Why Were Such Terrible Approaches Chosen to Handle COVID-19?

Two of the themes I’ve repeatedly tried to illustrate in my writings are the widespread lack of critical thinking in medicine and the pervasive propaganda apparatus that in many ways has taken its place. I believe both of these are particularly relevant to the current attempts to revive the COVID response.

For example, when someone (thanks to effective propaganda) has a monopoly over the truth, it shields their actions from scrutiny because no one will be able to question if what’s being done makes any sense. Since many of the COVID mitigation policies made no sense, those who became aware of their nonsensical nature in turn refused to follow them, but since many others were shielded from that information, they happily complied with everything.

In this article, I would like to examine some of the major deficits in critical thinking I observed throughout the COVID response in the hope we can avoid making those mistakes again.

Foundational Epidemiology

When COVID first started, there were a variety of unknowns about the virus. One of the most important ones was if it had a droplet or aerosol spread. Some viruses, like influenza (the flu) spread through being attached to water droplets, and for those viruses, “targeting” water droplet spread to varying degrees mitigates their transmission.

For example, while viruses are infinitely smaller than the gaps in a cloth mask, water droplets are not, so if someone wears a cloth mask, the cloth fiber will inhibit the expulsion of water droplets from the mask wearer, and by extension the degree to which they spread influenza. Likewise, the distance water droplets can travel is limited to around 6 feet, as the droplets quickly fall to the ground, so maintaining distance between people reduces the spread of those viruses.

Finally, droplet with viruses will attach to surfaces, after which point, they can be picked up by someone physically touching the surface.

Conversely, if a virus is aerosolized (meaning it freely floats in and travels through the air), none of the above applies. Instead it will spread everywhere, hang around in the air long after someone has left, and penetrates most of the barriers designed to block it.

Aerosolized pathogens are thus known to be much more contagious and the hospitals have much stricter isolation protocols to prevent their spread within the hospital (tuberculosis and measles are the two classic pathogens known for this).

As it so happened, from the start of the pandemic, there was very strong evidence COVID-19 spread through aerosols — for example at the end of January 2020, the Diamond Princess cruise ship experienced one of the earliest COVID outbreaks and was quarantined. The outbreak on the ship was closely studied by experts around the world as it had inadvertently provided the perfect experimental conditions to study how COVID-19 was transmitted.

One of the many observations made was that people who remained in their rooms caught COVID-19, which suggested the virus was spreading through the ventilation system and was thus aerosolized.

Subsequently, numerous other observations also emerged suggesting aerosolized transmission, such as outbreaks occurring where individual indoors were 18 times more likely to catch the virus indoors than those outdoors along with numerous cases of individuals catching COVID-19 from people they were far over 6 feet away from.

By the time the Diamond Princess outbreak happened, I was relatively certain aerosols were a key route of transmission. Yet, despite numerous parties petitioning the WHO with evidence of aerosol transmission, the WHO insisted that only droplet transmission was occurring, and sent out numerous statements dismissing the aerosol hypothesis. Eventually, two years later, the WHO changed their position and quietly announced that aerosol transmission also was occurring.

This monumental mistake prompted Nature (a premier scientific journal) to conduct an investigation to determine exactly how this happened and confirmed that the WHO had ignored an overwhelming volume of evidence for aerosol transmission during that period.

Note: For those of you who cannot view the full article, a summary by Mercola can be viewed here.

This is very similar to many of the other profound lapses of judgement we saw throughout COVID-19 (we will cover throughout this article) where longstanding scientific principles and clear scientific evidence were thrown out the window so a COVID-19 response at odds with the actual science could be conducted.

In short, had aerosol transmission have been recognized, there would have been no justification for either masking or social distancing.

Note: In a 3/21/21 editorial by Scott Gottlieb (one of Trump’s FDA commissioners) stated that no one knew where the arbitrary 6 foot recommendation came from and Gottlieb’s best guess was that it originated from the mistaken assumption that SARS-CoV-2 spread through water droplets.

My best guess is that social distancing originated from a high school sophomore’s 2006 science fair project, and like many things to come in the pandemic industry, was based off of wildly inaccurate computer models.

Critical Thinking and Diagnostic Tests

Within medicine, much of a doctor’s education has shifted to being trained to follow clinical algorithms, standardized protocols, and authoritative guidelines (all of which often but not always improve patient outcomes) rather than doctors using their critical thinking to independently decide what the best approach is for each patient they see.

As the previous example illustrates, being told to have everyone wear cloth masks and socially distance should have raised some red flags, but rather than ask if the recommendations made sense, the majority of doctors instead simply pushed the guidelines they were given onto their patients and community.

One longstanding area that highlights the issues with robotically following protocols is the way diagnostic testing is utilized. When doctors aren’t sure what to do, they typically order standard diagnostic tests to help their guide their approach. While this seems reasonable, the problem is that they often don’t think two steps ahead and ask any of the following before ordering the test:

• Will the possible results of this test in any way change how I treat this patient?
• How likely is this test to harm the patient and does that potential harm outweigh the benefits of the test?
• How likely is this test to tell me something I don’t already know?
• Could an appropriate physical examination tell me what I am trying to figure out with this test?

Note: The last point is a huge issue in medicine, as medical training has gradually shifted away from performing a detailed physical examination (which is often the most useful way to evaluate someone) to ordering lots of expensive tests, which has led to much of the physical examination becoming a lost art in the richer nations. I can’t prove this, but I have always thought this shift occurred to help make money for the medical industry.

Because of all of this, I continually see patients who receive lots of unnecessary tests. For instance, any time a patient is sent to a specialist, the specialist will typically order the bread and butter tests of their specialty even if there is no good justification for doing so.

In many cases, I’ve referred a patient to an appropriate specialist, told the specialist on the phone what I think the patient needs done, why I would caution against using their standard tests for the patient’s specific circumstances, tell the same to my patient, and then inevitably find out that the specialist successfully pushed them to do the test, and in many cases didn’t do anything else.

Eventually, I realized the most effective way to prevent this happening to my patients was to tell them:

The doctor I’m sending you to may want to order this test. If they do, ask them to tell you what possible results could come up from the test, roughly how likely each one is, and how each result would change their management of your case. You can also ask them if there are any potential risks from the test and how much the test will cost, but try to focus on if there is any point to the test in the first place.

The area where I most commonly encounter this issue is with MRIs, which neurologists typically default to using, particularly if they can’t make sense of what’s happening. Whenever an MRI (or CT) is done, you have the option of injecting a contrast agent which makes it easier to see all the details present. With MRIs, the primary contras agent utilized is gadolinium, a metal that due to its magnetic properties, becomes illuminated on MRIs.

Gadolinium is a toxic heavy metal that has the unfortunate side effect of sometimes causing severe permanent illnesses (e.g., neurological disabilities) in those who receive contrast agents containing it. For example, Maddie DeGaray was a child enrolled in Pfizer’s small trial that tested their vaccine in children.

She had a bad reaction which the investigators tried to cover up (as her injury alone would have made the vaccine too dangerous to approve for children), eventually got a gadolinium MRI, at which point she immediately and permanently lost the ability to walk.

In short, because of how many people I’ve run into that developed gadolinium illnesses, I try to avoid those MRIs if at all possible (especially for sensitive patients). In doing so, I have learned that in the majority of cases where neurologists insist on a gadolinium MRI, there is no real net benefit compared to performing a normal MRI (e.g., the final test result will still be ambiguous, or nothing can do done for the most likely diagnosis the gadolinium MRI will detect).

Despite this, and the fact that enough evidence of gadolinium harm has accumulated that many large groups now recommend against it unless absolutely necessary, almost all doctors I meet still push these MRIs.

Note: Manganese is a much safer metal which also has the magnetic properties necessary to functions as a contrast agent. Despite decades of research and data showing it is both safe and effective, it is still not available to patients.

To provide an example that puts all of this into context, many COVID-19 vaccine injured patients I know have seen dozens of doctors (including specialists at premier institutions).

Those doctors have ordered countless (not necessarily safe) tests which cost insane amounts (e.g., one of my patients has seen over 30 specialists, had received almost 100 tests — many which required nuclear isotopes being injection, and their insurance has now paid well over $300,000.00 for those tests), but all failed to detect anything that could be diagnosed (frequently leading to the patient’s being referred to psychiatry).

In many cases, I’ve found this issue emerged because the conditions the vaccine injured have are things the standard tests and labs are simply not designed to detect.

For example, when microclotting occurs throughout the body due to strong positive charges (like those found on the spike protein) shifting the zeta potential to one which causes red blood cells to clump together (explained here), a myriad of different complex issues emerge throughout the body, many of which are due to nerves not getting the blood they need to function.

Those microclots are too small for MRIs to detect, so all MRI’s are “normal.” However in these same patients, when I’ve looked for the microclotting with tests designed to detect it (e.g., by examining the blood vessels of the eyes with a stereomicroscopes) the systemic microclotting can be easily seen.

One of largest failures in critical thinking I observed during COVID-19 came from the infamous PCR tests — the mass adoption of which was justified by the unscientific (and largely proven to be false) assumption that SARS-CoV-2 spread from asymptomatic individuals. These tests had two major issues:

Later, antigen tests were introduced which were much more useful because they could be done immediately (rather than you having to wait to get a PCR result from a lab) and more importantly, did not constantly get false positives.

To illustrate the ridiculousness of all of this, at my hospital, when a patient came in my colleagues did not think needed to be hospitalized, they gave the patient an antigen test (which typically came up negative — and thus did not require them to hospitalize the patient), whereas when a patient came in they felt needed to be admitted, that patient always received a PCR test that invariably came up positive.

Note: A few people I know believe they either got COVID from a nasal swab or suffered a significant injury to their nose as the result of a quick forceful swab at a testing site (which definitely has happened). In many of the cases I came across where the individual caught COVID after a swab, the timeline of events strongly argued for the two being connected.

However, I know Ryan Cole tested numerous swabs and was never able to find SARS-CoV-2 on one Because of this, I think those infections most likely resulted from individuals who were not ill being in close proximity to those who were when they went to get tested and an aerosolized SARS-CoV-2 then infecting everyone there.

Masking

When COVID-19 started in late 2019, I became very worried about it and concluded that I needed to find an effective way to treat it as soon as possible. At the same time, I also recognized that if the HIV response was anything to go off of, it was unlikely an effective treatment would ever see the light of day, especially given that Fauci (who was directly responsible for this happening with HIV) was still in charge — and as you all know, this is exactly what ended up happening.

My thought process in turn was that given the danger the virus posed (based on what I’d seen in China and Italy), I could not risk getting COVID until I felt confident I could treat it. For this reason, I fully admit I was one of the first people in the United States to mask with a fitted N-95 (specifically doing so at work, conferences and when traveling in airports), something many of my colleagues actively made fun of me for doing.

Note: For pathogens with an aerosol spread, N-95’s don’t really work unless they are fitted to the wearer as otherwise they just get in from the gaps between the mask and your face.

Additionally, for many infectious illnesses, the route of infection is often through the eyes or ears, something people rarely consider protecting (e.g., by not touching them), and frequently clearing out the ears (e.g., with hydrogen peroxide) can make a huge difference if done early in the course of a viral upper respiratory illness.

By May of 2020, I felt confident that I could treat COVID-19 and stopped masking entirely except when I was around a patient with COVID or legally required to — at which point those same colleagues were hostile towards me for not (cloth) masking in public.

In short, masking was not something I at all wanted to do, but I felt given all the unknowns at the start, it made sense to mask while I was figuring out how to treat COVID-19. In contrast, most of my colleagues did the exact opposite and did not listen to any of my warnings (which for example resulted in me needing to supply them with PPE I’d stocked up before it ran out).

I believe the difference in our thought processes came about because I always thought two steps ahead, whereas in each case, like I highlighted in the previous section with diagnostic testing, they did not and instead simply did whatever the current guidelines were.

This was particularly frustrating because after my warnings about COVID and then the need to acquire PPE were ignored, no one was interested in the treatments I put forward for treating COVID-19 (as they were not in the guidelines) even when the protocols I found had saved patients otherwise expected to die.

Once the masking kicked into gear, there were a few major points that argued against their mass adoption:

Fauci and Masks

In a recent article, I put forward the argument that people in power will typically lie if it’s possible for propaganda to convince the public they are telling the truth. Fauci’s duplicity during COVID-19 is an excellent example of this, as it can be proven he lied continually, and the manner in which he lied employed many of the classic propaganda techniques.

Consider this February 5, 2020 email Fauci wrote (which essentially matches what I believed at the time):

“Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection.

The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you.

I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low risk location.”

However, as we all know, Fauci instead became one of the leading cheerleaders for the masks, even after more and more evidence accumulated showing it made no sense at all. Many other politicians followed in his footsteps with equally ridiculous demonstrations:

Note: I suspect they did not do this at home.

As time went on, public opinion turned more and more against the masks. Eventually a Cochrane review (the most definitive form of evidence) was published that determined there was no benefit from cloth masking, a small benefit may occur from N-95 masking (depending on how it was assessed, compared to cloth masking, a -10%, 14% or 30% improvement was observed).

It should be noted that this review also included viruses like influenza which have a droplet spread, which means any of the benefits found for COVID-19 were likely smaller than stated. Given all of that, it’s remarkable to see how Fauci still makes non-sensical lies to defends their use — which even CNN is now calling him out on:

Note: What I find particularly frustrating about the useless approaches we used was that in tandem highly effective ones were never utilized. For example, since COVID-19 was known spread by aerosols and much more severely affected people indoors (since the SARS-CoV-2 aerosols floated in place rather than going away), increasing ventilation (e.g., by opening windows) was a simple and highly impactful approach no one ever used.

Likewise, numerous groups were able to show that safe ultraviolet light frequencies could rapidly neutralize the virus and prevent it from infecting individuals where those affordable (and non-disruptive) UV lamps were deployed.

Compulsive Handwashing

The CDC and many other organizations regularly released guidelines advocating for as much hand-washing as possible. The problem with this is that COVID-19 was never shown to spread through hands contacting contaminated surfaces (not unlike how its transmission was erroneously assumed to be through droplets).

A few physicians pointed this out from the get-go, and by early 2021, Nature one of the top scientific journals had admitted there was no point in repeatedly sanitizing surfaces. Likewise, the recent Cochrane review found regular hand washing at best can cause an 11% – 14% reduction in acute respiratory infections.

Nonetheless, compulsive handwashing became a fixture of the pandemic response. Reminders to wash your hands were everywhere. Individuals were regularly chastised or reprimanded for failing to continually wash their hands for 20 seconds, and before long every surface was being regularly disinfected with toxic chemicals.

As I watched all of this, I could not help but recall that a common feature of..