"I think this is what we should be talking about."
"I think this is what we should be talking about."
The past two weeks have been quite a boil, what with the give and take between the administration and its critics over the billions of pesos of pandemic funds. This definitely requires more intensive sleuthing, and out of the cameras so that it does not become another political football. In fact, the ongoing debate between pro- and anti-vaccines and the collateral pro- versus anti- ivermectin should interest us even more.
Michael Yeadon is a professional scientist and once a vice-president for allergic research and respiratory diseases at Big Pharma Pfizer Inc. He warned in a 30-minute interview, which has since gone viral, and in a long series of articles and tweets (until his account was mysteriously cut off by Big Tech Twitter), that governments and medical regulators — including the WHO, the US CDC and its counterparts in Europe and in their spheres of influence (possibly outside of China, Russia and maybe India) and their favorite scientists funded by government such as the US NHI (Fauci’s domain) and the WellCome Trust (huge private medical research fund with benefactors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) — have hijacked the COVID-19 pandemic to suit their common (even if at times competing) ends of public control, extraordinary corporate profits and the remaking of nations and societies as we know it and probably yearn for.
If Yeadon’s warning sounds extraordinarily frightening if not outrightly panicky bordering on being absurd, you are not the only one thinking that way. Even his closest associates at Pfizer and colleagues in the medical and scientific research community found his assertions “out of character.”
But that should not stop you from delving deeper into these debates if only to enlighten you on the questions and concerns which have been bothering you for sometime since the start of the pandemic and the global lockdown eighteen months ago. As Claire Craig, a British science researcher who has known Yeadon for sometime correctly advised after the latter’s Twitter account was taken down, “Science is always a series of questions and the testing of those questions and when we are not allowed to ask those questions, then science is lost.”
Yeadon dared and continues to dare ask those questions and more so now he is being ridiculed, shut out and even threatened to be ousted from his previous calling. That should not be allowed to happen at all. But at least he is in good company. Robert Kennedy, Jr., scion of the Kennedy dynasty and a businessman in his own right, has also sounded the alarm over the seeming “ overreach” which the trio of politicians, health regulators and Big Pharma and their investors have imposed on countries and in the world.
Another eminent scientist, Michael Levitt, a winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry, has also cast doubts on the prognosis and the eventual measures put in place against the pandemic. Sometime back, he told the Stanford Daily that “he had expected the pandemic would end in the United States in 2020 and kill no more than 175,000 Americans – a third of the current total – and “when we come to look back, we’re going to say that wasn’t such a terrible disease.”
Of course, Levitt has since admitted that his projections about the pandemic in the United States were wrong, but he continues to advise that COVID-19 eventually won’t be seen as “a terrible disease” and that lockdowns “caused a great deal of collateral damage and may not have been needed.”
Herein lies the other critical issue in this ongoing debate: the matter of lockdowns. An increasing number of people including scientists, regulators and even politicians are now getting convinced that there is a need to review the science and ensure that the nagging concern over an “ over reach”, an overreaction, if you may, is responsibly answered. The collateral damage which Levitt noted and which runs through Yeadon’s narrative cannot and should not be ignored. After all, if we go by the figures and the attendant measures to contain it as imposed by governments and regulators, economies and peoples have really taken a severe beating.
One analyst even went as far as to suggest that the collateral damages wrought by the pandemic may have been more lethal than the actual disease itself. And, yes, its impact on people’s lives and societies the world over may be carried over years after COVID-19 has become endemic as is being touted by a number of scientists and its treatment not as costly as is now being unimaginably imposed.
In any event, with Yeadon’s narrative going viral and more and more questions now being asked about the foundational science on COVID-19 and the measures imposed worldwide to “ do battle” against it, our very own scientific community and medical practitioners should hunker down to work and review our own response measures. This is to provide our already burdened citizens responsible and responsive answers to the nagging questions about this deadly virus and get all of us to move as one to secure our health and bring our struggling economy on track to recovery. The earlier, the better.
While we commend the continued sleuthing over the use or misuse of the pandemic funds, get the guilty to account for their sins and ensure that whatever funds and measures to be put in place from hereon follow the rules, it is time that the science is properly and thoroughly debated and validated. That is the more critical concern which all of us, scientists or non-scientists, should delve into if we are to “ move as one” as one of the earlier advisories harkened to do.