The Swiss have voted to keep vaccine passports by a clear majority. I live in Switzerland (but cannot vote), and in this essay I’ll present some analysis of why this outcome may have occurred.
Firstly, what was the vote actually about? It was a referendum on whether to keep the COVID law, which authorised (among other things) the implementation of the vaccine passport and contact tracing systems. As such, although passports are effectively a form of coercion, this wasn’t directly a vote on mandatory vaccination. There were two sides: ‘No’, meaning scrap the law and end the passports, and ‘Yes’, meaning keep it.
That’s all in theory. In reality, of course, the vote is already being used by politicians to argue for lockdowns for the unvaccinated (about one third of the population).
So – what went wrong for the ‘No’ side? I believe there were at least three factors that fed into each other:
- Unlike the British Government, the Swiss government doesn’t release the core data you would need to argue against the vaccine passport policies.
- For the second time in a row, the ‘No’ campaign chose its messaging very poorly. The campaign they ran was unconvincing.
- Like elsewhere, the news is dominated by the Government’s own narrative-building efforts and uncritically accepted reports – even nonsensical claims. In particular, public health officials have been spreading misinformation by convincing people the unvaccinated are unsafe to be around even if you’re vaccinated (which makes no sense if you also believe the vaccines are highly effective).
I will analyze each factor below.
Despite this, we should recognize the possibility that how people voted had nothing to do with any campaigns or policies, but simply reflects their pre-existing vaccination decisions. As we can safely assume almost nobody voted ‘Yes’ while also choosing to be unvaccinated (as this would simply be a vote to impose expensive and awkward restrictions on themselves indefinitely), we must also assume, given the results, that almost everyone who chose to take the vaccine also chooses to try and force other people to take it.
The psychology of this is probably core to the state of the world right now and deserves a much closer look. However, today I’ll make the simplifying assumption that campaigns and arguments do have at least some impact and analyze it through that lens.
Unavailable data
The simplest and most ideologically neutral arguments against vaccine passports is that they are:
- Illogical, because they imply the vaccinated have to be protected from the unvaccinated, which suggests the vaccines do little to suppress infection which in turn suggests there’s little point in protecting the vaccinated from the unvaccinated.
- Ineffective, because Covid vaccines aren’t sterilizing so they allow infectious vaccinated people to wander around spreading infection, quite possibly without realising it. Thus they won’t impact case numbers and this seems to be born out by case curves.
- A form of mandate, which is immoral because you’re forcing people to take a substance they don’t need/think could be unsafe, and they might be right.
To prove (2) you need to have data on the rate of infection among the vaccinated. In England the population can not only see this data, it’s also made available in both the Government’s preferred “adjusted” form and also in its pre-adjusted form. The UKHSA explains the adjustments, the data is age stratified, can be tracked over time and we can even watch the public arguments between different government agencies as they debate how that data should be presented and used. Thus you can point at it and show that the vaccinated get Covid and spread it, and show that the claims of efficacy rely on huge statistical “adjustments” combined with assumptions about group psychology, as the raw data actually shows negative effectiveness.
In Switzerland, like in most of the world, none of this has happened because the Government’s Covid dashboard simply doesn’t provide data on vaccination rates for anything except hospitalisations and deaths. End of story. Unless you’re willing to use foreign data to argue against a local policy, the matter being voted on simply could not be opposed using a data-backed argument of any kind. Of course, it couldn’t be supported with data either, but people remember the claims that vaccines are highly effective against infection.
To prove (3) you would need reliable data on vaccine injuries. No such data exists. Although the Swiss Government does collect reports of adverse events, these data suffer from the same problems as the same data in other countries, namely, rampant under-reporting and a steadfast refusal by the medical establishment to take the reports seriously. My fiancé has several friends who have been injured by the vaccines here (Moderna seems to be quite aggressive compared to AstraZeneca – I don’t know anyone in the UK reporting injuries). None of them has received any kind of help from the medical system. One went to a doctor and was surprised when the doctor said she had the exact same type of problem (missing periods); the advice was simply to go home and wait to see if it got better on its own. That was months ago but it never did get better. Meanwhile several friends of mine reported that the vaccines made them so sick they were confined to bed for a day each time they got the jab. Again, no reports were filed at any point. This experience aligns with this series of interviews with hospital workers, where several nurses assert that doctors are systematically discounting any possible connection between vaccination and illness, even when patients say directly their problems started right after vaccination. This sort of thing is not exactly confidence-building in the quality of the safety data.
Regardless, for whatever reason – perhaps their ads would be blocked if they raised it – the ‘No’ campaign stayed away from the topic of safety and personal choice.
Bad messaging
Just like the first time the Swiss voted on Covid measures, the ‘No’ campaign was primarily run by a group called the Friends of the Constitution. As the name implies this is not actually a dedicated anti-Covid campaign group and I’ve felt both times that the campaigns have been quasi-hijacked by this group’s pre-existing agendas and interests.
The messaging by ‘No’ boiled down to three points:
- Covid measures are mass surveillance.
- Say no to divisions in society.
- Say no to endless measures.
Of these points, really only the third feels like it has any force, and it’s primarily a vague assertion about what the Government might do in future. While I personally believe endless measures are pretty much where we’re at now already, a lot of people still think all this has some sort of near-term end date. And while the passports have created very large and obvious divisions in society, these are – from the perspective of the vaccinated – a division by choice, one that the “divided” could choose to end by getting the jab. And because the shots are free and the Government/media more or less refuses to acknowledge the possibility that a negative cost:benefit ratio might exist for anyone, the vaccinated can see no logical reason why anyone would refuse. So while this language tries to make it sound like other kinds of within-living-memory social division (e.g. racism), it’s not. It’s a unique thing more akin to religious conflicts than anything else.
The message about mass surveillance is especially problematic. The difficulties with logic and honesty during Covid times are not entirely restricted to the public health world. There are two parts to this: passports and contact tracing. The passport system is not actually a form of mass surveillance with the current infrastructure, and contact tracing isn’t being done at the moment, hasn’t been for some time, and when it was it was done using local data collection that was only provided to the Government if a case was actually detected. Moreover, the claim that this is all about mass surveillance is effectively a claim it’s not about fighting Covid. That’s a very serious allegation but isn’t made with any accompanying evidence to prove it, ignores that the infrastructure built so far actually works hard not to engage in mass surveillance, and, finally, ignores the fact that the Government already has mass surveillance infrastructures anyway.
Let me flesh out the claim I just made about vaccine passports, as it’s probably not obvious why I think that. The QR codes are large and high density because they contain all the data of the certificate itself, meaning that the apps that read them don’t have to contact any remote server to verify the certificate. Moreover, the apps are open source, no data is saved locally, all the technical documentation is available, it is distributed also outside of the app store (on Android), and you could even make your own version of the verifier app if for some reason you suspect the version being distributed through the app stores doesn’t match the code being made available. But if that was happening, it would be prima facie evidence of a conspiracy so at that point you could just reveal it. NB: The infrastructure doesn’t have to be designed this way, yet it is.
So this argument has to boil down to “but it could be changed in future”. Yes, it could, but that would get noticed and would then probably trigger another referendum in which mass surveillance would actually be the primary topic – and also the ‘No’ campaign wasn’t making that claim: it was saying these systems are already mass surveillance. It would be especially difficult to convert passports into mass surveillance because the software engineers behind the scheme already proved no such surveillance is required for the scheme to ‘work’, using whatever public health definition of work they think they’re achieving. Moreover, such an infrastructure could just as easily be put into place using cell tower records and banking systems, and in fact this has already been done a long time ago. Governments around the world routinely track their citizens in all sorts of ways, including at scale. Showing us how that infrastructure worked is how Edward Snowden ended up in Russia. They really don’t need vaccine passports on top of that.
A vaccine passport system is an especially illogical form of mass surveillance because – even if it did work the way the campaigners implied – all it would tell governments is what bars, restaurants and events people happen to visit, which is not especially important information, and compliance is already quite low so they wouldn’t even get reliable records of that either. My guess is I get checked about half the time I go out. The rest of the time the business owners don’t bother asking.
Overall, I can’t shake the feeling the campaign group behind ‘No’ might contain a lot of people for whom privacy and surveillance are just their thing, and they came to see Covid as a way to raise funds on which their preferred messaging and campaigning could ride coat-tails. The end result has been an ineffective and unconvincing campaign even to the people it should strongly appeal to. And it didn’t convert anyone who has already taken a vaccine.
Lack of reliable news
The U.K. is a little unusual in that someone’s launched a news site that challenges the public health establishment (this one). I’m often reminded of the problems conventional journalism has when British friends send me links to BBC News stories, like the story they published about the Swiss referendum by Imogen Foulkes.
She starts by presenting a cartoon made by one guy, posted on one billboard in one station, specifically in order to troll a set of anti-mandate protestors, as an example of “Swiss yes campaign posters”. In reality, there wasn’t a Swiss ‘Yes’ campaign, and the report goes downhill from there. A few paragraphs later, she is blaming large data errors in the BBC’s graph of cases on Switzerland, saying: “Countries do not always release figures every day, which may explain some of the sharp changes in the trendlines.” In fact, the Swiss Government does release data every day and its dashboard shows no such data errors – the flaws were introduced by the BBC or the university it’s sourcing this information from. Foulkes quotes a 23 year-old who thinks the vaccine passport means “I can know everyone in here is safe, because they are all vaccinated, tested, or recovered” without pointing out that this is wrong, then she tries to ‘fact check’ a student who correctly points out she’s at little risk of Covid by claiming she might get “serious and long term” health consequences from an infection. Actually less than ~2.5% of people still report any symptoms of Long Covid 12 weeks after infection and those seem to mostly be psycho-somatic. Covid especially isn’t serious for young students and it’s misinformation to claim otherwise – but Foulkes isn’t done! She just keeps going and claims there aren’t enough hospital beds or staff in Switzerland, although the Government’s own statistics show that the country has unusually large capacity margins, with ICU usage usually being below 80% of capacity (most countries run at more like 90-95% utilization), which has at any rate fallen by half compared to what it was at the start of the pandemic – and astoundingly the article just keeps getting more and more deceptive. That was by no means a complete fact check. This is one of the reasons the reputation of ‘fact checkers’ is circling the drain: if they actually cared about misinformation, keeping up with the BBC’s output alone would consume all their time.
The situation worldwide is hardly any better. People who may have doubts about the integrity of public health narratives in the U.S. are more or less forced to rely on a handful of websites – such as the Brownstone Institute – and a couple of bloggers: Alex Berenson, an ex-NYT journalist, and El Gato Malo, a firebrand who mixes Covid analysis with outspoken political advocacy while also pretending to be a cat (many of his articles are quite good, but needless to say, quirky). The U.S. CDC doesn’t release information about vaccine effectiveness in anything close to a useful form, and, bizarrely, actually has commercial conflicts of interest because it turns out to be a holder of patents on vaccine technology, which it licenses for profit to the very same pharma companies the U.S. Government is supposed to be regulating.
Switzerland sits somewhere in the middle. It does have conventional media outlets that are sometimes public-health-skeptical, but they are ultimately the work of conventional journalists and thus do very little original research, preferring to focus on social commentary. For example, they generally won’t search the scientific literature or raw data to double check arguments made by the public health agency, as happens often on this site. For sceptical news there is the Swiss Policy Research site, which has published some good articles, and in particular documented a long litany of false claims and incorrect statistics published by Swiss media. There is also Corona Transition, which functions more like the Daily Sceptic. Nonetheless, being brand new sites with few resources, all such new outlets struggle to get the same level of readership as existing newspapers and TV stations.
So the lack of detailed data, news no more reliable than anywhere else and a very high level of trust in government, means the quality of debate about public health measures is quite low. It’s thus easier for the Government to pass off various unfounded assertions as ‘facts’.
Conclusion
Despite the above, there are some reasons to be positive. The percentage of the population that voted against the measures is very large, even if not a majority. In no way can it be said this is a fringe concern. Although there was no official ‘Yes’ campaign, in reality the might of the entire establishment, including the Government, media, academia, the civil service and the medical community, have pretty much all been doing an endless ‘Yes’ campaign for the last two years – and still around 40% of the people who voted rejected their arguments. Additionally, from reading comments and talking to people, a major motivation for those who voted ‘Yes’ was the belief that they faced a choice between vaccine passports or more lockdowns. Thus the vote can also be interpreted, if you wish, as a vote against lockdowns.
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Covid antibodies will of course diminish over time… but T-cell immunity will remain for the longer-term, at least for those who have had the virus rather than the experimental biological agent.
Where is the government programme to test T-cell immunity in the community?
No one wants to talk about T-cell testing; there is an FDA approved test, but nothing in the UK as of yet, I believe.
Plenty of people talking about T-cell based testing.
Fact is it remains hard and time consuming to do. The only recent attempts at rapid tests still have mixed results.
They’re of limited use.
Both natural and vaccination based infection stimulate good T cell responses.
“They’re of limited use.” Maybe. The same could be said for a lot of the other testing that goes on, at great expense. A lot of effort has gone into vaccines, and a lot of money into many other things. But not much that I can see has gone into existing or new treatments or attempts to properly understand how covid spreads and prior immunity. Driven by agenda, not desire for truth.
“limited use” … ???
I’d say a hell of a lot have served no useful purpose, and many measures have exacerbated harm.
Bottom line : this is a very ordinary virus that just requires the accepted measures for management, and an adequately prepared and resourced healthcare system.
Yes indeed. I guess I was writing from the POV of someone who believes (or pretends to) that covid is unprecedented – if you believe this why are you not calling out the lack of effort to understand it better. The only thing believers do is call for more lockdowns and vaccines.
I guess the literal tens of thousands of pre-prints and peer reviewed studies on SARs2 as people try to understand it totally passed you by?
Part of the problem is this IS the most studied virus in history. We’re finding things out we didn’t expect but that might not be terribly unusual elsewhere – but we just never looked.
Well, I guess they did. But judging by what various govts and other bodies are actually doing, none of these studies are very useful – or they are ignored.
Or more accurately, you haven’t read any of them, have no idea of any of them so are in no position at all to even begin to judge what the govts or various bodies policies are or are not based on.
Well one assumes they all confirm govt policy from the start has been the best approach, as that is what they have done. Seems unlikely to me.
You may recall that many months ago when asked why arrivals at airports and ferry terminals were still not routinely tested for Covid the government response was
‘Such tests are of “limited use because of the large numbers of false results such tests throw up”.
Sort of showed the testing scam up a bit really though it didn’t gain much traction in the press.
One of the features of this scam has been the way in which the government can turn on a sixpence, and the public will go on grazing without lifting their heads at the sudden movement.
It’s completely weird. Animal Farm translated into real life. Four legs bad, two legs good?!
Thy’re of limited profit
I had to downvoted realarthurdent on account of that fact. He’s dim.
Can be done in Harley St I believe, and I’m looking into it – although it will cost a bit
Not sure how accurate but it’s something I’m intensely curious about and owe to self.
I’d rather know one way or the other although if anyone knows it’s a waste of time, please say (fon excepted – I think we all know what you’d have to say so save your breath)
T-Cells and Ivermectin are verboten.
Verboten other than the 22,000 Scholar articles on T-cells and SARs2?
Or the 2,800 articles and citations on Ivermectin?
So why aren’t they authorising the use of ivermectin then?… Because the moment there is an effective treatment for c19 the emergency authorisation for the vaccines will be revoked.
Why aren’t they?
Because quite simply there is no good peer reviewed data to suggest its safe or effective and none providing any useful clinical use protocol.
You’d know that if you browsed the studies rather than just picking whatever dubious quality ones are supplied by your conspiracy theory website of choice.
So about as much evidence as there exists regarding efficacy and risk analysis for mass testing of a healthy population, facemasks for children, facemasks outdoors, and stay at home orders then.
Correct.
There’s no evidence any of that works.
Neither is there any for Ivermectin being in any way beneficial.
Very good. In that case I will offer one observation with good will. It is all well and good pointing at the quantity of research going on in areas related to SarsCov2/Covid19 as evidence of open debate. But that is clearly not reflective what is occurring in the wider public domain, where evidence based ‘facts’ are clearly in short supply. Pointing at the layman and effectively saying “you don’t understand this dummy” does nothing to bridge that divide.
https://swprs.org/who-preliminary-review-confirms-ivermectin-effectiveness/
You obviously don’t read the studies. I think it’s called cherry picking. The fact is it’s very safe in the recommended doses for, for instance, the treatment of parasites. If I’m on death’s door and they want to stick a tube in my lungs or give me 3mg of Ivermectin, I hope I’m able to gasp out “I’ll take the tablet, please”. I’ll even take the dog’s tablet.
It’s funny, when you google it, the recommendation for not taking veterinary Ivermectin is that it’s used to treat animals weighing up to a ton, so you might overdose…….
.https://swprs.org/who-preliminary-review-confirms-ivermectin-effectiveness/
This is a WHO study on the use of Ivermectin for the treatment of Civid 19.
No apology needed, just spread it.
Why do we need any government testing for a bad flu? This appears to be all about ever more dependence on Big Pharma and slavish devotion to modelling experts.
And at the end we have perpetual development of yet more experimental vaxxes for a virus (and its mutations) that is endemic (ie unstoppable) but with a survival rate greater than a seasonal flu (according to WHO).
And so it goes around inflated test results > unnecessary lockdown > experimental vaxx > mutant found > more lockdown > inflated test results > unnecessary lockdown > experimental vaxx > mutant found etc….
Meanwhile kiss your natural immune system (and culture, and economy…) goodbye.
No mention of T cell immunity as others have said.
Here’s an interesting article that does mention T cells. It’s beyond my skill level to evaluate it, but the article and the paper it’s based on are certainly interesting
https://market-ticker.org/post=242205
There are over 20,000 articles and citations on T-cell response and SARs2.
How in anyones view is this “no mention” ?!
I was talking about this Lockdown Sceptics article having no mention of T cell response, despite it’s central importance in immunity.
That’s great. Job done then. Back to normal…..
Bozo:…….erm, hang on a minute. We have been reliably informed that there are one, two maybe three, variants of variants on the way, possibly by Summer, or Autumn but definitely by Winter and millions of you are going to die so to keep the deaths manageable we will continue with ALL restrictions and house arrest.
Now go and say your prayers, you will need them.
‘die’??? No no no, it’s ‘SADLY die’. Please use the right terminology.
unless they get vaccinated by the booster to mop up the variants.
Yeah, that’s exactly what Boris will say.
And then lockdown for Xmas anyway.
And that’s not taking account of the aliens.
‘suggest’ ‘estimate’ ‘likely’ that the moon is made of cheese.
The ONS use models to estimate the likely numbers so they can suggest they know anything. Gone are the days of real collected data.
and the other 20+% have natural immunity.
Towards the end of his post Michael Curzon links to the Daily Mail
‘number of adults with antibodies could be higher than ONS is reporting’
Their headline includes
“Hugs could be back say experts ! “.
About 70-75% of the commenters are saying
‘what planet are you on ? I’ve never stopped hugging’ and numerous ‘mutant variants’ thereof.
Lockdown is finished bozo, in Gods name Go and take the others with you.
This was in the Spectator lunchtime email – note the recognition of T cell immunity which is missing from the Sky News report above, and the commenters below have noted.
See my posts above. “Prevalence” rates are probably much higher than the experts say … because the virus began to spread much earlier than the experts say.
If you haven’t got antibodies after 18 months of this doing the rounds then you must be a hermit. That 30% are probably false negatives.
That or 30% got it so mildly their immune systems just brushed it off and didn’t bother creating the antibodies – why would you if its so mild?
Either way – its done and dusted – lets open up fully so we can go to the pub and laugh at what a bunch of cretins our politicians and their advisers are.
I strongly suspect that most of those who have tested positive for antibodies did so because they had recently received a vaccine.
See link: “After about two months, however, just 16.7 percent of the patients had a potent antibody response. … People are producing a reasonable antibody response to the virus, but it’s waning over a short period of time and depending on how high your peak is, that determines how long the antibodies are staying around,” Katie Doores, lead author on the study at King’s College London …”
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/507043-virus-immunity-in-recovered-patients-may-be-gone-in-months-researchers-say
But this doesn’t mean that people who had contracted the virus are not immune. Apparently, much longer-lasting “natural immunity” is conferred not by antibodies proper but by by T and B cells. For “most” people, this immunity lasts at least 8 months – maybe years or even a lifetime.
To me, this means that a lot more people have had COVID than is widely accepted – which means that we are much closer to hypothetical “herd immunity” levels than most appreciate.
Some of us believe COVID was “spreading” weeks if not months before the Wuhan outbreak. Certainly, months before the lockdowns of March 2020.
I’m one of the probably millions of people who suspect they had COVID before it was said to be circulating in the world. A fair percent of these people, like myself, got antibody tests in May or later. For the vast majority of such people (but, importantly, not all), these tests came back “negative” for antibodies.
The common conclusion: “Oh, we didn’t have COVID.” But I don’t think we should reach this conclusion based on the antibody study I cite above. It’s very possible that at least some of us did have the virus and/or COVID but, by the time we got our antibody tests, we didn’t have enough antibodies remaining to be detected with the tests.
To me, the logical inferences of likely early spread are seismic and myriad. For example, any efforts to “lockdown” society – to “stop” or “slow” virus spread – in early March 2020 were futile and certainly happened months too late. Also, those trying to estimate what percentage of the population has contracted the virus by now are beginning their “counts” months later than they should.
Current estimates say that 20 to 43 percent of the population may have been (naturally) exposed to the virus by now. In my opinion, a better estimate might be 40 to 70 percent. That is, it’s very possible we are almost at “herd immunity” right now … and this doesn’t count the percentage of people who have now been vaccinated.
The greatest (and still untold) story about COVID is when it actually started to spread. Compelling evidence exists that this spread began at least by November 2019, probably earlier.
Why has there been no serious inquiry that would connect some dots that might better establish the “early spread” conclusion? Skeptics like myself can only speculate … which I do below.
Regarding the question of why no serious or “legitimate” investigation has been commissioned by authorities (or journalists) into the “early spread” hypothesis, I offer my own opinions in this piece (which, amazingly, was actually published).
https://uncoverdc.com/2020/07/13/covid-19-is-a-real-search-for-the-truth-now-taboo/
In my post above, I point out that the vast majority of people who thought they had COVID (and later got an antibody test in an effort to “confirm” this), did test “negative” for antibodies in April or May 2020.
However, this was not the case for everyone. As my journalism and research document, at least 16 Americans who had COVID symptoms in November and December did get subsequent antibody tests … that came back “positive.”
Significantly, none of these Americans had visited China. Just as significantly, these individuals lived in four different geographically-dispersed states – Washington, New Jersey, Alabama and south Florida.
So the obvious question becomes: How did all these people living thousands of miles away from one another all contract the virus if it was not “spreading?” My answer, which I think employs logic, is that the only way ALL of these people could have contracted the virus was that it was “spreading” … and if the virus had spread from Washington state to New Jersey to Alabama and to south Florida … it was spreading “widely.”
Another important and unanswered question is this: Why didn’t the CDC at least interview and test these 16 people people, everyone of whom’s diagnosis was “confirmed” by antibody tests? (Several of these people have now tested positive for antibodies multiple time. Brandie McCain, who had COVID symptoms in December 2019, has now had FOUR positive antibody tests).
Bolstering my hypothesis of “early spread” is a CDC study of archived units of blood collected by the American Red Cross in NINE states. Some of this blood was collected over just three days in mid-December 2019 and the balance was collected in mid-January 2020.
This study, which for some reason generated little interest or comment (and, inexplicably, no follow-up or additional studies or other units of “archived” blood supplies), concluded that 1.42 percent of the tested blood samples showed signs of COVID infection. That doesn’t sound like much, but when one extrapolates a “positive” sample of 1.42 percent to the entire American population, we get 4.7 million likely or possible cases.
If approximately five million Americans already had been exposed to COVID between mid-December 2019 and mid-January 2020, how many people do we think had been exposed by March 2020?
Also, readers interested in this topic, should not forget that legions of Americans were sick with the “flu” in December 2019 and January 2020. According to CDC estimates, this number could have been as high as 55 million Americans (16.6 percent of the population). I’d also note that of those sick people who went to the doctor complaining of flu like symptoms, the vast majority (70 to 80 percent, per my research) actually tested “negative” for influenza.
Now I’m not saying all 35 to 55 million of the people sick with an “influenza-like illness” (ILI) had COVID in the “virus season” of 2019-2020 …. but if only 10 percent – or 20 percent – actually had COVID … this could be America’s “first wave” of COVID right there.
The “hole” in my hypothesis is that there’s no way “health officials” could have “missed” a pandemic this widespread … the spike in deaths would have simply been too great to miss.
I acknowledge that NATIONAL death statistics do not seem to show a spike in deaths in, say, January or February 2020. In America, this spike actually commences around the second week of March (which in itself is interesting as only a handful of Americans were supposed to have had COVID by this date. As the time period from infection to death from COVID is usually about 25 days, people who began to die in greater numbers in mid-March must have been infected in mid-February … when officials say there was only a handful of cases in the entire country).
However, I’ve also looked at “mortality data” from at least a dozen states, and it seems there WAS a noticeable jump in deaths in at least 10 states, and this “spike” in deaths above the norm began before March 2020.
For example, If memory serves, mortality data from Michigan shows a big spike in deaths above the norm in the age cohorts of 65 and older, and this spike began weeks before mid-March 2020. This is significant as any analysis of death rates needs to focus on the age cohorts that experience the greatest risk from COVID.
That is, I wouldn’t expect to find significant spikes in death rates in December and January among people under the age of 60. COVID rarely kills people in this category. But I would expect to see a noticeable spike in deaths among older citizens, at least in a fair number of states.
I’d also note that at least 50 percent of the “early deaths” from COVID – at least in the early weeks and months of the pandemic – occurred among nursing home residents.
I acknowledge that it would “fit” my hypothesis better if I could find examples of large numbers of deaths among nursing home residents prior to, say, February 2020. This said, I also think it’s possible there WERE more deaths of nursing home residents in this earlier time frame. My guess would be that these deaths were just attributed to pneumonia, influenza, “old age” or whatever. FWIW, I have found sources – including county coroners – who DID note an increase in deaths among older residents prior to COVID. Some of these were “home health” patients or dementia patients.
Still, I’ve been unable to find published reports showing abnormal spikes of “nursing home” deaths between December 2019 and February 2020. This is one reason I made this post: Maybe better mines than my own can offer possible explanations. (Maybe the virus had not yet reached “critical mass” among nursing home residents, or maybe there were some nursing homes that experienced a rash of deaths in the months prior to March 2020?)
I’d also point out that my hypothesis posits that the virus began to spread in America maybe in November. It follows that deaths – in large (or noticeable) numbers – wouldn’t begin until maybe a month later. The number of deaths that would be expected to occur would be some fraction of the total number of cases at a given period of time.
If 5 million Americans had COVID on January 15th (a possible figure if the results of the Red Cross Blood study was generalized to the entire population), how many “extra” deaths would we expect to be recorded? If COVID kills 1-in-10,000 Americans who contract the virus, this number would only be 500 “extra” deaths (a figure so small it could easily be “lost” in national mortality data). Even if COVID kills 1-in-1,000 people who contract the virus, this would still be just 5,000 “extra” deaths, with these “extra” deaths spread out over 50 states over two or three months.
Again, I’m searching for possible explanations that could plausibly explain how the virus could have been spreading throughout the country before March without a noticeable national uptick of deaths happening until March 2020. I’m not sure what these explanations may be, but I do believe plausible explanations may exist.
I’d also add that if the virus was spreading, it was spreading faster among the most active cohorts of the population, which would be the younger age cohorts – which includes those unlikely to die from the virus. (However, many of these people would be expected to become “sick,” which clearly DID happen in eye-opening numbers).
For those who dismiss this hypothesis, I would ask if they can at least offer a plausible theory that would explain how at least 16 Americans who were sick with COVID symptoms in November and December 2019 later tested positive for COVID antibodies, as well as offer plausible alternative theories that would account for the findings of the Red Cross blood study.
And, again, I do believe it’s significant that so many people in America (and the world) were sick with “something” that was NOT influenza in the weeks and months before COVID became the global story.
The chronology of the origin and “spread” of this virus is clearly unknown. I’d go so far to say that efforts to “connect the dots” and provide evidence of “early spread” seems to be off-limits to journalistic inquiry, as well as to “public health official” inquiry.
As you can probably tell, I find this both bizarre and maddening. I do appreciate that I’m able to publish a few of my thoughts on this subject at a site created for those who might be skeptical of the official COVID narrative.
We certainly had a covid-like illness here in Suffolk UK between october 2019 and february 2020, peaking in december, and I’ve heard the same in parts of the West Country, ie the other side of the UK.
Most people weren’t ill enough to visit their doctors but the ones who did were told thetre was a “nasty virus doing the rounds”
And so it should have stayed.
Would be interesting to see the timing of this early spike in different regions.
One family I know reckon they caught it from their son, who had been skiing in France and returned with a “nasty cough”. Everyone else in the family caught it but with hugely varying degrees of symptoms. Add in the findings in sewage and blood samples in Italy and Spain and the early onset lloks highly plausible