A look back at Polio to gain some perspective on COVID-19

(originally posted 4/27/20 - updated with more evidence)
 
      Are you familiar with this book?

     It's assembled by pharmaceutical giant Merck -- the company I used to work for. The Merck Manual is well-respected around the world by doctors and scientists. It's considered a sort of medical "bible" by many and summarizes the published science on various diseases.

    
     My high school biology teacher once told me about what it was like to live through the polio epidemic of the 1950s. He was a child at the time and recalled classmates, "dropping like flies." He told me it was terrifying coming to school each week and learning that more classmates had fallen ill with polio.

     However in recent years, I have struggled to reconcile my teacher's experience with the published science I have read as I looked into the issue of polio a bit more.

     For example, look at this passage from page 2341 from my own 17th edition of the Merck Manual:

     Do you understand what it is saying?

     Essentially it says that during epidemics of polio in unvaccinated populations, over 99% of people who become infected have completely asymptomatic infections, that don't harm them, but DO leave them with lifelong immunity. Does that surprise you?  It did me!

    So here is what I have struggled to understand:  How can I reconcile my respected teacher's lived experience of seeing "classmates dropping like flies," from polio -- with the fact that published science suggests that polio victims were less than 1% of those infected?

    I am having a similarly hard time reconciling the incredible panic as well as the media emphasis on how dangerous COVID-19 is, all the different ways that causes harm and the frequent images of hospitals being overwhelmed -- with the emerging science as it becomes published. So lets dive a bit deeper on both of these to try to better understand.

     If classes had about 25 kids in them back when my teacher lived through Polio, how many people could my teacher have personally witnessed disappearing from school because of polio...if over the course of the epidemic less then 1% ever had any obvious symptoms of the disease?

      There is other science regarding polio that I am thinking about now as well.

     There were anecdotal reports in the medical literature of parents reporting that their child's paralysis started immediately following getting a diphtheria shot -- and explaining that the paralysis even began in the very limb into which the shot had been given. Most doctors at the time dismissed these reports as purely coincidental and few doctors today have any knowledge of this history being documented in the journals -- or the fact that these accounts were widely dismissed in the medical community at the time.

      But I think we should now be asking this question: How much of the reported polio morbidity and mortality resulted from our medical interventions?

       Because in  2014 The Lancet published this article:

     Here are a few quotes from that Lancet article:

"...tonsillectomies led to a significant risk of respiratory paralysis
due to bulbar polio."

      "The steady rise in polio incidence...[was traced to]...the
expansion of immunisation programmes for diphtheria, pertussis,
and tetanus."

  That Lancet article explains how intramuscular injections can trigger paralysis - if given within 30 days of being exposed to wild polio. It also confirms that a tonsillectomy can likewise trigger polio paralysis.  Keep in mind -- tonsillectomies were being widely done back then -- even on healthy kids -- and the vaccine program was expanding rapidly.

    Interestingly -- human history has many accounts of isolated sporadic cases of polio-like paralysis going back 1000s of years -- but never until the 1800s, do we have any accounts of multiple cases of paralysis in a single community!  The US polio epidemics came right on the heals of mass diphtheria vaccination, penicillin shots, and widespread routine tonsillectomies. So the big question we should now be asking is this:



     Did our past medical practices actually turn (what had historically been) isolated sporadic polio paralysis cases into epidemics of paralysis?

      Likewise -- are our current medical practices (ventilators and Influenza vaccines and fever reducers) increasing deaths from  COVID-19?

    

     Early on in NY City as COVID cases were increasing -- an ER doctor on the front lines posted a video sharing his observations that COVID impacted the lungs differently than other flu-like illnesses and he went on to explain how he thought that using high-pressure ventilation was damaging the lungs and killing people -- BUT the current protocols prevented him and every other astute doctor from adjusting their treatments so as to prevent what they thought was injuring patients -- Watch this Medscape interview of him (below.)

It appears that the video I linked to above was removed from YouTube -- (this seems to be happening frequently.) Fortunately, I found another copy of it on Medscape's site:

      Ventilators may not be the only thing that increased mortality from COVID-19 -- multiple studies suggest that influenza vaccine is also playing a role. But here too -- even though we have multiple published studies suggesting that getting a flu shot may put you MORE at risk from Coronaviruses -- public health officials throughout this pandemic could be seen on TV repeatedly telling everyone to "get your flu shot." 

     Read the studies for yourself -- each of the screen shots below links back to the original article. I realize there are scientists who disagree with this evidence -- or think the benefits of flu shots still justify the risk...but given the whole big picture -- shouldn't we err on the side of, "First do no harm?"

     Another standard treatment that likely is increasing bad outcomes from COVID infections -- is the use of fever reducers.

    

     There is good evidence that fevers are adaptive -- providing an assist to our
immune system in fighting off infections:

     It's also well documented that use of aspirin in the 1918 flu pandemic greatly increased the number of flu-associated deaths as well:

     And here is what History.com has to say on the subject:

     At one point -- a few sources questioned the use of Ibuprofen for COVID patients...

     But those questions were quickly drowned out by public health officials and the media assuring us these things were safe.

    Meanwhile I couldn't help but notice we were being deluged with first person accounts from people describing how they nearly died from COVID-19 -- and in their own recounting, again and again, I noticed them saying how early on when they weren't that sick they were alternating taking tylenol and advil...

    And Tylenol -- in addition to risks associated with it's ability to lower fever, may present an additional risk.

      One of the downsides of Tylenol is that it reduces the level of glutathione in our body -- which is an important antioxidant that protects our liver and lungs from damage when inflammation gets out of hand.  In fact -- do you know what emergency rooms give to people who have overdosed on Tylenol to save their lives?  N-Acetyl-Cysteine. NAC works by increasing the level of glutathione in our body. Some health care providers have suggested that it could also protect us from the worst effects of COVID-19.  So might taking tylenol actually make us more vulnerable to a bad outcome from coronaviruses?

     Now compare the science you just saw with the official response from the company making Tylenol:

(FYI: It appears that the page I screen shot above has disappeared from the internet -- but it's still available archived here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200924214149/https://www.tylenol.com/covid-19-update#i-ve-heard-concerns-about-taking-ibuprofen-is-it-safe-to-take-tylenol)

     So just like with Polio paralysis being increased by the common medical interventions of tonsillectomies and injections it is likely that we have also increased COVID-19 deaths from ventilators, flu shots and fever reducers.

       But the picture is still not complete...

     Did you realize that many of the cases counted as polio -- actually did not have polio? The same situation appears to be happening today with COVID-19. Many of the deaths being attributed to COVID-19 probably did not actually die from COVID-19.


    Our popular mythology touts President FDR as one of the most famous polio victims. But published science now suggests FDR did NOT actually have polio:

  
     Did you realize that the way polio was diagnosed before and after introduction of the polio vaccine changed? In 1952 there were 21,000 cases of paralytic polio diagnosed in the US. Here was the World Health Organization's criteria for diagnosing them at that time:

      That means that cases of Guillain-Barre, Acute Flaccid Myelitis, Aseptic Meningitis, Transverse Myelitis and perhaps other conditions too --  all would have been likely to have been counted as, "Polio" prior to the introduction of the polio vaccine.

     But after the vaccine was introduced a polio diagnosis required identification of the presence of the polio virus in throat secretions, cerebrospinal fluid or stool.  Wouldn't that change alone inflate the pre-vaccine accounting of how bad polio was? (while making the vaccine appear to have been responsible for saving more children from polio than it really did.)

     I fully expect that once a COVID-19 vaccine is licensed, we will see the official diagnostic rules for COVID-19 changed to be more specific than they are now as well.  The most immediate impact of this change will be to obfuscate the actual number of lives saved by the vaccine.

    Look at this alert (screen shot below) CDC issued on March 24 instructing doctors to put COVID-19 as the primary cause of death on every death certificate where there was any possibility it may have been a COVID death -- and since hospitals actually get greater financial reimbursement for COVID deaths compared to flu deaths -- can you see how this might be inflating COVID numbers?

     And yes, hospitals do make additional money from patients diagnosed as COVID -- so they are incentivized to support this inflation as well.

    

     Here is evidence that at least some of our flu morbidity and mortality are being counted as COVID-19 cases...

     Newer data suggests far more have been infected with (and recovered!) from COVID-19...

    

      This is very significant -- as it suggests that the case-fatality rate of COVID-19 is far less then we thought at first.  In fact it now appears likely to be pretty close to that of seasonal flu! Strangely I  have seen almost no mention of these studies by CNN, MSNBC, or FOX...


                  WHY NOT?

    

      And check this out...

 
        Two MD's in California, who own five clinics and did
         their own testing said this:

     And now are being widely discredited, and some of the coverage of their press conference is being removed from news sites

    


     But this just doesn't make sense --- hospitals really were overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases.  How could that be...if the case fatality rate isn't that much different than the seasonal flu?

     Do you remember seeing these headlines...

notice they're From 2018 !!!

(Yeh -- I don't recall seeing any of them back then either!)

     Is it possible that a major factor contributing to hospitals being overwhelmed in both 2018 and 2020 is the fact that they have so prioritized efficiency and profit OVER public service -- that they simply don't have enough capacity to deal adequately with any kind of surge?

     As a society  -- do we so value maximizing return to shareholders of hospitals, that we are ok with shutting down schools and quaranteening healthy citizens --  in order to keep (for-profit) hospitals from being overrun?  Perhaps a return to hospitals being run as not-for-profits that serve communities is what we really need?

     A final point of comparison between COVID and Polio...

     Every medical intervention carries risks and benefits, and the risk/benefit ratio varies dramatically from one person the next. One size does not fit all. With all interventions we recognize this....all except for one that is...vaccines.

     Blood thinners save some lives. They also end others prematurely. Antibiotics are lifesaving in certain situations, they also enable tragic consequences -- including for many not directly using them.  Why with vaccines are we discouraged from recognizing this same fact? In fact -- often censored for simply wanting to discuss the evidence of harms from this medical intervention -- so that we can honestly assess the real risk-benefit ratio?

     The live polio vaccine was eventually determined to be TOO dangerous for use in the US.

     The Cutter Incident (screen shot from CDC site below) was just one example of the vaccine causing paralytic polio -- the very thing the vaccine was supposed to prevent. There continued to be occasional polio cases caused by the vaccine after this too -- that's why the US went to the inactivated polio vaccine (which unlike the live vaccine, does NOT keep a person from getting and spreading polio to others if exposed -- only reduces that individual's chance of being paralyzed) so it does not actually produce herd immunity -- which is the justification for mandating that people get the vaccine in the first place.

     But the live polio is still used in other parts of the world -- where it continues to cause harm:

:


     But there were even bigger harms from the polio vaccine that are rarely discussed:

SV40 is being linked with more and more human cancers...

     While the CDC's website (in the screen shot about the Cutter incident above) assures us that all polio vaccine associated with with the Cutter incident was immediately pulled from market, our government and vaccine manufacturers took a decidedly different approach with regards to the known SV40 contamination.

     Though they did institute screening of polio vaccine produced going forward to prevent future SV40 contamination, the previously manufactured (contaminated) vaccine was not recalled and continued to be administered to millions of children around the world for several more years. Below is a screen shot from Asbestos.com:

 

     How can we trust public health officials' assurances that their recommendations have a net public health benefit -- when their calculations do not factor in known harms from their interventions? We only ever hear how many lives polio vaccines saved --- and never how many they have cost.

   Harm from past polio vaccines may still be accruing in the population (see study below) as well.

and now LOOK at this--

1961 Chicago Tribune article

I actually found this article first on the Everly Report Website. I like to provide multiple sources because so many sources that challenge the pharma-tech narrative are disappearing from the internet!  I really encourage you to not only read this article -- but read it two or three times!  Every time I reread it -- I find more gems of insight (very relevant to COVID and what we are being told about it) that I failed to notice the last time I read it -- there is just SO MUCH GREAT CONTENT in the Tribune article.  One of the most remarkable things about this article -- is that media actually reported on the SCIENCE  - and the scientific dissent -- that is NOT happening today, the media is cherry picking the science and only sharing what supports the pharma-tech narrative, which just happens to be facilitating the greatest transfer of wealth that has ever taken place on the planet!

     Unlike 1961, today -- the media only present a single perspective to us. Public health officials (under the spell of pharma) make their recommendations without considering the unintended consequences, and seek to prevent the public from considering their own unique risk/benefits, and having the right to give their true informed consent.  Then to make matters worse any scientist who even questions those one-size-fits all recommendations gets censored, and many doctors who read the science for themselves and then  try to do what they think is best for their individual patients  have lost their jobs.

All of this, taken all together, explains why we are seeing so many deaths worldwide , and why the US especially seems to be having among the worst outcomes to COVID.

     The public health response has exacerbated existing inequalities and has had widespread negative impacts on mental health. As more data comes in, it is likely we will be facing dramatic increases in domestic violence, depression, suicide and food insecurity  as a result of lock downs, and authoritarianism seeking to force healthy people to cover their faces, or risk exclusion from public spaces, and then to coerce people into getting dangerous experimental vaccines.

I thought this  interveiw below made many great points.

     But there is an even bigger picture here -- which I hope you will consider.  Robert F Kennedy Jr. explains it beautifully in his video address to the world:

(Nov 12, 2021 update) I just noticed that the above video is no longer available on Youtube after it had at least 373K views -- another victim of censorship.  So I found that video available on another platform (below) but am leaving the "unavailable" one above to document the censorship and allow people to come to their own conclusions about what is being censored.