A reasonable, clearly explained analysis by Eyal Shahar   Not a shred of doubt: Sweden was right.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Counting the dead used to be the work of epidemiologists, statisticians and demographers. So was analyzing the numbers and drawing conclusions. In the past year many are counting deaths, but the numbers have no meaning without the context of a relevant time period, population and history. That is, epidemiology.

The most counted country is probably Sweden, a stubborn dissenter that refused lockdowns, mask mandates and contact tracing. By the time of this writing, 14,349 Swedes have reportedly died from the coronavirus.

Has the Swedish model failed?
Were the lockdowns justified?
Were the economic and social upheavals in most of the world an unavoidable necessity?

The answer to all is a resounding no. The first (and not the only) witness: Sweden.
To understand the testimony, we need to learn only two concepts: “flu year” and “excess mortality”.

“Flu year” versus calendar year

Many calculate mortality statistics according to the Gregorian calendar, but December 31st is not a meaningful end date for winter mortality in the northern hemisphere. The flu wave and the associated wave of mortality reach the peak at various dates, and sometimes secondary waves appear. Furthermore, the use of the Gregorian calendar combines the mortality in the first part of one winter (sometimes mild) with mortality in the second part of the previous winter (sometimes severe). There is no scientific justification for this grouping when analyzing historical trends.

The statistical alternative, which may be called “flu year”, contains a full winter season. Annual mortality is calculated from the beginning of the flu season, which is usually counted from week 40 (early October), till week 39 in the following year (end of September). Thus, the coronavirus waves in the spring and summer of 2020 belong to the 2019–2020 flu year, whereas the last winter wave belongs to the current flu year which will end in September.

Excess mortality

The concept of “excess mortality” is a little abstract. We need to compare actual mortality with “expected mortality”, but the latter is a theoretical idea that cannot be verified: what would the mortality in the 2019–2020 flu year have been, had there not been a pandemic? How do we calculate “expected mortality”?

One method uses a statistical model called linear regression. We fit a line to the mortality data from previous years, check its past performance, and use the continuation of the line to compute expected mortality. The distance between a data point of actual mortality and expected mortality on the line is excess mortality (or “mortality deficit”).

Mortality in Sweden by flu year

The graph shows the annual mortality in Sweden per million people in the last 22 flu years, where each flu year is labeled according to the calendar year in which it ends. For example, the last data point on the graph is mortality between October 2019 and September 2020: 9,234 per million people (95,365 deaths). To magnify, the vertical axis starts at 7,000.  Source: SCB.SE

It is easy to see that the points are located close to a straight line, until the flu year that ended in September 2018. The general downward trend reflects a consistent increase in life expectancy in Sweden for many years.

Experienced data analysts will attest that the fluctuations around the line are generally small and expected until 2018 (explained variation: 0.96). In contrast, both the flu year that preceded the pandemic (2018–2019) and the pandemic year (2019–2020) substantially deviate from the line: the former — in lower than expected mortality, and the latter — in higher than expected mortality.

Excess mortality in Sweden in flu year 2019–2020

Continuation of the line, which was fit by the statistical model, yields the following estimates: In 2018–2019 there was “mortality deficit” in Sweden of 300 per million people (-3.3%) whereas in 2019–2020, the pandemic year, there was excess mortality of 364 per million people (+4.1%). Excess mortality following mortality deficit, and vice versa, are well known and expected, as the main source of mortality is an elderly population with limited life expectancy. (The sequence “excess after deficit” is, of course, better than the reverse order.)

Assuming the excess mortality in 2019–2020 “fully balanced” the mortality deficit in the previous flu year, the true excess mortality in Sweden was less than 1% (about 700 deaths). And if we assume, absurdly, that the mortality in 2019–2020 was not affected at all by the mortality deficit in the previous flu year, then the excess mortality in Sweden did not exceed 4.1% (about 3,800 deaths). Excess mortality of a few percentage points, or more, has been calculated in many countries where life has been severely disrupted. Part of that excess has been attributed to lockdown and panic.

To remind us, the hysterical response to the pandemic was not due to fear of an excess annual mortality of 4% or even 10%. The apocalyptic forecasts, which caused the world to shut down, predicted about 90,000 deaths from the coronavirus in Sweden by the summer of 2020: 100% excess mortality! No wonder policy makers around the world prefer to forget those predictions.

Mortality in Sweden in the current flu year

The final summary of the current flu year (October 2020 — September 2021) will be known in the fall, but the data accumulated more than halfway through allow for interim conclusions. As many know, the coronavirus replaced the flu viruses this year, and there was no flu in Sweden, either. Nor were there apocalyptic predictions; only warnings about the number of accumulated deaths.

I chose to compare the mortality in Sweden in the current flu year (week 40, 2020 till week 15, 2021) to the corresponding mortality in 2017–2018. Two reasons for this choice: First, Europe experienced a severe flu season in that winter, which makes it an appropriate comparison. Second, although the flu season was severe in Sweden compared to previous years, it was still substantially milder than in Europe as a whole.

The graph shows a low mortality wave at the end of 2017 and a noticeable wave in February-March 2018 (another example of why a December 31st cutoff might distort historical trends). This winter, the mortality wave coincided with the coronavirus wave and its peak in late December. (In 2020 there were 53 weeks, so the dates do not exactly match.) A secondary coronavirus wave, which appeared in mid-February, half way through the decline of the former, did not result in a secondary mortality wave.

The all-cause death toll in Sweden in the first 29 weeks of the current flu year is 56,452 (5,441 per million people) compared to 55,967 (5,544 per million people) in the same period in 2017–2018. In that winter, the excess mortality rate in Europe attributed to the flu was at least twice as high as in Sweden.

Sweden proved right in the retest.

A colossal mistake

The pandemic has taken its death toll, ranging from large to small in different countries and within countries, and mostly affected the frail elderly. But the lockdowns and panic were unsubstantiated, prevented nothing, and caused indescribable damage to society. Sweden’s statistics tell us, unequivocally, that in much of the world lives have been lost and livelihoods have been destroyed — in vain.

Will anyone, in any country, be held accountable?

Eyal Shahar,

Professor Emeritus of Public Health (University of Arizona);
MD (Tel-Aviv University, Israel);
MPH, Epidemiology (University of Minnesota)

 

The sordid story is about big pharma aided and abetted by big media and tech protecting their pandemic payday by banishing mention or acknowledgement of ivermectin’s success fighting Covid19.  H/T Jo Nova article It’s the biggest medical scandal since 1850.  Excerpt in italics:

Michael Capuzzo, a New York Times best-selling author , has just published an article titled “The Drug That Cracked Covid”. … But unfortunately most reporters are not interested in telling the other side of the story. Even if they were, their publishers would probably refuse to publish it.

That may explain why Capuzzo, a six-time Pulitzer-nominated journalist best known for his New York Times-bestselling nonfiction books Close to Shore and Murder Room, ended up publishing his article on ivermectin in Mountain Home, a monthly local magazine for the people of the Pennsylvania mountains and New York Finger Lakes region, of which Capuzzo’s wife is the editor.

Michael Capuzzo writes at Mountain Home The Story of the Cover Story. Excerpts in italics with my bolds

When my daughter Grace, a vice president at a New York advertising agency, came down with COVID-19 recently, she was quarantined in a “COVID hotel” in Times Square with homeless people and quarantining travelers. The locks on her room door were removed. Nurses prowled the halls to keep her in her room and wake her up every night to check her vitals—not to treat her, because there is no approved treatment for COVID-19; only, if her oxygen plummeted, to move her to the hospital, where there is only a single effective approved treatment for COVID-19, steroids that may keep the lungs from failing.

The absence of treatments for COVID-19 is a global crisis, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said recently on 60 Minutes, for vaccines “are not enough.” Dangerous variants sweep the globe after mutating in the world’s poor and unvaccinated, lockdowns persist, and millions more are likely to die. The wondrous m-RNA vaccines need a cop buddy.

Fortunately, I knew of an early treatment for Grace. It’s a cheap generic drug, safer than Tylenol, FDA-approved to treat scabies and lice in children and the elderly, with many other uses that make Ivermectin a “wonder drug.” In fifty-five clinical trials with 445 scientists and 17,730 patients around the world, Ivermectin has been shown to be the most powerful drug to eradicate COVID-19 in all stages of the disease, including prevention and early treatment.

It’s what the world desperately needs now, according to Dr. Pierre Kory, a former professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison medical school, whose research group, the nonprofit Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, has developed the most effective non-vaccine treatments in the world from safe, FDA-approved generics. They have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, including eighty-year-old Judy Smentkiewicz of Buffalo, the star of this month’s cover story. Judy’s remarkable story is a “miracle,” her family says, thanks to Pierre Kory, science, and God.

Grace researched Ivermectin and was surprised that it is not FDA-approved as an anti-viral to treat COVID-19, although it is FDA-approved as an anti-parasitic agent. This would be an “off-label use,” a routine thing in medicine comprising some 20 percent of all prescriptions—aspirin to prevent heart attack or stroke, for instance, is “off label.” This is called doctoring. And it was routine until COVID-19, when a big pharma-dominated health system tried to eliminate all generic competition to protect its biggest payday of all time.

Judy had the choice to fight back or die. A worldwide revolution that will determine the future of medicine and who lives and dies from COVID-19—the battle of Ivermectin—is fighting back, fighting for life. Grace, I’m happy to say, was prescribed Ivermectin and got better fast.

If you are interested in Ivermectin, check out http://www.flccc.net, and talk to your doctor. Here’s a help page on how to talk to your doctor: http://www.COVID19criticalcare.com/guide-for-this-website.

I got onto this story on Mother’s Day, 2020, when my wife Teresa, who many know as the publisher and editor of Mountain Home, and I watched Dr. Kory testify to the U.S. Senate about his group’s first breakthrough, a steroid treatment that was saving 95 percent of COVID-19 patients when 80 percent were dying in New York City and the world was in panic. To our surprise, as longtime journalists—we met at The Philadelphia Inquirer—Dr. Kory was cancelled by a global news blackout. Was not a treatment that could save the world news?

While Teresa puts out the magazine, I’ve written two New York Times-bestselling books, Close to Shore and The Murder Room, featuring some of the world’s most brilliant scientists. Now I’ve spent months interviewing Kory and his colleagues, and I’ve seen unthinkable things. When professor Joe Varon, a top critical care doctor and Mexican-American hero recently honored with “Joseph Varon Day” in Houston for his COVID-19 treatments that are saving the city’s sickest poor, black, Mexican, and immigrants, invited journalists from CNN, The Associated Press, and Reuters to his COVID-19 ICU to get out the news of his life-saving treatment, all the journalists fictionalized the story to make it seem like most everyone was dying when in fact most everyone was living. The happy story, the truth, didn’t fit the official government science.

We live in a remarkable media age where a positive story on CNN, perhaps more so than a peer review in The New England Journal of Medicine, will instantly encourage doctors in two hundred countries to use a perfectly safe and legal drug and save humanity. I call on my fellow colleagues, including former colleagues and friends at The Washington Post and The New York Times, to open their hearts and minds to legitimate, unreported doctors and therapies and write about all sides of the Ivermectin story, like journalists always have. It is a historic opportunity.

For the first time in the long journey from Gutenberg to Google, journalists may be the ones to save the world.

All of sudden, legacy and social media are allowing suspicions about the origins of WuFlu.  For example, a Real Politics article Another ‘Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory’ May Prove Correct.  Excerpt in italics with my bolds.

If only we lived in fairytale land, where the little boy’s observation that the emperor has no clothes snapped the people back to reality. In modern America, however, the exposure of delusional prevarications is met with a shrug by the powers that be, who simply move on to the peddling of other untruths.

For more than a year, government experts and their stenographers at our most prestigious media outlets denied what was clear to anybody with a modicum of common sense – that the COVID-19 pandemic that had originated in Wuhan, China, could have originated in the Wuhan lab where scientists were performing dangerous research into coronaviruses.

And now a video from Dr. Lawrence Sellin:

Transcript from closed captions in italics with my bolds.

I am Dr Lawrence Sellin. First I would like to thank all the young anti-communist chinese men and women who have worked with me to expose the truth about the laboratory origin of covid 19. Yes, covid 19 was created in a laboratory and it was a product of the People’s Liberation Army’s bio warfare program. I no longer use the word leak to describe what happened because that infers negligence but innocence of intent. The Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army are not innocent so it does not matter how covid 19 was released because it was part of an evil plan with evil intent.

Together we have proven that covid 19 came from a laboratory, and because of our hard work, the world is beginning to accept that fact. The creation of covid19 was part of a process that has been underway for decades, but one that was greatly accelerated in 2016 by the fusion of military and civilian research as directed by the CCP’s 13th five-year plan.

Since the beginning of the pandemic it has been our goal to discover how covid19 was made and who made it. The answers to those questions reside in an analysis of the structure and organization of the PLA’s bio warfare program. As you know we have been using a technique I call virus research network analysis. It is a modification of traffic analysis, a method developed during the early days of world war II by Britain’s Gordon Welchman at Bletchley Park, which contributed to the breaking of Germany’s enigma code.

Let us now review what we know. The PLA’s biowarfare program has three levels: First there is a core secret military level layered on top of that are china’s universities and civilian institutions. It is that middle layer which gives the PLA access to the knowledge and skills of the international virus research community. Overall command and control of the PLA’s biowarfare program is done through the academy of military medical sciences in coordination with china’s ostensibly civilian academy of science and the Centers for Disease Control.

Over many years there has been a massive virus collection effort led by the PLA’s veterinary institute headquartered in Tan Chang. Other facilities such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology have been involved in the collection of viruses. Some bad coronaviruses were selected for further bio-warfare development based on their potential to jump from bats to humans that was a fundamental PLA bio-warfare criterion. That is the ability to blame nature for an actual bio-warfare attack.

Two bad coronaviruses isolated by the PLA were zcc 45 and zxc 2041 identified by Dr Lee Main Young as the coronavirus backbone for covid19. Laboratory manipulation of bad coronavirus backbones coordinated by the PLA was done at different centers focusing on different aspects of biowarfare weapon development. Virus recombination and gain of function research was undertaken at several sites including the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Pre-adaptation for human infection by serial passaging using genetically engineered humanized animal models occurred under the guidance of Tuwan King of the institute of laboratory animal science. Shibujang likely supervised the insertion of the fury and cleavage site with expertise provided by the southern medical university in Guangzhou.

Based on sources inside china a fully formed or nearly fully formed covid19 virus was ready for testing in the early months of 2019. The full extent of that testing is not yet known, especially whether or not there was a deliberate release into a human test community. Again based on sources inside china one covid19 sample was sent from Nanjing headquarters of the PLA’s eastern theater command to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for testing on non-human primates. In that time frame the only facility in Wuhan capable of undertaking such studies was the biosafety level 3 animal laboratory at Wuhan University. That facility also happens to be in the same district that was the epicenter of the initial covid19 outbreak. That test therefore is one potential scenario for the start of the pandemic

That is what we know but there is still more to do. Even though we know the covid19 virus was man-made, we need to understand all the details of how it was made and by whom. We need to describe the complete structure and organization of the PLA’s biowarfare program. We need to expose the extent of the PLA infiltration of international virus research programs, and which scientists assisted the PLA, either directly or indirectly in its biowarfare efforts.

Our investigation will continue.

Background from Previous Post

 

Update March 27, 2021 Ex-CDC Director Believes Wuhan Flu Escaped from a Lab

Live Science reports Ex-CDC director believes COVID-19 escaped from a lab, but cites no evidence

Excerpts in italics with my bolds.  A previous post is reprinted further on showing the evidence not discussed and hand-waved away by Fauci, whose NIH funded the Wuhan research facility from which the virus likely came.

Dr. Robert Redfield told CNN that this was his opinion on the origins of the virus.

“I’m of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped,” Redfield told CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta. “Other people don’t believe that, that’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out.”

Still, a number of scientists say the most likely explanation is that the virus emerged naturally, passing from bats to another animal and then to humans, Live Science previously reported. Recently, a team from the World Health Organization, which is investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2, said that it agrees with this hypothesis — WHO officials said the virus likely passed from bats to animals on wildlife farms in China, and then to humans, Live Science previously reported.

Redfield said he didn’t believe the bat theory. “Normally, when a pathogen goes from a zoonosis to humans, it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more and more efficient in human-to-human transmission,” Redfield told CNN. “I just don’t think this makes biological sense.”

The former CDC chief wasn’t suggesting SARS-CoV-2 is an engineered virus — another theory with no supporting evidence — just a natural escapee. “In the lab, you think that that process of becoming more efficient was happening?” Gupta asked. [Note:  There is significant evidence of an engineered virus documented in the discussion below.]

“Yeah, let’s just say I have coronavirus that I’m working on. Most of us in the lab, we’re trying to grow a virus, we try to help make it grow better and better and better … so we can do experiments,” Redfield responded.

Why Wu Flu Virus Looks Man-made ( previously posted Sept. 2020)

A virologist who fled China after studying the early outbreak of COVID-19 has published a new report claiming the coronavirus likely came from a lab.  This adds to the analysis done by Dr. Luc Montagnier earlier this year, and summarized in a previous post reprinted later on.  Dr. Yan was interviewed on Fox News, and YouTube has now blocked the video.

If you are wondering why Big Tech is censoring information unflattering to China, see Lee Smith’s Tablet article America’s China Class Launches a New War Against Trump  The corporate, tech, and media elites will not allow the president to come between them and Chinese money

Doctor Li-Meng Yan, a scientist who studied some of the available data on COVID-19 has published her claims on Zenodo, an open access digital platform. She wrote that she believed COVID-19 could have been “conveniently created” within a lab setting over a period of just six months, and “SARS-CoV-2 shows biological characteristics that are inconsistent with a naturally occurring, zoonotic virus”.

The paper by Yan, Li-Meng; Kang, Shu; Guan, Jie; Hu, Shanchang  is Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Overview

The natural origin theory, although widely accepted, lacks substantial support. The alternative theory that the virus may have come from a research laboratory is, however, strictly censored on peer-reviewed scientific journals. Nonetheless, SARS-CoV-2 shows biological characteristics that are inconsistent with a naturally occurring, zoonotic virus. In this report, we describe the genomic, structural, medical, and literature evidence, which, when considered together, strongly contradicts the natural origin theory.

The evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 should be a laboratory product created by using bat coronaviruses ZC45 and/or ZXC21 as a template and/or backbone.

Contents

Consistent with this notion, genomic, structural, and literature evidence also suggest a non-natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. In addition, abundant literature indicates that gain-of-function research has long advanced to the stage where viral genomes can be precisely engineered and manipulated to enable the creation of novel coronaviruses possessing unique properties. In this report, we present such evidence and the associated analyses.

Part 1 of the report describes the genomic and structural features of SARS-CoV-2, the presence of which could be consistent with the theory that the virus is a product of laboratory modification beyond what could be afforded by simple serial viral passage. Part 2 of the report describes a highly probable pathway for the laboratory creation of SARS-CoV-2, key steps of which are supported by evidence present in the viral genome. Importantly, part 2 should be viewed as a demonstration of how SARS-CoV-2 could be conveniently created in a laboratory in a short period of time using available materials and well-documented techniques. This report is produced by a team of experienced scientists using our combined expertise in virology, molecular biology, structural biology, computational biology, vaccine development, and medicine.

We present three lines of evidence to support our contention that laboratory manipulation is part of the history of SARS-CoV-2:

i. The genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 is suspiciously similar to that of a bat coronavirus discovered by military laboratories in the Third Military Medical University (Chongqing, China) and the Research Institute for Medicine of Nanjing Command (Nanjing, China).

ii. The receptor-binding motif (RBM) within the Spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, which determines the host specificity of the virus, resembles that of SARS-CoV from the 2003 epidemic in a suspicious manner. Genomic evidence suggests that the RBM has been genetically manipulated.

iii. SARS-CoV-2 contains a unique furin-cleavage site in its Spike protein, which is known to greatly enhance viral infectivity and cell tropism. Yet, this cleavage site is completely absent in this particular class of coronaviruses found in nature. In addition, rare codons associated with this additional sequence suggest the strong possibility that this furin-cleavage site is not the product of natural evolution and could have been inserted into the SARS-CoV-2 genome artificially by techniques other than simple serial passage or multi-strain recombination events inside co-infected tissue cultures or animals.

Background from Previous post June 30, 2020:  Pandemic Update: Virus Weaker, HCQ Stronger

In past weeks there have been anecdotal reports from frontline doctors that patients who would have been flattened fighting off SARS CV2 in April are now sitting up and recovering in a few days. We have also the statistical evidence in the US and Sweden, as two examples, that case numbers are rising while Covid deaths continue declining. One explanation is that the new cases are younger people who have been released from lockdown (in US) with stronger immune systems. But it may also be that the virus itself is losing potency.

In the past I have noticed theories about the origin of the virus, and what makes it “novel.” But when the scientist who identified HIV weighs in, I pay particular attention. The Coronavirus Is Man Made According to Luc Montagnier the Man Who Discovered HIV. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Contrary to the narrative that is being pushed by the mainstream that the COVID 19 virus was the result of a natural mutation and that it was transmitted to humans from bats via pangolins, Dr Luc Montagnier the man who discovered the HIV virus back in 1983 disagrees and is saying that the virus was man made.

Professor Luc Montagnier, 2008 Nobel Prize winner for Medicine, claims that SARS-CoV-2 is a manipulated virus that was accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Chinese researchers are said to have used coronaviruses in their work to develop an AIDS vaccine. HIV RNA fragments are believed to have been found in the SARS-CoV-2 genome.

“With my colleague, bio-mathematician Jean-Claude Perez, we carefully analyzed the description of the genome of this RNA virus,” explains Luc Montagnier, interviewed by Dr Jean-François Lemoine for the daily podcast at Pourquoi Docteur, adding that others have already explored this avenue: Indian researchers have already tried to publish the results of the analyses that showed that this coronavirus genome contained sequences of another virus, … the HIV virus (AIDS virus), but they were forced to withdraw their findings as the pressure from the mainstream was too great.

To insert an HIV sequence into this genome requires molecular tools

In a challenging question Dr Jean-François Lemoine inferred that the coronavirus under investigation may have come from a patient who is otherwise infected with HIV. No, “says Luc Montagnier,” in order to insert an HIV sequence into this genome, molecular tools are needed, and that can only be done in a laboratory.

According to the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine, a plausible explanation would be an accident in the Wuhan laboratory. He also added that the purpose of this work was the search for an AIDS vaccine.

In any case, this thesis, defended by Professor Luc Montagnier, has a positive turn.

According to him, the altered elements of this virus are eliminated as it spreads: “Nature does not accept any molecular tinkering, it will eliminate these unnatural changes and even if nothing is done, things will get better, but unfortunately after many deaths.”

This is enough to feed some heated debates! So much so that Professor Montagnier’s statements could also place him in the category of “conspiracy theorists”: “Conspirators are the opposite camp, hiding the truth,” he replies, without wanting to accuse anyone, but hoping that the Chinese will admit to what he believes happened in their laboratory.

To entice a confession from the Chinese he used the example of Iran which after taking full responsibility for accidentally hitting a Ukrainian plane was able to earn the respect of the global community. Hopefully the Chinese will do the right thing he adds. “In any case, the truth always comes out, it is up to the Chinese government to take responsibility.”

Implications: Leaving aside the geopolitics, this theory also explains why the virus weakens when mutations lose the unnatural pieces added in the lab. Since this is an RNA (not DNA) sequence mutations are slower, but inevitable. If correct, this theory works against fears of a second wave of infections. It also gives an unintended benefit from past lockdowns and shutdowns, slowing the rate of infections while the virus degrades itself.