I wrote this paper with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (nominee NIH director) and Dr. Harvey Risch (Yale epidemiologist) when we were arguing to end lockdowns and end the emergency; all 3 of use wrote & we
each tweaked in the end. Jay is a good man, I did not agree on the vaccine for elderly and I have stated my views many times here...but serious people can have disagreements yet agree GENERALLY
Jay is a good man, will do good, he comes with a superb heart, wants to do good, was vilified like I was for his stance against lockdowns etc. Sometimes people can’t agree on everything, but you must judge on the ARC of someone’s life and folk like me will always work with people like Jay who I know seeks to fix things.
As I re-read out paper, the text did not highlight that the PCR process was 95% false positive (we should have) and so many of the so-called positives were not ideally. But the jest of the paper was that the emergency declaration had to end and it was suffering Americans to keep it in place…in other words we were saying whatever this was, e.g. they said a pandemic, I said not, but whatever it was, it was OVER.
Start here:
The time has come to terminate the pandemic state of emergency. It is time to end the controls, the closures, the restrictions, the plexiglass, the stickers, the exhortations, the panic-mongering, the distancing announcements, the ubiquitous commercials, the forced masking, the vaccine mandates.
We don’t mean that the virus is gone – omicron is still spreading wildly, and the virus may circulate forever. But with a normal focus on protecting the vulnerable, we can treat the virus as a medical rather than a social matter and manage it in ordinary ways. A declared emergency needs continuous justification, and that is now lacking.
Over the last six weeks in the US, the delta variant strain – the most recent aggressive version of the infection – has according to CDC been declining in both the proportion of infections (60% on December 18 to 0.5% on January 15) and the number of daily infected people (95,000 to 2,100). During the next two weeks, delta will decline to the point that it essentially disappears like the strains before it.
Omicron is mild enough that most people, even many high-risk people, can adequately cope with the infection. Omicron infection is no more severe than seasonal flu, and generally less so. A large portion of the vulnerable population in the developed world is already vaccinated and protected against severe disease. We have learned much about the utility of inexpensive supplements like Vitamin D to reduce disease risk, and there is a host of good therapeutics available to prevent hospitalization and death should a vulnerable patient become infected. And for younger people, the risk of severe disease – already low before omicron – is minuscule.
Even in places with strict lockdown measures, there are hundreds of thousands of newly registered omicron cases daily and countless unregistered positives from home testing. Measures like mandatory masking and distancing have had negligible or at most small effects on transmission. Large-scale population quarantines only delay the inevitable. Vaccination and boosters have not halted omicron disease spread; heavily vaccinated nations like Israel and Australia have more daily cases per capita than any place on earth at the moment. This wave will run its course despite all of the emergency measures.
Until omicron, recovery from Covid provided substantial protection against subsequent infection. While the omicron variant can reinfect patients recovered from infection by previous strains, such reinfection tends to produce mild disease. Future variants, whether evolved from omicron or not, are unlikely to evade the immunity provided by omicron infection for a long while. With the universal spread of omicron worldwide, new strains will likely have more difficulty finding a hospitable environment because of the protection provided to the population by omicron’s widespread natural immunity.
It is true that – despite emergency measures — hospitalization counts and Covid-associated mortality have risen. Since mortality tends to trail symptomatic infection by about 3-4 weeks, we are still seeing the delta strain’s remaining effects and the waning of vaccine immunity against serious outcomes at 6-8 months after vaccination. These cases should decline over time as delta finally says goodbye. It is too late to alter their course with lockdowns (if that were ever possible).
Given that omicron, with its mild infection, is running its course to the end, there is no justification for maintaining emergency status. The lockdowns, personnel firings and shortages and school disruptions have done at least as much damage to the population’s health and welfare as the virus.
The state of emergency is not justified now, and it cannot be justified by fears of a hypothetical recurrence of some more severe infection at some unknown point in the future. If such a severe new variant were to occur – and it seems unlikely from omicron – then that would be the time to discuss a declaration of emergency.
Americans have sacrificed enough of their human rights and of their livelihoods for two years in the service of protecting the general public health. Omicron is circulating but it is not an emergency. The emergency is over. The current emergency declaration must be canceled. It is time.
Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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Authors
Harvey Risch, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a physician and a Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine. His main research interests are in cancer etiology, prevention and early diagnosis, and in epidemiologic methods.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a physician, epidemiologist and health economist. He is Professor at Stanford Medical School, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Faculty Member at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute, and a Fellow at the Academy of Science and Freedom. His research focuses on the economics of health care around the world with a particular emphasis on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. Co-Author of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Dr. Paul Alexander is an epidemiologist focusing on clinical epidemiology, evidence-based medicine, and research methodology. He has a master's in epidemiology from University of Toronto, and a master's degree from Oxford University. He earned his PhD from McMaster's Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact. He has some background training in Bioterrorism/Biowarfare from John's Hopkins, Baltimore, Maryland. Paul is a former WHO Consultant and Senior Advisor to US Department of HHS in 2020 for the COVID-19 response.
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Thanks for reminding about this important paper.
I'm a fan of Dr. Bhattacharya's, mainly for his bright spirit and his astounding courage. However, I cannot respect the fact that he, or any other doctor, fell for the con and recommended the experimental clotshots to the elderly. Much was in fact known about the novel use of lipid nanoparticles and clotting, as well as other neurological adverse events, and from the start, before the Pfizer documents came out. And Dr. Fauci, well, I am astounded that it wasn't obvious to everyone that he was lying every which way about covid from the get-go. That said, I trust that Dr. Bhattacharya has since become enlightened on these noxious injectables, and I sincerely wish him well.
Does he still support the mRNA vaccines for the elderly? If he does, and advocates for them in the White House, then there is a problem.