Dr. Knut M. Wittkowski is one
of many academics raising cause for concern over the current “lockdown”
measures that’ve been initiated by multiple governments in response to the
COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, the points that
scientists like Wittkowski make continue to be ignored by mainstream media,
which contributes to the information they share being largely unacknowledged.
Information
does however tend to permeate through social media, but there is an ever
growing presence of an authoritative technological ‘fact checker’ that is
attempting to discredit viewpoints, regardless of how valid they are and how
much evidence is available to back up that viewpoint. We’re actually at a point
where opinion’s shared on big and in some cases, ‘controversial’ topics are
flagged and deemed as ‘false news’ by Facebook ‘fact-checkers.’ One of the most
recent examples was the opinion shared by Dr. Ron Paul.
Freedom of speech is being hindered, there’s no doubt about that, even when the
opinions come from the leading experts in the field. Will the opinion of
research of Wittkowski be flagged as well? We will see.
Wittkowski
received his PhD in computer science from the University of Stuttgart and his
ScD (Habilitation) in Medical Biometry from University Tübingen, both in Germany. He worked for 15 years with
Klaus Dietz, a leading epidemiologist who coined the term “reproduction
number”, on the Epidemiology of HIV. After this Wittkowski headed the
Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at The
Rockefeller University, New York for 20 years. Dr. Wittkowski is currently the CEO of
ASDERA LLC, a company discovering novel treatments for complex diseases from
data of genome–wide association
studies.
The
quotes and discussion below are from a recent interview with him that’s been
put on YouTube, you can watch the full interview below. The interview is where
the quote in the title comes from. And you can check out a recent paper he put
out on the topic as well, titled The
first three months of the COVID-19 epidemic: Epidemiological evidence for two
separate strains of SARS-CoV-2 viruses spreading and implications for
prevention strategies, here.
I looked into the claim that
people make that in China and South Korea the social distancing had
successfully helped to control the epidemic. I looked at the date when people
actually started social distancing. In China, the epidemic peaked on February 1st
to February 5th, in that period. But the schools were not closed until February
the 20th. That was two weeks later, in South Korea we have a similar pattern.
In both these areas, social distancing started long after the decline,
and therefore “had very little impact on the epidemic. That means they had
already reached herd immunity, or were about to reach herd immunity.” They were
very close, but by installing the social distancing, “they prevented it from
actually getting to the final point. And this is why we’re still seeing new
cases in South Korea several weeks after the peak.”
You cannot stop the spread of a respiratory disease within a family,
and you cannot stop it from spreading with neighbours, with people who are
delivering, who are physicians, people are social and even in times of social
distancing they have contacts and any of those contacts could spread the
disease. It will go slowly so it will not build up herd immunity but it will
happen, and it will go on forever until we let it go….Humankind has survived
all sorts of respiratory diseases, nature has a way of making sure that we
survive.
He
explains how “nothing is fundamentally different from the flus that we have
seen before, every couple of years there’s a flu that’s a bit worse than the other
flus were, and it goes away in exactly the way the other flus went away, and
this one behaves exactly the same way. The epidemic has ended in China, it was
ended in South Korea, in Iran it’s declining it will be ending anytime soon. It
could be a bit longer than typically because of the containment which flattened
and prolonged the epidemic. And
in the United States we’re doing the same thing, we’re prolonging the epidemic
to flatten the curve but eventually it will end.”
These stories are circulating the world
and contributing to chaos and to people being afraid of things they shouldn’t
be afraid of….I’m not paid by government, so I’m entitled to actually do
science.
According to Wittkowski,
“There is nothing to be scared about, this is a flu epidemic like every other
flu, maybe a bit more severe, but nothing that is fundamentally different from
the flus that we’ve seen in other years.” Again, when it comes to lockdown and
social distancing, he re-iterates by stating, “Well, we will see maybe a total
of fewer cases that is possible, however we will see more cases among the
elderly because we have prevented the school children from creating herd
immunity. And so in the end we will see more death, because it’s the school children
that don’t die it’s the elderly that die so we will see more death because of
this social distancing.”
He goes on to emphasize that
we will have a second wave because of social distancing and lockdown.
If we had herd immunity now, there couldn’t be a second wave in
autumn…If we had herd immunity, we wouldn’t have a second wave. However, if we
prevented herd immunity from developing, it is almost guaranteed that we have a
second wave as soon as either we stop the social distancing or the climate
changes with winter coming or something like that.
He makes many interesting
points. You can watch the full interview below.
(Go to website for video.)
Reprinted
with permission from Collective Evolution.
Copyright
© Collective
Evolution
