General George S. Patton once proclaimed, “Fear kills more people than death!”
That makes as much sense (or not) as something Yogi Berra said: “No one goes to that restaurant anymore; it’s too crowded.” These days no one goes to the restaurant because the government freaked out and shut it down. But some eminent medical experts have dared to say the response to COVID-19 has been both overbearing and unwarranted.
Dr. John Ioannidis of Stanford University says such “draconian countermeasures” may represent “a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.” He points out that the Diamond Princess cruise ship with 3,711 on board had only seven deaths from 700 infections. That’s a one percent death rate despite how elderly cruise ship passengers tend to be. By contrast, “mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses that have been known for decades can have fatality rates as high as eight percent when they infect elderly people in nursing homes.”
Ioannidis says that if one extrapolates the cruise ship stats to regular age demographics, the mortality rate drops to 0.125 percent. That’s close to the 0.1 percent mortality rate for the regular flu.
Better safe than sorry, some would argue. But not German microbiologist Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi. He says drastic anti-COVID-19 measures “are grotesque, absurd and very dangerous.”
While some fear COVID-19 will infect one million Germans and kill 30 every day, Bhakdi says typical flus kill 20 to 100 people every day anyway. “The horrifying impact on the world economy threatens the existence of countless people . . . [Medical] services to patients in need are reduced . . . . All these measures are leading to self-destruction and collective suicide based on nothing but a spook.”
Lee Harding – Frontier Centre for Public Policy – April 6, 2020.
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