FIVE FREEDOMS: Twenty Steps to End the Madness

Lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, and all of the Covid-19 pandemic restrictive policies societies were subjected to over the last 18 to 19 months have all failed catastrophically. Governments did devastating things to their societies with illogical, unscientific, and unsound policies that will take decades to recover from. The costs have been staggering in terms of damage to mental health of populations, the consequential rise in hunger and poverty, the crushing effects on economies, the loss of education, escalated costs to healthcare and the delayed and cancelled care for non-Covid illnesses, and the impact on crime. Tens if not hundreds of thousands (and potentially millions) were denied treatment for other medical conditions.

Lockdowns did not protect the vulnerable, but rather harmed the vulnerable and shifted the morbidity and mortality burden to the underprivileged. We instead locked down the ‘well’ and healthy, while at the same time failing to properly protect the actual group that lockdowns were proposed to protect, the vulnerable and elderly. We shifted the burden to the poor (women, minorities, children) and caused catastrophic consequences for them.

In some sense, what we have done is actually perverse and sickening, with even calls from those more affluent groups to maintain lockdowns as they have ‘settled’ into quite a nice flow and structured life. They can walk their dogs, tend to the garden, and go for coffee as they wish. The poor were in the worst economic situation to afford the lockdowns and estimates are that it will be decades for them to recover. Wealth disparities placed those who were more vulnerable economically in a difficult position in terms of sheltering from the pandemic. It left them exposed.

Lockdowns badly harmed the elderly, leaving them confined in their nursing homes and extended the window of exposure to the virus for them. And they were subject to repeated exposure from staff who brought the pathogen into the confined settings and drove the hospitalizations and deaths. Lockdowns thus reduced the movement of the younger low-risk persons to the same level of movement and mobility as the elderly higher-risk persons and thus equalized the chance of infection between the low-risk and high-risk (young and old). This was catastrophic as it denied movement toward population immunity in most instances.

The lockdown was really the key feature of global governments’ Covid pandemic actions and really worked to disable societies. They turned out in all locations and nations to have been counterproductive, unsustainable and were meritless and unscientific. There was no good reason, no sound justification for this and particularly to harden lockdowns and keep them going after we quickly learnt in the spring of 2020 how to manage Covid and who was the at-risk group.

These unparalleled policy actions were enacted for a virus whereby the median/mean age of death began in February 2020 at about 82 to 83 years of age, and remains so in August 2021. Whereby this was similar to or greater than the typical life-expectancy in most nations of approximately 79 to 80. If you were high-risk and did succumb to Covid-19, you were at almost 100% chance of living past your expected life-expectancy. Covid-19, despite what the media would want you to believe and have stated for 18 months now, has not shortened lives in general.

So much societal damage for a virus with an infection mortality rate (IFR) roughly similar (or likely lower once all infection data are collected) to seasonal influenza. Stanford’s John P.A. Ioannidis identified 36 studies (43 estimates) along with an additional 7 preliminary national estimates (50 pieces of data) and concluded that among people <70 years old across the world, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.57% with a median of 0.05% across the different global locations (with a corrected median of 0.04%). The rate of survival for those under 70 years is 99.5%. Moreover, the IFR has been shown to be near zero for children and young adults. While anyone is at risk of being infected, “there is more than a thousand-fold difference in the risk of death between the old and the young.”

What is the way forward? What are the steps required to end this madness now and make sure nothing like this happens again?

1) No more one-size-fits-all approach; instead, encourage an age-risk stratified ‘focused’ protection approach, focusing only on those who are at risk; leave the rest of society alone, and definitely our children.

2) We need encouragement for elderly high-risk and vulnerable persons in the society (those with underlying medical conditions, obese persons to protect themselves); double and triple down protections in nursing homes, long-term care facilities, assisted-living facilities, care homes, in private households etc..

3) Allow physicians to exercise their best clinical judgements in how they can best treat their patients and cease the threats of discipline and punitive actions for not following the approved political line on matters of natural immunity and vaccine safety. Medical license boards around the country and the world have threatened countless medical providers with punitive actions for informing patients. The doctor-patient relationship used to be sacrosanct but that has been taken away. This has resulted in a neglect of early sequenced multi-drug treatment (combinations of antivirals, corticosteroids, and anti-thrombotic, anti-clotting drugs).

4) We need urgent PSAs on Vitamin D supplementation, on reducing obesity and on the positive impact on risk of healthy lifestyles, nutrition, exercise etc..

5) Message to the population that we are not all at equal risk of severe outcome or death if infected, such that there is a 1,000-fold difference in risk between children and older adults; 16-year-old Suzie who is in good health is not at the same risk of illness as 85-year-old grandma who has 2 to 3 medical conditions.

6) No mass testing of asymptomatic persons, only testing of symptomatic, ill/sick persons, including where there is a strong clinical suspicion; with this, stop contact tracing where the virus has already spread extensively as it confers no benefit; these have been harmful.

7) No isolation/quarantine of asymptomatic persons, only isolation of symptomatic ill/sick persons, including where there is a strong clinical suspicion; no isolation of asymptomatic persons at borders; these have been very harmful.

8) No mask mandates, no mask use in school children, no mask use outdoors (it is nonsensical), make case-by-case decisions based on risk.

9) No school closures, no university closures, nor forced quarantine of people in contact with those who test positive.

10) No lockdowns whatsoever (and ever in such situations), no business closures; open society fully immediately. The crushing harms and devastation from lockdowns as we have seen far outweigh any benefit and the harms are most pronounced among the poorer in society who are least able to afford the restrictions. The lockdown itself kills people, destroys families, prevents education of our children; child abuse was missed by closed schools (and remote schools) and the lockdowns promoted child abuse; lost jobs cause stress in the household and with closed schools, children are vulnerable as the visibility is gone and this is catastrophic. There is near zero risk to children from Covid and we are harming them by school closures; it was one of the most devastating misapplications of public policy. Most of the decisions made by the governments and their medical advisors were irrational, specious, and in most part reckless and have caused far greater harm. Countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Trinidad and Tobago of the Caribbean are test case examples of all that goes wrong with nonsensical government lead responses and policies with unqualified illogical and irrational Covid advisors, ministries of health officials and leaders, medical officers of health and a corrupted media running interference. These nations have leaders in Prime Ministers who should be fired from office for they exact an unbearable tool on their public, being highly inept, uninformed, irrational, and near dictatorial in actions that have no scientific basis. They devastate their people and leave them in a state of constant lockdown and reopening with no end in sight. They are incompetent for they fail to read the science or understand the lockdown data or evidence across 19 months now that it does not work in any manner, and it results in suffering of the people.

11) Allow the vast majority of society (the healthy persons, the young e.g. children, teens, young adults, middle-aged adults, older adults), the ‘well,’ and those with no underlying illnesses, to continue daily lives as close to normality with reasonable common-sense precautions. In other words, we do not impede the low risk of becoming infected and we leave them largely unrestricted with common sense safety precautions. We heighten their risk of transmission (we increase the probability of infection among the younger and low-risk persons, especially our healthy and well children), so to speak. And that at the same time, we secure the high-risk of illness persons so that infection risk is reduced for them. We strongly mitigate the chance of infection in the high-risk. We create a risk differential of contracting the virus that is skewed towards the young and healthy. And we do this harmlessly and naturally.

12) Mandatory vaccination by a nation or setting is a non-starter, for such has no place in good governance societies that are free. No vaccinations for persons under 70 years of age (it is not needed and contra-indicated once there is no risk); no vaccinations for children as the vaccine offers no opportunity for benefit and only opportunity for potential harms; no vaccination of pregnant women or females of child-bearing age, no vaccination of Covid recovered persons (already cleared the virus and are now immune) or suspected Covid recovered persons. If vaccines are used in persons over 70 as suggested, it must only be used after shared decision-making with their clinicians whereby patients can make informed decisions and consent to being fully informed; consent must be properly administered, offer vaccines to high-risk front line medical staff who interact with high-risk persons.

13) Those advocating for vaccinations must also have risks on the table. Thus, pharmaceutical companies, vaccine developers, and governments, along with the FDA, must remove the liability protections. No liability equates to no trust by the public and certainly parents. They must come to the table and if they stand by these vaccines in that they are safe, then they (all involved in the manufacture and the advocating and mandating of these vaccines) must remove the liability protections that they benefit from. They must have direct skin in the game and be liable if there is harm as a result of the vaccinations.

14) No vaccine passports (or immunity or antibody passports), no such mandates as these will constrain the rights of citizens under the questionable guise of safety; the vaccines as designed so far do not protect an individual by the provision of “sterilizing immunity.” By sterilizing immunity we mean that there are neutralizing antibodies and there is no further prospect of either getting infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus after a vaccination nor of passing along the virus to others; the evidence is very clear that the vaccines do no such thing and have failed especially against the Delta variant whereby even the CDC states that the vaccinated and unvaccinated carry virus and can spread; a recent seminal and transformational Israeli study by Gazit et al. has revealed that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity; SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold (95% CI, 8.08 to 21.11) increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected,

15) The FDA and the CDC with vaccine developers must immediately implement proper safety surveillance systems for these vaccines. This must include data safety monitoring boards post vaccine, critical event committees, and ethics review committees, which at this time, do not exist. With this, a committee to review the existence and proper administration of ethical and fully informed consenting by the vaccinee.

16) Terminate the duplicity by public health leaders and medical experts with the misguided reliance on the exceedingly rare concept of asymptomatic spread, recurrent infections, and the flawed highly sensitive and ‘false-positive’ RT-PCR test. Immediately replace the dysfunctional PCR test or set the cycle count (Ct) threshold to 24 to denote positivity; a positive test must be accompanied by a strong clinical suspicion whereby there are symptoms consistent with Covid-19 being exhibited.

17) We must make clear that a ‘case’ is when someone has symptoms and is sick; an ‘infection’ is not a ‘case’ and this effort to deceive the public with the reporting of ‘cases’ must stop immediately so that the public understands the accurate parameters of the emergency.

18) Implement immediate testing for antibody and T cell immunity before vaccinating the designated group. If we are vaccinating the higher-risk persons; we do not vaccinate persons who have active infection or who have recovered from infection, the same way if your child gets the measles infection and get the rash and fever etc., you do not then vaccinate them after they have recovered; you send them to school for they are now immune; use that same logic with Covid-19.

19) Cease the illogical, irrational, inaccurate, and nonsensical absurdity that Covid-19 vaccine immunity is superior to naturally acquired immunity when the science is clear that natural exposure immunity is broad, robust, durable, mature, long-lasting and similar to if not way superior to the narrow, and immature immunity conferred by the Covid vaccines. A recent article by Scott Morefield at the Brownstone Institute reveals the ridiculousness of the CDC and NIH.

Just look at the data from Israel on infection if infected and recovered versus if double vaccinated and it essentially destroys the negation of natural immunity or need for vaccination in toto or vaccine passports. “More than 7,700 new cases of the virus have been detected during the most recent wave starting in May, but just 72 of the confirmed cases were reported in people who were known to have been infected previously – that is, less than 1% of the new cases. Roughly 40% of new cases – or more than 3,000 patients – involved people who had been infected despite being vaccinated. With a total of 835,792 Israelis known to have recovered from the virus, the 72 instances of reinfection amount to 0.0086% of people who were already infected with Covid. By contrast, Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection, with over 3,000 of the 5,193,499, or 0.0578%, of Israelis who were vaccinated getting infected in the latest wave.”

There are six studies that set the stage for the core argument that natural exposure immunity is far superior and long-lasting than vaccine-induced immunity in Covid-19 (here and here and here and here and here and here). These six studies support what I think are the key 34 studies and reports that show natural immunity reigns supreme over the Covid-19 vaccine immunity (here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here).

The search for these underpinning studies was not systematic and was meant rather, as a means to quickly gather evidence to assess the potency of natural immunity in this Covid emergency. It is therefore likely that given the search was not exhaustive, then it may have missed some additional (and important) published research. The reader must bear this in mind in any interpretation. I however feel that the presented uncovered Covid immunity research (natural versus vaccine induced) is robust enough to support the thesis.

20) It is way past time to throw away the masks for our children as they have provided no benefit and have and can cause harm to the growing child (emotionally, socially, and health and well-being, the masks are toxic, especially to our children). Unshackle your children, allow them to play free outside with their friends, to breathe the fresh air; allow your children again to live naturally with their environments. Allow their immune systems (their natural innate immunity system, their mucosal immunity) to be taxed and tuned up daily, challenged by the outdoors, by mingling and socially interacting, by living as normal (January 2020). We are creating a disaster and are likely and may have set our children up for disaster by the lockdowns, the masking, and school closures that have weakened their developing immune systems. Remember the risk to children is near zero and you as the parent must make the sensible common-sense decisions to safeguard your child. Do not listen to the nonsense the CDC puts out and use the last 18 months of the upside down, flip-flops and nonsensical, often wrong statements and guidance by the CDC and even Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins says to turn off the nonsense by the CDC. The CDC is one year behind the science constantly on all things Covid-19; “They parade around ‘science’ but most of this is discretion. It’s not science,” Makary said of the CDC’s recommendations.

Stop the drive to keep our people in fear, cowering under their beds needlessly. Stop the mass media hysteria and fear about variants and mutations, as this is a good aspect, as when viruses mutate they typically mutate to much milder versions. Moreover, there is no credible available evidence anywhere that the variants are more lethal, none. The vast majority of people who are infected do not have a serious problem with Covid, nearly 100%; ‘infections’ are not important and they are not a serious problem.

The medical experts and these Task Forces have been wrong. Every decision has proven disastrous and they have caused far greater suffering and death from the collateral effects of the lockdowns and restrictions. Medical experts who inform governments should broaden the advisement table and allow other voices to be heard. Allow other scientists and lay persons a seat at the table for as it stands, those currently at the table have only made illogical, irrational, unscientific, nonsensical, often absurd and even reckless decisions that have only hurt lives.

We need different perspectives and an open discussion. If it is all about the science, medical decision-makers must follow the data and science and to use it and use critical analysis of the data. These decision-makers must understand the impact of their policies and stopping Covid at all costs is not a policy and it is not attainable. If a policy is based on an unattainable goal, pursuing it by every means causes great harm to the population.

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Dr. Paul E. Alexander, PhD, expertise and teaching of epidemiology (clinical epidemiology), evidence-based medicine, and research methodology (former Assistant Professor at McMaster University in evidence-based medicine); former COVID Pandemic evidence-synthesis advisor/consultant to WHO-PAHO Washington, DC (2020) and former senior advisor to COVID Pandemic policy in Health and Human Services (HHS) Washington, DC (A Secretary), US government; worked/appointed in 2008 at WHO as a regional specialist/epidemiologist in Europe’s Regional office Denmark, worked for the government of Canada as an epidemiologist for 12 years, appointed as the Canadian in-field epidemiologist (2002-2004) as part of an international CIDA funded, Health Canada executed project on TB/HIV co-infection and MDR-TB control; employed from 2017 to 2019 at Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) Virginia USA as the evidence synthesis meta-analysis systematic review guideline development lead/trainer; education: graduate studies at University of Oxford England, University of Toronto Canada, McMaster University Canada, York University Canada; completed a short certificate program at Johns Hopkins Baltimore, USA, in bioterrorism (medical and public health aspects following the deployment of a biological weapon (weaponized pathogen such as small pox, plague, botulism, tularemia etc.) on a city such as Baltimore; doctoral studies and post doc completed under supervision of Dr. Gordon Guyatt, co-founder with Dr. Dave Sackett of the field of ‘evidence-based medicine (EBM)’; currently independent academic scientist and consultant

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