Epidemiologist says 'Influenza has been renamed COVID

JTN January 1, 2021

Rates of influenza have remained persistently low through late 2020 and into 2021, cratering from levels a year ago and raising the puzzling specter of sharply reduced influenza transmission rates even as positive tests for COVID-19 have shattered numerous records over the last several weeks. 

Where have all the flu cases gone?

Epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski thinks he can answer the riddle.

"Influenza has been renamed COVID in large part," said the former head of biostatistics, epidemiology and research design at Rockefeller University.

"There may be quite a number of influenza cases included in the 'presumed COVID' category of people who have COVID symptoms (which Influenza symptoms can be mistaken for), but are not tested for SARS RNA," Wittkowski told Just the News on Thursday. 

Those patients, he argued, "also may have some SARS RNA sitting in their nose while being infected with Influenza, in which case the influenza would be 'confirmed' to be COVID."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's weekly influenza surveillance tracker reports that the cumulative positive influenza test rate from late September into the week of Dec. 19 stands at 0.2% as measured by clinical labs. That's compared to a cumulative 8.7% from a year before.

Pope: Use pandemic to give the environment a vital “rest”

AP September 1, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how the Earth can recover “if we allow it to rest” and must spur people to adopt simpler lifestyles to help a planet “groaning” under the constant demand for economic growth, Pope Francis said Tuesday.  

In his latest urgent appeal to help a fragile environment, Francis also renewed his call for the cancellation of the debts of the most vulnerable countries. Such action would be just, he said, since rich countries have exploited poorer nations’ natural resources. 

“In some ways, the current pandemic has led us to rediscover simpler and sustainable lifestyles,” Francis said in a written message. 

“Already we can see how the Earth can recover if we allow it to rest: the air becomes cleaner, the waters clearer, and animals have returned to many places from where they had previously disappeared,” he wrote. 

“The pandemic has brought us to a crossroads.”
The pontiff urged people to seize the opportunity to reflect on their habits of energy usage, consumption, transportation and diet.  

Until now, “constant demand for growth and an endless cycle of production and consumption are exhausting the natural world,” the pope said, adding, “Creation is groaning.”  

People must be aware of their rightful place in nature, never thinking themselves masters of what Francis described as the “interconnected web of life.” 

Disintegrating biodiversity, climate disasters and the “unjust impact of the current pandemic on the poor and the vulnerable” amount to a “wakeup call in the face of our rampant greed and consumption,” the pope wrote.

Fauci: ‘No doubt’ Trump will face surprise infectious disease outbreak

Archive January 11, 2017

Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said there is “no doubt” Donald J. Trump will be confronted with a surprise infectious disease outbreak during his presidency.

Fauci has led the NIAID for more than 3 decades, advising the past five United States presidents on global health threats from the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s through to the current Zika virus outbreak.

During a forum on pandemic preparedness at Georgetown University, Fauci said the Trump administration will not only be challenged by ongoing global health threats such as influenza and HIV, but also a surprise disease outbreak.

“The history of the last 32 years that I have been the director of the NIAID will tell the next administration that there is no doubt they will be faced with the challenges their predecessors were faced with,” he said.

While observers have speculated since his election about how Trump will respond to such challenges, Fauci and other health experts said Tuesday that preventing disease pandemics often starts overseas and that a proper response means collaboration between not only the U.S. and other countries, but also the public and private health sectors.

“We will definitely get surprised in the next few years,” he said.

Anthony Fauci background: 

Fauci was born December 24, 1940, in Brooklyn, New York, to Stephen A. Fauci and Eugenia A. Fauci, owners of a pharmacy, where his father worked as the pharmacist, his mother and sister worked the register, and Fauci delivered prescriptions.^[2] The pharmacy was located in the Dyker Heights section of Brooklyn.

Fauci's paternal grandparents, Antonino Fauci and Calogera Guardino, were from Sciacca, Italy. His maternal grandmother, Raffaella Trematerra, from Naples, Italy, was a seamstress. His maternal grandfather, Giovanni Abys, was born in Switzerland and was an artist, noted for landscape and portrait painting, magazine illustrations (Italy) as well graphic design for commercial labels, including olive oil cans. His great-grandparents emigrated to the US in the late 19th century. Fauci grew up Catholic.^[2][3][4]

Fauci attended Regis High School in New York City where he graduated in 1958. He then enrolled at the College of the Holy Cross where he received a BS in classics in 1962. Fauci then went on to attend Cornell University Medical College where he graduated first in his class with an MD in 1966.^[2] He then completed an internship and residency at The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center.^[5]

^{1) Regis High School: is a private Jesuit university-preparatory school for Roman Catholic young men located on Manhattan's Upper East Side.[4] Annual class enrollment is limited to approximately 135 male students from the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut tri-state area. The school is ranked as both the best Catholic high school in the United States and the best all-boys school in New York.}

2) College of the Holy Cross:  is a private Jesuit liberal arts college in Worcester, Massachusetts. Founded in 1843, Holy Cross is the oldest Catholic college in New England and one of the oldest in the United States. Opened as a school for boys under the auspices of the Society of Jesus, it was the first Jesuit college in New England. Today, Holy Cross is one of 28 member institutions of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU) and is part of the Colleges of Worcester Consortium (COWC).

Ex-PM calls for global government to tackle coronavirus

The Guardian 26 Mar 2020 

Gordon Brown has urged world leaders to create a temporary form of global government to tackle the twin medical and economic crises caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The former Labour prime minister, who was at the centre of the international efforts to tackle the impact of the near-meltdown of the banks in 2008, said there was a need for a taskforce involving world leaders, health experts and the heads of the international organisations that would have executive powers to coordinate the response.

A virtual meeting of the G20 group of developed and developing countries, chaired by Saudi Arabia, will be held on Thursday, but Brown said it would have been preferable to have also included the UN security council.

Rhode Island Door Knocks in Search of Fleeing New Yorkers

US News March 28, 2020
WESTERLY, RI (AP) — The Rhode Island National Guard started going door to door on Saturday in coastal areas to inform any New Yorkers who may have come to the state that they must self-quarantine for 14 days while Gov. Gina Raimondo expanded the mandatory self-quarantine to anyone visiting the state.

Raimondo also ordered residents to stay at home, with exceptions for getting food, medicines or going to the doctor, and ordered nonessential retail businesses to close Monday until April 13 to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. She also directed realtors and hotel operators to include new requirements that any out-of-state residents must quarantine for 14 days in their purchase agreements.

State Police set up a checkpoint on I-95 in Hope Valley on Friday where drivers with New York license plates must stop and provide contact information and were told to self-quarantine for two weeks, WPRI.com reported.

Could we quarantine the constitution?

RT  22 Mar, 2020

 Do we really think “it can’t happen here” in America? Could we quarantine the constitution? Are we doing it already?

Panics from pandemics unleash unchecked governmental power. The very premise of popular films like V for Vendetta reveal this: a group uses a virus to seize power and create a totalitarian society. Anyone could witness this from far-off lands, watching the news about China locking people up in their own homes and then removing them screaming from those homes whenever the state wanted. World War I and the Great Depression birthed virulent forms of governments with leaders like Hitler, Mao, Mussolini and Stalin.

Governments across America already used the pandemic, and the media-stoked panic around the pandemic particularly, to limit, restrict or remove First Amendment freedoms of speech and free association, with officials complaining about the potential restraints the freedom of religion imposed upon them. Others denied or declared the right to deny Second Amendment rights of gun purchase for personal safety (at a time governments are issuing no-arrest and no-detention orders for a wide range of crimes in their community while publicly freeing inmates from jails and prisons). They want to coordinate with tech companies to surveil and spy on your everyday movements and activities, in violation of the Fourth Amendment and potentially waive, unilaterally, your medical right to privacy in multiple contexts. Stay-at-home orders deprive you of your profession, occupation, business and property, without any due process of law at all beyond an executive fiat in violation of the Fifth Amendment right to due process. Governments request the authority to involuntarily imprison any American on mere fear of infection without any probable cause of crime or clear and present danger of harm by that person’s volitional conduct, deny access to personal counsel in an unsupervised, un-surveilled manner in violation of the Sixth Amendment, and act as judge, jury and executioner in violation of the Seventh Amendment right to a trial by jury, as jury trials themselves get suspended around the country in the nation’s quieted courts and fear-muted public.

The real pandemic threat is here. It’s the panic that will quarantine our Constitution.