COVID Contrarians

Although treated as social pariahs for speaking out, despite the threats to their careers and reputations, there are a number of physicians, epidemiologists, scientists, economists and politicians that provide reasoned opposition to the extreme social and economic lockdowns of governments’ CV-19 responses. In an attempt to turn up the thought and turn down the emotion, I’ll list some that I come across, in no particular order.

Video upload 29 April 2020. This Austrian politico is great! Reminds me of some of British Nigel Farage’s parliamentary rants against his governments’ idiocy over the years. “On April 22, 2020, before the Austrian government, former Minister of the Interior Herbert Kickl openly denounces the fear-based manipulation built on catastrophic forecasts, helped by the media, to establish a strict confinement, presented as the only possibility for avoiding a coronavirus mass death. However Sweden, judged irresponsible for not having applied lockdown, had neither mass death, nor destruction of its economy, nor freedom restriction of its citizens.”

Freddie Sayers’ UnHerd article and video interview on 02 May 2020, with Michael Levitt, “professor of Structural Biology at the Stanford School of Medicine, and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for ‘the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.’ With a purely statistical perspective, he has been paying close attention to the Covid-19 pandemic since January…. [H]e thinks indiscriminate lockdown measures [are] ‘a huge mistake,’ and advocates a ‘smart lockdown’ policy, focused on more effective measures, focused on protecting elderly people.” Some of the numbers that Levitt uses in the interview seem way off because I think he is using a “per 100,000 population” metric rather than total numbers. Regardless, his points are well made.

Opinion piece in the NYPost, 27 April 2020, by Daniel G. Murphy, MD, – chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at St. Barnabas Hospital in The Bronx. He says that his ED and hospital experienced 2 weeks of the worst medical situation that he has seen in his career. That peaked on April 1, 2020, and quickly declined. He calls to open the economy and the hospitals, to get on with suspended medical care. He reports that the virus is much more prevalent in the community (and subsequently has a much lower fatality rate) than is appreciated. He cites that 43% of people in his area test positive. The public’s fear is excessive. Natural herd immunity is developing. Get back to work!

The Bakersfield, California, doctors. May 4, 2020. “Perspectives on the Pandemic – Episode 6: When Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi held a press conference on April 22nd about the results of testing they conducted at their urgent care facilities around Bakersfield, California, the video, uploaded by a local ABC news affiliate, went viral. After reaching five million views, YouTube took it down on the grounds that it ‘violated community standards.’ We followed up with the doctors to determine what was so dangerous about their message. What we discovered were reasonable and well-meaning professionals whose voices should be heard.”

Zubin Damania, MD (ZDoggMD) interview from 17 March 2020. “Is Our Cure Worse Than The Disease?… Legendary vaccine scientist and rationalist Dr. Paul Offit and I discuss the current response to the COVID-19 epidemic, relationships to influenza and RSV, absolute vs. relative risk, which populations we should target most for social distancing, the fecal-oral spread of this novel coronavirus, comparisons to norovirus and rotavirus, and a deep dive into vaccine development and its challenges.” Dr. Damania has some other related interviews at his site.

One of several interviews by Journeyman Pictures with Stanford epidemiologist, Prof. John Ioannidis, who “discusses the results of his preliminary studies, including his latest, which shows a drastically reduced infection fatality rate of SARS-CoV-2. (Several study links are listed.) He also gives an insight into the Swedish approach to the crisis and gives a possible explanation for the escalated situation in New York City. Furthermore, he highlights the importance of remaining rational, analytical and aware of the potentially fatal consequences of the measures. Prof. Ioannidis advises we calmly and rationally consider which measures work and which don’t.” He says that no one should be blamed for being scared and reacting strongly to the unknowns of the virus, initially. However, science has given us the information to make adjustments to our approach. Deaths are on the order of a severe flu. Lockdowns do not have any evidence of superiority over the non-draconian approaches used elsewhere (like Sweden, Taiwan, S. Korea). Significant bad consequences are on the horizon for continued lockdowns.

Another great Journeyman Pictures interview, “Perspectives on the Pandemic Episode 5” with, Knut Wittkowski, a professor of epidemiology for 15 years in in Germany, who then worked for 20 years in NYC at the Rockefeller Institute as the head of the Dept of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design at the Center for Clinical and Translational Science. There was apparently a big media push to discredit this previous Professor of Epidemiology, that he was not so titled at the Rockefeller Institute. In this follow up video interview, he clarifies that he never represented himself as such. His true credentials are above. Sad that media and public ad hominem attacks have to be employed to attempt to discount and discredit him because his information cannot be refuted. He “says his initial claim has been vindicated: The lockdowns – always a dubious proposition for a respiratory virus – came too late in the U.S. and elsewhere, and were therefore even worse than useless. By turns emotional and darkly comic, Wittkowski ranges across all the essential topics of the crisis, and gives answers you are unlikely to see in the major media. Not to be missed.” Journeyman Pictures YouTube channel link. And their website with a host of documentaries and interviews. And here is Dr. Wittkowski’s pre-print study: “The first three months of the COVID-19 epidemic: Epidemiological evidence for two separate strains of SARS-CoV-2 viruses spreading and implications for prevention strategies.”

A study out of Univ of Rochester Med Center, April 2020. “The Potential for Antibody-Dependent Enhancement of SARS-CoV-2 Infection: Translational Implications for Vaccine Development.” The lethality of COVID is associated not so much with the direct effects of the virus, but rather the body’s massive immune response. Antibodies from previous infections or those produced by previous vaccinations may play a role in harmfully ramping up an immunopathology. This Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) may cause greater disease severity due to an excessive immune reaction that causes host harm and/or death. ADE is “linked to the development of cytokine storm syndrome, which occurs in the most severe cases of MERS, SARS and COVID-19 infection.” “… we may produce vaccines that enhance, rather than protect against, severe SARS-CoV-2 infection.” Study by Jiong Wang MD, and Martin S. Zand MD PhD. Department of Medicine, Division of Nephrology, and Clinical and Translational Science Institute, University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY USA. Here’s the downloaded .pdf if the link is not available.

2012 UTMB-Galveston immunology dept study with SARS vaccines. They led to infiltrative eosinophilic pulmonary disease. “Immunization With SARS Coronavirus Vaccines Leads to Pulmonary Immunopathology on Challenge With the SARS Virus.” Additional studies are referenced at the site. There is a big rush to develop a COVID vaccine. If previous vaccine attempts for corona viruses have had significant side effects, precluding their advancement to safe use in humans, I, for one, want to see some long term safety studies. Let’s make sure there is evidence that benefit outweighs risk. (Authors: Chien-Te Tseng, Elena Sbrana, Naoko Iwata-Yoshikawa, Patrick C Newman, Tania Garron, Robert L Atmar, Clarence J Peters, Robert B Couch. Department of Microbiology and Immunology, The University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas.)

Professor Peter Collignon from the Australian National University medical school, interviewed by his local newspaper, 02 April 2020. The extreme government reactions and lockdowns are based on panic, not data. “You are safer outside than inside.” He also “took aim at modeling that suggests hundreds of thousands of deaths, saying the same models were used for the SARS, ebola and swine flu epidemics and had been wrong.”

16 April 2020. YouTube video. “Unlike its European neighbors and much of the rest of the world, Sweden has chosen to avoid a lockdown in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Cato Senior Fellow (and a Swede) Johan Norberg explains why Sweden is keeping its country open and allowing so much economic activity, and why its approach may prove to be superior from a public health perspective.” He says, “Sweden isn’t the experiment. The rest of you are. No one has ever taken such drastic measures.”

17 April 2020, UnHerd interview with Swedish epidemiologist and consultant to EU and WHO, Johan Giesecke: “Why lockdowns are the wrong policy.” Professor Giesecke explains Sweden’s more reasoned approach: socially isolate the elderly and ill, encourage adults to work and study from home without police enforcement, *hygiene*, kids still go to school, people can shop, people practice distancing, groups under 50 in number are permitted. He says the models have been unreliable and based on highly variable guesses, that the draconian lockdowns have no scientific basis, that governments have no viable criteria from which to back down from the lockdowns because there is no achievable goal (when deaths are zero for a month?), that this will likely be on the order of a severe flu season, that many millions of people have already had the virus and mostly been low to asymptomatic, that although typically the virus will take months of life from the elderly and ill it is the living that will deal with the aftermath of societal disruption and government excesses (especially the dictatorial trends of Eastern Europe), that even if lockdowns have an effect at slowing spread that ultimately the final death count will be relatively unchanged, no matter what you do this virus is a tsunami that will roll across the globe, fear and political gain drive the response rather than science, a major epidemiologic difference in COVID transmission and influenza is that the latter is driven by children whereas the the former is uncommon to affect the younger population,….

17 April 2020, Spiked Interview with British pathologist Dr. John A. Lee. “There’s no direct evidence that the lockdowns are working” Some of Dr. Lee’s quotes: “Unfortunately, the media have tended to reinforce the initial ideas about what this disease was like which have not necessarily been borne out by the numbers since then. …other places which are doing different things seem to have similarly shaped graphs. It is only an assumption that the lockdown is having a big effect on the virus spread, but this is not a known scientific fact…. It seems incredible to me that we are not equally as interested in the effects of the lockdown on lives and livelihoods as we are in the actual virus itself. I think we are guilty at the moment of being a bit monomaniacal and focusing only on one thing, and really not focusing enough on the consequences that are coming out of what we have done to face this one thing.”

Full lockdown policies in Western Europe countries have no evident impacts on the COVID-19 epidemic. Thomas Meunier. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Falmouth, Massachusetts. Ensenada Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education, Ensenada, BC. April 23, 2020. Abstract: This phenomenological study assesses the impacts of full lockdown strategies applied in Italy, France, Spain and United Kingdom, on the slowdown of the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak. Comparing the trajectory of the epidemic before and after the lockdown, we find no evidence of any discontinuity in the growth rate, doubling time, and reproduction number trends. Extrapolating pre-lockdown growth rate trends, we provide estimates of the death toll in the absence of any lockdown policies, and show that these strategies might not have saved any life in western Europe. We also show that neighboring countries applying less restrictive social distancing measures (as opposed to police-enforced home containment) experience a very similar time evolution of the epidemic.

Addendum 09 May 2020: On May 6, 2020, US Senate video round table led by Pat Toomey – PA (R) with expert witnesses for epidemiology, health policy, economics and physician leadership. Some of my interpretations: it is safe to allow phased and gradual opening of schools and workplaces while continuing to increase targeted testing and screening surveillance; nursing home and hospital patients and staff need high levels of testing as potential hot spots for resurgence; much of the rest of the country’s population can receive “representative testing” samples with more focused testing and isolation in response, which can be accomplished with fewer than 1 million tests per day; the country is in a much better position than a few months ago and has proven a high health care capacity, especially considering that the very high original estimates for morbidity and mortality were inflated; the “new normal” may include retaining changes in our social patterns of interaction (e.g. no more hand shaking, comfort with greater distancing,…) and delivery of health care (like telemedicine); the health care, economic and social costs of lock downs have been and may still be severe and must be balanced against realistic health benefits; the vulnerable will still need to be isolated and protected; as phased opening occurs, any identified areas or venues of increased will need modification;….

Addendum 12 May 2020: This past week it came to light that the computer modeling code used by Neil Ferguson is basically garbage, or sh*tcode. In Mark Jeftovic’s article: “It was an Imperial College computer model that forecasted 500K deaths in the UK (and 2.5 million in the US) should policymakers pursue a ‘herd immunity’ approach (a la Sweden), that influenced them to reverse course and go full lockdown instead. The model was produced by a team headed by Neil Ferguson, (who recently resigned his post advising the UK government when it surfaced that he was himself violating lockdown directives by breaking self-isolation for dalliances with a married woman). The source code behind the model was to be made available to the public, and after numerous delays and excuses in doing so, has finally been posted to GitHub.” A former senior Google software engineer reviewed the code here and calls for an immediate retraction of any publications based on it. A reddit thread entitled Code Review of Ferguson’s Model calls for review and commentary by professionals in the field, and is scathing.

Washington Post, May 9, 2020: The recurring mantra is to trust the “experts.” “… in this COVID-19 atmosphere, where scientists and researchers and medical professionals and scholars have taken over much of the control of U.S. politics and government and how American citizens are supposed to now behave and function — it’s more important than ever to remember this: Scientists can be wrong, very wrong. Moreover, scientists can lie. And very often, as history shows, they do.” (Article and links duplicated at RPI, if placed behind pay wall.)