The top 12 lies about COVID-19
Mark Crispin Miller
The Top Twelve Lies about Covid19.
Elsewhere on this site we go in some detail into the science of epidemics and other matters. This article is just a quick run-down of the Top Twelve Lies.
1. People dropping dead in the streets.
Guardian January
Metro January 31st
The Sun January 31st
This is how the media portrayed Covid19 at the beginning: a disease so dangerous that people walking along the street suddenly dropped down dead. Virtually all the UK media carried these photos. It’s very odd that in the first two pictures, and variants of them in other papers, those emergency workers have no equipment with them, and appear to be just standing around doing nothing. Are these faked photos? There have been no reports of people dropping dead in the street anywhere since then. And if it had been true in China, the virus would have been noticed very quickly. We now know that the symptoms are indistinguishable from colds, flu or pneumonia. These photos were the start of the Coronapanic lies.
2. Three Percent Will Die.
The WHO put out this 3% death rate figure early on. You don’t need to be a maths wizard to know that’s one person in thirty. That’s a serious reason to panic. We now know that the death rate is around 0.1%. That’s about one in a thousand, and comparable to seasonal flu. But just as important, the figures are massively skewed towards people around eighty who have at least two existing serious conditions, and are already in a care home: people who have minimal quality of life, and little remaining expectation of life. For younger, healthy people, and younger here can mean under seventy, never mind twenty or thirty, the risk of death is vanishingly small.
3, Herd Immunity is a Dangerous Idea.
This is one of the most serious corruptions of science ever. You don’t need a degree in Epidemiology to know that epidemics come and go. The very definition of the word implies that. (Conversely, a disease which stays around for many years is called endemic.) You do need to know just a smidgen of Epidemiology to understand why epidemics come and go. It’s not rocket science. When the new disease arrives, everybody is susceptible to it, because it is new and therefore nobody has any immunity. The disease can race through the population, but as it does so it leaves immune people in its wake. As the number of immune people grows, the disease finds it harder and harder to spread. When the number of immune people reaches a certain point (which varies with different diseases) the bug can find no new people to infect, so the bug itself effectively dies. That point is called herd immunity. It is the only way to defeat a new virus. But see number 4.
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