Editor’s Note: Timothy Craig Allen, MD, JD, contributed to this column.
Over 86,500 people have reportedly died in the United States from the Coronavirus, and the fear generated by those deaths is driving the public policy debate. But that number is a dramatic overcount. Our metrics include deaths that have nothing to do with the virus. The problem is even worse as the Centers for Disease Control over counts even some of these cases and the government has created financial incentives for this misreporting. Relying on these flawed numbers is destroying businesses and jobs and costing lives.
“The case definition is very simplistic,” Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of Illinois Department of Public Health, explains. “It means, at the time of death, it was a COVID positive diagnosis. That means, that if you were in hospice and had already been given a few weeks to live, and then you also were found to have COVID, that would be counted as a COVID death. It means, technically even if you died of clear alternative cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it’s still listed as a COVID death.”
Medical examiners in Michigan use the same definition. In Macomb and Oakland Counties, where most of the deaths occurred, medical examiners classify any deaths as Coronavirus deaths when the postmortem test is positive. Even people who died in suicides and automobile accidents meet that definition.
Still, these broad definitions are not due to a few rogue public health officials. The rules direct them to do this. Unlike other countries, “if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death,” as Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, recently noted.
Classifications go beyond even these broad categories. New York is classifying cases as Coronavirus deaths even when postmortem tests have been negative. Despite negative tests, classifications are based on symptoms, even though the symptoms are often very similar to those of the seasonal flu. The Centers for Disease Control guidance explicitly acknowledges the uncertainty that doctors can face. When Coronavirus cases are “suspected,” they advise doctors that “it is acceptable to report COVID-19 on a death certificate.”
That isn’t just a theoretical issue. On April 21st, when New York City’s death toll rose above 10,000, the New York Times reported that the city included “3,700 additional people who were presumed to have died of the coronavirus but had never tested positive” – a more than 50 percent increase in the number of cases.
But the problem is worse than this broad definition implies. Birx and others believe that the CDC is over counting cases. The Washington Post reports they are concerned that the CDC’s “antiquated” accounting system is double counting cases and inflating mortality and case counts “by as much as 25 percent.”
There are additional reasons for concern. Some doctors feel pressure from hospitals to list deaths as due to the Coronavirus, even when they don’t believe that is the case, “to make it look a little bit worse than it is.” There are financial incentives that might make a difference for hospitals and doctors. The CARES Act adds a 20 percent premium for COVID-19 Medicare patients.
Incentives matter. When the government increased the disability compensation for air traffic controllers, a lot more controllers suddenly started claiming to be disabled. When unemployment insurance payments increase, more people become unemployed and stay unemployed for longer periods. When the government offers flood insurance that charges everyone the same insurance premium regardless of the risk level in their area, more people build homes in frequently flooded areas.
The Washington Post and others claim that we are undercounting the true number of deaths. They reach that conclusion by showing the total number of deaths from all causes is greater than we would normally expect from March through early May, and that this excess is actually due to deaths not being accurately labeled as due to the Coronavirus. But these are simply not normal times. Lots of people with heart and other problems aren’t going to the hospital for fear of the virus. Surgeries for many serious conditions are being put off. The stress of the situation is increasing suicides and other illnesses.
Deaths that have absolutely nothing to do with the Coronavirus count as virus deaths. Add to that claims that the CDC is double counting some of these improperly identified cases and the perverse financial incentives created by the government, and you have a real mess when crucial decisions are being made based in large part on this data.
Erroneous data unduly scare people about the risks of the disease. It keeps the country locked down longer than necessary, which destroys peoples’ lives and livelihoods in many other ways. Exaggerated fears of the virus endanger lives by keeping people from obtaining treatment for other medical problems. It also makes it impossible to accurately compare policies across countries.
It is hard to believe that we are basing such crucial decisions on such flawed data.
Lott is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. Allen is a Governor of the College of American Pathologists and Professor and Chair of the Department of Pathology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. He is also on the Board of Directors and the Academic advisory board for the Crime Prevention Research Center.
Thousands gather without a care at Woodstock in August 1969 despite a deadly flu pandemic, while today we cower in place amid COVID-19.
Patti Mulhearn Lydon, 68, doesn’t have rose-colored memories of attending Woodstock in August 1969. The rock festival, which took place over four days in Bethel, NY, mostly reminds her of being covered in mud and daydreaming about a hot shower.
She was a 17-year-old high-school student from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, when she made the trek to Max Yasgur’s farm with her boyfriend Rod. For three nights, she shared an outdoor bedroom with 300,000 other rock fans from around the country, most of whom were probably not washing their hands for the length of “Happy Birthday” — or at all.
“There was no food or water, but one of our guys cut an apple into twenty-seven slices and we all shared it,” she said. At some point, a garden hose from one of the farm’s neighbors was passed around and strangers used it as a communal source for bathing and drinking, she said.
And all of this happened during a global pandemic in which over one million people died.
Enlarge ImageThough Woodstock was not held during the peak months of the H3N2 pandemic (the first wave ended by early March 1969, and it didn’t flare up again until November of that year), the filthy festival went ahead when the virus was still active and had no known cure.The LIFE Picture Collection via
H3N2 (or the “Hong Kong flu,” as it was more popularly known) was an influenza strain that the New York Times described as “one of the worst in the nation’s history.” The first case of H3N2, which evolved from the H2N2 influenza strain that caused the 1957 pandemic, was reported in mid-July 1968 in Hong Kong. By September, it had infected Marines returning to the States from the Vietnam War. By mid-December, the Hong Kong flu had arrived in all fifty states.
But schools were not shut down nationwide, other than a few dozen because of too many sick teachers. Face masks weren’t required or even common. Though Woodstock was not held during the peak months of the H3N2 pandemic (the first wave ended by early March 1969, and it didn’t flare up again until November of that year), the festival went ahead when the virus was still active and had no known cure.
“I wish they had social distancing at Woodstock,” jokes Lydon, who now lives in Delray Beach, Florida, and works as a purchasing manager for MDVIP, a network of primary care doctors. “You had to climb over people to get anywhere.”
I wish they had social distancing at Woodstock.
– Patti Lydon, who attended the festival in 1969
“Life continued as normal,” said Jeffrey Tucker, the editorial director for the American Institute for Economic Research. “But as with now, no one knew for certain how deadly [the pandemic] would turn out to be. Regardless, people went on with their lives.”
Which, he said, isn’t all that surprising. “That generation approached viruses with calm, rationality and intelligence,” he said. “We left disease mitigation to medical professionals, individuals and families, rather than politics, politicians and government.”
While it’s way too soon to compare the numbers, H3N2 has so far proved deadlier than COVID-19. Between 1968 and 1970, the Hong Kong flu killed between an estimated one and four million, according to the CDC and Encyclopaedia Britannica, with US deaths exceeding 100,000. As of this writing, COVID-19 has killed more than 295,000 globally and around 83,000 in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University. But by all projections, the coronavirus will surpass H3N2’s body count even with a global shutdown.
Aside from the different reactions to H3N2 and COVID-19, the similarities between them are striking. Both viruses spread quickly and cause upper respiratory symptoms including fever, cough and shortness of breath. They infect mostly adults over 65 or those with underlying medical conditions, but could strike people of any age.
Both pandemics didn’t spare the rich and famous — Hitchcock actress Tallulah Bankhead and former CIA director Allen Dulles succumbed to H3N2, while COVID-19 has taken the lives of singer-songwriter John Prine and playwright Terrence McNally, among others. President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Humphrey both fell ill from H3N2 and recovered, as did UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson from COVID-19 last month.
Both viruses infected animals — a 4-year-old Malayan tiger at the Bronx Zoo tested positive for the coronavirus in early April, and in January 1969, the original Shamu at San Diego’s SeaWorld, along with two other killer whales named Ramu and Kilroy, contracted the Hong Kong flu.
Enlarge ImageThe H3N2 pandemic of 1969 took the lives of Hitchcock actress Tallulah Bankhead (left) and former CIA director Allen Dulles.Getty Images (2)
Both pandemics brought drama to outer space: During an Apollo 8 mission in December 1968, commander Frank Borman came down with the Hong Kong flu while in orbit. And in early April, three NASA astronauts returned to Earth after seven months aboard the International Space Station, with astronaut Jessica Meir remarking that it felt like coming home “to a different planet.”
During both pandemics, horror stories abounded — from the bodies stored in refrigerated trucks in New York last month to corpses stored in subway tunnels in Germany during the H3N2 outbreak.
Those who had H3N2 and survived describe a health battle that sounds eerily familiar to COVID. “The coughing and difficulty breathing were the worst but it was the lethargy that kept me in bed,” said Jim Poling Sr., the author of “Killer Flu: The World on the Brink of a Pandemic,” who caught the virus while studying at Columbia University. “X-rays after recovery showed scarring at the bottom of my left lung.”
Renee Ward, 53, remembers her entire family contracting the virus in Greenville, NC, during Christmas of 1968. “My father got sick first, quickly followed by me and my mother,” she said. But their symptoms were mild, for the most part. “Christmas morning, I was trying to play with my new kitchen set from Santa, while my mother watched from the couch and cried because we couldn’t travel to be with my grandparents.”
Linda Murray Bullard, 60, from Chattanooga, Tenn., remembers visiting a “super” grocery store with her mom just before Thanksgiving in 1968. Days later, her mother was in bed with a fever, chills and dry cough.
“I turned 9 years old on December 5th, but because she was so ill we didn’t celebrate,” said Bullard. “I just wanted her to feel better.” Days before Christmas Eve, her 33-year-old mother went to an ER and was diagnosed with the Hong Kong flu. She died shortly after.
The global fight to stop (or at least slow down) COVID-19 has brought heavy restrictions on all aspects of public life, including restaurants, bars, weddings, funerals, churches, movie theaters and gyms. Schools have reverted to remote learning and most business now happens via Zoom. The Grand Canyon is closed, as are all Disney parks and Las Vegas casinos. Professional sports are on indefinite hold, including Wimbledon, which canceled for the first time since World War II.
Enlarge ImageThe Hong Kong flu sickened Shamu (above) and President Johnson (right); COVID-19 has also hit zoo animals and world leaders, including UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the wife of Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau.The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images; Alamy
How does this compare to the Hong Kong flu? Nathaniel Moir, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, said there were few precautions taken during the H3N2 pandemic other than washing hands and staying home when sick.
“It was like the pandemic hadn’t even happened if you look for it in history books,” he said. “I am still shocked at how differently people addressed — or maybe even ignored it — in 1968 compared to 2020.”
The virus rarely made front-page news. A 1968 story in the Associated Press warned that deaths caused by the Hong Kong flu “more than doubled across the nation in the third week of December.” But the story was buried on page 24. The New York Post didn’t publish any stories about the pandemic in 1968, and in 1969, coverage was mostly minor, like reports of newly married couples delaying honeymoons because of the virus and the Yonkers police force calling in sick with the Hong Kong flu during wage negotiations.
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A vaccine was soon developed — in August 1969, not long after Woodstock — but the news of a cure didn’t get much media attention either.
It may seem like the world responded to the 1968 pandemic with a shrug of indifference, but the different approaches may be down to a generational divide, said Poling. In 1968, “we were confident with all the advances in medicine. Measles, mumps, chickenpox, scarlet fever and polio all had been brought under control,” he said.
Tucker remembers being taught as a child of the ’60s that “getting viruses ultimately strengthened one’s immune system. One of my most vivid memories is of a chickenpox party. The idea was that you should get it and get it over with when you are young.”
Even with those relaxed ideas about viruses, the Hong Kong flu caught the world by surprise. It was different from previous pandemics because of how fast it spread, thanks largely to increased international air travel.
Much of our current thinking about infectious diseases in the modern era changed because of the SARS outbreak of 2003, which “scared the hell out of many people,” said Poling. “It’s the first time I recall people wearing masks and trying to distance themselves from others, particularly in situations where someone might cough or sneeze.”
The idea that a pandemic could be controlled with social distancing and public lockdowns is a relatively new one, said Tucker. It was first suggested in a 2006 study by New Mexico scientist Robert J. Glass, who got the idea from his 14-year-old daughter’s science project.
Enlarge ImageH3N2 even reached as far as outer space, with Apollo 8’s Frank Borman (above right) becoming ill in December 1968.Getty Images
“Two government doctors, not even epidemiologists” — Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, who worked for the Bush administration — “hatched the idea [of using government-enforced social distancing] and hoped to try it out on the next virus.” We are in effect, Tucker said, part of a grand social experiment.
But the differences between how the world responded to two pandemics, separated by 50 years, is more complicated than any single explanation.
“If I were 48 in 1968, I would have most likely served in World War II,” said Moir. “I would have had a little brother who served in Korea, and possibly might have a son or daughter fighting in Vietnam.” Death, he said, was a bigger and in some ways more accepted part of American life.
The Hong Kong flu also arrived in a particularly volatile moment in history. There was the race to land a man on the moon and political assassinations and sexual liberation and the civil-rights movement. Without 24/7 news coverage and social media vying for our attention, a new strain of flu could hardly compete for the public’s attention.
But, even if people in 1968 had been told to stay home, it’s unlikely they would’ve protested, Moir said. Dining out, for instance, was a rare indulgence for most American families then. Today, “we spend as much eating out as we do preparing food at home,” Moir said. A 2013 study by market research firm NPD Group found that between the mid-1960s to the late 2000s, middle-income households went from eating at home 92 percent of the time to 69 percent of the time.
In 2020, we feel that being denied music festivals and restaurants is an egregious attack on our liberty. “A big part of our freakout over COVID-19 is a reaction to everything in this country that we’ve taken for granted,” Moir said. “When it’s taken away, we lose our minds.”
It’s a point echoed by Lydon. Her best memories of that wild weekend aren’t the sweaty crowds or the music — Jimi Hendrix’s electric guitar scared the “begeebers” out of her, she said — but the quiet moments afterwards back at a parent’s house in New Jersey.
“I ate the best grilled-cheese sandwich and drank the best lemonade,” she said. And “I took the best shower I ever remember.”
Big Tech companies are aggressively tamping down on COVID-19 “misinformation” — opinions and ideas contrary to official pronouncements. Dr. Knut M. Wittkowski, former head of biostatistics, epidemiology and research design at Rockefeller University, says YouTube removed a video of him talking about the virus which had racked up more than 1.3 million views.
Wittkowski, 65, is a ferocious critic of the nation’s current steps to fight the coronavirus. He has derided social distancing, saying it only prolongs the virus’ existence and has attacked the current lockdown as mostly unnecessary.
Wittkowski, who holds two doctorates in computer science and medical biometry, believes the coronavirus should be allowed to achieve “herd immunity,” and that short of a vaccine the pandemic will only end after it has sufficiently spread through the population.
“With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity. About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won’t even have recognized that they were infected,” he says in the now-deleted video.
“I was just explaining what we had,” Wittkowski told The Post of the video, saying he had no idea why it was removed. The footage was produced by the British film company Journeyman Pictures.
“They don’t tell you. They just say it violates our community standards. There’s no explanation for what those standards are or what standards it violated.”
In articles and interviews across the web, he has likened COVID-19 to a “bad flu.” That likely made him a target for YouTube, which said in April it would be “removing information that is problematic” about the pandemic.
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“Anything that goes against [World Health Organization] recommendations would be a violation of our policy and so removal is another really important part of our policy,” CEO Susan Wojcicki told CNN.
Wittkowski’s argument is a minority opinion among his colleagues, but still well within mainstream thought and currently is the basis for Sweden’s non-lockdown approach to the pandemic.
The embattled WHO, however, is not a fan, with the group’s executive director of health emergencies, Mike Ryan, this week calling it “a really dangerous, dangerous calculation.”
Rockefeller University — Wittkowski’s employer for 20 years — also released a statement sharply distancing themselves from him last month.
While the doctor might have been too hot for YouTube, he has found a home at the American Institute for Economic Research, which is currently hosting the video online.
Across social media, censors have been racing to limit the flow of verboten information.
“We have broadened our definition of harm to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information,” Twitter said in April shortly after removing two tweets by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
That same month Facebook conceded they had been working with state governments in California, New Jersey and Nebraska to remove pages for anti-quarantine events.
“It’s the kind of totalitarian thinking and conduct that has cost millions of lives in recent world history. The fact that it’s being done by private companies and not government doesn’t change that,” Ron Coleman, a prominent First Amendment lawyer, told The Post.
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Wittkowski, however, says history has already vindicated his earlier position that the old and immunocompromised alone should have been strictly isolated, which The Post reported in March.
Roughly one-third of all US COVID-19 deaths have been among nursing-home patients and staff, a problem which Wittkowski says was deeply exacerbated in New York by Gov. Cuomo’s March 25 executive order requiring nursing homes to accept individuals with the virus.
“Cuomo can’t undo his mistake of forcing nursing homes to take in infected people when the horse is out of the barn,” he said.
If nothing else, Wittkowski has made a point of practicing what he preaches.
The German national flouts New York’s coronavirus restrictions, walking around his Upper East Side neighborhood maskless and eating in underground restaurants.
“We don’t have to fear anything but fear,” he said. “Wasn’t that an American who said that?”
A second wave outbreak of the new coronavirus in China is now sweeping the county, and new lockdowns are being enforced in parts of Wuhan, Harbin, Heilongjiang, and elsewhere. In Wuhan’s Dongxihu district, where a residential community was recently locked down, videos emerged corroborating witness reports that metal plates are being used to seal entrances of buildings.
Locals in the residential community told The Epoch Times in interviews there are about 5,000 people and 1,000 homes in the community, as well as several factories and businesses.
And while Chinese authorities are requiring all 11 million people in Wuhan to be tested for the virus, videos showing medical workers not changing gloves between tests are raising concerns of unintended infections from the medical workers.
These stories and more in this episode of Crossroads.
Rashid A. Buttar, DO, FAAPM, FACAM, FAAIM: Dr. Rashid A. Buttar received his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis with a double major in Biology and Theology at age 21, and then attended medical school at the University of Osteopathic Medicine and Health Sciences, College of Osteopathic Medicine and Surgery in Des Moines, Iowa, graduating with his medical degree at age 25. He trained in General Surgery and Emergency Medicine and served as Brigade Surgeon for 2nd Infantry Division, Republic of South Korea, and later as Chief of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Moncrief Army Community Hospital at Ft. Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina while serving in the US Army.
Dr. Buttar became an Eagle Scout at the age of 14, becoming the youngest person in the US to get his Eagle that year, and made the list for promotion to Major in the US Army at the age of 28, becoming the youngest person to make the list for Major that year in the US Army just prior to finishing his service in the Armed Forces. During his military career, Dr. Buttar had the privilege of serving with and being attached to the 2nd Infantry Division, the 101st Air Assault Division, and the 5th Special Forces Group. Dr. Buttar is board certified and a Diplomate in Clinical Metal Toxicology and Preventive Medicine is board eligible in Emergency Medicine and has achieved fellowship status in three separate medical organizations (Fellow of the American College for Advancement in Medicine, Fellow of the American Academy of Preventive Medicine, and Fellow of the American Association of Integrative Medicine).
Johns Hopkins University had predicted that Taiwan would have the second most COVID-19 cases in the world, due to its close proximity to Mainland China. But astonishingly, in spite of being only 80 miles from the coast of China with over 400,000 of its 24 million citizens working in China, as of mid-April, the country only had 400 cases of COVID-19, and only 6 deaths. And the vast majority of their 400 cases came into the country from abroad.
All of this has happened without shutting down the country with lock downs, and with almost all of its businesses continuing to operate. Is Taiwan doing something else the rest of the world is largely missing?
This question will no doubt be asked for months or even years into the future, but it is a question well worth asking, given the devastating effects to the economy that have resulted from more restrictive measures such as the United States took.
The first thing to note is that while President Trump is now looking seriously at pulling out of the World Health Organization, Taiwan was never part of it. They were not allowed to join due to the WHO’s pro-China stance.
According to the Taipei Times, Taiwan’s CDC tried to warn China and WHO on December 31, 2019 about possible human-to-human transmission of the new coronavirus, while China was still denying that such transmission was possible.
That same day, Taiwan started policies to monitor travel from China to reduce the chance of having the coronvirus come into their country. They were one of the first countries to restrict travel from China at their borders.
Taiwan had bad experiences from the 2003 SARS (another coronavirus) outbreak in China, and as a result their hospitals were well supplied with equipment to handle any outbreaks. This SARS situation had reportedly taught them to have a healthy distrust in China and the World Health Organization to accurately report facts, and to have their own plan in place for future outbreaks.
But unlike the U.S. and many other countries, Taiwan did not quarantine the entire nation. They focused on quarantining travelers coming in from abroad in their own homes, while the rest of the nation went about their business, with some restrictions in place such as wearing face masks, and practicing social distancing.
It is hard to argue with their reported results so far, with so few actual cases and very few deaths. They kept the country open, and did not destroy their economy.
Protests in the streets, oil trading at negative numbers, rapidly spiraling unemployment, locked-down international travel and trade: I think we can all agree that by any barometer, including these, the world has failed the Wuhan flu test.
Why the world’s answer to the China flu has been so disastrously wrong, ill-thought out and ignorant to reality can be left to future post-mortems. But after spending literally trillions on public health over the decades to prevent just such an occurrence, it’s clear by now that the world’s investment in public health professionals was wasted.
We can debate whether the cost was worth it, but there is no denying that the cost has been beyond anyone’s imagining.
Some may argue that in such a crisis, experts faced a no-win situation where they had to either trade lives for the economy or the economy for lives.
To that I give a one-word answer: Taiwan.
Taiwan is the other “China”. It’s a small island off the southern coast of China, called the Republic of China (ROC). It was created as a bastion of “free” China as the Communist Party took over mainland China (PRC).
The island may be small, but the country is a regional and worldwide powerhouse. It’s the 21st largest economy in the world (19th if counting by PPP), despite having a population of just 24 million. It ranks 11th in GDP per capita, comparable to Denmark and Sweden.
It’s also an important partner with Communist China as one of the leading investors, trading partners and bankers for the PRC. Consequently, Taiwan hosts quite a bit of contact with the PRC.
That’s why the results from Taiwan in fighting China’s Wuhan flu—as they call it in Taiwan—is so extraordinary.
Worldwide there have been 321 cases of COVID-19, or Wuhan flu, per million people. In Taiwan there have been just 0.3 cases per million people for a total of 422 cases, with only six total deaths.
Equally important is that while the Taiwanese economy has been damaged by the global shutdown, their domestic economy and society has remained open. (Source and Full Article Here.)
We report these results as a comparison to what other actions have been taken in other countries, that have had far more disastrous results. We are not necessarily endorsing everything that Taiwan has done, just reporting the facts about their response and their results so far.
Many questions are still unanswered. Did the actions the Taiwan Government take cause a much lower rate of reported infections of COVID-19? Or are there other factors involved that kept their infection rates lower? Since the SARS outbreak more than 15 years ago was so severe there, was there some natural immunity against coronaviruses involved? Did their location closer to the equator with more sunlight and warmer temperatures this time of year play a factor?
About the only thing we do know for sure, is that the vaccine gods and their global leaders like Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci and the WHO cannot take credit for Taiwan’s success, because they never were able to successfully develop a vaccine for SARS, and they have successfully kept Taiwan out of the WHO.
This pandemic has provided us with a clinical trial in the healing power of freedom. We can now compare two control groups in the form of two Chinese societies — one free and democratic, the other under the grip of a brutal totalitarian dictatorship.
Totalitarian China has not only been ravaged by the virus but has also spread the contagion to our shores. Free China has defeated it. The lesson is clear: COVID-19 grew in the cesspool of Chinese Communist tyranny.
The antidote to the coronavirus is freedom. (Source.)
Copyright 2020 – Health Impact News. Permission granted to republish in full, with links back to Health Impact News as the source, and author credit kept in tact.
We have featured the articles published by Michigan physician Dr. David Brownstein for many years here at Health Impact News. But we were just notified that his blog has been shut down, apparently to suppress the information he was publishing that went against Big Pharma and their narrative regarding COVID-19.
As we have previously reported, Dr. Brownstein has had tremendous success treating COVID-19 patients successfully with holistic non-pharmaceutical methods.
Dear CHM Patients-
I want to let you know that we have been ordered by the FTC to stop making any statements about our treatment protocols of Vitamins A, C and D as well as nutritional IV’s, iodine, ozone and nebulization to support the immune system with respect to Coronavirus Diseases 2019 (COVID-19).
According to this letter:
“It is unlawful under the FTC Act, 15 U.S.C Sec. 41 et seq. to advertise that a product or service can prevent, treat, or cure human disease unless you possess competent and reliable scientific evidence, including, when appropriate, well-controlled human clinical studies, substantiating that the claims are true at the time they are made. For COVID-19, no such study is currently known to exist for the products or services identified above. Thus, any Coronavirus-related prevention or treatment claims regarding such products or services are not supported by competent and reliable scientific evidence. You must immediately cease making all such claims.”
What this means is that I will not be able to blog, post, tweet, email, etc. for awhile.
I want you to know that CHM is NOT closing. I am still here and so are my colleagues. It is my honor to be your doctor.
To All Our Health! ~DrB
The articles we have published on our website authored by Dr. Brownstein remain, and are protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
Unfortunately, as a licensed physician, Dr. Brownstein has stricter regulations on what he can publish since he charges for his services.
This does NOT mean he has done anything wrong or illegal, it just probably means he has neither the time nor resources to fight this in court right now, where he would probably win on Constitutional grounds.
This was one of Dr. Brownstein’s last blog entries regarding the wearing of masks, which criticized Governor Whitmer (which is NOT illegal!).
We Must Wear Face Masks? Show Me the Science Behind That!
by Dr. Brownstein
Folks, I have been writing to you about COVID for over a month. It is been a painful time period for all of us.
What is really sad is that too many political dictates are being fostered on us without any good scientific evidence to back them up. One of those requirements that has me irritated is the use of face coverings that I see so prevalent out there.
When I go to Costco, 95% of the people in the store are wearing face masks.
Why is that?
The Governor of Michigan recently released an edict requiring that citizens wear a face covering when in any enclosed public space.
It specifically states, “Any individual able to medically tolerate a face covering must wear a covering over his or her nose and mouth—such as a homemade mask, scarf, bandana, or handkerchief—when in any enclosed public space.”
Later in the edict, it states, “Supplies of N95 masks and surgical masks should generally be reserved, for now, for health care professionals, first responders and other critical workers who interact with the public.”
It should be well known that cloth masks, bandanas, or handkerchiefs will do very little to stop the spread of coronavirus. In fact, they may actually increase your risk of becoming ill from corona and other influenza-like illnesses.
A 2015 study found cloth masks, when compared to surgical masks, increase the rate of influenza-like illnesses 13x! (1) Cloth masks are probably best avoided and should not be reused without properly sanitizing them.
Regular surgical masks are not much better in this situation. The COVID-19 virus is 0.125 µm in size. Surgical masks have been shown to not adequately filter against aerosols measuring from 0.9-3.1 µm. (2)
Other researchers have shown that particles from 0.04-0.2 µm can penetrate surgical masks. (3)
A 2020 study in Seoul, South Korea looked at the effectiveness of surgical and cotton masks in blocking COVID-19 in a controlled comparison of four patients. (4)
The COVID-infected patients were put in negative pressure isolated rooms. The scientists compared disposable surgical masks (3 layers) with reusable cotton masks.
Patients were instructed to cough 5 times while wearing no mask, surgical mask, or cotton mask. Interestingly, all swabs from the outer masks—including surgical masks—were positive for COVID-19.
Inner masks were also found to be contaminated. That means the mask did not effectively filter out the COVID virus since it is too small. The authors state, “Neither surgical nor cotton masks effectively filtered {COVID-19} during coughs by infected patients.”
The study also reported greater contamination on the outer than the inner mask (both surgical and cotton) surfaces.
The authors claim that the mask is either allowing the virus to cross from the inner to the outer surface because the virus is too small or the aerodynamic feature of a mask could explain this finding. A turbulent jet due to air leakage around the mask edge could contaminate the outer surface.
We have made far too many political decisions in the COVID crisis based on fear and not on reliable data. Here is a perfect example of another one: everyone must wear a mask when inside any public place.
Should you wear a mask?If you are coughing or sick, my answer is yes. A surgical mask, and to a lesser extent a cotton mask, will block large droplets from being spread.
However, should we dictate to healthy people that they are required to wear a mask—cotton or surgical—when in any public enclosed space? Someone show me the science supporting the Executive Order by the Governor of Michigan. And Governor Whitmer wonders why so many of us are annoyed.
To All Our Health,
~DrB
Addendum: A further annoyance is my lack of success in getting masks—both N95 and surgical masks– for my staff to use when we are treating COVID patients. Perhaps the Governor should release an executive order helping us get the PPE equipment we need. We have had masks, gowns and face shields on order for over two months. That is beyond annoying.
Editor’s Note: Timothy Craig Allen, MD, JD, contributed to this column.
What's happening? 