—SOME QUESTIONS A GOOD JOURNALIST MIGHT ASK POLITICIANS & PUBLIC HEALTH AUTHORITIES: A THREAD—

1/ Why has the government NEVER undertaken a comprehensive impact assessment before approving & re-approving highly intrusive & costly lockdowns?

—TAKEAWAY LESSONS FROM PANDEMIC 2020-21: A THREAD—

Below, a few basic lessons I have drawn, as a political philosopher and informed citizen who has made it my business to closely follow political, social, economic, clinical, & epidemiological aspects of the pandemic:

1/ Most mainstream journalists cannot be relied upon to critically uncover, & impartially convey, the facts surrounding a complex & unfolding crisis. If you watch RTE, BBC, or CNN, you are fed naively one-sided stories laced with fear-mongering, misleading use of statistics, etc.

2/ If you wish to inform yourself about a public crisis like this pandemic, you must find commentators who have limited access to mainstream media, good credentials, & arguments that consider a wide range of available evidence. You need to be pro-active about diversifying sources

3/ Reliance by govts upon advisory committees with a clearly one-sided take on the pandemic (eg suppression at all cost) has led to catastrophic outcomes. Govts must diversify their scientific sources & encourage ROBUST scientific debate among their advisors.

4/ Hyper-centralised management of public health is ineffective. Decision-making power must be decentralised so that it can adapt quickly to local conditions. Care homes were badly hurt by top-down mandates that were sluggishly responsive to evolving conditions on the ground.

SCB has dropped its final 2020 stats on deaths for Sweden. This chart is a breakdown by age for both sexes compared to 2018.

Most notably, there's no excess among children and people of working age, confirming the preliminary stats for males I had published earlier.

Here's the same data, but with spline interpolation applied to the 5-yr age groups. This just smooths out some of the random and cohort-related fluctuations. The picture is the same.

Unfortunately, the fact deaths are exclusively concentrated in the elderly age rage means that all of the deaths you see reported are pretty much all theirs. Fortunately, since they're generally retired, they don't need to sacrifice their livelihoods to protect themselves.

We need evidence-based mitigation strategies. Terrorizing a 15yo with imminent death is neither helpful nor honest. Closing schools isn't helpful (and Sweden hasn't). Be aware around your (grand)parents. Take care of them, make sure they understand the risks.

With the resources we have spent/lost on locking down people below 75 years old, I'm sure we could have devised a far superior targeted approach for those who need it and request it. We don't need to demolish our society, economy, and the lives of future generations to save lives

I have studied the pandemic response of many countries. One of them got a key element right, which resulted in very few deaths: Japan. Their response was to keep people OUT of hospitals. A policy of early home treatment works best, hospitals only for severe cases & NO INTUBATIONS

JAPAN: "No restrictions were placed on residents’ movements, and businesses from restaurants to hairdressers stayed open. No high-tech apps that tracked people’s movements were deployed." RESULT: Among the lowest deaths in the

Saving the NHS simply means providing early treatment kits in pharmacies & avoiding hospitals for Covid19 patients. For Covid19 infections during a pandemic, hospitals are the problem, not the solution.

I have read accounts of people with high fever literally turned away from hospitals, yet being told by phone what treatment protocol to follow. That was the best pandemic response by far, NOT lockdowns.

JAPAN had some of the lowest Covid19 mortality in the world:
-NO LOCKDOWN
-NO TEST AND TRACE
-NO BUSINESS CLOSURES
-NO HOSPITAL FOR NON CRITICAL CASES
-HOME TREATMENT
-HEALTHY DIET
-LOW OBESITY

PROBIOTICS & VIT D: "The vitamin D receptor is highly expressed in the gastrointestinal tract where it transacts gene expression..These results support the underlying hypothesis that the human gut microbiome and vitamin D metabolism are integrally related"
https://t.co/15rVFa1fkk

"Men with higher levels of 1,25(OH)2D and higher activation ratios, but not 25(OH)D itself, are more likely to possess butyrate producing bacteria that are associated with better gut microbial health."

"Several studies suggest that gut microbiota alter intestinal vitamin D metabolism (VDM), and probiotic supplements can affect circulating vitamin D levels."

"Because the serum 25(OH)D correlates with overall vitamin D storage, it is the preferred clinical measure to assess vitamin D sufficiency."

"Clinically, serum 25(OH)D levels ≥20 ng/ml are considered adequate while 25(OH)D levels <20 ng/ml are defined as vitamin D deficiency."