This website contains parental reports of injury/death from the CDC childhood vaccine schedule pre-Covid.
To see the injury/death from Covid vaccines see Virus-Hoax.com (over 1 million "excess" deaths in the US)
Hospital Covid protocols more deadly than any virus, real or imaginary. Watch Vaxxed 3, Authorized to Kill
COVID-19 Case Numbers Driven by Faulty Tests
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David Icke Explains how it's Possible to Control Billions of People using Fake Statistics about a Nonexistant VirusDr Andy Kaufman, MD: The COVID-19 Test is Detecting Genetic Material from Our Own Exosomes, not a Foreign Invader/VirusDr Thomas Cowan, MD on Flu Epidemics (10 min clip)Pandemic Created by Diagnostic Fraud and ManipulationNYC ICU MD: COVID Symptoms Match Oxygen Deprivation, Not ARDS UK Scientist Walks Back His 13-Year-Old, Undisclosed Software Model Warning of 2-4 Million Flu DeathsBritish scientist Neil Ferguson panicked the world on March 16 when he published the bombshell report predicting 2.2 million Americans and more than half a million Brits would be killed. Ferguson is walking back his doomsday scenarios, after both the U.S. and U.K. governments effectively shut down their citizens and economies. He now says that the U.K. should have enough ICU beds and that the coronavirus will probably kill fewer than 20,000 people in the U.K. - more than 1/2 of whom would have died by the end of the year in any case because they are so old and sick. The New Scientist reports Ferguson acknowledged it was impractical to keep the country in an isolated lockdown for 12 to 18 months, especially because of the impact on the economy. “We’ll be paying for this year for decades to come,” he said. Source: The Federalist According to data from the Italian National Health Institute ISS, the average age of the positively-tested deceased in Italy is 81 years old. 10% of the deceased are over 90 years old. 90% of the deceased are over 70 years old. Less than 1% of the deceased were healthy persons; i.e. persons without pre-existing chronic diseases. Only about 30% of the deceased are women. 80% of the deceased had suffered from two or more chronic diseases. 50% of the deceased had suffered from three or more chronic diseases such as cardiovascular problems, diabetes, respiratory problems and cancer. Surprisingly, CDC is instructing hospitals worldwide to combine suspected cases together with confirmed cases when reporting figures for infection and death. But "confirmed" means nothing with a test that has an 80% rate of FALSE POSITIVES. Also, they are instructing hospitals to include figures for people who died "with" COVID-19 together with people who died "becasue of" COVID-19. |
PCR Test Used to Create a Case-demic Via False PositivesAlthough COVID-19 is said to be a novel coronavirus, the test is not able to distinguish between COVID-19 antibodies and other coronavirus antibodies. So with the COVID-19 antibody test, 7-14% of people worldwide will test positive due to previous flu episodes or flu shots, but that does NOT indicate an active infection. In any case, unless the rate of false positives is near zero, such tests should never be used for contact tracing and forced isolation. Also, the original justification for infringing the 1st Amendment right of peaceable assembly was to insure that hospitals were not overwhelmed with patients. However, the only US hospitals that even came close to reaching capacity were in NY, NJ and Seattle. So the original projections were seriously flawed. Thus stores and parks must open immediately and the 1st Amendment must never again be infringed for any reason; especially not on unexamined theoretical models. Stanford Epidemiologist Warns that the Coronavirus Crackdown is Based on Bad Data‘Like an elephant being attacked by a house cat’ “If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR [virus] tests, the number of total deaths due to ‘influenza-like illness’ would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average.” The statement is from a sobering and illuminating essay by Stanford University epidemiologist John Ioannidis, co-director of its Meta-Research Innovation Center, published in the life sciences news site STAT. The coronavirus-driven crackdowns on public life by state and local political leaders are being made in a data vacuum, Ioannidis warns, and extreme government measures to prevent infections may actually lead to more deaths. “The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic,” he says. “But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco,” with policymakers relying on “meaningless” statistics based on unreliable samples:
The general ignorance of journalists when it comes to reporting scientific research is making the response worse. Consider the complicating factors when trying to project that one cruise ship’s mortality rate “onto the age structure of the U.S. population”: It’s based on seven deaths, in a population (tourists) that “may have different frequencies of chronic diseases” than the general population. The “reasonable estimates” for the general population range from 0.05 percent to 1 percent (the elderly tourist cruise line death rate), Ioannidis writes:
The Stanford scientist notes that “mild” coronaviruses (not COVID-19) have much higher case fatality rates when infecting “elderly people in nursing homes” (the main cluster of cases in the Seattle area), and account for up to a tenth of respiratory hospitalizations. Ioannidis further notes the difficulty of nailing down what might have killed a person with multiple infections, citing an autopsy series of elderly victims of respiratory viruses: “A positive test for coronavirus does not mean necessarily that this virus is always primarily responsible for a patient’s demise.” His own “mid-range guess” for the COVID-19 mortality rate – 0.3 percent of the general population – would produce 10,000 deaths, but that would not even register a blip “within the noise” of estimated deaths from “influenza-like illness.” Without better data (and yes, the Trump administration irredeemably botched the testing), policymakers are using “prepare-for-the-worst reasoning” to impose “extreme measures of social distancing and lockdowns”:
The conventional wisdom to “flatten the curve” – managing the load on the health system through social distancing – could even backfire, Ioannidis writes:
He warns policymakers to consider the consequences of “lockdowns of months, if not years, [where] life largely stops.” If we’re going to risk the “financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a meltdown of the social fabric” caused by such extreme measures, “we need unbiased prevalence and incidence data for the evolving infectious load to guide decision-making.” Ioannidis’s analysis should be taken the most seriously by state and local leaders, who actually have the power to destroy their economies and civic life, and the scientifically ignorant media who feed them doomsday coverage. Source
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#705 $5,000 Reward for Proof of Covid 19 Diagnosis
#704 Coronavirus: Why There is Nothing Novel About it
Cancer is only one of many diseases caused by microwave radiation. The incidence of malignant brain tumours has increased sharply since cell phones became widely available, and is continuing to increase annually:
Technological devices have become essential components of daily life. However, their deleterious effects on the body, particularly on the nervous system, are well known. Electromagnetic fields (EMF) have various chemical effects, including causing deterioration in large molecules in cells and imbalance in ionic equilibrium. Despite being essential for life, oxygen molecules can lead to the generation of hazardous by-products, known as reactive oxygen species (ROS), during biological reactions. These reactive oxygen species can damage cellular components such as proteins, lipids and DNA. Antioxidant defense systems exist in order to keep free radical formation under control and to prevent their harmful effects on the biological system. Free radical formation can take place in various ways, including ultraviolet light, drugs, lipid oxidation, immunological reactions, radiation, stress, smoking, alcohol and biochemical redox reactions. Oxidative stress occurs if the antioxidant defense system is unable to prevent the harmful effects of free radicals. Several studies have reported that exposure to EMF results in oxidative stress in many tissues of the body. Exposure to EMF is known to increase free radical concentrations and traceability and can affect the radical couple recombination. The purpose of this review was to highlight the impact of oxidative stress on antioxidant systems.
In this article, I’m focusing on the type of test, and whether it’s accurate, even if you assume the coronavirus is causing disease.
Reading through CDC literature (see also here), I believe the two most prevalent US testing methods are: antibody, and PCR.
Antibody tests are notorious for cross-reactions. This means factors in no way relevant to a given virus can make the test read positive. In that case, the patient would be falsely told he “has the coronavirus.” But it gets worse. Traditionally, antibody tests reading positive were taken as a good sign for the patient: his immune system had contacted a germ and defeated it. Then, starting in 1984, the science was turned upside down: a positive test was, astoundingly, taken to mean the patient was ill or would soon become ill.
The PCR test (which requires excellent technicians who will not make any number of possible mistakes) takes a tissue sample from a patient which might contain a tiny virus particle(s) much too small to be observed—and blows it up many times, so it can be seen. However, the test says nothing reliable about HOW MUCH virus is in the patient’s body. Why is that important? Because millions and millions of replicating virus in the body are necessary to even begin talking about actual illness. A positive PCR test, nevertheless, will be taken to mean the patient “has the epidemic disease.” —An even deeper issue: where is the PRIOR PROOF that the PCR is testing for a virus that actually causes disease?
The prospect of these two tests being done on Americans is not comforting, to say the least. People will be roped into believing they are “epidemic cases,” and therefore need to be isolated, and treated with highly toxic antiviral drugs.
In the event they become ill, from the drugs, they’ll be told “the coronavirus is doing the damage.” In some cases, this will result in even further dosing with the same drugs, at higher levels—a disaster.
A very small percentage of doctors are aware of the profound shortcomings of these two diagnostic tests. Most of them will shrug off their doubts and perform the tests anyway, because refusal would endanger their careers and medical licenses.
“the false-positive rate of positive results was 80.33%” and 85% false negative rate. The test kits don’t work. If the test kits don’t work, or are less reliable than a coin flip, then all the data on “who has it” is utterly meaningless and it’s all a total fraud and hoax. People are still dying, but from the same illness as always: the flu. So, what follows is only exact quotes from the articles, and links. Below are 15 sources giving commentary on the reliability of the COVID19 test kits in use.
MoreScientists are detecting novel RNA in multiple patients with influenza or pneumonia-like conditions, and are assuming that the detection of RNA (which is believed to be wrapped in proteins to form an RNA virus, as coronaviruses are
believed to be) is equivalent to isolation of the virus. It is not, and one of the groups of scientists was honest enough to admit this:
“we did not perform tests for detecting infectious virus in blood” [2]
But, despite this admission, earlier in the paper they repeatedly referred to the 41 cases (out of 59 similar cases) that tested positive for this RNA as, “41 patients… confirmed to be infected with 2019-nCoV.”
Another paper quietly admitted that:
“our study does not fulfill Koch’s postulates” [1]
Koch’s postulates, first stated by the great German bacteriologist Robert Koch in the late 1800s, can simply be stated as:
• Purify the pathogen (e.g. virus) from many cases with a particular illness.
• Expose susceptible animals (obviously not humans) to the pathogen.
• Verify that the same illness is produced.
• Some add that you should also re-purify the pathogen, just to be sure that it really is creating the illness.
Famous virologist Thomas Rivers stated in a 1936 speech, “It is obvious that Koch's postulates have not been satisfied in viral diseases”. That was a long time ago, but the problem continues. None of the papers referenced in this article have even
attempted to purify the virus. And the word ‘isolation’ has been so debased by virologists it means nothing (e.g. adding impure materials to a cell culture and seeing cell death is ‘isolation’).
Media coverage of the rapidly growing Coronavirus 2019 nCov epidemic is unanimous that official bodies are doing everything possible to contain it, using all the tools of modern medical science and public health resources.
The UK government has committed 40 million pounds to research. We are told that this novel virus was rapidly identified, a test developed and those testing positive are being rapidly quarantined and treated with the latest medications.
But there is a dissenting voice. David Crowe is a Canadian software and telecommunications engineer with a degree in mathematics and biology who has become an independent expert in 21st Century global infections such as SARS, Ebola and flu.
Working from a database of 10,000 scientific papers, government, corporate and mainstream media reports, he has been raising fundamental questions about the way viral epidemics and are identified and treated.
I work in the healthcare field. Here's the problem, we are testing people for any strain of a Coronavirus. Not specifically for COVID-19. There are no reliable tests for a specific COVID-19 virus. There are no reliable agencies or media outlets for reporting numbers of actual COVID-19 virus cases. This needs to be addressed first and foremost. Every action and reaction to COVID-19 is based on totally flawed data and we simply can not make accurate assessments.
This is why you're hearing that most people with COVID-19 are showing nothing more than cold/flu like symptoms. That's because most Coronavirus strains are nothing more than cold/flu like symptoms.
The few actual novel Coronavirus cases do have some worse respiratory responses, but still have a very promising recovery rate, especially for those without prior issues.
The ‘gold standard’ in testing for COVID-19 is laboratory isolated/purified coronavirus particles free from any contaminants and particles that look like viruses but are not, that have been proven to be the cause of the syndrome known as COVID-19 and obtained by using proper viral isolation methods and controls (not PCR that is currently being used or Serology /antibody tests which do not detect virus as such).
PCR basically takes a sample of your cells and amplifies any DNA to look for ‘viral sequences’, i.e. bits of non-human DNA that seem to match parts of a known viral genome.
The problem is the test is known not to work.
It uses ‘amplification’ which means taking a very very tiny amount of DNA and growing it exponentially until it can be analyzed. Obviously any minute contaminations in the sample will also be amplified leading to potentially gross errors of discovery.
Additionally, it’s only looking for partial viral sequences, not whole genomes, so identifying a single pathogen is next to impossible even if you ignore the other issues.
The Mickey Mouse test kits being sent out to hospitals, at best, tell analysts you have some viral DNA in your cells. Which most of us do, most of the time. It may tell you the viral sequence is related to a specific type of virus – say the huge family of coronavirus. But that’s all.
The idea these kits can isolate a specific virus like COVID-19 is nonsense.
And that’s not even getting into the other issue – viral load.
If you remember the PCR works by amplifying minute amounts of DNA. It therefore is useless at telling you how much virus you may have.
And that’s the only question that really matters when it comes to diagnosing illness. Everyone will have a few virus kicking round in their system at any time, and most will not cause illness because their quantities are too small. For a virus to sicken you you need a lot of it, a massive amount of it. But PCR does not test viral load and therefore can’t determine if a osteogenesis is present in sufficient quantities to sicken you.
If you feel sick and get a PCR test any random virus DNA might be identified even if they aren’t at all involved in your sickness which leads to false diagnosis.
And coronavirus are incredibly common. A large percentage of the world human population will have covi DNA in them in small quantities even if they are perfectly well or sick with some other pathogen.
Do you see where this is going yet?
If you want to create a totally false panic about a totally false pandemic – pick a coronavirus.
They are incredibly common and there’s tons of them. A very high percentage of people who have become sick by other means (flu, bacterial pneumonia, anything) will have a positive PCR test for covi even if you’re doing them properly and ruling out contamination, simply because covis are so common.
There are hundreds of thousands of flu and pneumonia victims in hospitals throughout the world at any one time.
All you need to do is select the sickest of these in a single location – say Wuhan – administer PCR tests to them and claim anyone showing viral sequences similar to a coronavirus (which will inevitably be quite a few) is suffering from a ‘new’ disease.
Since you already selected the sickest flu cases a fairly high proportion of your sample will go on to die.
You can then say this ‘new’ virus has a CFR higher than the flu and use this to infuse more concern and do more tests which will of course produce more ‘cases’, which expands the testing, which produces yet more ‘cases’ and so on and so on.
Before long you have your ‘pandemic’, and all you have done is use a simple test kit trick to convert the worst flu and pneumonia cases into something new that doesn’t actually exist.
Now just run the same scam in other countries. Making sure to keep the fear message running high so that people will feel panicky and less able to think critically.
Your only problem is going to be that – due to the fact there is no actual new deadly pathogen but just regular sick people you are mislabelling – your case numbers, and especially your deaths, are going to be way too low for a real new deadly virus pandemic.
But you can stop people pointing this out in several ways.
1. You can claim this is just the beginning and more deaths are imminent. Use this as an excuse to quarantine everyone and then claim the quarantine prevented the expected millions of dead.
2. You can tell people that ‘minimizing’ the dangers is irresponsible and bully them into not talking about numbers.
3. You can talk crap about made up numbers hoping to blind people with pseudoscience.
4. You can start testing well people (who, of course, will also likely have shreds of coronavirus DNA in them) and thus inflate your ‘case figures’ with ‘asymptomatic carriers’ (you will of course have to spin that to sound deadly even though any virologist knows the more symptom-less cases you have the less deadly is your pathogen.
Take these simple steps and you can have your own entirely manufactured pandemic up and running in weeks.
They can not "confirm" something for which there is no accurate test.
Belief is a very dangerous bias. 98% of deaths in Italy can be attributed to another cause, firstly ask these questions: 1) Is there an electron micrograph of the pure and fully characterised novel SARS-CoV-2 virus? If so where can it be viewed?
2) What is the name of the primary specialist peer reviewed paper in which the novel virus in question is illustrated, and its full genetic information described?
3) What is the name of the primary publication that provides proof that novel virus SARS-CoV-2 is the sole cause of covid-19? If you can’t then provide any scientific proof that this virus causes any disease at all? There is no science being used in this political pandemic, my heart goes out to all those who have lost loved ones but you dont just believe what you read in media. The WHO are corrupt and modern medicine is controlled by drug companies, they are not in the industry to cure people but to keep sick people alive as long as possible whilst extracting their $. Grow up and read a book, then think about the big picture. This is what doctors are trained ‘not to do’. Specialise and have only vague understanding of the organism as a whole. Virus causes nothing, it is the excretion of toxins from an infected cell. -Dennis Blair
According to the latest data of the Italian National Health Institute ISS, the average age of the positively-tested deceased in Italy is currently about 81 years. 10% of the deceased are over 90 years old. 90% of the deceased are over 70 years old.
80% of the deceased had suffered from two or more chronic diseases. 50% of the deceased had suffered from three or more chronic diseases. The chronic diseases include in particular cardiovascular problems, diabetes, respiratory problems and cancer.
Less than 1% of the deceased were healthy persons, i.e. persons without pre-existing chronic diseases. Only about 30% of the deceased are women.
The Italian Institute of Health moreover distinguishes between those who died from the coronavirus and those who died with the coronavirus. In many cases it is not yet clear whether the persons died from the virus or from their pre-existing chronic diseases or from a combination of both.
The two Italians deceased under 40 years of age (both 39 years old) were a cancer patient and a diabetes patient with additional complications. In these cases, too, the exact cause of death was not yet clear (i.e. if from the virus or from their pre-existing diseases). -Ramon Martinez
The man who panicked the world is now running from his doomsday projections. British scientist Neil Ferguson ignited the world’s drastic response to the novel Wuhan coronavirus when he published the bombshell report predicting 2.2 million Americans and more than half a million Brits would be killed. After both the U.S. and U.K. governments effectively shut down their citizens and economies, Ferguson is walking back his doomsday scenarios.
He now says both that the U.K. should have enough ICU beds and that the coronavirus will probably kill under 20,000 people in the U.K. - more than 1/2 of whom would have died by the end of the year in any case because they are so old and sick.
The New Scientist reports Ferguson did acknowledge it was impractical to keep the country in an isolated lockdown for 12 to 18 months, especially because of the impact on the economy. “We’ll be paying for this year for decades to come,” he said. Source: The Federalist
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a key member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, co-authored an article published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine predicting the fatality rate for the coronavirus will turn out to be like that of a "severe seasonal influenza."
In an exceptionally bad flu season, the case fatality rate is about one-tenth of 1 percent, the authors write.
Regarding the current coronavirus pandemic, they said: "If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%."
Taking into account the unreported cases, they conclude "that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively."
The Council of Europe member states will launch an inquiry in January 2010 on the influence of the pharmaceutical companies on the global swine flu campaign, focusing especially on extent of the pharma's industry's influence on WHO. The Health Committee of the EU Parliament has unanimously passed a resolution calling for the inquiry.
The step is a long-overdue move to public transparency of a "Golden Triangle" of drug corruption between WHO, the pharma industry and academic scientists that has permanently damaged the lives of millions and even caused death.
The parliament motion was introduced by Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, former SPD Member of the German Bundestag and now chairman of the Health Committee of PACE (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe). Wodarg is a medical doctor and epidemiologist, a specialist in lung disease and environmental medicine, who considers the current "pandemic" Swine Flu campaign of the WHO to be "one of the greatest medicine scandals of the Century."
The text of the resolution just passed by a sufficient number in the Council of Europe Parliament says among other things, "In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines. The "bird-flu"-campaign (2005/06) combined with the "swine-flu"-campaign seem to have caused a great deal of damage not only to some vaccinated patients and to public health-budgets, but to the credibility and accountability of important international health-agencies."
The Parliamentary inquiry will look into the issue of "falsified pandemic" that was declared by WHO in June 2009 on the advice of its group of academic experts, SAGE, many of whose members have been documented to have intense financial ties to the same pharmaceutical giants such as GSK, Roche, Novartis, who benefit from the production of drugs and untested H1N1 vaccines. They will investigate the influence of the pharma industry in creation of a worldwide campaign against the so-called H5N1 "Avian Flu" and H1N1 Swine Flu. The inquiry will be given "urgent" priority in the general assembly of the parliament.
In his official statement to the Committee, Wodarg criticized the influence of the pharma industry on scientists and officials of WHO, stating that it has led to the situation where "unnecessarily millions of healthy people are exposed to the risk of poorly tested vaccines," and that, for a flu strain that is "vastly less harmful" than all previous flu epidemics.
Wodarg says the role of the WHO and its the pandemic emergency declaration in June needs to be the special focus of the European Parliamentary inquiry. For the first time, the WHO criteria for a pandemic was changed in April 2009 as the first Mexico cases were reported, to make not the actual risk of a disease but the number of cases of the disease basis to declare "Pandemic." By classifying the swine flu as pandemic, nations were compelled to implement pandemic plans and also the purchase swine flu vaccines. Because WHO is not subject to any parliamentary control, Wodarg argues it is necessary for governments to insist on accountability. The inquiry will also to look at the role of the two critical agencies in Germany issuing guidelines on the pandemic, the Paul-Ehrlich and the Robert-Koch Institute. Source
F. William Engdahl is author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. He may be contacted through his website: engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net
Citizens of many countries throughout the world have recently become human subjects in a grand social science experiment that is being conducted without our informed consent.
As social scientists, when we conduct an experiment, we are most often required by law to obtain the informed consent of our human subjects. That is, we are required to explain to each subject, in great detail, precisely what we are trying to accomplish in our project, as well as its duration, cost and risks.
We also have to abide by an ethical code, which says that there should be no psychological or physical harm to the subject.
Unfortunately, the current experiment that is being conducted on us by supposedly democratic governments throughout the world follows none of these principles. Moreover, it has been designed by unelected public health officials; the same officials who failed in their duty to protect us from the virus.
Therefore, we are allowing the unit responsible for government failure to give advice on how to “solve” a problem that is in large part their fault. These officials also seem to have a single goal in mind: reducing the number of individuals who contract the virus.
Such a single-minded approach is not consistent with an appropriate cost/benefit analysis of the consequences of their proposed actions.
The other pernicious force at play in this multifaceted tragedy is a crazed media, which have sensationalized the spread of the virus and vastly overestimated the damage the virus could create. For example, media outlets constantly refer to Italy, which is clearly an outlier along many dimensions, pressuring policymakers to lockdown the entire economy.
This dangerous interplay between the media and policymakers has been termed an “availability cascade” by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman.
“The cycle is sometimes sped along deliberately by ‘availability entrepreneurs,’ individuals or organizations who work to ensure a continuous flow of worrying news. The danger is increasingly exaggerated as the media compete for attention-grabbing headlines.
“Scientists and others who try to dampen the increasing fear and revulsion attract little attention, most of it hostile: Anyone who claims that the danger is overstated is suspected of association with a ‘heinous cover-up.’ More
What causes people, who appear to be fit, to keel over without a seizure or to tremble suddenly? What is the underlying cause? And what makes Wuhan and Northern Italy different than other parts of the world? So different that COVID-19 kills people with no apparent explanation?
In 2018, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology selected Wuhan as a pilot city for the “Made in China 2025” plan. The overarching goal aimed at the industrial city of 11 million to become the world’s Internet of Things mecca. The goal? A 5G smart city that would connect homes, offices, hospitals, factories, and autonomous vehicles via a digital fabric.
Renowned for its factories and severe pollution, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) envisioned elevating Wuhan as the global smart city of the future. All of the commands, controls, data sharing, and data flowing through artificial intelligence systems would showcase China as the preeminent digital leader of the world.
At the center of the plan, the Chinese telecom syndicate of ZTE, Huawei, Hubei Mobile, and China Unicom began to transform Wuhan into a giant 5G “hot spot” for wireless technology. The 5G launch in the Hubei capital city culminated with the October 2019 Military World Games. Wuhan activated 20% of its 10,000 5G base stations, and the rest by the end of the year. With the hottest 5G pilot city on the planet, the CCP planned to leverage the publicity to attract more foreign investment and lure international businesses to prop up China’s flagging economy.
Then disaster struck. More
The problem, critical care physician Cameron Kyle-Sidell told Medscape this week, is that because U.S. physicians had never seen Covid-19 before February, they are basing clinical decisions on conditions that may not be good guides.
“It’s hard to switch tracks when the train is going a million miles an hour,” said Kyle-Sidell, who works at a New York City hospital. “This may be an entirely new disease,” making ventilator protocols developed for other conditions less than ideal.
As doctors learn more about the disease, however, both frontline experience and a few small studies are leading him and others to question how, and how often, mechanical ventilators are used for Covid-19.
The first batch of evidence relates to how often the machines fail to help. “Contrary to the impression that if extremely ill patients with Covid-19 are treated with ventilators they will live and if they are not, they will die, the reality is far different,” said geriatric and palliative care physician Muriel Gillick of Harvard Medical School.
Researchers in Wuhan, for instance, reported that, of 37 critically ill Covid-19 patients who were put on mechanical ventilators, 30 died within a month. In a U.S. study of patients in Seattle, only one of the seven patients older than 70 who were put on a ventilator survived; just 36% of those younger than 70 did. And in a study published by JAMA on Monday, physicians in Italy reported that nearly 90% of 1,300 critically ill patients with Covid-19 were intubated and put on a ventilator; only 11% received noninvasive ventilation. One-quarter died in the ICU; 58% were still in the ICU, and 16% had been discharged.
Older patients who do survive risk permanent cognitive and respiratory damage from being on heavy sedation for many days if not weeks and from the intubation, Gillick said.
To be sure, the mere need for ventilators in Covid-19 patients suggests many in the studies were so critically ill their chances of survival were poor no matter what care they received.
But one of the most severe consequences of Covid-19 suggests another reason the ventilators aren’t more beneficial. In acute respiratory distress syndrome, which results from immune cells ravaging the lungs and kills many Covid-19 patients, the air sacs of the lungs become filled with a gummy yellow fluid. “That limits oxygen transfer from the lungs to the blood even when a machine pumps in oxygen,” Gillick said.
As patients go downhill, protocols developed for other respiratory conditions call for increasing the force with which a ventilator delivers oxygen, the amount of oxygen, or the rate of delivery, she explained. But if oxygen can’t cross into the blood from the lungs in the first place, those measures, especially greater force, may prove harmful. High levels of oxygen impair the lung’s air sacs, while high pressure to force in more oxygen damages the lungs.
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