Iatrogenic public health

I have written a number of times that at virtually every stage during Covid pandemic, our public health authorities, when faced with a decision, made the wrong decision.  While this was a grave failure in public health policy, it was an even greater failure of governance.  

Scott W. Atlas documents this nearly unparalleled consistency of failure.  

Here are the 10 biggest falsehoods—known for years to be false, not recently learned or proven to be so—promoted by America's public health leaders, elected and unelected officials, and now-discredited academics:

1. SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than the flu by several orders of magnitude.

2. Everyone is at significant risk to die from this virus.

3. No one has any immunological protection, because this virus is completely new.

4. Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread.

5. Locking down—closing schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-COVID medical care, and eliminating travel—will stop or eliminate the virus.

6. Masks will protect everyone and stop the spread.

7. The virus is known to be naturally occurring, and claiming it originated in a lab is a conspiracy theory.

8. Teachers are at especially high risk.

9. COVID vaccines stop the spread of the infection.

10. Immune protection only comes from a vaccine.

El Gato Malo covers this in The Greatest Lie Told During Covid.  He is also making a separate argument I have not seen before.  That the catastrophic death rate among the young and healthy during the 1918 Spanish Flu was due to an iatrogenic public health policies failure.  

there is actually quite a lot of convincing evidence that many of the “young, healthy deaths” in spanish flu were iatrogenic.

this is a word that’s going to come up a lot and a topic that’s going to be the big field of debate around covid going forward. it’s probably one of the most important scientific questions in the world right now. so let’s define it:

 

loosely put, iatrogenic death is when the doctor kills you. and there is a long and unpleasant history on that one from benjamin rush bleeding george washington to death to killing “witchy” cats to stop a plague carried by the fleas of the very rats they were eating to (and especially) new “wonder drugs” that are poorly understood but that rapidly go into widespread use.

and one of those drugs was aspirin.

aspirin had just come into widespread availability in 1918 (and bayer was rushing it to market for the pandemic). it was the new wowie-zowie drug and doctors (and especially militaries) all over the world fell in love with it. they prescribed it widely to those with spanish flu. in doses ranging from 8 to 31 grams per day. oopsie.

a typical aspirin today is 325mg and max dosing per day is ~4 grams.

a toxic dose is 200-300mg/kg of weight. that’s about 20g for a 180 pound person.

31g is “you’re going to die really, really fast and there is not a damn thing anyone can do to stop it once you take that dose.”

this is why incredible caution should be exercised around large departures from tested and true medical practice and new pharma modalities and products.

It seems increasingly clear that the US funded the creation of Covid-19.  That the Wuhan Virus Institute accidentally leaked it.  That the US response to Covid-19 was almost uniformly in contradiction of established NIH pandemic response plans, and that many, if not most, of US Covid-19 deaths were iatrogenic in nature.

We are a long way from telling that story but most the foundations are in place.