaths, the EU continued a €1.2 billion agreement with Gilead for 500,000 treatments and it continued to be prioritized for use in the United States.
Final results of the Solidarity study confirmed the finding of little or no effect. In contrast, the use of cheaper drugs with antiviral activity, like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, was suppressed. Although ivermectin is now included in lists of the US National Institutes of Health in August 2022, governments are silent on its use, preferring to transfer funds to Pharma for newer on-patent drugs.
Expanding lockdowns from prisons to society
Lockdowns may prove to be one of the gravest governmental failures of modern times. A cost-benefit analysis of the response to COVID-19 found lockdowns to be far more harmful to public health (at least 5-10 times) in terms of well-being than COVID-19. Significant collateral damage is not unexpected, as mass business closures and restricted movement have affected billions of people globally through poverty, food insecurity, loneliness, unemployment, educational interruption, and interrupted healthcare. What did not make media headlines is the more than 3 million children who have died from malnutrition in the first year of the pandemic. Together with increasing malnutrition, the world is facing rising burdens of child marriage and child labor, developmental and mental problems, poverty, suicide and chronic disease.
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