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“Over the course of this pandemic I have often wished that Hans Rosling was still alive. For those who are unaware, he was a medical doctor and a professor at Karolinska Institutet who had a particular interest in global health and development. In 2012, Time magazine declared him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. During the last few months of his life, in 2017, he wrote an excellent book called “Factfulness”, that summed up most of his thinking, and described how many of the things people “know” about the world are completely wrong. Hans Rosling is something of a hero of mine, and if he was still alive, I’m sure he would have contributed to bringing some sanity to the current situation. With his global influence, I think people would have listened….Two of Hans Rosling’s former colleagues at Karolinska Instituet, professor Anna-Mia Ekström and professor Stefan Swartling Peterson, have gone through the data from UNICEF and UNAIDS, and come to the conclusion that at least as many people have died as a result of the restrictions to fight covid as have died of covid directly.”

The quote above comes from Sebastian Rushworth, a medical doctor in Sweden. Reading his recent blog post, I came across the fact that, as you can see above, two of Hans Rosling’s former colleagues at Karolinska Instituet, professor Anna-Mia Elkström and professor Stefan Swartling Peterson, have gone through the data from UNICEF and UNAIDS, and come to the conclusion that least as many people have died as a result of the restrictions to fight COVID as have died of COVID directly. I verified this using multiple sources, and it’s true, these professors did in fact come to this conclusion, and there are many sources expressing this. They have been interviewed about their findings on SVT, the Swedish public broadcaster. If you speak Swedish, you can watch a documentary that discusses their conclusions here. (source)(source)

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Before we go any further, I’d like to mention that lockdowns may have in fact killed more people already given the fact that we know deaths being marked as “COVID” deaths, in many cases are not actually a result of COVID. For example, Ontario public health clearly states that deaths will be marked as COVID deaths whether or not it’s clear if COVID was the cause or contributed to the death.

Dr. Ngozi Ezike, Director of the Illinois Department of Public Health stated the following during the first wave of the pandemic,

If you were in hospice and had already been given a few weeks to live and then you were also found to have COVID, that would be counted as a COVID death, despite if you died of a clear alternative cause it’s still listed as a COVID death. So, everyone who is listed as a COVID death that doesn’t mean that was the cause of the death, but they had COVID at the time of death.

Professor Anna-Mia Elkström and professor Stefan Swartling Peterson haven’t been the only ones to express concerns.  The consequences of lockdowns are many, and we are choosing this approach for a virus with a 99.95 percent survival rate for people under the age of 70, and a 95 percent survival rate for people over the age of 70. That said, we do know that the primary reason is to avoid hospital systems from becoming overburdened by apparent COVID cases.

Lockdown harms were pondered early on in the pandemic, a report published in the British Medical Journal titled Covid-19: “Staggering number” of extra deaths in community is not explained by covid-19″  has suggested that quarantine measures in the United Kingdom as a result of the new coronavirus may have already killed more UK seniors than the coronavirus has during the months of April and May .

Bhattacharya, MD, PhD wrote an article  for The Hill titled “Facts, not fear, will stop the pandemic.” In it he points out a number of facts regarding the implications of lockdown measures, which also include that fact that:

Internationally, the lockdowns have placed 130 million people on the brink of starvation, 80 million children at risk for diphtheria, measles and polio, and 1.8 million patients at risk of death from tuberculosis. The lockdowns in developed countries have devastated the poor in poor countries. The World Economic Forum estimates that the lockdowns will cause an additional 150 million people to fall into extreme poverty, 125 times as many people as have died from COVID.

Let’s not forget about the mental/psychological consequences of lockdowns as well, along with the economic factors.

Furthermore, many scientific publications have shown that lockdowns have no impact on the spread of the virus. For example, a study published by four medical professors from Stanford University has failed to find evidence supporting the use of what they call “Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions” (NPIs) like lockdowns, social-distancing, business closures and stay at home orders. According to the study, these measures have not been sufficient and are not sufficient to stop the spread of COVID and therefore are not necessary to combat the spread of the virus.

A group of doctors and scientists published an essay for the American Institute for Economic Research explaining and presenting the data as to why they believe lockdowns are not only harmful, but useless to combat COVID. In the essay they present a multitude of studies supporting the same conclusions found in the Stanford study cited above. You can read that here.

Another issue with the pandemic is the problem of false positives. A number of reputable sources, including many public health officials have raised concerns about the potential of false positives, especially when testing asymptomatic people. Many of these people, and based on my research the majority of them, will actually be “false positives.” Meaning they don’t have the virus, and/or are not capable of transmitting it to others. Of course, Facebook fact checkers and others argue otherwise, and herein lies another challenge. With fact checking comes censorship of differing opinions, and thus many are not hearing about these other perspectives because they are being shut out. Should we not be allowed to explore other credible perspectives?

You can find read more about that (PCR testing and false positives) and access sources for that claim, here.

The Censorship of Science

What’s plagued scientists who share the type of information shared above is the censorship they experience. For example, a  letter to the editor published in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “Open Schools, Covid-19, and Child and Teacher Morbidity in Sweden” expressed that:

“Despite Sweden’s having kept schools and preschools open, we found a low incidence of severe Covid-19 among schoolchildren and children of preschool age during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic…No child with Covid-19 died…Among the 1,951,905 million children who were 1 to 16 years of age, 15 children had Covid-19, MIS-C, or both conditions and were admitted to an ICU, which is equal to 1 child in 130,000.”

According to a recent article published in the British Medical Journal:

“The Swedish government has said that it will strengthen laws on academic freedom after a leading Swedish academic announced that he was quitting his work on COVID-19 because of an onslaught of intimidating comments from people who disagreed or disliked his research findings.”

The leading Swedish academic is the one who published the paper referenced above.

Below is a tweet from Professor Jay Bhattacharya, a medical professor from Stanford who is also referenced earlier in the article.

This is ironic because the community standards of a free country militate against exactly the kind of censorship that @facebook is enacting. It is a modern form of book burning.

Professor Jay Bhattacharya. pic.twitter.com/cgGfhjADro

— Great Barrington Declaration (@gbdeclaration) February 9, 2021

At the end of the day, what does it say about our world when so many scientists, credible information, and data is censored? What does it say when only one side of the coin is emphasized and pushed by our governments and mainstream media while the other side is ridiculed, ignored, unacknowledged and, when it does manage to gain traction and reach the masses, it’s labelled as a “conspiracy theory?”

Below is a tweet from Martin Kulldorff, a Professor of Medicine at Harvard University. Along with Bhattacharya and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology and one of the world’s foremost infectious disease experts, the Great Barrington Declaration started.

Media/Twitter/Facebook are full of silly smears and false conspiracy theories about the #GreatBarringtonDeclaration @gbdeclaration. Weirdly, it is actually a compliment, since it means that opponents lack public health arguments against focused protection.https://t.co/0BIA4Lo34D

— Martin Kulldorff (@MartinKulldorff) February 26, 2021

If there’s one thing that’s for certain, it’s the fact that open and transparent scientific debate should be encouraged, not shut down and censored. I’ve said it many times before, it’s odd how someone like Dr. Anthony Fauci can achieve instant virality through mainstream media yet tens of thousands of experts in the field never see the light of day.

Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain. Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health. Politicians and industry are responsible for this opportunistic embezzlement. So too are scientists and health experts. The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency—a time when it is even more important to safeguard science. – Dr. Kamran Abbasi, executive editor of the prestigious British Medical Journal, editor of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, and a consultant editor for PLOS Medicine. He is editor of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and JRSM Open. Taken from his published a piece in the BMJ, titled “Covid-19: politicisation, “corruption,” and suppression of science.”

Even If We Weren’t In A Lockdown, We Should Still Be Questioning Our “Normal.

“This is an important question at the moment, and we are seeing it in everything from alternative media to mainstream media. As we saw with Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau, even politicians are warning their citizens that what you see happening now will be the ‘new normal’ to some extent. What do they mean by this? Should we want things to go back to how they were prior to this pandemic? Do we have a future of even more restrictions in sight?

From my perspective, I don’t want things to go back to ‘normal’. Why do I say this? Because I ask myself the question: was life prior to, and even during this pandemic, truly allowing humanity to thrive? Was it anywhere even close to what humanity is capable of? Or is it a society and world designed out of programming that has convinced us to accept basic survival as being how we should live… as normal?

This can be a question for everyone no matter where you live on this planet. Whether the weekly rat race is reality or whether having to worry about whether you will get your next meal is your reality, is this truly how we want to live and what humanity is capable of?

If not, then how can we shift the conversation to begin exploring how we might change the way we live in our society?

Read more here.