Pearls and Irritations

The Coronavirus might have been spreading quietly in humans for years, or even decades, without causing a detectable outbreak – Dr Francis Collins, Director, The National Institutes of Health. Governments treat epidemics as acts of a capricious God and have done so every ‘flu season for centuries. ‘Herd immunity’ is the rule, not the exception. 

Says former UK Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn, “I remember distinctly going to a meeting at the Cabinet Office, where we got a lecture about herd immunity. The last time I discussed herd immunity was when I worked on a pig farm 40 years ago. It was absurd that actually you would build up herd immunity by allowing people to die. And so, while the government was going into eugenic formulas and discussing all this stuff, they were not making adequate preparations.” 

Is it surprising then, that when the WHO confirmed the Covid-19 outbreak in January 2020, the CDC’s Dr Anthony Fauci announced, “The American public shouldn’t worry about the coronavirus outbreak in China”?

The CDC, born in 1946 as the US Army’s Communicable Disease Center, and still headed by a non-scientist Army officer, has only ever provided surveillance, research, and advice. It has always left execution to the Army’s chain-of-command. Finland’s Institute for Health and Welfare fields more public health staff than the CDC. 

Pandemics have always been highly political, even regime-changing. When Swine Flu struck during the 1976 presidential campaign, Gerald Ford endorsed mass immunization, but the vaccine proved ineffectual and lethal and contributed to Ford’s loss. When AIDS struck five years later, Ronald Reagan ignored it and was reelected in a landslide. 

When the presence of Covid-19 in the United States could no longer be ignored, the White House disregarded the WHO’s warnings, classified Covid discussions and moved them to secure facilities, then released information on a need to know basis. The CDC banned Covid testing until March 2020 and served recalcitrant health officials with cease and desist orders. 

Only after President Trump lost the 2020 election did thirty-four CDC researchers, using archived Red Cross blood samples, announce what many had suspected: by December, 2019, the virus was well established in the USA. Somewhere between four and six million Americans had developed sufficient Covid antibodies to qualify for an EU ‘Green’ vaccination pass:

Findings: Of the 7389 samples, 106 were reactive by pan-Ig. Of these 106 specimens, 90 were available for further testing. Eighty-four of 90 had neutralizing activity, 1 had S1 binding activity, and 1 had receptor-binding domain/ACE2 blocking activity >50%, suggesting the presence of anti–SARS-CoV-2–reactive antibodies. Donations with reactivity occurred in all 9 states.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may have been introduced into the United States prior to 19 January 2020.

The obvious question is: how long before 19 January 2020 was SARS-Cov-2 introduced?

Happily, the answer is not far to seek.

If we know how long it takes for the number of total confirmed deaths to double in America–the death doubling interval–and the one month’s total confirmed Covid deaths, we can calculate the approximate date when the virus appeared.

Since we know it takes one-hundred thirty-nine days for Covid deaths to double in the US, and we also know that 70,000 Americans died of it in January 2020, we can work backwards from that date, halving the deaths every 139 days.

This date is supported by mystery death spikes in 2019, and by similar findings in Europe, especially from Italian researchers:

Abstract: SARS-CoV-2 RBD-specific antibodies were detected in 111 of 959 (11.6%) individuals, starting from September 2019 (14%), with a cluster of positive cases (>30%) in the second week of February 2020 and the highest number (53.2%) in Lombardy.

Conclusions: People with no symptoms not only were positive after the serological tests but had also antibodies able to kill the virus. This means that the new coronavirus can circulate among the population for long and with a low rate of lethality not because it is disappearing, but only to surge again”.

Why did the CDC miss it? A clinician friend explained: 

The argument that Covid-19, if already spreading in the US, even in 2019, would have been mandatorily detected in real-time just because of an alarming quantitative increase in the death rate is obviously wrong. If that were the case, the Italian and Spanish Health services who struggled for four months with high concentrations of elderly Covid-19 patients would have seen such an “excess mortality” red flag, but they never did, until the Chinese made a decisive qualitative step forward and identified a novel virus. 

Covid has a low death rate, and as such could not have been identified just by an alarmingly-increased excess death rate, especially in the early months of the pandemic when the number of cases were low. It is the qualitative factors, clinical symptoms, scans, serology, and the like that should have raised the red flag, but instead the CDC chose to bury them under the now-discredited “EVALI” convenience tag.

The Chinese identified SARS-CoV2 led by qualitative drives, not because they had too many deaths, but because they reacted as perfectionist professionals when faced with symptoms they could not attribute to any previously-known respiratory syndrome.

It would have been extremely easy to hide the statistical effect of 6 – 7 months of running Covid19 infection in the USA, especially at the inception stage of the epidemic. Laymen may object that, if 100,000 died, someone would have noticed. No. 

Maybe somebody would have “noticed” an extra 100,000 deaths, but not until they had accumulated and been totalised alongside the excess death or negative death rates from all other factors. For instance, the uncertainty on the death toll for ‘flu during only the 6-months winter season is as high as 38,000 deaths–so it would have taken a long time for an extra 100,000 deaths to raise a red flag as a confirmed anomaly.

In other words, considering its comparatively small order of magnitude, the 2019 Covid death rate would have been easily missed amongst other uncertainty factors such as ‘flu death rate and falling life expectancy.

So it appears that China, far from being the source of the outbreak, may have been the last to experience it. Certainly, the WHO found no evidence of Covid there before December, 2019, and subsequent statistics support that conclusion.