The Italian Coronavirus experience

Italians are great dramatizers.  Are they dramatizing here too?

Here’s the basic situation: the Italian health agencies are reporting escalating COV deaths—big fear-story out front…

But in the background, other Italian government researchers are combing through patient records, to take a much closer look…to see whether people are dying from the virus or other more obvious causes.

Are people dying coincidentally WITH the virus, or BECAUSE OF the virus? Is the virus a mere harmless passenger in the body, or is it the driving force?

The Italian results are astonishing, to understate it by a mile. Bloomberg News has the story: 3/18, “99 percent of those whose died from virus had other illness, Italy says”:

“More than 99% [!] of Italy’s coronavirus fatalities were people who suffered from previous medical conditions, according to a study by the country’s national health authority.”

“The Rome-based institute has examined medical records of about 18% of the country’s coronavirus fatalities [so far, because it’s slow work], finding that just three victims [!!], or 0.8% of the total, had no previous pathology [disease]. Almost half of the victims suffered from at least three prior illnesses and about a fourth had either one or two previous conditions.”

“More than 75% had high blood pressure, about 35% had diabetes and a third suffered from heart disease.”

“The average age of those who’ve died from the virus in Italy is 79.5 [!!!]. As of March 17, 17 people under 50 had died from the disease. All of Italy’s victims under 40 have been males with serious existing medical conditions.”

BANG.

Average age of those who’ve died: 79.5. Are you kidding? Lots of prior medical conditions, weakened immune systems, and what this emerging study isn’t saying: all these people had obviously been treated for those prior conditions with toxic medical drugs. Furthermore, once they’d been diagnosed with coronavirus, chances are many of them were put on highly toxic antiviral drugs. Thus delivering the final blow.

Imagining the coronavirus was the CAUSE of death would be a ridiculous fantasy. But these people are counted as “coronavirus deaths” by the other Italian reporting agencies, who are jacking up the numbers.

Does this remind you of any other reports I’ve been detailing? The elderly people with obvious prior diseases who died in Australia; and the elderly people who were diagnosed as coronavirus cases in the state of Washington—all living in a long-term-care nursing home?

Getting the picture? This death-numbers con—aside from covering up the real causes of death, including MEDICAL—is the forward spear being used to justify locking down and wrecking economies all over the world right now, and that means attacking the people in any way connected to those economies who have to work to make a living.

There are statistical vampires at work, using the elderly and sick and dying to feed numbers to health agencies around the planet. Those agencies tap their press contacts, and horror reports emerge, and the unsuspecting public, in economic lockdowns, sit in front of the tube and watch these reports, and inhale the cooked-up fear.

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Argentinian Doctor Sentenced to Prison for Refusing to Terminate Pregnancy

In Sweden, midwives can be fired and deemed unemployable for refusing abortion. In Ontario Canada, doctors can face professional discipline for refusing to administer (or refer for) euthanasia. Ditto to refusing an abortion in Victoria, Australia. In California, a Catholic hospital is being sued–with the explicit blessing of the courts–for refusing to allow a transgender hysterectomy.

But now in Argentina, the right to obtain an abortion has been declared so fundamental that an objecting M.D. can be held criminally culpable for refusing to terminate a pregnancy.

That would seem to be a moral and legal impossibility. But Argentina just elevated the “medical conscience” controversy to a whole new level of concern — from the potential of not “only” having one’s professional license revoked, but also, to the loss of personal freedom for refusing to act against personal conscience based on deeply held religious, moral, or professional beliefs. From the BioEdge story:

An Argentine court has upheld the criminal conviction of a gynaecologist who refused to abort the child of a rape victim in 2017. Dr Leandro Rodriguez Lastra was sentenced to a 14-month suspended jail term, plus 28 months of disqualification from holding public office. Dr Rodriguez Lastro will appeal.

The victim was a 19-year-old in her fifth month of pregnancy, the result of sexual abuse by a relative. At first she used an abortion drug provided by an NGO. That failed and she was referred to the hospital where Rodríguez Lastra was head of gynecology.

The doctor said that abortion posed a risk to both the unborn child and the mother. However, the judges said that the only thing necessary for a legal termination of pregnancy was a formal request from the rape victim.

The child was later given up for adoption.

Good grief, it’s almost as if the court considered the doctor to be a co-conspirator with the rapist.

Adding to the topsy-turvy nature of that decision, instead of being dead the baby is alive in the world. Shouldn’t that outcome, at least, be a cause for celebration instead of condemnation in this difficult circumstance?

How can a doctor be imprisoned for obeying the Hippocratic Oath? Lastra is a licensed professional and the court decided that refusing to abort constituted a “failure to comply with the duties of a public official,” which was an affront to the mother’s “autonomy.” The BioEdge story quoted the court’s ruling:

“Faced with the intersection of so many vulnerabilities, the accused ignored the autonomy of the young woman, giving priority to the reproductive function that she symbolized as a woman, over her dignity, over her right to health and to be informed, accompanied, contained and respected in the process of interrupting the pregnancy, an interruption to which she had a right over any other right or interest”.

“ … ignoring a woman’s voice, ignoring her vital needs, subjugating reproductive rights, devastating the psyche and enslaving the body in order to force pregnancy after a rape, means denying the victim’s status as a subject of rights and is the incarnation of gender violence in its most painful form”.

And here’s a telling twist to the story: A few years ago, a different Argentinian court granted an orangutan a writ of habeas corpus to be released from a zoo. So, an ape was declared a wrongfully imprisoned “person,” while a doctor was declared a criminal for refusing to take innocent human life.

I can write those words. I understand their meaning. But I can’t comprehend such an utter rejection of human exceptionalism.

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Cop hatred from the ACLU

When a white cop shoots at a black crook, it's the white cop who is in danger  -- Devin Eaton in this case

A few hours before the sun came up on April 16, Devin and his partner got a call that changed his life forever. Armed robbery in progress.

After a caller called about a robbery at a gas station, the reported robber – Paul Witherspoon – sped off... but not before the caller gave a 9-1-1 operator his complete description.  Black male.  Dreadlocks.  Red car. They even got the license plate number right.

And that’s what the police dispatcher conveyed to my son - the robber had a gun.

When Devin saw the suspect at a red light, he turned his patrol car around and flipped on the blue lights. As my son got out of his police cruiser and approached the red car Witherspoon swung open his door and aggressively jumped out to face Devin.

It was before dawn.  Chilly.  And Witherspoon had a dark object in his right hand.

That’s when Officer Eaton drew his service pistol and fired several shots at the suspect. A Yale University officer had also joined the felony stop... and fired his gun at Witherspoon, too.

Devin only had a split-second to react. He was afraid for his life and he knew the caller reported that Witherspoon was armed. Following his police training, Devin acted to protect himself and his partner.

Witherspoon wasn’t injured, but the passenger in his car was hit with a non-lethal shot.

We breathed a sigh of relief... until the ACLU got involved.

They’ve got a long history of being anti-cop.  And they demanded that Devin son be fired from his calling – the police officer career he loves.

The facts show that Devin acted properly with the information he had. But the prosecutor didn’t see it that way. So, five months after the event, the state attorney charged my son with Aggravated Assault.

Now I worry for his safety. You see, after the ACLU sent that letter to the Mayor, anti-cop protesters locked arms and marched in the streets.

Devin never asked for any of this. All he did was make a split-second decision when he thought his life was in imminent danger.

And for simply following his training and making his best effort to protect himself and his fellow officers, Devin is staring at twenty years in prison!

To make matters worse, Devin has been suspended – without pay – from his job as a police officer.

Devin’s legal bills have climbed to neck high.

But just when we were about to lose hope, we got a phone call from Jason Johnson at the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF).

If you know anything about LELDF, you know they help fund and prepare a successful legal defense for good cops who’ve been wrongly accused of crimes they didn’t commit.

But we aren’t out of the woods yet. We still have to raise the money for Devin’s case.

That’s why I’m imploring you to find it in your heart to donate just $35, $50, $100 or more to LELDF

You see, LELDF is a non-profit organization which means they don’t receive any money from the government.

P.S. Witherspoon has a rap sheet a mile long.  His arrest record is littered with offenses like driving under the influence, carrying a dangerous weapon, and reckless driving

Donations here

Via email from Conservative Action News:  team@mail.conservativeactionnews.com






We are about to find out how robust civilisation is

Matt Ridley

On Sunday, lonely as a cloud, I wandered across a windswept moor in County Durham and passed a solitary sandstone rock with a small, round hollow in the top, an old penny glued to the base of the hollow. It is called the Butter Stone and it’s where, during the plague in 1665, coins were left in a pool of vinegar by the inhabitants of nearby towns and villages, to be exchanged with farmers for food. The idea was that the farmer or his customer approached the rock only when the other was at a safe distance.

Four modern coins were on the rock, anonymous offerings to the spirits of the moor. Never once in my six decades did I expect to be back in a 17th-century world of social and physical distancing as a matter of life and death.

There are no good outcomes from here. Many people will die prematurely. Many will lose their jobs. Many businesses will go under. Many people will suffer bereavement, loneliness and despair, even if they dodge the virus. The only question is how many in each case. We are about to find out how robust civilisation is. The hardships ahead are like nothing we’ve known.

The British government has been unusual in ramping up its social distancing measures, rather than rushing them all at once. This resulted in a good deal of bafflement and criticism, some of it justified. The driving motive was concern that a resurgence of the virus after its initial suppression would be a disastrous outcome, because people would not allow themselves to be curfewed twice, so the timing had to be right. But the vicious experience of Italy has changed everything. So when the darned models revealed that a single ‘managed’ peak here leading to eventual herd immunity might kill 260,000 people and overwhelm the National Health Service, the strategy shifted from ‘delay’ to ‘suppress’.

The government is now effectively admitting that even if drastic curfews lead to successive waves of the disease, that may be the least worst outcome. It is still a daunting prospect. Successive waves mean successive curfews and successive body blows to the economy. If we clamp down hard now and the infection rate drops, then we might be able slowly and cautiously to restart the economy in the summer but have to clamp down again when the virus resurges. Each time we do this, it will be more painful, but at least the health service will be that much better prepared, with more intensive-care beds, more isolation facilities, more ventilators, more and newer testing kits, more data on the efficacy of repurposed drugs.

Moreover, each time the virus re-emerges, there will be more immune people to help look after the sick. Once you’ve had the disease, and assuming the immunity you acquire is long-lasting (not yet certain), then you are in a special category of person who can be employed — or volunteer — for what would otherwise be risky work, and for looking after older people. Each wave of the disease can then be less awful.

One side-effect of the government’s step-by-step approach is that the people have got ahead of the authorities. Lots of people have been volunteering to give up gatherings, work from home if they can or travel less before being asked to. The chorus of complaint last week on social media that the government was not doing enough is a sign that people are now telling the government what to do — which is how it should be in a democracy. A prime minister is being criticised for not ordering us to do things, but ‘advising’ us. Better than the other way round. As the libertarian thinker Douglas Carswell put it on Monday: ‘Treat people as responsible adults and they will behave more responsibly.’

Until this year I thought this kind of infectious pandemic could not happen today. The defeat of infectious diseases as a cause of death has been so complete as to seem invincible: plague, smallpox, cholera, typhoid, measles, polio, whooping cough and many more eradicated or nearly so. The failure of terrifying new animal-derived viruses like Hanta, Marburg, Sars, Mers, ebola, swine flu, bird flu and zika to cause more than a local or temporary interruption of the march of progress left us complacent. (Only HIV went global.) The advance of science allowing the rapid reading of the genome of the new coronavirus gave us false confidence: we would know how to beat it by the time it got out of China. It seemed that only the most innocuous of common colds, and milder forms of flu, seemed capable of remaining ubiquitous. And coronaviruses are a common cause of the common cold, so (despite Sars) they seemed like pussy cats, not tigers.

It turns out that I and many others were badly wrong. The human race has been playing epidemiological Russian roulette all along. It has taken Mother Nature a long time to put a bullet in the right chamber, combining high contagion with asymptomatic carriers and a significant death rate, but she has done it.

We now know that we should have been building far more preparedness for such an event. The World Health Organization has been asleep at the switch. The Wellcome Trust did well to establish a Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation in 2017 in partnership with the Gates Foundation along with the Indian and Norwegian governments, but it should have been started much earlier.

Against many risks, excess precaution is a mistake, doing more harm than good by preventing innovation — but not in the case of threats that can explode exponentially from small beginnings. Apart from Singapore, which built a special hospital after Sars, and South Korea, which geared up to test people and gather data on a huge scale, the world had done far too little to get ready for this possibility. Everything now is catch-up. And we are trying to catch the fastest runner of them all: an exponential curve.

The number of cases outside China has increased tenfold roughly every ten days. If it continues at this rate, in two months the virus will have infected 100 million people. A vast experiment is happening as different countries try different strategies, with some in Asia having notably more success than others in Europe. But to stop the virus gaining a permanent foothold in the human population will require every single one of those experiments to work.

In the long run, we will get through this. Effective drugs will be found. Methods for keeping the very sick from dying will improve. The milder forms of the virus will probably out-compete the harsher versions. A vaccine may yet work — though it has come as quite a shock to find out just how little vaccine development has improved in recent decades. Genomics allows us to read viral genomes in a flash and make messenger-RNA vaccines, in which the body manufactures the viral proteins, doing away with the need to put killed or attenuated viruses into the body. None the less, a scientific paper that I failed to read last year warned: ‘The current state of vaccine development is an expensive, slow and laborious process, costing billions of dollars, taking decades, with less than a 10 per cent rate of success.’

We must not despair or return permanently to autarky and localism. With the right precautions, an open, free-trading, free-moving, innovating world is possible without pandemics and is essential for raising living standards. Government must both splash the cash and slash many of the things it does that are not urgent to alleviate human suffering, and there are a lot of them. But in the midst of our misery let us be thankful for one thing: unlike many plagues, this one spares children.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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