Ran into this here (from about 5 months ago):
It is a graph of the relative lethality of several notorious diseases.
Comparison Of Chinese Wuhan Covid Lethality To Other Diseases
COVID is now being compared to the Spanish Flu, because the US reported death toll is allegedly 400,000, but this neglects that the Spanish Flu was nearly a magnitude worse in per capita terms, as the population of the US was about 100,000 million at the time, less than one-third of today, and the death toll was nearly 700,000.
Better comparisons are the 1957 Asian Flu pandemic or the 1968 Hong Kong Flu pandemic, the latter of which, in that same summer, the country had the largest mass gathering in US history, Woodstock.
I had the 1957 Asian Flu. It was pretty bad. Fever spiked to 106 F and Dad stuck me in a cold bath. I remember being a bit delirious out of it. You know it was something that made an impression when you realize I was about 4 or 5 at the time… and I still have a vivid memory of it.
Of course, the 1968 flu also came and went. Though IIRC I didn’t have much reaction to it. I think that the survivors of the 1957 version were ready for that one. What I remember about that year was riding my Honda Trail 90 toward a similar “Concert” being held near San Francisco and giving up after about 20 miles of Very Cold Dank Winter. I was a kid bundled up with many layers of plain cloth jackets, not a real cold weather gear motorcycle suit. Still wasn’t sick though.
Smallpox was still around when I was a kid. I have the scar on my shoulder from the vaccination. They would scratch an area about the size of a quarter and put some pox derivative in it. It would ooze and fester and eventually make a scar. Polio was common then too, and I had both types of Polio vaccine (at about 10 yo) as I was in the group where they changed the protocol.
There was a point where my Sister was thought to be at risk for Scarlet Fever. Me too. We had a series of “Strep Throat” episodes. I “got over them” fairly well. Did get a scar / pocket in the throat from an infection spot that made a kind of boil (about the size of a lentil). IIRC we got penicillin to make it go away, at some high price.
Dad asked the M.D. “What can we do to stop this coming back?” M.D. ( Dr. Sullivan IIRC) said “Don’t give the antibiotics. Let them develop immunity.” Next round we didn’t go to the doctor. The periodic return ended.
I guess folks were braver then.
Measles & Mumps? I’ve had ’em.
Went swimming in the same summer swimming holes as the kids who got polio (sister’s best friend, 5 years older than me, was in braces until high school when she was finally able to walk without them). Polio spreads in summer in water…
There’s more diseases I’ve had. Some kind of intense cough. Croup? Whooping cough? Folks called things all sorts of names, who knows if they were right. But at a minimum German Measles, some other measley thing with red spots – twice, chicken pox, and who knows what all else.
Then some folks wonder why I’m not very concerned about Chinese Wuhan Covid. I have an existence proof that my immune system is working well and has a history of defeating worse things.
There’s another interesting graph in that article. It compares Chinese Wuhan Covid to other flu pandemics and has an estimate in the bar for the suspected degree of over statement of Covid deaths. Very enlightening.
Chinese Wuhan Covid Compared Minus Overstated
Even with the “overstated” left in, this isn’t really much of a disease. Then add in that it almost exclusively kills off old folks on the edge of death anyway. I can’t see any reason to risk The Children on an experimental FrankenShot. Looks like it is better to just let them develop natural immunity. IMHO, it’s what Dr. Sullivan would have done.
Musings from the Chiefio 
I’ve had scarlet fever. It is an over-reaction by the immune system in producing the immune factor called complement. I have an uncle that got rheumatic fever, He has the heart damage to this day (he’s 90 this year) and has had pacemakers (yes, plural) inserted. One of the ways scarlet fever kills is via immune mediated nephritis and subsequent kidney failure. My own pediatrician said that the streptococcus that causes the initial illness has yearly epidemics, though the risk of scarlet and/or rheumatic fever varies by the strain. So yes, take the penicillin (and I did for several years) to balance the risks until you get old enough to have your immune system settle down. Some of the kids who got strep throat later had pneumonia or meningitis (bad!), while others just got inner ear infections (not nearly as bad).
I am a few years younger than our host. I’ve had all of the vaccines that were available at that time. My polio vaccine was the Salk version. They air-gun injected the smallpox vaccine. That was done at the school, with us all lined up. Others were the usual 5/8″ 26 or so gauge needle subcutaneous or intra-muscular kind.
I know I am, to some great extent, preaching to the choir here — but EVERY. SINGLE. STEP. in this viral episode seems in retrospect to have been calculated to increase the number of people willing to take an experimental, poorly tested, not-really-a-vaccine with completely unknown long term effects.
The ONLY even moderately plausible scenario which I have been able to come up with which does not have absolutely evil reasons is this: Suppose this “vaccine” is a preventative for some form of biological warfare thought to be imminent against the American people. Is this likely? I certainly don’t think so, but all the more likely reasons are just plain evil. And I note also, that many of the popular figures pushing this vaccination program most vehemently are not the sort of people I would trust with my house key.
@CDQuarles:
I have the same “age dependent differences” with the spouse. There’s a load of things that were common for me as a kid that she never experienced. Probably enhanced by my growing up in a rural area that was about a decade behind the rest of the country…
We had “March Of Dimes” dime holders on the counter in our restaurant to help fund “Iron Lung” machines for kids with polio. I lived through the end of that era as a kid. She never experienced it. But did have a close friend confined to a wheel chair from vaccine induces polio paralysis – a rare but real condition. A few in a million vs 1:5000 or so for wild polio. As I understand it, the original killed vaccine (injected) had no cases of paralysis. The decision to go with the attenuated live (sugar cube) was based on community inoculation via contact with the folks shedding the attenuated version. Accepting a “few” cases of paralysis for broader coverage, even of those not given the vaccine directly.
We did the “line up at school for the air gun” thing for some vaccination or other. Don’t remember exactly what it was. By then I’d already had Chicken Pox, Measles & Mumps, so may have been redundant. We went out to the “Migrant Labor Camp” near the river for the County operated free vaccine clinic where I got the Smallpox and a couple of other vaccinations. My sister was crying about it ’cause she didn’t want a scar on her shoulder… I remember the needle scratch not hurting much, but the festering sore later was not so comfortable.
Very different experience for the City Girl future spouse 1/2 decade later living in Silicon Valley… Doctors offices and all…
@TTN:
It’s that hard core “Bum’s Rush” that first got me thinking maybe no “pseudo-vaccination” for me. Sent me down the investigation path.
The more I found out, the less I liked it. There’s a reason your body is reluctant to make antibodies against a corona virus and tries to take it out with innate immunity only first. Bypassing that seems like risky business to me. Just asking for ADE – Antibody Dependent Enhancement.
Then just the question of “How much and how long will your cells be making spike protein?” is vague. It will vary, perhaps a lot, by person. Seems like very risky business to me, too. What IF my metabolism makes a lot more than some other person? Then they designed it to adhere to the cell membrane? Right next to “me” proteins? That’s just asking for auto-immunity targets to be flagged along with the spike. As someone with modest auto-immunity issues already, that seemed like Very Risky Business.
I’m just really uncomfortable with the decisions made. (There’s more than those examples).
The final AwShit for me was how any treatments were Hard Core Dissed / Attacked. My whole life any potential treatment was treated as a gift to test and at least find out. Here we had treatments that were being “canceled” and vilified before any data were even available. That’s not doctoring, that’s political manipulation. That was also when I used my first dose of ivermectin from a bottle left over from treating bunnies for E. Cuniculi. (My sniffles and scratchy throat were gone the next day and I ordered another bottle ;-)
The whole process just stinks. And when things “just stink” I don’t play in that game.
EM, This was discussed in
I was roundly criticized for my take on this virus that now seems to closely match your current take on the issue.
EM “.. Going for “herd immunity” by telling the “at risk” to hide while everyone else shares the bug is asking for disaster. With about 340 million population, if only 1% of them are surprise bad cases, an order of magnitude below experience, will be 3.4 million and that will break the medical system and be a disaster. Better to be hyper proactive than disastrously reactive..”
I said at the time that the various national health organizations have not got anything right in the predictions of the last several pandemics, all being widely overhyped. This is , again, true.
The world is becoming infected with “Chicken Little Syndrome “ though.
@Ed Forbes:
As the data changes, so does my evaluation of the data.
At that time (3 months into it) we were being fed a load of (what is now know to be) crap data. Lethality way overstated as only hospitalized cases were being recognized. China showing video of people dropping in the streets. The Plague Ship having most passengers whacked to some degree. The “experts” asserting 100% vulnerable / to be infected. And the immortal “There are NO treatments”…
Doing the math, then, it DID look like 3.4 million potential dead.
Since then we’ve learned:
About 1/3 of the population have pre-existing immunity from exposure to other corona viruses.
A large percentage (maybe 80%?) of “cases” are very mild to no symptoms.
The “test” was bogus from the start, and then deliberately run way too many cycles. Then, running that test on whole populations regardless of symptoms is guaranteed to toss a LOAD of false positives (almost all will be false positives when very few actual cases exist).
There are several good treatments.
The young are essentially invulnerable to the disease.
The only ones actually dying from it are the elderly with comorbidities and a few younger edge cases.
In hindsight it is very clear that you were far more right then, than “data driven” me had been. BUT, what is unclear is were you “right” due to superior information / analysis, or just via a lucky guess? Hard to say as “intuition based on experience” is just another way of saying “Right Brain looked at it and gave an answer”; a different kind of cognition from Left Brain data and analysis.
So yes, by all means, take your victory lap.
@TTN:
FWIW, had TPTB said something more like:
“We have HCQ that sort of works sometimes maybe, and Ivermectin looks promising so we’re putting it in trials. Oh, look, we have an experimental vaccine. Ask your M.D. if it is right for you.”
I’d likely be vaccinated right now. It was the “overplayed hand” that spooked me.
Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, deputy director of the Immunization Safety Office at the CDC, noted 484 preliminary reports of myocarditis and pericarditis among vaccinated people under 30 as of June 11 against a backdrop of over 27 million administered doses. Of the total, 323 met CDC’s case definitions for myocarditis and/or pericarditis, 309 of whom were hospitalized, 295 were discharged at the time of analysis and at least 79% recovered from symptoms. Nine remained in hospital care, with two in intensive care, and 14 weren’t hospitalized.
https://www.foxnews.com/health/data-suggests-likely-link-covid-19-mrna-vaccines-rare-heart-issues-cdc-panel
I have never had a flu that really knocked me on my keister, but as we’re about the same age cohort I’ve had all the jabs you’ve had. I’m 65 in another month, so functionally in the “danger” zone for COVID. Plus, I have 3 co-morbidities. Under some pressure from my employer I did the Moderna two-step and had absolutely no reaction. It’s unlikely I’ll be around for any late-developing side effects of the 20-year variety, but now I’m starting to worry about some of the possible effects now being hinted at. I guess we’ll see.
As I recall it, the only vaccines when I was a wee lad were the DTP, influenza, polio and smallpox ones. The MMR ones were around for my children in addition to those of the 50s and 60s. Not everyone got the influenza one. Pneumonia (as in pneumococcus) vaccines also came later, as well as meningitis vaccines (meningococcus). There are quite a few more now, such that my and my sister’s grandchildren get way more than we did.
@D.J.Hawkins:
This is a decision graph of large unknowns in both directions. There is NO known good answer.
Some of us will be “experimental subjects”.
Some of us will be “controls”.
Who “wins” will be unknown for at least a year more. So not much reason in worrying about it.
FWIW, to the extent Ivermectin does work and does bind to the end of the spike protein, it ought to be helpful with both “vaccination side effects” of the spike protein (when first vaccinated) and with ADE (should it be a risk).
So just pocket that notion for a while. IFF you start to “have issues” with a “variant” causing problems, you have some fallback options to evaluate.
For me, were I going to take the jab, I’d have ivermectin in me for the duration of the spike protein production. It has a very good chance of reducing the prompt side effects and spike protein damages. Then, much later, were ADE shown to be an issue, Ivermectin can likely also reduce the severity (on several fronts) of whatever happens. Anti-inflammatory, spike protein binding site blocking, and more.
I’ve lost the link to the article, but saw one that showed the atomic / molecular skeleton of ivermectin in the context of the spike protein binding site and showed how it nicely fit and had electrostatic bonding attraction that matched.
Long winded way to say “Don’t worry. Just be curious.”
On the flip side:
I’m in the “control” group. So far so good and NO bad thing. HOWEVER…
Any day now I could be in the grocery store or an elevator and get Chinese Wuhan Covid or an aggressive variant. It could kill me in a week or two. I’m betting my life, literally, on what I’ve read about ivermectin. Nothing says that’s the best idea…
Or I could just forget one week to take my dose, and end up hospitalized by surprise.
You pays your money and you takes your chances.
Vaccine time line, history of what was made available in which years:
https://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-history/developments-by-year
@E.M. “China showing video of people dropping in the streets.”
That video is STILL one of the more confusing parts of it, and while I can think of a couple of explanations, I do not find any of them convincing.
1) Yes, the Chinese really WERE hit hard with people dropping in the streets. But if so, why did we not see the same things here? 1a) Maybe it is genetic — except that Chinese people here in the US did not show extreme reactions 1b) They were hit by a different virus — except that (other than the Iranian high government officials) it magically stopped spreading to the rest of the world 1c) The Chinese toll was due to their horrible air pollution interacting with the virus — maybe, sort of, kind of, but I would have thought other high pollution areas would show up as death centers 1d) The high Chinese toll was a result of an earlier round of vaccines produced and tested in China for the earlier SARS epidemic, and we were seeing the phenomenon reported for many earlier coronavirus vaccines, the extreme reaction to later wild strains — but I have no confirmation that Wuhan was a site for earlier SARS vaccine testing.
2) No, the Chinese were NOT hit hard, which means that 2a) Maybe the Chinese were faking the severity, perhaps to induce panic in the West — but if the virus originated in China why would they want to increase the reaction of the West instead of playing it down? 2b) Some non-Chinese group was posting fake videos (“fake” in this sense also could mean an authentic video of some different event rebranded as COVID) for the purpose of inducing panic — but a lot of supposedly reliable eyewitnesses from China claimed to be experiencing the deaths and lockdowns all around them.
I see no convincing explanation, but those early reports from China still strike me as a major puzzle piece which simply does not fit. Something important is missing.
@E.M. “It was the “overplayed hand” that spooked me.”
Ditto. It reminds me in many ways of the playbook used for pushing CAGW.
I was convinced that China was greatly understating the affects of the Wuflu. And by every metric available that appears to still be true.
Or China has an answer or solution they are not sharing?
My aunt had Polio when she was a teen. She lost the use of her legs for the rest of her life. But still raised 4 kids. today’s youth would just lay down and die.
Got my small pox scar. Have had Measles and Chicken Pox. Never had the mumps. But had both forms of the polio vaccine as well. By the time my kids came around, they had a Chicken Po Vaccine, but it was still very new and not widely available. Before they could get it, one of them brought the bug home, so we made sure all were exposed. 3 of 4 got it.
I found this remark from Boris Johnson on 14 June chilling (he’s talking about postponing the final, step-four ending of lockdown):
“At that stage, on the basis of the evidence that I can see now, I’m confident that we will be able to go forward with the full Step 4, the full opening.” But he added: “That, of course, does not exclude the possibility – I’m afraid, and we have got to be honest about this – the possibility that there is some new variant that is far more dangerous, that kills people in a way that we currently cannot foresee or understand.”
What on earth was he alluding to? It sounded like the words of a man who knows that something awful is on its way, for which the vaccines he’s pushing will be responsible, but which he can’t admit to, for whatever reason.
I think life is going to become very difficult for those of us in the UK who have declined these vaccines. But if I’m ever tempted to take the easy way out, and get injected in return for a vaccine pass, those words will be enough to make me pull back. Who know whether he was thinking of ADE, or the Hoskins effect, or maybe nothing to do with the vaccines at all? Either way, I simply don’t want that worry hanging over me.
At 59, slim and in good health, I’ve lived through two whole seasons of this virus now without noticing a thing healthwise. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
And now, something COVID completely different …
Disparities such as these could create a world in which three types of countries emerge from the pandemic — the wealthy nations that used their resources to secure Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots, the poorer countries that are far away from immunizing a majority of citizens, and then those that are fully inoculated but only partly protected.
China, as well as the more than 90 nations that have received the Chinese shots, may end up in the third group, contending with rolling lockdowns, testing and limits on day-to-day life for months or years to come. Economies could remain held back. And as more citizens question the efficacy of Chinese doses, persuading unvaccinated people to line up for shots may also become more difficult.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/06/23/nations-that-relied-on-chinas-covid-vaccines-now-seeing-large-increases-in-infections-n1456452
@ The True Nolan re:
“I see no convincing explanation, but those early reports from China still strike me as a major puzzle piece which simply does not fit. Something important is missing.”
After the first 2 or 3 videos of people falling down in the street in China and getting hauled away bodily, I started getting this gut feeling that the videos were staged. As one who has been involved with stage productions, my BS alarm started going off, big time.
So I started avoiding MSM reporting and started studying reports from those whose health advice I already have been trusting for many years.
I keep wondering, though, if the ten years I spent without a TV (from 1976 to 1986) might have helped loosen the grip that mass media previously held on me.
Even so, sometimes I view a few seconds of MSM reporting about Covid, and it seems almost like it would suck me back into its grip again. I turn it off and shake my head, usually, and refuse to receive it.
Oh, I had a conversation with an employee my town’s oldest funeral home last month. She mentioned that they dealt with no Covid deaths until one in October last year. We both confessed our skepticism to each other. ;-)
One last thing…I have been keeping tabs on the county-wide count of deaths. It stuck around 35 for a long time, until they started holding mass vaccination PODs. Then it roughly doubled in pretty short order.
@Power Grab: “After the first 2 or 3 videos of people falling down in the street in China and getting hauled away bodily, I started getting this gut feeling that the videos were staged.”
As time goes by, I am beginning more and more to think you are right on that. I know that those videos came via unofficial channels — and in fact that was one of the things which I found made them more creditable. In retrospect, how difficult would it be for someone (perhaps the usual GEBs) to surreptitiously slip those videos into the US and tag them as authentic Chinese man-on-the-street observations.
“It stuck around 35 for a long time, until they started holding mass vaccination PODs. Then it roughly doubled in pretty short order.”
Disturbing — but believable.
In retrospect, the whole “welding people in apartments” and “falling down dead in the streets” looks like a Video Hype to Create Panic. I smell “Theatre For Effect”…