John S. Chamberlain
original essay written, Saturday, March 14, 2020, Den Haag, Netherlands
published Tuesday, March 17, 2020, on fluhysteria.com
updated Friday, March 20, 2020 (1918 statistics)
updated Tuesday, March 24, 2020 (scientific report)
updated Friday, March 27, 2020 (pulmonary inflammation)
The current health hysteria which was first brought to public attention on 23 January 2020 and magnified into a supposed global threat around mid February, has no real medical basis and is the result of public health officials making experimentally unfounded statements that mischaracterize ordinary pneumonia deaths and harmless colds as public health threats.
Every responsible person should reject these wild, illogical and panic-driven allegations, and demand that their governments stop wasting money, restricting citizen rights, issuing irrational quarantines and making alarmist official statements until they have valid proof that the deaths they are claiming are something other than ordinary deaths by simple bacterial pneumonia, a common terminal illness.
This current hysteria is in no way unique. Over and over again, we have seen the same class of doctors and public health officials make dire prognostications and false alarms about how "millions" would die. Just in the last 50 years we have had Swine Flu, Avian Flu, SARS, MERS and the 2003 Coronavirus. All of these hysterias have proven to be ridiculously trumped up scare stories. In each case, Congress has rewarded these false prophets by allocating billions of dollars to them. These health officials and drug companies have a huge financial incentive to generate false "pandemics" and frighten people unnecessarily. In 1976, President Gerald Ford announced how the Swine Flu could kill 20 million people and that it was imperative that a gigantic vaccination program be started to innoculate the entire population of the United States, 220 million people. Later this proposed vaccine was abandoned as ineffective and possibly dangerous. The COVID-19 scare is simply a continuation of a long line of illogical and hysterical public health officials crying wolf.
The scientific report which announced the discovery of nCoVID-19 (novel coronavirus 2019) is suspicious. The scientists claimed that they sampled only three patients and found three different, but similar viral genomes in the three patients. They then postulate that these three different viruses are part of a clade of viruses (a clade is a family descended from a common ancestor). The Chinese had a very large team; why would they sample only three patients? It makes no sense. I suspect that they sampled dozens of patients, but most of them either had no virus, or the viral genomes did not match. So, what they did is choose three of the samples that were most similar to each other and then they reported just those three as their finding. In other words, it appears that they failed to find a viral cause of the nursing home deaths, so they selectively chose their data to give the false impression that they did find a virus.
In recent years in China, old people have been increasingly moved into large end-of-life facilities. Whereas formerly old people would be taken care of by their family, the Chinese have begun copying the western world in sending their old into nursing homes. In these places, with many old people living in close proximity to each other, outbreaks of pneumococcus can kill many people all at once. It is likely that all of the deaths reported in China are of this type and are bacterial in nature, not viral. The elite Chinese lab which discovered COVID-19 has tested only a handful of people and this lab has not performed any experiments whatsoever to prove that this random viral clade is the cause of death, rather than ordinary pneumonia or other pre-existing conditions, for the patients in question.
In the early 1950s, exactly the same thing happened in Great Britain. The National Assistance Act of 1948 converted large numbers of workhouses into nursing homes and many old people in England, Wales and Scotland were sent into these crowded facilities. This caused a sharp spike in deaths in the early 1950s due to pneumonia as pneumococcal infections would spread due to the close contact of the old people and their nurses. Just like now, the public health officials in Great Britain announced that this was a great "influenza epidemic."
So called "influenza" is medically identical to the common cold and is caused by the exact same viruses that cause colds. Doctors will sometimes say that flus are distinguished by, for example, high fever, but this is not true. You cannot say one person has a fever of 101 so he has a cold, but this other person has a fever of 102, so they have the flu. There is no dividing point. The fact is that so-called "flus" and "chest colds" are clinically indistiguishable from the common cold which is not surprising because they are caused by the same exact viruses. What happens is that a person gets a cold, becomes frightened and goes to the doctor who solemnly announces, "You have the flu," thereby confirming the patient's fears. It is a psychological diagnosis, not a medical one. If 10 patients suffering from colds are shown to 10 different doctors who are asked to decide whether the patients have the "flu" or a "cold" the results will be random.
Nearly all the deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the United States by early March 2020 have occurred in a nursing home and the people there died of pneumonia, not a virus. This nursing home has absolutely no connection to China. That people in this nursing home have supposedly tested positive for COVID-19 simply shows that the test is unreliable and the results are coincidental, not that these people died from a viral infection. The alleged death cases since that time are undoubtedly of a similar nature: ordinary deaths by pneumonia or other unrelated causes that have been co-opted by public health officials to bolster their scare stories. That the vast majority of alleged COVID-19 patients experience only ordinary colds is further evidence that the small number who have died had a problem which is unrelated to COVID-19. Since the identity of these victims and their case files have been kept secret, there is no way to verify claims concerning the cause of death.
The entire theoretical basis for these so-called "influenzal epidemics" hinges on a totally unproven theory called coinfection. The idea of this theory is that a virus gives a person a cold, which "inflames" the patient's lungs and makes them susceptible to a subsequent bacterial infection which then kills them. This ridiculous theory, which defies common sense, has never been experimentally proven or even tested in any meaningful way. Public health officials simply spout this absurd theory as though it was an established fact when it is not. If coinfection were possible, then healthy people would be getting pneumonia all the time and any cold would be a life-threatening event. The idea that somehow this one particular corona virus magically "inflames" the lungs, whereas the millions of other similar corona viruses do not is equally ridiculous. The reality is simple: viral infections do not cause bacterial infections. The theory of coinfection is nonsense adopted for the purpose of trying to back up hysterical mischaracterizations of ordinary deaths by pneumonia.
The touchstone for the public health officials who are trying to promote pandemic threats in the 20th and 21st centuries is the supposed 1918 "influenza epidemic." These officials claim extreme numbers of deaths caused by an influenzal pneumonia in 1918, anywhere from 10 million to 300 million, depending on which book you read. These concocted statistics have no basis in reality. Any sober count of genuine cases shows that the deaths in question were a few hundred thousand at the most. The high numbers quoted in textbooks are the result of unscientific extrapolations in which the researcher has supposed that some fraction of the population, 1% or whatever, was killed and then they multiply the fraction by the total number of people in the population. If you go back and read actual vital statistics and medical reports from the period, you will quickly see that these purported numbers are wildly exaggerated.
Furthermore, the victims did not die of pneumonia, much less a virus. This can be proven by reading case histories. For example, at Fort Devens, one of the epidemic sites, most of the men died very quickly, many within 72 hours of arriving at the base. This rules out a viral cause. Cold viruses typically have a 4-5 day asymptomatic incubation period. This is followed by a 7-10 day period of symptomatic illness. In the rare circumstances that a healthy young man dies of pneumonia, it often takes two weeks or more. If the deaths at Fort Devens had had a viral cause, then it would have taken at least 20 days from their arrival at the camp before they would have died. Since the deaths occurred much faster than this, we can rule out a viral cause, or even ordinary pneumonia.
The likely cause of death for the young soldiers entering Fort Devens was septicemia. In 1918, it was not understood how to properly sterilize vaccines and there was no refrigeration. Therefore, vaccines were kept in warm rooms and liable to become contaminated with bacteria. If bacteria is injected into the body it can easily cause septicemia. Every soldier entering Fort Devens was injected with vaccines upon their arrival at the base. Septicemia has a 50% lethality and can easily kill within 48-72 hours. The case histories at Fort Devens are consistent with induced death by septicemia, and not with any spontaneous contagion.
Influenzal hysterias feed on ignorance, fear and blind faith in authority figures. Your defenses against hysteria are knowledge, courage and scientific skepticism. You can help end this hysteria by dispassionate consideration and insisting on proof and reasoning from those making wild claims. Write your political leaders and demand that they use science and experimentation to prove medical facts, rather than rely on speculation, rumor and tradition. In particular, you should demand the following:
(1) The identity and case histories of COVID-19 patients who have died should be made public so that the cause of death can be investigated by neutral observers.
(2) The DNA test for COVID-19 should be checked against viral genomic databases to verify that the markers used are not generic.
(3) The DNA test for COVID-19 should be verified by experiment on a population known to be uninfected to determine the false positive rate for the test.
(4) Any quarantines should be statistically proven to be effective by non-government-supported epidemiologists before they are implemented.
(5) The alleged causal link between COVID-19 infection and bacterial pneumonia should be proven by controlled experiments before deaths by pneumonia are attributed to COVID-19.
Only by your action and insistence on rationality can we subdue the present hysteria and prevent counterproductive government policies and spending.