CoVID19: what do we really know?

A visitor to my website sent me this email:

“Hello Dr Bauer. I just read your 2002 article on Confessions of an AIDS Denialist. . . . You must have a lot to say about COVID-19! I . . . would be interested in your view.”

I suspect that my reply will have been rather disappointing:

“I had a lot of fairly reliable data about AIDS and HIV, but there’s a great lack of sound, reliable data about the present circumstances.

AIDS was first noticed and named in the early 1980s, and I looked into it seriously some 20 years later. With CoVID-19, even well-informed experts have been revising their views steadily as more information comes in.

At least one thing is clear already, thanks in part to what has been learned about HIV/AIDS: There is no reliable gold-standard test for diagnosing infection by the supposed coronavirus. HIV/AIDS can be blamed for that because it was with HIV that virologists first allowed the medical profession to use antibody tests and PCR tests as diagnostic of infection even as the published peer-reviewed mainstream literature stated quite clearly that these tests could not establish the presence of infection and should not be used for diagnosis.

The reason is that pure virions, particles of HIV, have never been isolated direct from an AIDS patient.

CoVID-19 infection is being diagnosed on the basis of PCR tests without isolation of actual virus. Even if the bits of RNA or DNA being picked up by PCR could be known to be like some components of a coronavirus, that would not demonstrate that they actually originated from particles of such a virus. As De Harven  had pointed out with respect to HIV tests, what PCR picks up might come from random circulating pieces of DNA or RNA or from the expression of human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs).

I think John Ioannidis Is trying honestly and without preconceptions or conflicts of interest to understand CoVID-19, and he is eminently qualified to do so. His most recent analysis  suggests that the virulence of CoVID-19 is comparable to that of the respiratory virus(es) underlying really bad so-called flu seasons.

The numbers that are being thrown around in the mass media are more misleading than informative. For instance, numbers of cases are continually reported and publicized as disastrous without any information about the symptomatic levels of those cases.

In my view, the clearest indication that deaths can be ascribed to the influence of a novel coronavirus is the data on excess all-cause deaths — https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

Both in Europe and in the United States, it seems that 2020 is definitely worse than the bad flu season of 2018.

The comparative data for European countries do not yield obvious information about the best way of handling the present infectious agent.

I think that one more thing is, however, quite clear: we do not properly understand why excess deaths are typically somewhat higher during “flu seasons”. Is it simply that when the weather becomes more wintry, mortality increases? Of course particularly among those who are the least healthy, which tends to be among those of greater age? Do respiratory viruses play a significant role in this? If so, should some of the measures now being advocated also be practiced during all winter seasons? What is the actual efficacy, if any, of vaccinating against flu?

I do not subscribe to the conspiracy theories that regard the pandemic as planned by governments, agencies, and corporations (e.g. the Gates Foundation) as a step toward increasing domination and control of the general population. I do believe very strongly, however, that the circumstances are being made considerably worse for most people through deliberate actions of pharmaceutical companies, associated conflicts of interest among legislatures and executives, and widespread general incompetence, together with the lack of an impartial, authoritative source of scientific knowledge and understanding.

A sad lesson from HIV/AIDS is that official agencies dealing with medicine in general and virology in particular are not truly competent. Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield, the CDC as a whole, the World Health Organization, etc., continue to be quite wrong about HIV/AIDS. And the approval of drugs and medical devices is incompetent or corrupt or both, and is no safeguard against products pushed by the pharmaceutical companies even when their potential benefits are greatly outweighed by the risks and harms; look no further than HPV vaccines, for example.”

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