Dr. Knut Wittkowski is not making any friends on social media or in the medical community, but he doesn’t seem to care. Recently, his viral video about the Chinese COVID-19 was censored by YouTube and removed for not adhering to the World Health Organization messaging. Stephen Kruiser had that story. Any doctor who speaks out against the approved narrative is immediately “debunked” by the in-crowd and censored on social media.
The California doctors who held a press conference in favor of herd immunity over lockdowns were mercilessly savaged across the media and accused of wanting to make money rather than keep people safe.
But as more and more doctors speak out against the narrative, their message is getting out despite the biased “fact-checkers” and big tech censors. The truth is, there is no consensus in science. That trope is false. Not all doctors or scientists agree and that’s doubly true where COVID-19 is concerned as the worldwide lockdown strategy is hotly-contested.
Wittkowski, former head of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at The Rockefeller University’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science, was interviewed by Spiked, where he excoriated the lockdown of healthy people to fight a virus.
When the whole thing started, there was one reason given for the lockdown and that was to prevent hospitals from becoming overloaded. There is no indication that hospitals could ever have become overloaded, irrespective of what we did. So we could open up again, and forget the whole thing.
I hope the intervention did not have too much of an impact because it most likely made the situation worse. The intervention was to ‘flatten the curve’. That means that there would be the same number of cases but spread out over a longer period of time, because otherwise the hospitals would not have enough capacity.
Lockdown leads to more death
The flattening of the curve, the prolongation of the epidemic, makes it more difficult to protect the elderly, who are at risk. More of the elderly people become infected, and we have more deaths…Firstly, we have the direct consequences: suicides, domestic violence and other social consequences leading to death. And then we have people who are too scared to go to the hospitals for other problems like strokes or heart attacks. So people stay away from hospitals because of the Covid fear. And then they die.
Wittkowski believes we are already well on the way to herd immunity and that a “second spike” scenario is an invention by politicians who don’t want to admit they are wrong about their lockdown strategy. “This is an invention to justify a policy that politicians are afraid of reversing,” he said.
Social Distancing Is a Disaster
Why? What is the justification for that? People need to ask the government for an explanation. The government is restricting freedom. You do not have to ask me for justification. There is no justification. It is the government that has to justify what it is doing. Sorry, but that is how it is.
The lack of diversity of viewpoints and the freezing out of doctors who advocate for herd immunity from the discussion bothers Wittkowski.
Governments did not have an open discussion, including economists, biologists and epidemiologists, to hear different voices. In Britain, it was the voice of one person – Neil Ferguson – who has a history of coming up with projections that are a bit odd. The government did not convene a meeting with people who have different ideas, different projections, to discuss his projection. If it had done that, it could have seen where the fundamental flaw was in the so-called models used by Neil Ferguson. His paper was published eventually, in medRxiv. The assumption was that one per cent of all people who became infected would die. There is no justification anywhere for that.
Wittkowski says that the situation in Italy, where the population had a higher number of elderly with comorbidities who died in large numbers made people irrational.
Very early on, we knew from China and we knew from South Korea that this is an epidemic that runs its course, and there was nothing special about it. But when it hit Italy, we stopped thinking about it as an age-stratified problem, and instead lumped everyone all together. The idea that if we did not shut down the schools the hospitals would have been overwhelmed does not make any sense. I frankly still cannot fully understand how our governments can be so stupid.
Lockdown Science Is Corrupt
But when the governments explain themselves they always claim they are “following the science.” But what if science has been corrupted by governments? Wittkowski says it has.
They have the scientists on their side that depend on government funding. One scientist in Germany just got $500million from the government, because he always says what the government wants to hear.
Scientists are in a very strange situation. They now depend on government funding, which is a trend that has developed over the past 40 years. Before that, when you were a professor at a university, you had your salary and you had your freedom. Now, the university gives you a desk and access to the library. And then you have to ask for government money and write grant applications. If you are known to criticise the government, what does that do to your chance of getting funded? It creates a huge conflict of interest. The people who are speaking out in Germany and Switzerland are all independent of government money because they are retired.
Wittkowski contends that COVID-19 is only highly dangerous to the elderly with comorbidities and that the U.S. government knew that as well but put our elderly in greater danger.
The first death in the United States was in a nursing home in Seattle. And that was by the end of February. So everybody knew that we were expecting the same thing that we had seen in Italy – an epidemic that hits the elderly. But until just this week in New York State, the government told the nursing homes that if they did not take in patients from hospitals, they would lose their funding. So they would have to import the virus from the hospitals.
One third of all deaths in New York State were in nursing homes. One could have prevented 20,000 deaths in the United States by just isolating the nursing homes. After three or four weeks, they could have reopened and everybody would be happy.
That would have been a reasonable strategy. But shutting down schools, driving the economy against the wall – there was no reason for it. The only reason that this nonsense now goes on and on, and people are inventing things like this ‘second wave’, which is going to force us to change society and never live again, is that the politicians are afraid of admitting an error.
Wittkowski believes the worst was over around Easter and instead of admitting that we were overly cautious, our leaders doubled down on stupid and destroyed the economy.
Four weeks later, on 8 April, the number of new infections was already down. In time for Easter, our governments should have acknowledged they were overly cautious. People would have accepted that. Two weeks’ shutdown would not have been the end of the world. We would not have what we have now – 30million people unemployed in the United States, for example. Companies do not go bankrupt over a two-week period. Two months is a very different story. If you have to pay rent for two months for a restaurant in New York with no income, you will go bankrupt. We see unemployment, we see bankruptcies, we see a lot of money wasted for economic-rescue packages – trillions of dollars in the United States. We see more deaths and illness than we would otherwise have had.
So how is Wittkowski living his life? He’s visiting speakeasies and black-market restaurants in New York City. He told the New York Post about his clandestine activities.
“Yesterday I went to my favorite speakeasy and had dinner,” he said, saying there were about eight others dining alongside him. He declined to name the establishment.
The veteran physician believes social distancing will only prolong the virus by preventing the natural development of “herd immunity.”
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Megan Fox is the author of “Believe Evidence; The Death of Due Process from Salome to #MeToo,” and host of The Fringe podcast. Follow on Twitter @MeganFoxWriter
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