The latest edition of the Spectator carries a piece by Oliver Basciano entitled “Brace yourself for a coup in Brazil“. Basciano speculates that due to President Bolsonaro’s myriad failings, prominent among them his alleged failure to protect the Brazilian population from Covid (he was sceptical about lockdowns and the need for vaccines for those with natural immunity and about their safety), he will launch a coup rather than await the verdict of the online voting machines – which look set to deliver a victory to convicted fraudster, ex-President and darling of the Left, Lula Da Silva.
To back up his claim about Bolsonaro’s “disastrous handling of the pandemic” Basciano states that “some 685,000 Brazilians died”.
Brazil’s a big country with a population of about 220 million. I’m always worried when someone puts in a big number with no context. Is 685,000 deaths a lot? It sounds a lot. But how does Brazil’s pandemic performance compare with some of the poster boys and girls of the Covid A team?
Let’s just contrast Bolsonaro’s “disastrous” handling of the pandemic with that of Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand. You know Jacinda Ardern, she’s the ‘caring woman’, the pin-up girl of Covid zealots the world over.
Well, strangely, the cumulative rate of infections, virtually all of which occurred after she’d coerced persuaded 90% of the population to get vaccinated multiple times, is over twice the rate of the infections to date in Brazil. Yet, Bolsonaro’s performance was “disastrous” and Ardern’s was virtuous?
“Oh, but those are just cases,” says a passing Covidian. “It’s not cases that matter, it’s deaths. And don’t compare to New Zealand, compare the fatality rate in Brazil to that within the EU. We all know that Bolsonaro is a murderer for leaving his country unprotected by vaccination while the EU rolled out vaccinations to nearly all of their citizens.” Okay, here’s the comparison: Covid deaths in 2020 up to September 20th compared to deaths in 2022 up to September 20th.
Well, that’s an odd thing. In the first nine months of 2020, the number of Covid deaths was almost the same in Brazil and the EU, though as the population of Brazil is lower than the EU the rate of fatalities was admittedly lower in the EU (322 per million vs 643). However, in 2022 the virtuous, caring, sharing, empathising EU leadership have seen Covid deaths increase by 60% over the 2020 figure to a whopping 231,330 deaths, this in spite of having vaccinated most of the deceased. Isn’t that incredible! This year, as Biden tells us it’s all over, we’ve seen 60% more Covid deaths in the EU than we did in 2020 when the first Covid wave broke over an immune naïve population. Meanwhile, that monster Bolsonaro, with his disastrous handling of the pandemic has seen deaths fall by 52% against the 2020 number. If Bolsonaro’s performance had been comparable to the EU’s, 158,000 additional Brazilians would have died this year. Bolsonaro’s supporters could be forgiven for being grateful that it’s Bolsonaro not von der Leyen calling the shots.
Basciano’s Spectator piece goes on to state: “A senate inquiry into his failure to buy vaccines, in a country with almost no anti-vax movement, recommended criminal charges against him.”
I’m not sure what the relevance of the statement “with almost no anti-vax movement” is, but leaving that aside, let’s just test this claim. Another surprise! That awful Covid sceptic Bolsonaro has actually managed to inject more vaccines into more arms in Brazil than von der Leyen has throughout the EU.
I hold no brief for Bolsonaro, but clearly with the sidelining of Trump he is now number one in the firing line, being demonised for not kowtowing to the globalist narrative. The claims about how he disastrously mismanaged the Covid pandemic are just lazy tropes. But worse is that the author, and so many others, appear to believe that the course of a pandemic is within the control of a Government. In reality, I lay no more blame on von der Leyen for her lamentable record across the EU than I do on Bolsonaro for his performance in Brazil or Ardern in New Zealand, at least in terms of the number of ‘cases’ and deaths (the lockdowns and other coercive measures are another matter). Indeed, to make this point, let’s compare the reported infection rate in Brazil with that of South Korea and Japan.
In both South Korea and Japan, mask-wearing has been widespread for years. Both countries have advanced health facilities and health systems. The Japanese and South Korean populations are remarkably compliant with government guidelines. They bow rather than shake hands. They tend to have relatively low BMI measures. They are, in a sense, everything Brazil is not. And yet, South Korea’s cumulative reported infection rate is almost three times that of Brazil and Japan has just overtaken bad-boy Brazil in cumulative infections. The odd thing is no one’s claiming that the performance of Japan and South Korea has been ‘disastrous’. No one’s recommending that their leaders stand trial for criminal negligence.
Questions have been raised about definitions used in defining Covid deaths, hospitalisations and infections. One thing there’s less ambiguity about is all-cause mortality. Consequently, excess deaths are relatively straightforward to define and perhaps the best benchmark for how the pandemic impacted a country. If we look at all-cause mortality for a number of South and Central American states the relative performance of Brazil looks pretty good against its regional neighbours.
Was Peru’s particularly hard lockdown the cause of additional all-cause deaths? Maybe, maybe not. Were Bolsanaro’s policies responsible for Brazil’s relatively favourable regional outcome? Again, maybe, maybe not. From the evidence it’s perfectly apparent that we delude ourselves if we attribute Covid deaths to particular government policies. Governments and leaders are responsible for many things, but the reality is they can’t do much against airborne viruses.
Many commentators have claimed that South Americans are particularly susceptible to Covid. The highest death rates have tended to be in South American countries. This may be down to social factors, lack of pre-exposure or it may be genetic. Whatever the cause, the evidence from its neighbours shows that Brazil always faced an uphill task in protecting its population from the ravages of Covid. Couple that with the widespread poverty in the country and the hand to mouth existence of many and realistically, the options faced by Bolsonaro were fairly limited. From our current vantage point, two and a half years down the track, it looks like he played his hand pretty well.
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Maybe ,while they are at it , they can start surveillance on kids affected after their mothers or they themselves were Jabbed !
This is another example of the general woke pattern: Given a problem X, say, racism, the less harmful the actual effects of the problem become, the more hysterical the people making a living from manageing X act in order to distract from the fact that their well-paid positions have really become useless encumberances.
I was unaware until recently that there is a Chicken Pox vaccine. In the past children would be taken to Chicken Pox parties by their parents to be deliberately exposed to another child with Chicken Pox. The wisdom in this was that a child would be exposed to this virus early and develop immunity, which by and large is what happened, without much fuss. The reason I was given that children need the CP vaccine is that CP can be bad for some children.
That and society’s predisposition to believe that governments and experts must solve our problems.
And they’re not entirely wrong. Modern man has slowly degenerated into a soft, office bound creature that has few of the survival skills and sense of self sufficiency that our ancestors only a few generations ago had in abundance.
The most-recent example of surival skills I’m aware of involved a guy who was stationed close the ruins of Fleury in summer 1916 with his (German) army unit. During various earlier opportunities, he had grabbed a lot of gas cartridges and coffee powder. The men were all badly suffering from thirst and the only availble source of water was a large puddle with a rotting corpse in it. The guy with the gas and the coffee powder than started cooking bowls of coffee from this water so that they could safely drink it. But this probably wasn’t quite what you had in mind.
I would say that those with agrarian skills, of which there were still plenty in the mid 20th century, were pretty self sufficient.
Manual workers, of which there were many only 30 years ago, had plenty of confidence to do things with their own two hands.
As far as I can see, the physical skills of most young people these days are limited to their two thumbs.
That’s more what I was referring to.
People who engage regularly with the physical world are much less likely to be fooled or intimidated by our state bureaucracies and their invented or highly exaggerated dangers.
You seem to be living in a somewhat strange world. Neither farming nor manual labour of craftsmen have gone away. At the moment, there are 331 apprenticeships advertised in the small, rural German town (about 7700 inhabitants) my parents are living in. About 60% of these are certainly for jobs which don’t involve computer work.
I’m not sure if people without an account can see Twitter posts yet. Anyway, whoever put together this 7min montage of the usual UK criminals has done a great job. Just mind-blowing how it was all 100% blatant lies and there can be no justification from their perspective for the harms and tragedies which subsequently followed as a result of their flagrant deceit.
https://twitter.com/FunctionGain/status/1675247367899979777
We are still locked out Mogs.
I don’t know how long this is going to go on for. Musk says ”temporary”, but just how temporary is that? It’s a nuisance, everyone’s complaining about it because the number of tweets you view is is also limited.
Perhaps it is an underhanded way of pushing up subscriber numbers.
Ve vant names…
Remember this from 2022? The Human Rights Attorney Leigh Dundas talking at a Special Meeting of Board Supervisors of Orange County, California..the woman is on fire!
But she talks about ‘locking down for RSV’…and in the USA she says it has a death rate for children of 0.000004714.. or four one millionths of a percent….
….but if it saves just one life!!!!
https://rumble.com/v1ug65q-human-right-attorney-leigh-dundas-and-others-declare-never-again-to-orange-.html
I had a conversation the other day about the defibrillators that seem to have appeared in greater and great number. I was trying to discuss. 1. How many cardiac arrests happen close to one. 2.Would there be there anyone who can or is willing to have a go reviving a dead person 3. What happens when these things inevitably need servicing and or replacing, Is there some kind of benefit analysis, all of which was countered by ‘well if it saves one life, its worth it’. Well, how much are we prepared to spend.? Give everyone a defib in a backpack and a trained paramedic to accompany them about their daily business.? When compassion comes in the door, common-sense seems to go out the window.
Do you know which company makes them? If it is a UK one are we to become a “world leader” in this product? Very important to become a “world leader” where ever possible to our politicians, they think the electorate is impressed by “world leadership”.
Dr Mike Yeadon had a very good piece on this on his Telegram channel a few days ago – I haven’t really sussed the mechanics of Telegram yet – and he explained that to a large extent vaccination is a double edged sword and certainly where RSV’s are concerned, of which there are thousands, it is wholly the wrong way to treat and natural immunity is nigh on essential.
As I understand it the vaccination procedure basically undermines the body’s ability to fight and particularly so with RSV’s. Effectively, shoving vaccines in to children to protect against RSV’s is completely undermining their immune systems and they suffer more infections.
Funnily enough this is extremely profitable for Pharma. No…ooo I can hear you shouting. More bloody conspiracy theory.
Dead infants don;t take long to replace
Towards the end of 2021 I viewed a video clip from Ireland AM on One-Live TV based in Dublin. It showed a group of women eagerly demonstrating the application of face-coverings, these were home-made, to a doll. The aim was to practise getting “a nice tight fit” on a baby’s face and to “normalize and demystify” covering the face from childhood onwards. Viewers were encouraged to get their own small children to help and join in this exercise in interfering with the airways of babies. Viewers were also shown how to take nasal swabs of babies and make a habit of this risky business. I watched in disbelief and complained (in vain, of course) to my MP, even though masks were also mandated in Britain’s and NI’s schools around that time. There is an ‘ID with a mask’ setting on the I Phone and everyone knows how loathe to part with these gags the NHS still is. This article is chilling, because the first place it will lead is to covering the faces of our young, as night follows day. The vile and sinister practice of covering the human face is not going away.