this simple, counter narrative fact keeps cropping up all over the world.

hospital and ICU utilization has been and remains low this year.

it's terribly curious that so few of these monitoring tools provide historical baselines.

getting them is like pulling teeth.

we might think of this as an oversight until you see stuff like this:

this woman was arrested for filming and sharing the fact that their are empty hospitals in the UK.

that's full blown soviet. what possible honest purpose does that serve?

https://t.co/AschDuxMcf
this is the action of a police state and a propaganda ministry, not a well intentioned government and a public heath agency.

"we cannot let people see the truth for fear they might base their actions on real facts" is not much of a mantra for just governance.
90% full ICU sounds scary until you realize that 90-100% full is normal in flu season.

staffed ICU beds are expensive to leave empty. it's like flying with 15% of the plane empty. hospitals don't do that.

and all US hospitals are mandated to be able to flex to 120% ICU.
the US is currently at historically low ICU utilization for this time of year.

61% is "you're all going to go out of business" territory as is 66% full hospital use.

can you blame them for mining CARES act money? they'll die without it.
US hospitals have been under such strain from lack of use that they engaged in massive lay offs. they have only hired half those people back.

the temp agencies are glutted with staff and have no demand. this argument that "we have beds but no docs" is flat out made up.
many hospitals can easily hit 150% ICU at need.

this is why when everyone in media was panicking about texas hospitals, the CEO's were not.

because they actually know how this works and had been at the same levels the year before.

https://t.co/fk3ox76Eri
meanwhile, california is fiddling the data to make occupancy look like it's 100%.

https://t.co/Z2dnsKFKpT
but california ICU is not 100%. it's 81%. that is a low number for this time of year by 10-20 points.
and no, LA is not overwhelmed.
nor is SF or SD.
this endless "we need to save the hospitals!" canard has been the false driver of bad policy.

they have not been threatened in the US throughout this whole covid pandemic. not even perennial basket case NYC needed to use overflow.

unlike 2018.

https://t.co/t9GGMQL8pt
hospitals are dramatic places. there is a reason so many TV shows have used them as a setting. crazy stuff happens every day. and you can always find some 2nd year resident having a melt down.

that's why so many wash out of that job.
this hospital stress has been used to push awful health policy. they stir your fear and your heart strings with histrionic anecdote and misleading data.

they then use it to push masks and lockdowns, 2 policies that have shown 0 efficacy.

https://t.co/lR5ZF6z7J2
asymptomatic spread has been shown time and time again to be negligible.

you could drop it to zero and make no meaningful difference in this epidemic.

https://t.co/iYENQLK7S9
and all this was known. it was in all the standing pandemic guidelines.

this is not "following the science" this is ignoring 100 years of it to make stuff up and take the world on an unprecedented public health joyride that has ended in disaster.

https://t.co/sFdUYqPoZy
we've used tests that are not suited to purpose to and bizarrely and uniquely inclusive definitions to drive a "casdemic" and to overstate deaths using "death with" instead of "death from."

https://t.co/8atnB5fnda
and we have ignored the basic stats 101 concept of "sample rate" to make a drop in US prevalance look like a rise.

https://t.co/ocBWQWb3tk
2020 is the year we abandoned science and reason in favor of unfounded charlatanry and propaganda to force upon an unsuspecting populace policies that could not and did not work to address a problem that was never real.

lockdowns and masks do not slow spread or save hospitals.
there is no evidence that lockdowns and masks save lives and loads of evidence that they have not.

and yet we keep going back to this poisoned well for more water every time we get scared because those who inflicted this cannot and will not admit that it failed.
the admission that this policy has been a total failure would be political suicide. if you want to know why this issue is so political, that's why.

the architects of this disastrous and ineffective policy need to brazen it out and pretend it worked.
they need to pin medals on themselves and declare victory or they will be pariahs.

their best interest is not your best interest and as they party at french laundry and jet to cabo, it's clear they do not believe a world of what they are saying.

and neither should you.
anyone who cannot see by now that hospitals are fine and that lockdowns do not work is either so data illiterate as to be hopeless or so dishonest as to be not worth listening to.

which one makes you want them in charge?

they dominated 2020. do not let them dominate 2021.

More from el gato malo

for those looking for a compendium of mask studies this set from swiss policy research looks useful and has some good links and discussion.

also attaching 2 past debunkings of widely disseminated US studies that health officials have attempted to

first, the kansas study spread by CDC and so many "twitterdocs" and politicians.

it's a master class in cherry picking and misusing data through truncation.

the data proving it was false was widely available at the time it was


also the mass general study, a classic of the "sun-dance" variant: use no control group and then presume that any action undertaken was the result of some thing you did.

ignore the fact that the whole rest of (unmasked) massachusetts got the same


the fact that CDC has been spreading studies like these and using them alongside flimsy lab bench experiments with no clinical outcomes or even real world measurement speaks poorly of both CDC & the evidence for masks

the good studies do not support use



and lab bench droplet projection studies are meaningless.

it's one tiny aspect of a large system and may actually be counterproductive if masks are nebulizing droplets and making virus more aerosol in spread and more deeply
global health policy in 2020 has centered around NPI's (non-pharmaceutical interventions) like distancing, masks, school closures

these have been sold as a way to stop infection as though this were science.

this was never true and that fact was known and knowable.

let's look.


above is the plot of social restriction and NPI vs total death per million. there is 0 R2. this means that the variables play no role in explaining one another.

we can see this same relationship between NPI and all cause deaths.

this is devastating to the case for NPI.


clearly, correlation is not proof of causality, but a total lack of correlation IS proof that there was no material causality.

barring massive and implausible coincidence, it's essentially impossible to cause something and not correlate to it, especially 51 times.

this would seem to pose some very serious questions for those claiming that lockdowns work, those basing policy upon them, and those claiming this is the side of science.

there is no science here nor any data. this is the febrile imaginings of discredited modelers.

this has been clear and obvious from all over the world since the beginning and had been proven so clearly by may that it's hard to imagine anyone who is actually conversant with the data still believing in these responses.

everyone got the same R
from the "make orwell fiction again" files:

google has memory holed the great barrington declaration

not only have they wiped it from the top results, they have salted it with false claims about "climate denial"

it's pure, simple propaganda

here's bing (who plays it straight)


simple, right? here's the declaration, here's the wiki page.

you can see the authors, kulldorf, gupta, bhattacharya's names and know this this was written by medical professors at harvard, stanford, and oxford.

there's no slant, not editorializing, it's primary source info.

now let's have a look at google.

pretty different looking results, huh? not only do they not lead with the declaration itself or its authors, they lead with dishonest hit pieces.

they try to tie it to climate denial and fake science.

um, no. this is "fake search."


the google results for "great barrington declaration" are simply not search results at all.

it's a propagandistic hit piece ducking the science, ignoring the credentials of the authors, failing to show the declaration, and spinning it as some kind of fringe cabal of "deniers."


it's staggeringly blatant once you see it, but will anyone?

or will they be fooled by this because it's subtle and you think google is a search engine, not a radicalized editorial column.

and it's now EVERYWHERE.

reddit will not allow users to see

More from Health

Some thoughts on this: Firstly, it might be personal preference, but I am not keen on this kind of campaign as I feel like it trivialises cancer. Sometimes the serious message gets lost because people are sharing pics of cats or whatever and the important context is gone.


More importantly, the statistic being used in the campaign is misleading. It says 57% of women put off cervical screening if they can't get waxed. But on further investigation, that's not accurate.

The page here goes on to say "57% of women who regularly have their pubic hair professionally removed would put off attending their cervical screening appointment if they hadn’t been able to visit a beauty salon."

So the 57% represents a concern not across the whole population of women, but only those who regularly get waxed. So how big of an issue is this across the whole population? And what else is stopping people getting smears?

I think campaigns for cancer screening are really tricky because there is so much nuance that often doesn't fit into a catchy headline or hashtag. It's certainly not easy and is part of a bigger conversation.

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