The only certainty about the ‘novel’ virus is that a great deal of
nonsense is being talked about it by people who really ought to know better,
and a great deal of opportunism is being displayed.
From
Netanyahu grabbing the chance to postpone his corruption trial to Hollywood starlets claiming
they have ‘tested positive’ (surely not a sad and cynical attempt to up their
profile), this bandwagon is seething and teeming with those trying to seize
their moment of fame or get rich or stay out of jail or just join in the mayhem
It’s cool to be nCoV-positive
now. Maybe that’s why such inordinate numbers of famous people are staking
their claim to it.
ISIS are apparently a bit worried
about nCoV also and is allegedly sending out travel advisories
to its jihadists.
Yup, that’s a real thing,
right there. Really happening. Definitely.
Meanwhile,
the propaganda is relentless, and there’s a variety for all tastes.
If
you like your fear porn vanilla you can read all the articles based on total
speculation that tell you millions will die if we don’t demand martial law and
vaccines. (Speaking of vaccines, the as-yet-untested Covid19 vaccine is going
to mandatory in Denmark,
and in the US the manufacturers will have legal immunity should
it cause any ill-effects).
If you are of a more
sceptical turn of mind well, how about nCoV as bio-weapon? Plenty of juicy
stuff on that topic also.
And scientists and science
journals are not immune. There’s no shortage of people with PhDs willing to
talk nonsense with a sciencey spin in order to convince the more inquiring
proles that the governments are correct to invoke emergency powers and get that
untested vaccine cranking out asap.
Look
at this beauty. Written by a team of MDs and other ‘experts’ and appearing
in The Lancet,
it is about the most naked example I have seen to date of pseudoscience being
used to inflate the perception of nCoV as something other than what it is.
The purpose of the article is
apparently to find some sort of barely rational reason for estimating the nCoV
case fatality rate to be higher than it actually is by a factor of ten.
Here’s the ‘reasoning’ it
offers:
However, these mortality rate
estimates are based on the number of deaths relative to the number of confirmed
cases of infection, which is not representative of the actual death rate;
patients who die on any given day were infected much earlier, and thus the
denominator of the mortality rate should be the total number of patients
infected at the same time as those who died.
They actually suggest with a
straight face (though they don’t say why) that in order to get a ‘real’ figure
for case fatality we need to count deaths as a percentage only of those who
became infected at the same time as those who died.
So, if on Day One of a
hypothetical new disease, two people get it and one dies, this would be a 50%
case fatality ratio.
Sure, no problem. Common
sense and statistics agree with that.
But
what if from Day Two to Day Ten inclusive 198 more people get it and none of them
die?
Well, according to the normal method of assessing CFR that would
be 200 cases, one death, and a CFR of 0.5%
But
with this brilliant new method, it would still be a CFR of 50% – because we are only
allowed to count the cases who got sick on the same day as the fatality. And
only two people got sick that day, of whom 50% died.
You see the corrupt genius of
it? It’s a statistical nonsense that crucially gives permission to any would-be
stats compilers in the WHO or elsewhere to overestimate the CFR of this bug, or
indeed any other subsequent alleged ‘killer’ virus.
If you doubt this is the
point, then read the article. This is just what the authors do, having the
total gall to claim the ‘real’ CFR for nCoV is anywhere up to 20%, based solely
on this crazy new way of figuring out the stats.
Which will look great in
future headlines, and help pave the way for public acceptance of a total
fascist dictatorship.
If you ever doubted that corruption is
now endemic and all our institutions – political, legal, medical – are stacked
with yes-men and jobsworths or fools prepared to put their names to any junk
proclamation that might get them a raise or save their professional skins, just
think of this article. Written by alleged world-class ‘experts’, published in
the Lancet, and nothing
more than a word salad of contradictory nonsense and meaningless conclusions
designed to promote a political and propagandist point.
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