In a previous article titled The Covid Amnesia Project and the Plot to Erase 2020, I discussed the deliberate effort to erase the horrific scenes of 2020, the overflowing hospitals and morgues, led by doctors who now want you to believe we overreacted to COVID 6-years-ago. I also wrote that these doctors “don’t want you to remember what they actually said in 2020, their farcical forecasts and pro-infection agenda.”
Today, I will remind you. Unlike them, I think it is vital to resist pandemic revisionism and accurately remember what they actually said in the spring of 2020, especially because they now claim time has vindicated their pandemic vision, that they were basically right about everything.
Three doctors whose words are worth recalling all hail from Stanford University. Though none of them treated COVID patients, they nonetheless greatly influenced our COVID response. Let’s honestly remember what they said in the spring of 2020.
Dr. John Ioannidis
On March 17, 2020, Dr. John Ioannidis wrote an essay titled A Fiasco in The Making? As The Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold, We Are Making Decisions Without Reliable Data. It said:
If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like illness.” If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.
Though Dr. Ioannidis discounted “pessimistic scenarios” about the virus, he greatly worried about measures to contain it. He said:
One of the bottom lines is that we don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health. Unpredictable evolutions may ensue, including financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a meltdown of the social fabric. At a minimum, we need unbiased prevalence and incidence data for the evolving infectious load to guide decision-making.
In the most pessimistic scenario, which I do not espouse, if the new coronavirus infects 60% of the global population and 1% of the infected people die, that will translate into more than 40 million deaths globally, matching the 1918 influenza pandemic.
The vast majority of this hecatomb would be people with limited life expectancies. That’s in contrast to 1918, when many young people died.
The article also contained the seeds of the We Want Them Infected movement. It said:
School closures may also diminish the chances of developing herd immunity in an age group that is spared serious disease.
Two days later, Dr. Ioannidis published a paper titled Coronavirus Disease 2019: The Harms of Exaggerated Information and Non-Evidence-Based Measures. In it, he wrote about “exaggerated pandemic estimates,” “exaggerated case fatality rate,” and “exaggerated exponential community spread.” He said a claim that 20%-60% of adults would be infected was “substantially exaggerated.” He said, “China data are more compatible with close contact rather than wide community spread being the main mode of transmission.” He said that, “Even if COVID-19 is not a 1918-recap in infection-related deaths, some coronavirus may match the 1918 pandemic in future seasons. Thus, we should learn and be better prepared.” He felt this coronavirus was a false alarm. He wrote that:
If only part of resources mobilized to implement extreme measures for COVID-19 had been invested towards enhancing influenza vaccination uptake, tens of thousands of influenza deaths might have been averted.
Then, on April 9, 2020, he gave an interview where he said:
If I were to make an informed estimate based on the limited testing data we have, I would say that covid-19 will result in fewer than 40,000 deaths this season in the USA.
The USA reached 40,000 COVID deaths the next week.
Dr. Ioannidis also gave countless interviews like these 6-years-ago:
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
March 24, 2020, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya wrote an article with Dr. Eran Bendavid titled Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say? It began with much stronger justifications for lockdowns than anything I’ve ever written.
If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified.
However, the article continued:
But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.
Fear of Covid-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate—2% to 4% of people with confirmed Covid-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others. So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, two million to four million could die. We believe that estimate is deeply flawed…
If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%. Such a low death rate would be cause for optimism.
This does not make Covid-19 a nonissue. The daily reports from Italy and across the U.S. show real struggles and overwhelmed health systems. But a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million.
If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic, then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible… A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health. We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns.
Dr. Bendavid would later have the integrity to admit the obvious: they were “way off.”
Dr. Scott Atlas
On March 26, 2020, Dr. Scott Altas wrote an article titled Widespread Isolation And Stopping All Human Interaction Will Not Contain the COVID-19 Pandemic. It said:
There is massive uncertainty, but using Ioannidis’ mid-range fatality rate, this virus could cause about 10,000 deaths in the United States overall, overall, a number that would not be extraordinary news in the total of flu-like deaths every season…
We know that up to 99% of positive cases have nothing beyond mild symptoms. A University of Oxford study estimated that fewer than 0.1% of infected cases have significant symptoms requiring medical care…
More importantly, whole-population isolation is not medically ideal and will lead to less effective elimination of the infection threat. Population immunity for every disease like this can only be achieved by letting people who are not at risk for anything serious, who are not immune-compromised and elderly (the vast majority of people), get exposed to it.
On April 13, 2020, Dr. Atlas wrote an article titled Reentry After the Panic: Paying the Health Price of Extreme Isolation:
With a world-wide sense of relief, progress continues in containing the COVID-19 pandemic. Projections have been revised downward for virtually every major negative consequence of the disease. Few doubt that the unprecedented isolation policies and near-total economic lockdowns adopted by most countries had a significant impact on reducing deaths from the virus. And aside from New York, where almost half of the entire country’s deaths and cases have occurred, the vast majority of American hospitals were not overwhelmed beyond capacity. All of this is terrific news.
But we will now pay a big price. Our policy of total isolation involved trade-offs and left a significant problem by endangering the resumption of normal activity…
But a bigger price might now be paid from choosing extreme isolation. In the absence of immunization, society needs circulation of the virus, assuming high-risk people can be isolated. Infection itself allows people to generate an immune response — natural antibodies. Given the estimated contagiousness of COVID-19, about 60 percent of people in the community need to have antibodies to stop the spread by “herd immunity.” Remember, medical care is not necessary for the vast majority of people who are infected.
On April 22, 2020, he expressed similar thoughts in an article titled The Data is in — Stop the Panic and End the Total Isolation. It said:
The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase…The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19…
Vital population immunity is prevented by total isolation policies, prolonging the problem… Infected people without severe illness are the immediately available vehicle for establishing widespread immunity. By transmitting the virus to others in the low-risk group who then generate antibodies, they block the network of pathways toward the most vulnerable people, ultimately ending the threat. Extending whole-population isolation would directly prevent that widespread immunity from developing.
Dr. Atlas gave countless interviews like this:
The next time these doctors claim they were right, let’s remind them exactly what they claim to have been right about.