Ivermectin--or Something

 

We may be seeing the end of the virus...

A Journal of the Plague Year--Year 2

 

Out and about in downtown Toronto yesterday. In the Eaton Centre, the Food Court seating is cordoned off. To enter you must wear a mask, and show your vaccine passport and some form of ID. 

As I was sitting there with a friend, a group of perhaps five blonde women of varying ages walked past me, opened the cordon, walked out, then replaced the cordon. None of them were wearing masks. They did this right beside a group of five security guards and police, standing around talking to one another, presumably there to enforce the rules.

It seems obvious to me that this was a planned act of defiance. No doubt there were other places where they could have left the seating area that were not right beside a gaggle of security guards. It was anything but sneaky. It obviously did not affect anyone’s safety. It would have been little or no inconvenience for them to have just walked out by the designated exit; to leave, they would not have had to show anything.

One of the security guards challenged them. “Do you think you’re special? Do you think you don’t have to follow the rules like everyone else?”

I imagine this is what they had wanted. The women assembled in front of him. One of them responded, in a distinctly Eastern European accent: “we are doing this for you. You will thank us in two or three years. We are from a Communist country. We know how this is going to go. We are fighting for your freedom.”

The five stood there and took turns arguing with the security guard, remaining relatively calm. One turned to me and apologized for the disturbance.

I was impressed.

I hope they are wrong.

The Endless Pandemic

 

People are losing hope. In Canada, we are into a third wave of the pandemic, and each wave seems worse than the last. Friend Xerxes writes a column on “What if it never ends?”

It will end.

Even without any human intervention, all epidemics end. The Spanish flu managed four waves, but it ended, without a vaccine.

We are going to break this third wave by summer. We may be fighting variants for a few years, but at a lower level, with booster shots. 

See if I’m not right.

COVID and Divine Justice

 

Someone asks, “Why would a good and just God send COVID?”

It is a fair question. The moment you accept monotheism, everything is from God that is not from man.

But COVID may be from man. I think it is likely it escaped from the Wuhan Virology lab. It may even have been intended as a weapon, although its release was surely in error. It is mysterious how outbreaks seem to have been less severe in East Asian countries—almost as if there is some component sensitive to Chinese/Mongoloid and non-Chinese genetics.

But even if it is from God—it is just. We needed and deserved chastisement. Our nearly universal acceptance of abortion is about the same thing that led Yahweh in the Old Testament to wipe out the Canaanites, or the Romans to salt the ground of Carthage. They practiced child sacrifice. The collapse of the Aztecs, the Inca, might be accounted for in the same way: they practiced human sacrifice. They deserved to be taken down, and Yahweh did so, swiftly, through the Spanish. 

Aside from killing them outright, we have also ignored the welfare of the young in having women all work outside the home. We have ignored the need to pass on morals to our young. These are ample justification for destroying a culture. The entire point of a culture is to pass on moral guidance generation to generation. Our culture is therefore poisoned.

If this has not led to our own destruction—yet—it seems only because there is not some other culture ready to replace us. The Spanish, or the Hebrews, or the Romans, have not yet arrived on the scene. Who might they be?

Not the mainland Chinese, the CCP. If we are depraved, they are more depraved.

Children are Getting Shot in China

 

I teach some Chinese students online. This gives me a bit of a window on China. 

Last week, one of my students did not appear for class. When I asked him about it this morning, he explained that he was sick from being vaccinated.

For Covid?

Yes.

Sick for how long?

A week.

He is eight years old.

Unless he is confused, this suggests that vaccination has become remarkably widespread in China--they are at the point of vaccinating eight-year-olds. Also, if an eight-year-old is sick for a week as a result, that's a pretty rough vaccination--considering eight-year-olds usually get little or no symptoms from the virus itself.

Why would they be vaccinating kids, if this is so? No doubt, to achieve herd immunity. Children could be carriers. Or little Adam may have the honour of being part of a test group to determine how children tolerate the vaccine.

It seems possible he has it wrong, and the vaccination was for something else. But this is a surprisingly strong reaction to a familiar and common vaccine.

A Journal of the Plague Year

I’ve had an intuition for a while that the coronavirus scare would be mostly over by September.

I think there are inklings that it might be so.

The international race for a virus seems to be entering the final lap. Russia has actually announced that have one ready for distribution. This is a bit of a dodge; they are simply skipping the traditional third stage of trials, and will be testing it while using it. In this emergency situation, this seems to me to make sense.

But it means that they have not yet won the race; we will only know in a few months, as with several of the other candidates.

And it is a race; an international race for allies and prestige. Whoever does get a good vaccine out the door first will have scored a major coup. The Russians at least are well aware of this—they’ve named their vaccine “Sputnik V, an intentional reference to the space race.

Another prime candidate in this contemporary space race is England. All seems on track there; the New York Times reports that their Oxford vaccine has already been given to more than 10,000 volunteers in Britain, Brazil and South Africa. 30,000 people in the United States are to receive the vaccine next week. This means they are actually ahead of the Russians. AstraZeneca is poised to put out two billion doses if and when it is approved. Some months ago, the Oxford team was saying September was possible; it looks as though it may be.

The next strong competitor is China; or rather, a China-Canada collaboration. They are also into stage three, and still looks promising. China has several other candidates, one of which they have already, like Russia, begun using on their military.

The US of course has several vaccines in development too, and are pouring a lot of money into them, with “Operation Warp Speed.” They are pre-producing massive numbers of doses to roll out as soon as one is approved. Dr. Fauci says he is cautiously optimistic that one will be ready by the end of the year.

Evidence is growing that there is already widespread semi-immunity to the virus. The figure that comes up most often is 50%: 50% of the population already immune, due to prior exposure to other coronaviruses, aka the common cold.

This bodes well for finding a vaccine for the other 50%; in effect, we already have one. Quick and not so dirty: isolate the virus, and expose people to it. They get a cold; they do not die from coronavirus.

And if a cold can do it, it stands to reason that a lab-based vaccine should do it equally easily.

This also suggests that “herd immunity” is a lot closer than we thought. If we already are 50% immune, only another 20% of the population getting vaccinated should do it. There are indications that herd immunity has already taken effect in Sweden, or in London or New York City.

If herd immunity is this close, the Swedish approach might have been the right one: at worst, just open things up, let it rip, and in a month or two, the virus will be spent everywhere. The death rate in the meantime is going down, as we learn more about how to prevent and how to treat. The virus is becoming steadily less deadly.

The New Moonshot

When the US ordered the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston, the reason was said to be that they were engaged in industrial espionage—specifically, trying to steal information about American coronavirus vaccines. Now I hear reports of Russian hacking into UK and US computers for the same purpose.

Why was this their focus? One would assume that different teams are sharing their information in any case, right?

Maybe not. It seems to me that the race for an effective vaccine, or else a genuine cure, for COVID-19, is this era’s space race. Whoever gets there first demonstrates technological supremacy, and the payoff in national prestige will be immense. Countries like Taiwan and South Korea have already boosted their international prestige immensely by efficient responses to the virus. Countries known to be aggressively in the race are the USA, UK, Australia, Germany, China, Canada, and Israel.

The Case for Hydroxychloraquine

https://www.foxnews.com/media/hydroxychloroquine-could-save-lives-ingraham-yale-professor

https://www.newsweek.com/key-defeating-covid-19-already-exists-we-need-start-using-it-opinion-1519535

New Quebec Mask Is 99% Effective Against Coronavirus

More good news. Every little bit helps.

Promising New Drug for Coronavirus

Interferon beta. Preliminary trials on 101 patients in the UK indicate a 79% reduced rate of severe symptoms. Seems to be effective at any stage of the infection. In the limited study, NO ONE receiving the interferon died. The drug apparently works, if it works, regardless of any virus mutations.

Here's a Hopeful Analysis

Not by a doctor or a scientist, but he quotes a lot of sources,

He says COVID is dying.

The Wave Is Still Abating

I'm hearing much concern about a "second wave" for the coronavirus, and an upsurge in the US.

According to the stats, it is not true. It is notable that the daily plague count is not going down in the US as it is in Canada or the UK; I think that can indeed be blamed on the recent protests, and it may get worse.

Go East, Young Man

When this virus outbreak began—you remember we are in the middle of a pandemic, right?—I proposed that it was a kind of stress test among nations. Perhaps sent by God to do just this. It would show which societies are most vital.

Whether fully consciously or not, others seem to be making the same assumption. South Korea and Taiwan, for example, seem to have gained immensely in international prestige due to their ability to manage the crisis so well. This may be part of what is behind this drive to go from G7 to D10.

We are probably far enough into the outbreak now to declare some winners and losers. The chart shows the death rates per capita by seven-day average for a selection of countries: the developed “G7,” plus other countries in Central/Eastern Europe and East Asia.

Tropical and antipodean principalities have been excluded because I assume the virus is sensitive to heat and light. China is excluded because their figures are probably not reliable. Russia is excluded because it seems to be still in the midst of it, and the ultimate outcome is not yet clear.

Most striking, to me, is how similar the trajectories are within the different cultural groups—with the interesting exception of Germany. This suggests that culture matters more than the particular government and the measures it took.

My conclusion is that, based on this stress test, civilizational vitality is currently greatest in East Asia, with Central and Eastern Europe next. This is where we can expect the future to emerge.

Now here's a thought: given that Canada could use a larger population, it might be wisest for the future of all Canadians to prefer immigrants from these most vital cultural regions. they may bring with them this cultural vitality, and infuse us with it. At the same time, in doing so, we are less likely to drain the parent society of its vitality.

Which would mean, for example, open doors to refugees from the current Chinese crackdown on Hong Kong.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Suddenly, in Toronto, it is summer weather—t-shit weather. It was snowing two weeks ago. After the long winter, and the long lockdown, it is futile to try to enforce quarantine. Last weekend, apparently people were cheek-by-jowl in Trinity-Bellwoods Park, without masks. The washrooms were still closed, so people were urinating at random. Similar scenes are reported from the US.

It has all gone on too long.

Grocery shopping, people were less inclined than ever to maintain distancing. There was little if any pretense. Fewer were wearing masks.

We may as a result see a sudden spike in new cases and deaths—disaster. We may not. I have long thought the virus is likely to recede for the summer, from sunlight and warm weather. There has been no spike in Georgia or Florida, which ended their lockdowns weeks ago.

I think the authorities are being unwise in maintaining the lockdowns. It would be better to end them, while stressing the need for masks and distancing. That way, they would maintain some credibility, and get some compliance.

Scott Adams has reported the interesting fact that Costa Rica has a local drug industry that manufactures hydroxychloraquine. As a result, they have been prescribing it at first symptoms. I do not know if this is with or without zinc. But Costa Rica also seems to have had a notably lower death and infection rate so far than other nearby countries.

If hydroxychloroquine really does turn out to be of significant value, a lot of people will have a lot of blood on their hands for ignoring or even trying to discount it. Why is it that, at this late date, we still have no properly controlled study looking at its use at first symptoms in combination with zinc, the situation in which, clinically, is has been reported to work?

This pandemic has, it seems to me, been an education in how corrupt and self-serving the people in charge most often are.

I think many others are coming to this conclusion as well.

Still Holding Steady

Stats Suggest Lockdown Is Not Needed

JP Morgan study suggests states that have ended the lockdown in the US have seen new cases decline instead of rising.

It seems to me the datum that new cases are actually declining instead of rising when lockdowns end strengthens the thesis that the virus is sunlight-sensitive, and going into decline because of summer.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Another shopping day; about the only time I get a glimpse of the outside world. Cold May day, with leaves on the trees and flowers in bloom.

The store was more crowded this week, perhaps because of the long weekend. Half the meat aisle was empty; no powdered milk; a sign below the yeast and the baking powder warning to buy now, while supplies last.

People seem to be slacking off on the social distancing.

Trump has announced he is taking hydroxylchoraquine and zinc. The mainstream media have already declared hydroxychloroquine ineffective and dangerous. Now they must struggle to explain why Trump would be taking it himself. What will they do if a study comes in showing it is effective—for we have not yet seen a controlled study that used it as recommended?

No doubt the media would not report it. But the Trump administration could make sure the word got out.

That the media would have so recklessly got themselves into this position suggests their underlying suicidal tendencies.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Steve Bannon likes to start his shows by saying “Some decades nothing happens. Some weeks, decades happen.” It seems we are at such a time. Perhaps the biggest time of turning since 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Perhaps since 1967-68.

A compendium of the present moment:

The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases has been declining in the US, UK, Sweden, and Canada for some time. For many weeks, it seemed to be only growing; we seem to have turned the proverbial corner, crested that hill. In the US and UK, it has been going down since mid-April. In Sweden and Canada, since May 1st. This is especially significant because it has been happening at the same time that testing has been growing quickly, so that we should naturally be seeing more new cases.

The daily death toll, a lagging indicator, is also now heading steadily down.

I include Sweden to see if this is a result of the lockdown. It seems not.

Throw in Spain and France. In Spain, the number of cases has been declining since the end of March; in France, since April 2nd.

Guess what this is all aligning with?

The coming of warmer weather.

It seems as though we can generally expect an abatement of the virus for the summer months. For what that should be like, throw in the antipodes, Australia and New Zealand: a small hump around the end of March, really of infected people arriving from abroad, until the borders were shut, and now almost nothing.

We should be good for summer, here in the Northern Hemisphere, at least if we stop flights from below the equator. Until perhaps October.

This gives us some time to prepare our defenses. At a minimum, even without a vaccine or a cure, with our newfound experience, we should be able to attack the thing the way the South Koreans did, testing, tracking, isolating, masking, keeping the economy going.

In the meantime, Tim Poole worries about war breaking out between the US and China; Drudge reports a Pentagon war game suggests China could win a war with the US in the Pacific.

Let’s unpack that. There has never been a war between two nuclear powers, and there is probably a good reason: Mutual Assured Destruction. So I doubt a straight-on confrontation between the US and China. I also doubt that the Pentagon’s war game really suggested a Chinese victory. If it had, bad idea to let that get public. More likely, they are projecting into the future, in order to convince the government to take China more seriously and spend more money on the military. We used to hear similar warnings about NATO’s capability against the Warsaw Pact.

It is true that the Chinese government has been acting aggressive. But the real effect of the coronavirus seems to be to have derailed their attempt to achieve world dominance by stealth. Now suddenly everybody’s on to it; in part thanks to their missteps in handling the virus and its public relations aftereffects, in part because the virus provides a vivid mental image of Chinese infiltration.

Their current aggression may therefore be a sign of weakness and frustration; people near the top may feel a need to show they still have a handle on things—because they do not.

Joshua Philipp expects the Chinese government to collapse within a year. I find that more likely than war. China is set for a spell of severe economic contraction. The government is going to run out of money: with the shutdown, where’s their stream of cash to come from? Their belt-and-road initiative is going to collapse, because they can no longer afford it, and because other nations are now going to be suspicious of their motives. Everyone is now worried about pulling their supply chains home, or diversifying them. People suspect Chinese products are designed to spy on them. Foreign investment is going to shift to India, Indonesia, Vietnam, South America. Demographic trends were already working against China, raising the cost of Chinese labour. A coordinated opposition seems to be coalescing around Hong Kong and Falun Gong.

For many years, few in China have supported the communist government for ideological reasons. Their popular support was based on the old Confucian idea, that the party was a body of experts who could manage well. They are vulnerable to any impression of incompetence.

Early in this pandemic, I theorized that it was a way for God to topple some malignant social entities. More than a theory; it follows from monotheism.

It may well be that it had to be this harsh to do the deed. But it still seems as if designed to topple the CCP.

Perhaps others. Perhaps also the Iranian regime; the Venezuelan; perhaps the EU in its present form.

In the US, it is hitting “blue” states far harder than “red” states; almost as though they were targeted.

Not that the mere presence of the virus should discredit the local politics. However, it seems to have prompted Democratic local regimes to resort to more draconian lockdown measures, in LA, New York City, and Michigan. This is their natural tendency, after all: top down, government driven. And this is perhaps producing a popular backlash. Some “red” regimes, like Florida and Georgia, are easing the lockdowns, and, so far, getting away with it, tending to discredit the big government approach.

The pandemic has also tended to show the established “experts” as frequently wrong; as either self-interested or incompetent. And the essence of “progressive” politics has always been rule by the experts.

I wonder whether the current crisis means the end of the American left as we know it.

There are signs. Google, for example, is cutting back on its “diversity programme.” Not ideological, the techie money guys were simply betting on the side they thought would be least controversial, and so most profitable. They may swiftly switch their bet from left to right.

Mainstream media outlets, the vital pillar of leftist control of “the narrative,” are dying like summer flies on the windshield from the lack of advertising revenue; and this is beginning to include “woke” online outlets too. For one thing, in the face of the pandemic, they are looking increasingly frivolous and irresponsible. If you want reliable news of what is going on with the coronavirus, it has been necessary to go to small independent sources.

Schools, colleges, and universities have been the other strong pillar of left-wing social domination; home of the “experts” and responsible for the indoctrination of the young. They too are particularly hard hit by this pandemic, with people forced to learn how to learn at home, busting their monopoly. Even if students return in the fall, colleges have been surviving and thriving on the foreign trade. Without those international tuitions, demographics should have forced them into decline a generation ago. And the foreign students are probably not coming back for some time.

New York City is apparently emptying out; twenty percent of the population of Manhattan has left. This is a natural reaction to an epidemic; London emptied out during the Black Plague. But having learned to telecommute, and that living at close quarters is not healthy, are they all coming back? The pandemic may inspire a general migration out of cities; something that economics seems to require in any case. Politically, this means a dispersal of the leftist base into Republican territory, where they will be, in most cases, a local minority. It seems likely they will over time adopt local attitudes more often than changing them.

In the meantime, circumstances seem to be combining to destroy the Democratic campaign for this presidential election to an almost uncanny extent. Biden’s mental capacity is visibly and rapidly declining; what were the chances of that? He has been caught by serious “metoo” accusations; he has been revealed to be deeply involved in Watergate-like political corruption in the Flynn affair. This on top of the prior apparent corruption of Burisma and Hunter Biden’s other business dealings.

The nomination process already looked seriously rigged. The Democratic leadership in general looked corrupt in getting him the nomination. Now they look incompetent in doing so as well.

A weak presidential candidate should hurt them in the House and Senate elections as well; but it seems to me that the House Democrats are messing things up badly enough on their own. The impeachment drive looked at best irresponsible, when we now see there was urgent action needed on the coming pandemic. During the pandemic, they are looking at best irrelevant, in staying away from Washington, at worst obstructionist. They have not looked like part of the solution, but part of the problem. The recent Republican victory in a Democratic seat in California may suggest a canary’s dying breath in an anthracite mine.

Interesting times, lads, interesting times.

A Journal of the Plague Year

It has been looking bleaker week by week: no end to the lockdowns, talk that there might never be a vaccine. Talk that there may be no herd immunity either. Maybe one remains vulnerable to reinfection. We just keep getting it until we all die.

But in the last day or two, there has been good news.

To begin with, Sorrento Therapeutics of San Diego says they have a cure. That’s the word they use, “cure.” It is an antibody that, they say, blocks the coronavirus 100% of the time. Better than a vaccine. A vaccine is never 100%. And can risk causing rather than preventing infection. Since this is a naturally occurring antibody, it seems likely to be pretty safe. Trials must still be held, but that’s a pretty bright light suddenly appearing at the far end of this tunnel.

An online source that has been pessimistic reports a study comparing hydroxychloroquine with zinc and azithromyacin to hydroxychloroquine with azithromyacin alone. This is not exactly what we need to see, but it showed a significant effect, at least twice as high as has been claimed for remdesivir. With remdesivir, patients recovered in eleven days, compared to fifteen without treatment. With this zinc mixture, treated patients recovered in five or six days. Mortality rates were significantly lower; not so for remdesivir. It looks as though they are cut in half. This despite the fact that the mixture was only given to hospital inpatients, already experiencing severe symptoms. Previous studies suggest hydroxychloroquine is most effective if given at first symptoms.

Other studies are showing that Vitamin D deficiency is highly correlated with the severity of the illness: a serious deficit makes you eight times more likely to die. If we can all take Vitamin D if we are deficient, fewer may get the virus, and fewer get seriously ill from it.

John Campbell reports that the British figures show a mortality rate of only 0.05 percent there, without these factors yet being added.

Scott Adams reports a study that universal use of face masks would by itself reduce the transmission rate by 80%. And probably cause what infections happen to be less severe.

Imagine how much less troubling coronavirus would be if all of these steps were implemented. My math is probably wrong here, but back-of-the-envelope: Face masks reduce death rates to 0.00625. Vitamin D further reduces death rates to 0.00078125. Hydroxy/zinc/zpack pulls it down to 0.00039—less, because it would also have an effect in reducing spread. Then, when it comes onstream, the antibody treatment gets it down to zero.

Meantime, the rate of transmission or death does not seem so far to have jumped in Georgia, considered reckless for opening up a few weeks ago. It may simply be that summer has arrived, first in the southern states, and that will significantly reduce the rate of spread in itself.

Meantime, Scott Adams, who has a degree in economics and an MBA, thinks we will see no serious economic fallout from all the extra debt for pandemic bailouts.

If the economy can open again, with a cure seeming just around the corner, things may take off like a rocket.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Shopping day today. The meat counter looked deceptively full. It wasn’t. A portion was fresh pasta instead, as before, now without the excuse of a special on it. A portion, when I looked closer, was vegetarian meat substitutes—brands and items the store never carried before.

Yeast reappeared, after long absence, but an unfamiliar brand.

Social distancing was impossible; no one else was doing it, and many objected if you tried. It does appear unfriendly if you hold back until they finish, or refuse to pass. Unpleasant experience.

I also felt that everyone’s mood was darker. Last week, and weeks before, there was a spirit of “we’re all in this together.” Now people everywhere are getting cranky. Probably including me. It’s past having any novelty value, and we are losing hope it will all end well if we just do as we are told by the authorities.

You can almost see the social fibres snapping.

The store seemed a bit busier than last week, but still no lineup and no wait to get in.

Dr. John Campbell, one of my YouTube authorities, reported a study in the New England Journal of Medicine which, he said, showed that hydroxychloroquine unfortunately did not work. But I, and many other listeners, immediately saw problems with the study. It was used without zinc, and in emergency departments on those with severe symptoms. It was almost as though they crafted the study to return negative results.

Dr. Campbell backed down from his definitive statement the next day.

I’d say hydroxychloroquine is still alive. It looks sinister that remdesivir has been approved already, despite only marginal results in an unfinished study, while we hear almost nothing officially about hydroxychloroquine, and what we hear seems engineered to be negative. Hydroxychloraquine is cheap and readily available. Remdesivir is a gigantic profit opportunity for Gilead Pharmaceuticals. It is almost enough to make you doubt the system.

As Milton Friedman pointed out, the problem with government regulations is that, in order to set and enforce regulations, government is obliged to rely on the expertise of those actually in the industry. So what do they do? Ensure the regulations reduce competition and work to their benefit instead of that of the consumer.

There are rumblings of other possible treatments. Campbell and Scott Adams are now both suggesting that Vitamin D deficiency may be an important factor in how badly one is affected by the virus. The statistical correlations look impressive. Again, it is striking that we hear nothing about vitamin D from any government source: there’s no money in it for the pharmaceuticals.

Adams has been saying there is no way we can have enough tests available in the next few months to move to a strategy of test, trace, and isolate—the obvious alternative to lockdown. But yesterday, Trump announced that the US had enough testing capacity now to do so. And the British government has begun the program on the Isle of Wight, with plans to make it universal in a week or two if all works as hoped.

It seems to me we can get things back up and moving with such a strategy, combined with UV light for sterilization in public places, infrared cameras to check for fevers at entrances to public buildings, face masks, checking everyone for vitamin D deficiency, and isolation of seniors and those with other risk factors. Even without effective treatments.