Inflated Fears: One Poll That Explains So Much
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“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.” - K. Men-in-BlackDear esteemed colleagues,In August of 2021, amid the global effort to get everyone vaccinated for COVID, a Gallup Poll asked 3000 Americans about their perceptions of the risk of COVID infection, and specifically about hospitalization in unvaccinated vs. vaccinated people.
At that time (as near as I can trust available data), we in medicine knew the risk of hospitalization from COVID in the unvaccinated to be less than 1%.
But that’s not what the American population believed. This chart shows what people had been led to believe, divided by the political party of the respondents:
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimates-covid-hospitalization-risk.aspx
Only the small fraction of people in the farthest left column got the answer right.
Importantly, more than 90% of people overestimated the risk of being (or having been) hospitalized for COVID if unvaccinated. More than 50% of Democrats and 30% of Republicans overestimated this risk from COVID by a whopping 30-50-fold (or even more). Wow.
Only 2% of Democrats and 16% of Republicans accurately perceived the risk.
Those polled came only somewhat closer to reality when asked the same question about vaccinated people. But roughly 65% of the population overestimated even that risk by between 10 and 500-fold.
Please note that I am not commenting here about any risks of the COVID vaccines. What I am doing is noting that the people in the USA profoundly misunderstood the risk of the COVID disease. Some might word this differently, and I think accurately: the people were systematically misinformed.
Appropriate fear can motivate rational responses. But exaggerated fear is akin to generalized anxiety disorder and results in irrational decision-making.
Is misleading the people into exaggerated fear a justifiable method to accomplish an aim? In this example, to encourage vaccination? That’s an ethical question of immense importance. Misinforming our patients is not the way we practice medicine, but some other professions induce fear in their customers as a matter of routine.
It is fair to say that the media do it all the time, regardless of their political stance. It’s engrained into their profession now. If it bleeds, it leads.
Let’s consider the decisions that the people had to make while excessively fearful. Pregnant women choosing whether to be vaccinated with a new experimental technology. Politicians and bureaucrats deciding whether to coerce vaccination, including of children, and people deciding whether to let the politicians and bureaucrats do so. Support for and implementation of lockdowns of schools and businesses and churches. Firing the unvaccinated. Government and the Federal Reserve creating trillions of new currency units, thus inflating the currency as they inflated COVID fear.
This Gallup poll teaches something notable and important:
We are being propagandized to be irrationally fearful.
Acknowledging this will help us to avert such dysfunctional fear and the poor decisions that result.
The Gallup data lead to other questions as well. Here’s one:
What other concerns inside and outside of medicine are these same news and information sources propagandizing us to overly fear, with or without intent to influence personal decisions and public policy?
Please let me know your thoughts (including your answers) by commenting below, and follow me, because I will be begin recommending some useful, productive, lucrative, and outright fun things for doctors to acquire, invest in, listen to, and enjoy.
Here is one: holding gold is a superb way to lessen fear. Indeed, for physicians, gold is a form of quiet Wealth Insurance. SWP, based in Cayman but with a global footprint, is a trusted, ethical, precious metals supplier and offshore or onshore storage vault. Click on the SWP logo below for an introduction.
With great respect,
John Hunt, MDEditor-in-Chief of The Reticular Formation
John Hunt, MD is a pediatrician, investor, author of Assume the Physician, and co-author with Doug Casey of Drug Lord and other novels.
How Much Damage Have Vaccines Done to Society? - A Midwestern Doctor
Superb piece by a Midwesterm Doctor:
https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/how-much-damage-have-vaccines-done
Powerful and worth your time. Would that physicians would awaken to the evil they participate in...
Important Article - Please do not comply - do not enable
"College math professor validates my survey conclusions: vaccines ARE the main cause of chronic diseases
Confirmed: vaccines are a public health disaster because they are the #1 cause of chronic disease. When will the medical community admit their error?"
https://kirschsubstack.com/p/college-math-professor-validates
.And, excellent interview with Ed Dowd:..
https://usawatchdog.com/government-media-pretending-massive-health-crisis-not-going-on-ed-dowd/
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Family Medicine, Medical Administration
United States
When the vaccines became available, and they were not given at all to physician offices in the USA, that was a huge red flag for me. That they had to set up mass vaccination stations, when the infrastructure already existed to immunize people in their own doctors' offices, in retrospect - what were they afraid of? Truth about the real need, efficacy, and danger of the vaccines?
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Ophthalmology
France
Les publications scientifiques sur la cancérogénèse, les AVC, les statistiques catastrophiques de mortalité corrélées au taux de vaccination, restent en général au stade de pré-print car il y a une véritable loi du silence de la part de la plupart des revues dites scientifiques. En même temps, en France, des lois se mettent en place permettant d'incarcérer les auteurs de ces études qui dérangent les affaires de big pharma. Lorsque la corruption devient systémique et tue par centaine de milliers, la confiance des malades est gravement compromise de façon globale, le respect du médecin s'effondre, la gangrène s'installe et le système finit par s'écrouler lamentablement avec des morts et de la misère.
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Pediatric Pulmonology, Allergy for children
United States
Dear Roger Price, Thanks for the website link. I signed up to learn more. Health Care and Medical Care are different things, arent' they. Much of Health Care (the methods of avoiding disease) can be free: Better nutrition choices, better sleep, better exercise, better stress avoidance. But some cost money-- dental and vaccines for example. Figuring out the financing of this, without coercion, will be interesting. Thank you.
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Most Moms-to-Be Interested in RSV Vaccination During Pregnancy
THURSDAY, April 25, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- More than half of women who are pregnant or planning to become pregnant are very likely to get vaccinated against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) during pregnancy, according to a study published online April 25 in Pediatrics.
Jennifer K. Saper, M.D., from the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, and colleagues characterized interest in RSV vaccination during pregnancy among women who were pregnant or planning to become pregnant. A cross-sectional online survey was conducted among individuals aged 18 to 45 years who were currently pregnant or trying to become pregnant in March 2023.
Overall, 1,528 of the 1,619 completed surveys were analyzed. The researchers found that 54 percent of respondents indicated being "very likely" to get vaccinated against RSV during pregnancy. The strongest predictor of vaccination likelihood was the perception of RSV as a serious illness. Predicted proportions of those "very likely" to vaccinate against RSV followed a similar pattern in the full regression model (63, 55, and 35 percent if RSV infection was perceived as serious and likely, serious and unlikely, and not serious, respectively).
"Educational efforts about protection against RSV illness in infants through vaccination during pregnancy and the consequent positive health implications for children may be a key component of public health and health care strategies to encourage RSV vaccination among pregnant individuals," the authors write.
Copyright © 2020 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Rogue immune cell found to cause poor antibody responses in chronic viral infections
Australian researchers have discovered a previously unknown rogue immune cell that can cause poor antibody responses in chronic viral infections. The finding, published in the journal, Immunity, may lead to earlier intervention and possibly prevention of some types of viral infections such as HIV or hepatitis.
One of the remaining mysteries of the human immune system is why a certain cell, called a B cell, which retains a memory for past infections – ensuring we fight off diseases we have experienced before – often only has a weak capacity to protect us from persistent infections.
Researchers from the Monash University Biomedicine Discovery Institute have essentially solved this mystery by discovering how chronic viral infection induces a previously unknown immune B memory cell that does not produce high levels of antibody. Importantly the research team, led by Professor Kim Good-Jacobson and Dr Lucy Cooper, also determined the most effective time during the immune response for therapeutics such as anti-viral and anti-cancer drugs to better boost immune memory cell development. "In the future, this research may result in new therapeutic targets, with the aim to reduce the devastating effect of chronic infectious diseases on global health, specifically those that are not currently preventable by vaccines," Dr Cooper said...Read more
What possibilities could this research offer?
WHO Chief Sounds Alarm on Bird Flu Circulating in U.S. Cattle
MONDAY, April 22, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- The H5N1 avian flu virus that's infecting U.S. cattle is increasingly showing up in mammals -- a dangerous sign that it could someday easily infect people.
That's the warning issued late last week by World Health Organization chief scientist Dr. Jeremy Farrar, CNN reported.
“We have to watch, more than watch, we have to make sure that if H5N1 did come across to humans with human-to-human transmission that we were in a position to immediately respond with access equitably to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics," he said at a news conference held on WHO’s new definition for airborne pathogens.
In rare instances, H5N1 can infect a human who's been in regular close contact with infected animals, as happened in a Texas cattleman earlier this month, but so far, human-to-human transmission is very difficult.
Increasingly, however, the virus is popping up in mammals that are much closer kin to humans than birds are.
“The great concern, of course, is that in doing so and infecting ducks and chickens -- but now increasingly mammals -- that that virus now evolves and develops the ability to infect humans," Farrar said. "And then critically, the ability to go from human-to-human transmission."
According to WHO, the death toll that could happen would be catastrophic: Since 2003, only 889 cases of human avian flu infection are known worldwide, but in 463 (52%) of those cases, the infected person died.
“This virus is a really scary virus. It’s something I would hate to see in humans,” Dr. Richard Webby, who directs the WHO’s coordinating center for studies on the ecology of influenza, told CNN.
Webby is also a scientist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. He's been studying H5N1 for two decades, and said the move to mammals is ominous.
"What’s happening now there are lots more small mammals being infected with this virus and we’ve ever seen in the past 20, close to 25 years of monitoring, so that is absolutely concerning," he said.
Right now, H5N1 doesn't seem to have picked up mutations that make human-to-human transmission a possibility, so "this virus has got quite a hurdle to overcome to become a real sort of human pathogen,” Webby said.
The virus involved in the one human case reported this month in Texas has been studied by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which said it did seem vulnerable to existing antiviral medications.
The man involved in that case only displayed minor symptoms, but was placed in isolation. At the time, the CDC labeled the threat to the public as "low."
The current outbreak of H5N1 among U.S. cattle herds has popped up in eight states -- Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, South Dakota, Idaho, Michigan, Ohio and North Carolina.
The CDC said it has also created a candidate H5N1 vaccine virus. The strain would be in readiness to help produce a viable vaccine, should the need arise.
More information
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on bird flu.
SOURCE: CNN
Copyright © 2020 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
