Straight-faced lies about missing Influenza

Lockdown fanatics claim their tyrannies may have eliminated Influenza. The contrary is more likely: Irrational measures employed against Covid may be undermining our capacity to fight any infection.

For the past year, an unmistakably incongruent crack has occasionally shown itself on the face of governmental lying about the ‘pandemic’. This has been the reliably accurate and truthful reports of the Central Statistics Office (CSO) — which has, generally speaking, seemed not to be implicated in any of the State-led attempts to mislead the public concerning the gravity of Covid-19. Throughout the pandemic of lying, the CSO has consistently reported the data concerning fatalities and other relevant indicators without massaging or spinning, and without offering ‘guidance’ to the public as to how the data might be interpreted. But this may be about to change, if occasional eruptions in recent news reports are any indication. 

There was, you see, this approaching problem for the official campaign of mendacity, arising from the racing certainty that the finalised mortality rates for 2020 will show no significant deviation from the patterns of recent years — at most two or three hundred above the recent average, i.e. nothing of statistical significance. This poses no small problem for the ‘health’ junta and its political puppets, since on its face it would appear to mean that there was no pandemic, ‘excess deaths’ being the absolute and unarguable indicator of such phenomena. 

The spin has accordingly started to emerge. References to the issue in media reports tend to draw attention to the second quarter of 2020, when – we are told – ‘14% more people died . . . compared with the same quarter of 2019 – 8,582 compared with 7,519.’ All true, of course, and on its face a significant deviation. What this does not reveal, however, is that the third quarter of 2020 showed a drop of 247 deaths from 2019, and the fourth quarter, when finalised at the end of March, is likely to show and even more significant decrease. This was entirely predictable on the basis of Professor Denis Rancourt’s conclusion that most of the excess in April 2020 — considered worldwide — arose from the early harvesting of elderly deaths due to stress generated by politico-media scaremongering. Incidentally, according to the CSO Q3 2020 bulletin, ‘[t]he mean average age of death was 81.1 years while the median age was 84.0 years for all deaths due to COVID-19 in quarter 3 2020.’

But the true telltale trail lies in the sequential fatality patterns of recent years. Deaths appeared to be increasing marginally each year up to 2020, having gone from 29,252 in 2014 to 31,134 in 2019, an increase of about 7 per cent, or an average increase of more than 300 per year. It would not be anomalous, therefore, if the final 2020 figure were to increase to about 31,500.

The aforesaid media reports also — rather gratuitously — tend to offer additional information along the lines of the following, which clearly presages the coming line of official fudging of the anticipated unhelpful official statistics:

‘According to the CSO and the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) lower preliminary figures are the result of delays in registering deaths for the full year, as well as a reduction in the number of people dying from normal flu because of the restrictions in place.’ 

Ah! The ‘science’ is preparing to land! The inconvenient absence of Influenza from the respiratory disease stakes this year had begun to be a standing joke, even in some medical circles, and that just won’t do. Now this ostensible inconvenience is about to be harnessed to the cause of justifying lockdowns and other coercive measures for dealing with minor illness.

The registration delay issue is a red herring, because this will have ironed itself out by the end of March — later this week, as this article goes up — three months being the statutory time limit by which deaths must be registered.  

But it is becoming clear from various barking dogs that the amoral authorities are currently straightening their faces to tell us that the reason for the otherwise deeply inconvenient 2020 mortality patterns is that the Covid restrictions — which failed to work for Covid — worked rather excellently in totally eliminating Influenza from Ireland in 2020. And, alas, after nearly a year of honest dealing, it looks like the CSO and HIQA are about to join in the spin game. 

The lockdown-eliminated-the-flu lie, like the others, is a globalised lie. The reason there has been no Influenza in the world this year, the Covid scammers  — with perfectly straight faces — inform us, is because the Covid measures — lockdown, masks, social distancing etc. — have been so successful. Has the average person, citizen out there any idea how stupid these Covid scamsters imagine him or her to be? At this stage they are minting new lies by the hour, waiting smirkingly to hear their media puppets repeat them, and then watching the punter swallow them whole. 

The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) has literally abolished the flu with the stroke of a pen, announcing in its Preliminary In-Season Burden Estimates on December 3rd 2020 that ‘[t]he week of April 4 [2020] was the last week in-season Influenza burden estimates will be provided for the 2019-2020 season. . . Reported flu hospitalizations are too low at this time to generate an estimate.’  The CDC is now delighted to report a 98% decrease in Influenza activity! And this astonishing decrease can be observed happening simultaneously all over the world! 

The Guardian, in a spot of scene-setting, had ‘reported’ as early as last September (again with a straight face) that, ‘Many countries in the southern half of the globe have . . . experienced either record low levels of flu or none at all, public health specialists in Australia, New Zealand and South America have said, sparing potentially tens of thousands of lives and offering a glimmer of hope as winter approaches in the northern hemisphere.

‘General practitioners in New Zealand have not detected a single Influenza case since they started screening patients in June, health data shows; last year about 57% of the samples they collected were positive.

‘The last flu cases detected by major hospitals in Auckland, the country’s largest city, were in April. “It’s amazing. There’s just nothing there at all. No Influenza,” said Michael Baker, professor of public health at the University of Otago in Wellington.’

There are eight strains of Influenza commonly in circulation, and both the CDC and WHO have routinely tracked all of these since time immemorial. All of these eight strains have now all but completely disappeared from the world. 

There is, of course, a ‘rational scientific’ explanation for why the flu has disappeared: It was the lockdown, face mask and social distancing measures wot dunnit. According to the CDC, flu cases began to decline in response to ‘widespread adoption of community mitigation measures to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2.’ Its Morbidity and Mortality weekly report of September 18th, 2020, stated: ‘In the United States, Influenza virus circulation declined sharply within 2 weeks of the COVID-19 emergency declaration and widespread implementation of community mitigation measures, including school closures, social distancing and mask wearing, although the exact timing varied by location.’ Now, in light of this miraculous accidental victory over Influenza, the CDC is pushing for mandatory mask-wearing, social-distancing and school closures every winter henceforth. And if it happens there on a Monday, it will reach us here by the Friday.

Interestingly, the CDC September 18th 2020 report also confides that ‘Influenza testing across the United States may be higher than normal at this time of year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.’ Despite this, the number of positive tests for Influenza ‘decreased from greater than 20% to 2.3% since the start of the pandemic.’

Of course it did. Every health agency in the world is under instructions to scrape together as many cases as it can of anything passable under the rather conveniently vague available definitions of Covid, because that’s where the money is. There’s no money in flu, hence no flu. 

The report continues: ‘CDC does not know the exact number of people who have been sick and affected by Influenza because Influenza is not a reportable disease in most areas of the U.S.’

Lesson: If you want to create huge instances of a ‘disease’, all you have to do is make it reportable. If you want it to disappear, just don’t make it reportable. Defund it. This immunology thing is simpler than it appears.  

It makes you wonder what all this fuss about ‘flattening the curve’ was about. If you really put your mind to it, you can make a ‘disease’ disappear overnight. You just wave a magic wand, shout ‘Evanesce!’ and the flu is no more. The only mystery remaining is why this doesn’t work with Covid. 

And, remember how, last summer, talk started about the likelihood of a ‘twindemic’ — flu and Covid all at once, two for the price of one? And, have you noticed how, in the Time of Covid, talk just ‘starts’ and next thing there’s a new law, another lie, another encroachment on freedom?

The ‘twindemic’ didn’t happen. Why not? Turns out it isn’t possible to have two respiratory conditions at the same time. Who knew? Apparently not doctors: How could you possibly expect doctors to know something like that? I guess ‘the science’ let them down. A recent study from Yale University found that, of 13,000 patients admitted to hospital with respiratory diseases, practically none had a cold and the flu at the same time. 

Turns out too that Covid is a big bully among respiratory condition and simply frightens timid little Influenza away with a growl! And this, despite the ‘health’ authorities claiming that only a minority of the population — one in five, they say — has so far contracted Covid, which is why we all need to be vaccinated, doncha know. 

And so, I can exclusively report that, in the Viral Olympics of 2020, the SARS-Cov-2 virus, beat the H1N1 virus in the long jump, with a record jump of 2.1 metres. The H1N1 virus, the previous record-holder for many years running, turned in a rather poor performance, falling well short of this year’s minimum qualifying length of 2 metres.

Because the Covid virus is bigger and more muscular, it was widely expected to do badly in the face mask competitions, especially those involving cloth, single-layered, low thread-count masks, these being in the most general use in the Covid-19 Olympiad. As it turned out, the H1N1 virus failed completely to penetrate even the most rudimentary cloth masks, whereas the SARS-CoV-2 virus made a clean sweep of the lower thread-count events, being forced into a succession of draws only in the quadruple-mask and upper-end surgical categories, where the outcomes were less conclusive. The H1N1 virus returned home without a single medal, the SARS-C0V-2 heroes sweeping the boards in gold, silver and bronze. 

It gets curiouser and curiouser. Using a magnifying glass to conduct closer study of the CDC figures for Covid deaths reveals something interesting in the small print.  ‘Covid deaths’ does not actually means ‘deaths from Covid’ as the non-scientist might naively intuit. The CDC has invented a ‘new category’ for such deaths — ‘PIC’ deaths. ‘PIC’ stands for ‘Pneumonia, Influenza and . . . Covid’! From the beginning of time until July 2020, the CDC counted Influenza and Pneumonia deaths separately, as the non-scientist layperson might have expected. Then, last July, it stopped doing this and started counting them all together, with Covid thrown in for good measure. If you have any problem with this it’s because you don’t understand science. 

If so, you are not alone. What has not even begun to be quantified in all this is the extent to which all our immune systems have been sabotaged by lockdown and the associated measures of social distancing, handwashing, face-masking and the almost total abstinence from shaking hands.

Some doctors have been warning that the restrictions will by now have depleted the immune systems of perhaps a majority of people to such an extent that they will be incapable of resisting the threat of viruses that may have grown stronger in lockdown conditions. Isolation and hyper-sanitisation may have incubated enormous problems that remain, for the moment, masked by the very conditions that are causing them — not excluding masks. This goes to one of the core absurdities of the ‘pandemic’ response: that the best and usual way to remain resistant to pathogens is to become exposed to periodic infections which the immune system strengthens itself in overcoming. Because our world is a microbial one, alive with bacteria, parasites, viruses and fungi, we need constant exposure to such entities to continue ‘educating’ our immune systems so they continue being resistant to them. These processes are especially vital in early childhood, when the immune system begins to adapt itself to the microbial world. Human beings do not develop fully functioning immune systems until about age six. Lack of adequate ‘experience’ at an early age may cause a child’s immune system to permit the development of allergies, autoimmune diseases and respiratory conditions like asthma, which may thereafter remain as lifelong problems. Interaction with other children, especially in robust outdoor contexts like sport and play, is vital for young children in particular, and the past year has seen massive curbing of such activities, despite SARS-CoV-2 representing no greater risk to children than the average flu bug.

Human beings, like all animals, depend upon being exposed to a range of viruses each year so as to avoid experiencing severe infections from any one of them. The abandoning of this age-old understanding by governments obsessed with imprisoning their populations may have depleted immune systems to the point that they are incapable of combatting even the mildest flu. These factors may be exacerbated by virtue of the bizarre behaviour of political and ‘health’ authorities who have been slow and grudging in their endorsement of the beneficial effects of vitamin supplements such as Vitamin D and C and zinc.

Has any government engaged in studies to ascertain the severity of these risks? Echo answers ‘risks?’

But this lacuna in governmental ‘concern’ for public health is not down to ignorance of the likely problem. Make no mistake: The governments who are doing all this are well aware of what they are doing. That’s why they warn us of the necessity of staying home to avoid spreading the virus, and in the next breath remind us that viruses spread more rapidly indoors. You pays your money . . . and then you pays with your freedom; then with your children’s education; then with your business or other means of livelihood; then with your life when it’s time to go to the ‘care’ home.

Speaking recently on the Andrew Marr Show on BBC television, the director of Public Health England’s Covid strategy, Dr Susan Hopkins, acknowledged that the UK needs to be prepared for the detrimental effect of lockdown on natural immunity: ‘I think we have to prepare for a hard winter, not only with coronavirus, but we’ve had a year of almost no respiratory viruses of any other type. And that means, potentially the population immunity to that is less. So we could see surges in flu. We could see surges in other respiratory viruses and other respiratory pathogens.’

An immunologist at the University of Ulster, Dr Gerry Quinn, who is also involved in providing advice on pandemic management to British MPs, was recently quoted by the [UK daily] Express as stating: ‘The government should actively start testing how weakened our immunity to other infections has become after a year of lockdown measures. Keeping people indoors — often in damp houses — and away from each other prevents people building up immunity for other viruses. Immunity develops over a lifetime and needs to be constantly challenged to work well. This is especially important in the first few years of development.

‘Viruses are mutating constantly. Using suppression measures or closing international borders to keep out “foreign mutants” of an already endemic virus is neither useful nor possible and there are many studies now showing that our suppression measures are doing virtually nothing to stop the spread of Covid-19.’

Addressing the same question, Professor Anthony Brookes, an expert in genetics at the University of Leicester, predicted that the consequences of the prolonged UK lockdown were likely to be severe.

‘Britain has imposed some of the most stringent lockdown measures in Europe. But viruses including coronavirus are like weeds in a garden, in that they will always find ways to spread. Weed suppression measures may hold back the weak ones, but the more vicious ones will grow through. In the same way, if you suppress a virus, the “stronger” strains that have a transmission advantage will quickly become the dominant strains.’

Professor Brookes believes that a wide range of respiratory pathogens will have been mutating during the lockdown, and warns that the suppression of viruses is ultimately the enterprise of fools.

‘[L]ockdowns, masks and the suppression measures make it harder for viruses to spread, so the rarer more transmissible strains grow through to re-establish the normal endemic equilibrium levels. Continuing social distancing, the use of masks, and other suppression measures just makes the new virus strains try harder to spread. If continued for too long we will never be able to take our masks off or interact as we once did because as soon as we do [so] we would be swamped by all the new forms of old viruses. We are setting ourselves up for a horrendous future. Once these new strains become dominant, then as soon as we put down our defences — in other words stop social distancing, remove masks, and behave as we did in the past — we will have no way to stop viruses spreading rapidly.’

Such a scenario could mean that, even if the various fanciful official hypotheses concerning why the flu has disappeared have some merit, that absence is anything but good news because it means we have merely postponed the onslaught to a time when we may be less prepared, individually speaking, to meet it. Flu viruses mutate from year to year, sometimes becoming weaker, sometimes stronger. This just might be good news: If the lockdown measures designed for Covid have indeed acted as a fire-break on one of the Influenza types, it is not impossible that this particular strain may have been truncated altogether. On the other hand, if a beefed-up version were to hit us in our present state, we might begin to wish for Covid to return for some light relief. And, once again, those most susceptible to the most acute consequences of these trends are likely to be residents of care homes. 

And, by the way, don’t be getting all carried away with the idea that the disappearance of the flu means people don’t need to get their annual flu ‘jab’. Oh no. ‘Influenza vaccination of all persons aged six months and over remains the best method for Influenza prevention and is especially important this season when SARS-CoV-2 and Influenza virus might co-circulate,’ the CDC advises. There is ominous talk, also, about the possibility that scientists might be able to gun down two bugs with one shot by adapting the non-vaccine RNA-based ‘vaccine’ developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna as a catch-all for Covid and the flu. Immunological good sense or a cunningly sneaky backdoor way of administering the Covid vaccine to people who might trust their annual flu shot more than a new, untried and unproven vaccine? You decide.

You might superciliously point out that getting a flu vaccination already leaves you with a more than 50 per cent chance — actually a two-to-one chance — of catching the flu in any given year, but, with respect, it’s because you’re not a scientist that you say stuff like that.

Or maybe not. There is a growing fraternity of sceptical scientists who look askance at the entire respiratory Olympiad. Peter Andrews is a science journalist and writer based in London. He has a background in the life sciences, having graduated from the University of Glasgow with a degree in genetics. He also happens to be Irish.

Addressing, in an article for RT last October, the question of whether anti-lockdown measures might indeed be credited with eliminating Influenza, Andrews was not in the least unclear:

‘In my opinion, this hand-waving explanation might just be the most awesome act of cognitive dissonance of this entire saga. Experts are claiming, with a straight face, that a laxly enforced hodgepodge of restrictions, which varies wildly between countries and regions, has overnight eradicated an ancient scourge of humanity from the face of the Earth. And in the next breath, they warn that the incidence of another identically transmitted virus is through the roof.

‘Much more likely in my opinion is that the flu has been confused for Covid in the vast majority of cases. Is it really so hard to believe that flu sufferers could have been confused for Covid cases? After all, we know that lung cancer patients were.’

Such sentiments are becoming more audible on a worldwide basis. Asked to comment on the remarkable miracle of the success of lockdowns in eliminating Influenza (notwithstanding their abject failure with Covid-19), Professor William M. Briggs, a statistical consultant and policy adviser at the Heartland Institute, says: ‘No, absolutely not. Lockdowns only help spread the flu . . .’ Professor Briggs also points out that, every winter throughout the northern hemisphere, anything between 8 and 12 per cent of deaths have Influenza as their final certifiable cause. Most laypeople tend to assume that winter burden Influenza is caused by the cold weather, but this mistakes correlation for causation. The crucial factor, Professor Briggs says, is that the cold weather forces people inside, and so causes many people to die. ‘We all enter these voluntary semi-lockdowns, just like the lockdowns we have now, installed by our governments as the “solution” [here he makes air-quotes] to stop the spread of the virus. It’s causing the spread of the virus. This is why we get all of these illnesses raging, as they say, through the population every single winter. We’re all in close quarters with one another. Locking down the healthy, quarantining the healthy, is asinine. The WHO, in 2019, coincidentally — whether you believe in coincidences or not — published a meta-analysis of all the studies that have been done: “What should you do during a pandemic?” And they said, “Here’s one thing you should not do: lock down. Don’t quarantine the healthy.” Okaaay . . .’

Professor Briggs emphasising that lockdowns actually increase flu infection because viruses spread more easily indoors is, in a certain perspective, in harmony with what the official scientists have been telling us about SARS-CoV-2. But, shaved of official spin and message-massaging, it appears actually to be an argument against lockdown.

All rational arguments, then, appear to point back to the same place: the location of the common sense we employed in confronting infection until approximately 13 unlucky months ago. This currently elusive quality told us to quarantine and protect the sick and vulnerable, allowing the strong and healthy to roam free. That strategy previously enabled pathogens — even virulent ones — to burn themselves out in the healthy population before they had a chance to grow sufficiently to do more than a modicum of damage. Some people succumbed — usually the very old, weak and immuno-compromised — and this was deemed to be an ineluctable fact of nature. By intervening in these processes, the human race, represented by hubristic scientists and moronic politicians — acting in a remarkable harmony of inanity — elected themselves God and proceeded to dismantle not merely centuries of medical understanding but the very frameworks and fabrics of the human world.

Leaving aside for this moment the question of ulterior motives and agendas, the consequences of all this have yet to reveal themselves. But it is already beginning to emerge that the detrimental effects may include not just the instrumental impacts on economies, livelihoods, businesses, relationships, human sanity and trust in authority, but also outcomes in the same category as those the lockdown measures were introduced allegedly to contain or prevent. If what we have explored in this essay is borne out in the coming months, then these consequences may exceed in gravity not just those threatened even by the most vocal Jeremiahs of the Covid cult, but also the worst nightmares of those who have lived for the past year in abject and abiding terror of something that is, at worst, marginally more serious than the common cold.

The answer, it would seem, is to ignore as far and as often as possible the idiotic strictures of governments, listen carefully to the advice of the deranged health tsars and do the diametric opposite — and, above all — filter everything you hear in the bought-and-paid-for (b&p4) media through the common-sense filters you were born with. Better still, shut down the flow by unplugging the b&p4 media at the wall and do the things that have kept you well in your past life leading up to the commencement of the current and continuing collective global insanity in the mad month of March 2020.