Monday, September 26, 2022

WaPo editorial on the Lancet Commission Report makes it easy to see the limited hangout

“The ability of the public health system to identify cases, trace contacts, and isolate infected individuals can be overwhelmed in just a few weeks of uncontrolled community transmission,” the report says.

Right, so you stop doing contact tracing when you know if doesn’t work. Instead, contact tracing was started after it was known to have had no chance of success. Because it was another surveillance tool being prototyped.—Nass

“National responses were often improvisational, occasionally bordering on the absurd,” the commission states.

Right, and this ‘revelation’ should be called out loudly, but was buried.

Governments “showed themselves to be untrustworthy and ineffective,” and “rancor among the major powers” then “gravely weakened the capacity of international institutions” to respond, especially the World Health Organization, which comes in for sharp criticism for repeatedly erring “on the side of reserve rather than boldness.” The panel calls for strengthening the WHO and giving it stronger powers and more solid financing.

The WHO criticism for not being bolder (WHAT?!!) is meant to add juice to the tale of this report, so that it gets more eyeballs. Admitting governments lied is meant to engender trust in the reader.

Another lesson is that a failure to grasp the viral transmission route led to cascading — and costly — miscalculations. Early in the outbreak, the commission states, “health authorities concentrated almost exclusively on spray transmission,” the idea that the virus is disseminated when people exhale droplets that fall by gravity after a distance of one or two meters. This led to emphasis on six feet of social distancing, extensive cleaning of surfaces and hand-washing. In fact, the virus was spreading in respiratory aerosols, microscopic particles that stay suspended in the air, not unlike cigarette smoke. Failure to focus more on this airborne route at the outset had serious consequences: “The use of face coverings, ventilation, and air filtration as effective risk reduction measures were not adequately encouraged,” the report says. The incorrect assumptions enabled the virus to spread “almost unabated, for months.”

There was no failure to grasp that the virus spreads by the airborne route. There was suppression of this knowledge at a planetary level. Had it been acknowledged, the plan to allow big box stores to remain open would have failed. Shutting down Main Street, where small, older stores had potentially better ventilation, could not be allowed. Remember that vulture capitalism requires winners and losers, who were chosen beforehand. Makeshift face masks did no good at all and probably caused harm. Now everyone knows that cloth masks don’t work—but they think face coverings that look like surgical masks do. Except there is no difference between the two types of masks. Neither works for airborne spread.

Oddly, the commission report skims over the fact that China’s leadership hid from the public the virus’s human-to-human transmissibility in the first three weeks of January 2020 — a dire mistake that allowed it to spread.

Because to get to the one world government no serious finger pointing is allowed.

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