March 7, 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hosted a roundtable discussion1
about COVID treatment, early treatment suppression, vaccine risks, the
collateral damage from school closures and lockdowns, and how to end the
COVID theatre once and for all. Panelists included physicians,
scientists and academics from around the U.S., including:
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, a former National Institutes of Health-funded researcher |
Dr. Robert Malone, a molecular virologist, bioethicist, vaccine researcher and co-developer of the mRNA vaccine platform |
Dr. Tracy Hoeg, Ph.D., an epidemiologist |
Dr. Jill Ackerman, a family physician |
Dr. Christopher D’Adamo, Ph.D., an epidemiologist and integrative medicine specialist |
Dr. Shveta Raju, an internist |
Dr. Harvey Risch, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology trained in mathematical modeling of infectious diseases |
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Ph.D., professor of health
policy at Stanford, research associate at the National Bureau of
Economic Research and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration,
which calls for focused protection of the most vulnerable2 |
Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., former professor of
medicine at Harvard University, now senior scientific director of the
Brownstone Institute, a biostatistician and epidemiologist with
expertise in vaccine safety evaluation, co-author of the Great
Barrington Declaration |
Dr. Joseph Fraiman, a rural emergency physician and clinical scientist, specializing in harm-benefit analysis |
Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Ph.D., Oxford University
professor, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine
development and mathematical modeling of infectious disease, co-author
of the Great Barrington Declaration |
We Must Hold Decision Makers to Account
As noted by Ladapo, one of the
things we must remember and remain intent upon as we move forward is to
hold people accountable for their public health decisions. Two years
after the “two weeks to slow the spread,” we have ample evidence proving
the decision makers “didn’t know what they were talking about,” Ladapo
says.
They abused their power, they manipulated data, they lied, and they
now want us all to forget what they said and did. We cannot let them get
away with it. Many errors were made, and those responsible must be held
to account.
“Their choices, that they made for everyone, were the wrong choices that led to, basically, no appreciable benefit,” Ladapo says. “We
cannot let them forget. We have to hold them accountable. We have to
let the country, the world, know what the truth is — because it’s the
right thing to do, and because it can happen again if we don’t.”
Thousand-Fold Difference in Risk Was Ignored
Bhattacharya was one of the first to investigate the prevalence of
COVID-19 in 2020, and he found that by April, the infection was already
too prevalent for lockdowns to have any possibility of stopping the
spread.
He points out that one of the most egregious mistakes made was to
ignore the fact that there’s a thousand-fold difference in risk between
the lowest and highest risk groups. Children and teens are at virtually
no risk of dying from COVID. Overall, the risk of COVID is primarily
relegated to the very old and those with multiple comorbidities.
Bhattacharya has called the COVID-19 lockdowns the “biggest public health mistake ever made,”3
stressing that the harms caused have been “absolutely catastrophically
devastating,” especially for children and the working class, worldwide.4
In some areas of the world, children have not been in school for two
years, and the ramifications of that will likely reverberate for
decades. Public health has also been negatively impacted by lockdowns
and other measures — measures which Bhattacharya states were based in
fear, not fact.
Stunning Denials of Science
Kulldorff, in his opening remarks, points out what he believes is one
of the most stunning parts of this pandemic, and that is the denial of
the basic science of natural immunity. Even doctors and hospitals that
“should know better have demanded vaccine mandates for people who have
already had COVID,” he says.
Perhaps even worse, hospitals have fired staff who have had COVID and
have natural immunity, simply because they did not want to get the
experimental jab. Those with natural immunity are not just less likely
to get COVID again, they’re also far less likely to spread it to others.
This makes them among the most valuable staff members a hospital can
have, yet they were routinely discarded.
“That goes against basic principles of public health,” Kulldorff says. “And
to have a director of the CDC who questions natural immunity, which we
have now, is sort of like having a director of NASA who questions
whether the earth is flat or round. It’s just mindboggling that we’ve
come into a situation like that.”
Fraiman, whose clinical research expertise includes risk-benefit
analysis, also expresses disbelief and frustration over the scientific
censorship we’ve seen in the last two years. He points out that many of
his colleagues are simply too afraid of getting fired to speak the
truth.
DeSantis, similarly, highlights how incredibly difficult it has been
to publish and find research that contradicted the official narrative,
and even when available, the mainstream media would refuse to
acknowledge it, whereas they would endlessly publicize speculation and
statements of opinion that had no basis in fact or science, but
supported — however flimsily — the official narrative.
I would add that so-called fact checkers have even gone so far as to “fact check” scientific peer-reviewed publications,5,6,7 labeling them as “misinformation” or outright “false,” resulting in their being censored on social media!
That’s an astounding development. It does not bode well for science
when noncredentialed individuals with zero experience in the topic at
hand are given the authority to decide the “truthfulness” or accuracy of
scientists’ work.
The Inversion of the Precautionary Principle
Gupta, who has some 30 years of expertise in mathematical modeling of
infectious disease, points out that what we’ve seen over the past two
years is an “inversion of the schedule of uncertainty.” In short, doubt
was cast on things that were rather certain — so-called “unknowns were
not unknown,” Gupta says — while certainty was claimed for things we had
no clue about.
“The powers that be told us the measures and restrictions would work,
but we didn’t know they would work,” she says. Moreover, we didn’t know
what their purpose actually was. “It was a rather incoherent set of
goals,” she says. One thing we knew for certain was that lockdowns and
other restrictions “would have enormous cost,” she says.
“That was the one thing we were certain about, yet
that’s what we went ahead and did. We inverted the precautionary
principle of trying to minimize harm, by doing the one thing we knew
would cause harm.”
I would add that the scale of that harm was never calculated or
addressed at any point along the way. It’s as though it didn’t matter
how great the harm was, as long as there was the appearance that we were
doing everything in our power to prevent COVID.
Plausibility Versus Science
Risch brings up a similar point, saying we’ve seen a lot of
misdirection. What’s been conveyed to the public have been things that
are plausible, but not scientific. “There’s a big difference between
things that seem plausible and things that are scientific,” he says.
For example, lockdowns are a plausible countermeasure, but they’re
not based in science. In fact, all the science we have, show them to be
harmful, with little or no benefit whatsoever. “The same has been true
for medications,” Rish says.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration put out warnings saying that
hydroxychloroquine should not be used in outpatients, even though they
had no data on outpatient use of the drug. They only had data on
in-hospital use, and the two situations are not comparable.
Early COVID symptoms are completely different from symptoms of
later-stage, severe infection and the two stages require completely
different treatments. Hydroxychloroquine only works well when used very
early. It’s not useful in the later stages, and frontline doctors were
well aware of this.
No Justification for Mandating Vaccines for Children
Malone — speaking on behalf of the International Alliance of Physicians and Medical Scientists,8
which currently has some 17,000 members — stressed that, in terms of
COVID policies, the Alliance has “made a series of very clear,
unambiguous statements.”
“There is no justification for mandating vaccines for children. Full stop,” he says. “We’re of the strong opinion that if there is risk there must be choice. This is fundamental bioethics 101.”
As noted in the second Physicians Declaration9
by dated October 29, 2021, children’s clinical risk from SARS-CoV-2
infection is negligible and long term safety of the shots cannot be
determined prior to the enactment of mandatory vaccination policies. Not
only are children at high risk for severe adverse events, but having
healthy, unvaccinated children in the population is crucial to achieving
herd immunity. Malone continues:
“No. 2, as far as we’re concerned, there is no
medical emergency now, and there is therefore no justification for the
declaration of medical emergency and the suspension of rights ...”
The Alliance also condemns “the hunting of physicians and the
restriction of physicians’ ability to prescribe and treat with early
treatment.” With regard to vaccines, Malone also highlights the fact
that while a Pfizer/BioNTech COVID injection has been approved by the
FDA, that product is not available.
So, there is NO FDA approved COVID “vaccine” on the market in the
U.S. The only products available in the U.S., for children and adults
alike, are emergency use authorization (EUA) products, for which
liability is waived.
Now, in order for the COVID injections to qualify for EUA, there
could not be any other treatments available, which appears to have been
the driving factor behind the suppression of early treatment with
repurposed drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
Mask Mandates Have Not Had Any Benefit
Speaking to the issue of mask mandates, Hoeg has published several
studies, looking at the effects of universal mask wearing. One of them
assessed compliance and outcomes in the Wisconsin school system. On
average, 92% of children complied with the mask wearing, and only seven
students out of 7,000 caught COVID during the 2021 school year.
This was used by media to proclaim that masks work. The problem is,
there was no control group, and the low infection rate could have been
due to anything. Hoeg points out we have studies from Scandinavia, where
masks were not worn, and they too had extremely low infection rates
among children.
Again and again, we’ve seen that children just aren’t susceptible to
COVID, especially not severe infection. So, low incidence really says
nothing about the effectiveness of masks.
DeSantis also notes that neighboring schools — one that had a mask
mandate and another that did not — had no discernible difference in
infection rates, which he believes is rather compelling evidence that
mask mandates have no benefit. What’s more, of the two largest
randomized controlled trials, both showed that masks do not prevent the
spread of infection.
According to Hoeg, we’ve inverted the precautionary principle with
respect to mask wearing as well. Without any high-quality evidence of
benefit, we’ve chosen to mask children even though we know there are
harms. They interfere with communication, impede learning, hinder
breathing, promote bacterial infections and more.
The Collateral Damage Has Been Immense
As noted by Fraiman, any time you consider a public health measure,
you have to conduct a thorough risk-benefit analysis. Who may benefit
and to what degree? What are the harms, who will be harmed the most,
what’s the extent of the collateral damage? Do the benefits outweigh all
of the risks?
In the case of school closures, “the collateral damage has been
immense,” Fraiman says. Physical and mental health has been impacted.
According to Fraiman, there’s been a doubling of obesity and diabetes,
for example, during the pandemic. There’s been a dramatic increase in
anxiety, depression and stress.
Recent statistics show a shocking spike in fentanyl overdose deaths
among high school-aged adolescents in the U.S. during 2020 and 2021. The
following graph, from a December 24, 2021, preprint article10 posted on medRxiv and tweeted11 out by Dr. John B., a scientist, illustrates the situation better than words.
According to the authors:12
“Adolescent overdose mortality saw a sharp increase
between 2019 and 2020, from 2.35 per 100,000 to 4.58 per 100,000,
representing a 94.3% increase, the largest percent increase of any
5-year age group ...
Trends were driven by fatalities involving IMFs
[illicitly-manufactured-fentanyls], which nearly tripled from 2019 to
2020, and represented 76.6% of adolescent overdose deaths in 2021 ...
Our results should also be understood in the context of rising rates of
adolescent mental illness during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“I think it’s quite clear that the collateral damage outweighed any
benefit that was there,” Fraiman says. “So, I think we need to take a
more systems-level approach before embarking on this kind of policy the
next time.”
Was Harming Children Intentional?
Bhattacharya adds, “Almost from the very beginning of the pandemic,
we adopted policies that seem like they were tailor-made to harm
children.” Lower-income children were disproportionally harmed by
lockdowns and school closures. “The effect on these kids has been
catastrophic,” he says.
He cites a study that calculated that, as a result of the school
closures during the spring of 2020, children in the U.S. will lose 5.5
million life years. Lost learning literally ripples through the child’s
entire lifetime. They lead less healthy and shorter lives and are more
likely to be steeped in poverty.
In some areas of the world, schools have been closed for nearly two
years. As noted by Bhattacharya, we’ve “robbed an entire generation of
their birthright.” Mask mandates have made the impact on children even
worse.
He points out that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention is the only public health agency in the world that still
recommends masking toddlers, “with literally not a single study showing
it has any consequence on the spread of the disease.”
“The only reason they continue to mask [toddlers] is because [the toddlers] are powerless,” he says. “We’ve
adopted this idea that children are the central problem; children are
the ones who should bear all the burden of infection control.
In fact, that’s not true. It has revealed the values
we have as a society, and it’s not a pretty picture. None of this has
actually worked to protect the vulnerable. Still, 80% of the deaths are
in people over 65. What have these restrictions on children bought? Not
very much, if at all. And it’s caused tremendous harm that we’re going
to have to address for years to come.”
Florida Recommends Against COVID Shots for Healthy Children
In late February 2022, Ladapo and DeSantis also updated the state’s policy on masks, formally discouraging mask wearing.13
Toward the end of the roundtable, Ladapo announced the Florida
Department of Health would also formally recommend against COVID shots
for healthy children, aged 5 to 17,14 as they “may not benefit from receiving the currently available COVID-19 vaccines.”
During the roundtable, risks such ass myocarditis were also
discussed. Florida is the first state to go against the CDC’s vaccine
recommendations. In a statement published with the new guideline, March
8, 2022,15 Ladapo said:
“Based on currently available data, the risks of
administering COVID-19 vaccination among healthy children may outweigh
the benefits. These decisions should be made on an individual basis, and
never mandated.”