How Will History Treat The Coronavirus Lockdown? With Prof. Denis Rancourt
You won't want to miss this very special Liberty Report! Former University of Ottawa physics professor Denis Rancourt joins today's program to examine the science behind government and media claims about the coronavirus outbreak. Does a national lockdown make any sense? Why did the scientists that governments listen to seem to get the numbers all wrong? And why have other scientists who challenged the accepted wisdom been silenced and ignored? What are the numbers? Why is the media only interested in bolstering government rhetoric, no matter how incorrect it proves to be? And, very importantly, why did state and local authorities take measures that almost guaranteed that senior care facilities would see more widespread suffering and death than necessary?
Prof. Rancourt's article that was mentioned in the show: http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2020/april/23/what-will-post-covid-look-like-on-tv-and-in-the-history-books/
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Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
Doing very well, and we have a nice program today, a special guest.
He didn't fly in from, but he's reporting from Ottawa.
So maybe later on, someday, people will be able to fly airplanes again.
It was up to him.
I think he would probably know how to encourage that.
But our guest today is Dennis Rancourt, a former tenured full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa.
He is a researcher for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association.
He has published many, many articles in leading scientific journals on physics and environmental science.
And Professor, welcome to our program today.
It's a pleasure to be here, Dr. Paul.
I'm glad to be here.
Wonderful.
And we will want to talk about an article you've written recently and your interest in coronavirus and what's going on there.
And obviously, you're very much attuned to civil liberties, which we join you in.
But thank you very much for being with us today.
And you might just give us an update a little bit about how and when you really developed the interest from the very beginning that you heard about coronavirus.
Or was there something there that really caught your attention?
Well, as soon as it came out, we were very concerned at the Ontario Civil Liberties Association that this could generate a whole cascade of violations of civil rights and liberties.
So as a researcher there, I immediately started looking at it.
But I'm also a scientist and I'm used to looking at the scientific literature and analyzing it.
I know all about the various measurement methods.
I used to teach it at the graduate level.
I know about statistical analysis.
I've used Bayesian inference theory in my research and so on.
So I'm a high-level reader.
And so I immediately poured into the science that was coming out and quickly realized that some of the key experts were saying that they couldn't see why this was a particularly virulent disease.
And then as more and more data and estimations based on the first measurements came out, it became very quickly clear.
And some of the clear-thinking researchers quickly said, you know, there's nothing here, basically.
There's no evidence yet that this is a particularly dangerous beast.
So let's not have these lockdowns and these extreme draconian methods.
Let's think about this.
Let's wait for a little bit more data to come in.
And so I was in admiration in front of these people who went against the mainstream media, went against what all the other talking heads were saying, and said what they really believed on the basis of their knowledge and their great experience.
These are experts in the field.
I could name them, but you know who they are.
You've been covering them on your show.
So I started reading their papers and all of the papers tied to them immediately and wrote a report for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association in which I explained that the government reaction to this was reckless and irresponsible and was actually contrary to the science up to the day that I published the report.
Dangers Of Full Lockdown00:08:52
There's a leading article in Science magazine, which is one of the preeminent science journals, that explained that if you do a full lockdown like this, there is great danger associated purely from increasing the number of infections and deaths from the disease itself, never mind the repercussions regarding the economy and so on, but from the disease itself,
the second wave and the further waves in the coming years, all total, can give you a cumulative death and infection that is much greater than what you were trying to prevent the first time around.
So, this was very serious modeling work that took properly into account that the transmissivity of the disease varies seasonally.
And we now understand that scientifically why that is.
That was a big challenge to understand that.
The understanding came in about 2010, where some U.S. scientists conclusively demonstrated that this was because it was being transmitted by aerosols in the atmosphere, and it was the absolute humidity of the atmosphere that controlled whether or not the aerosols stayed in the atmosphere as part of the fluid, the air, or quickly condensed out and were gravitationally pulled out so that you lost your transmissivity.
That is the scientific reason why these diseases, these viral diseases that attack the respiratory tract and that are transmitted through the air, this is why they are seasonal.
It's a question of absolute humidity.
So I reviewed all of that science, explained it, and explained that we know this now.
And then this latest paper in science by Kislerial showed that given that when you take that seasonality into account, it's very dangerous to start doing lockdowns under those kinds of circumstances.
You know, I was amazed about how many MDs and researchers and scientists fell in line.
It just seemed like it was unbelievable.
And it's a worldwide thing.
Do you recall of anything close to this?
I mean, I know this happens all the time.
People put a little false information out and spreads around and goes a little bit, maybe in one country.
But this is so big that it's so impressive to me.
And if my suspicions are correct, do you sort of have a suggestion on why this one got out of control like never before?
Yes.
Well, I've studied this as part of my research with the Association.
And the other time that it was measured by scientists, and actually explained, that there was this global media frenzy around an issue, was in relation to, and it happened at about the same time that Al Gore was putting out his film about global warming.
And so in the mid-2000s, when that film was coming out and before, all of a sudden, the media globally went in synchronicity from having a balanced view of global warming to completely adopting it as the correct thing overnight,
and the coverage on it in every major newspaper in the world overnight was four or five-fold greater all of a sudden, and then it has been maintained ever since.
So that is statistically impossible that that would happen just out of individual national papers looking for readers and things like that.
This appears to have been very motivated and coordinated.
And I believe that there is a network that does influence the main editors of the main papers in a great number of countries.
And then that sets the scene.
So the word is given out when they want something like this to just flood the mainstream media.
And we've seen it before, as I said, with global warming.
And now we saw it again with this new virus.
I think Daniel has a comment.
Yeah, a lot of this seems to point back to Neil Ferguson, Imperial College.
He did the first study, the first prognostication that 2.2 million Americans may die, will die, and half a million citizens of the UK will die.
And that got everyone's attention.
Then, of course, those numbers were picked up by the CDC and Anthony Fauci, which of course made him the point person for it.
It was distilled by the media, as you point out, distilled by the media into a handy little Soviet-style slogan, stay home, save lives.
It's amazing how the entire world has been shut down based on the predictions of one so-called scientist, Neil Ferguson, whose track record isn't that great, is it, Professor?
No, and the article itself was not peer-reviewed.
It was not pre-published in a major journal.
It's just a government white paper.
It's basically to serve whoever wants the person to write it.
But if you look at the serious scientists who intended to have their work peer-reviewed and who submitted it in that way and who are true experts in this, they were not at all saying these kinds of things, even initially.
So this was just a science pretext to put in place a campaign that some organizers wanted.
That's how I understand it.
Because it's not, you see, even that original paper is completely faulty because it uses a reproduction number, an R0 it's called, that is constant, which is now known to be nonsense because there has to be a strong seasonal dependence, which can vary four or five fold over the course of a season of that important parameter.
And that's because of what I was explaining earlier.
So any model that doesn't even acknowledge that this is a seasonal disease that is transmitted seasonally because of the mechanism of its transmissivity, if you don't acknowledge that, then it's a kind of model that we scientists call garbage in, garbage out.
Professor, what kind of reception have you received so far at the beginning?
Has it changed any?
If you were a university professor right now, would things be different for you?
Tell us what the reaction has been.
Yeah, there are a number of good, solid scientists and university scientists who have the kinds of view that I'm expressing because it is a scientific view, and they're being heard occasionally in the national media in Canada, but only because the national media have kind of a responsibility to be able to at least say that they tried to cover the other side.
They can't be accused of being totally biased.
But their reports are so few and they're cut off quickly and then they get buried with this tsunami of the government line that you have to really look for them.
So that's the situation is that the government promotes the talking heads that it selects and the serious scientists have a really hard time being heard.
And they've had to go to YouTube and they've had to go to alternative media to be heard.
So there are some extraordinary interviews with some of the absolute leading people in the field now that are not shown by the Canadian CBC and CNN.
You just don't see them.
But they are on YouTube.
And these are people that I've admired for over a decade.
I know their work.
I've reviewed their work.
They're really leaders, and they're independent thinkers as well.
So there is a core of independent thinking that still exists in universities and in the sciences, because it's there for historic reasons, and it's part of how scientists are trained.
But it's been captured and taken over by the institutions, and everyone more or less...
If they want government grants, if they want to be heard, if they want to have influence within the government, they have to be aligned.
So you, you have these little breakthroughs where an expert just can't take it anymore and goes on to youtube and but otherwise, you have to be aligned.
Hard Numbers Count00:03:32
You know, in the this article that you we published on Ronpaul Institute website and we'll put a link in the description.
But uh you, essentially the thing is, what is going to happen?
What will history, how will history treat this?
It looks thankfully, to be honest, of course, that the pandemic numbers are not coming in, like the government and the government paid scientists have predicted.
What do you think?
Tell us what you said in the article what do you think will be the fallout from this huge gap between what they warned when they shut us all down and what we're going to see?
Well there, you know, there's a hard number that you cannot get around, and that is how many people actually die of all causes.
That is a hard number.
You, you can negotiate and you can talk about the cause of death and you can do all kinds of tricks and so on, but when it comes down to it the, the number of deaths, are recorded, and that's a hard number.
And when you look at the total death rate, you know per million inhabitants or whatever in the western countries, and if they come out quickly enough and you can look at the hard numbers there, there there is but a blimp here, there there's nothing.
This is not a major killer that would warrant a military style lockdown of the whole planet.
This is nothing like that.
So there are seasonal variations in these death rates in western countries in, you know, northern and mid-latitudes, because of how the, how the transmission works, and so there are more deaths from pneumonia and things like that, which is well known, and those, those increases above the norm that are cyclical, fall in line with what we're seeing now with the, the so-called deaths by coronavirus which, which you know the, the attribution of, of of death is,
is an art, it's not really a science.
I mean, someone has three or four comorbidity conditions and dies, and you, you test them and you find that they're a positive for a coronavirus or the coronavirus.
Well what?
But what actually killed them and and when would they have died a week Later?
and so on.
So, there's a politics involved in counting causes of death, which you have to, scientists have gotten around by looking at total deaths and the cyclical behaviors of total deaths and deaths that are attributed in a convincing way, for example, to respiratory problems or to pneumonia, and when they do have a valid flu test to influenza.
So, there are these kinds of categories of numbers, and scientists have been looking at them for decades, and it's understood how these cycles work.
And this is not, in terms of the total death, there's no anomaly here, really.
This is all within the statistical variation.
So, it's really a non-phenomenon in terms of a killer of humanity.
So, how is the government going to survive that it did all this harm with lockdowns, given that this is a non-problem?
And my view that I expressed in that article was that, well, they'll just keep making up the story.
They'll stick to their absurdity and they'll make it up.
They'll say that the reason it wasn't so bad is because of the lockdown and things like that.
Right.
And I found your analogy in your article about the propaganda necessaries like war.
Propaganda Necessaries Like War Masks00:07:54
And Daniel was working with me in Washington when the Iraq war was starting, and we were trying to defy or challenge the war propagandas, and it wasn't easy.
But something has happened since then.
Even Trump was able to run on an anti-war policy that it was a stupid war.
Do you think shifting gears there is a little easier there than it might be on the coronavirus?
And also, it's the issue of patriotism.
They use it when they're gearing up for a war, whether it's a social war or whether it's a war against Iraq.
But do you think that it'll be a little bit more difficult for people to admit, oh, it was all a mistake?
Like many have now said it was a mistake for us to start that war in Iraq?
Yes, I think it will be much more difficult.
They've succeeded in getting the population to buy into this, to be genuinely afraid and to wear masks and to stay at home and to be aggressive in telling their neighbors to stay at home and to wear masks.
So they've elicited a broad popular support for this fabricated fear syndrome.
And people are going to have a hard time admitting that they were wrong to scold their neighbors and that they were wrong to believe in this and that they were wrong to take that personal suffering of staying at home that long.
Of course, one of the reasons this is working is because there are a lot of workers in the professional classes are just happy to get away from the office.
And they haven't lost their jobs and they're still salaried and they're able to stay at home with the kids and do family activities.
It's like a big holiday for them and make videos about it on YouTube and so on.
So one of the sources of compliance is that it has been such a nice family holiday for a lot of professional class workers.
And meanwhile, those that have to actually go out and work are opening up their businesses in defiance.
But the mask is an interesting issue because I think, I'm sure you'll agree, it has a psychological impact among all, above all.
Now, you've reviewed some of the literature on the effectiveness of wearing a mask, especially the cloth mask.
You know, we're two months into this coronavirus here in Texas, and the county judge, Lena Hidalgo for Harris County, she just woke up one morning last week and said, you know what, from now on, everyone in Harris County has got to wear a mask when you're outside.
But you've reviewed some of the literature, and you've come to some different conclusions about that.
Oh, that's nonsense.
From a scientific perspective, the science is clear.
There have been many controlled, randomized control trials, what are called meta-analyses of those controlled trials.
There have been many of these reports over the years, and none of them find any evidence whatsoever to support the idea that a mask, even a respiratory mask,
one of these N95 masks, a surgical mask, any kind of a mask that have been tested, there is no evidence whatsoever that it can increase the prevention of getting a viral respiratory disease because they're transmitted through aerosol, you know, very small particles that are part of the fluid in the air.
So as soon as the mask through breathing moves a little bit, or there is, even if you have a shield that comes around like this, they're never perfect.
You get tired of them.
They're uncomfortable.
All the tests show, and these are very careful studies, they haven't been able to find any benefit in terms of reducing your risk of catching whichever virus is going around at the time in the study.
So the masks don't work, nor should they work.
I reviewed the physics and biological literature as well that is relevant to masks and how they would operate.
They shouldn't work.
There's something called the minimal infective dose.
Well, it turns out that a very small aerosol particle, less than two micrometers, anything less than two micrometers, all the ones that are relevant, carry enough of a viral load in them, hundreds of virions, enough to infect you.
So you will be infected as soon as one of these small particles gets through, and they always get through.
So you look at populations of health care workers that are wearing these masks, the ones that are wearing them versus the ones that don't in these trials, you know, both groups get just as sick.
One of the main differences they found is that the healthcare workers that were forced to wear the tight-fitting ones were getting way more headaches.
But otherwise, they were catching as many of these infections as the others.
So the science is, I think there's a lot of science, and it's clear that there is no scientific and statistical reason to be wearing these crazy masks.
Wonderful.
We need to go, but I do have one more question.
I want to see if I can get a little bit of a comparison about the medical treatment in Canada compared to treatment here in the United States.
Of course, one thing that disappointed me is how much the medical profession and doctors have gone along with adapting to changing the death certificate to maintain a political position.
We've had a couple doctors just recently come out and say it's all nonsense and they don't go along with it.
But because of the systems of medical care, Canada and the United States, and the doctors, do you think that one country had the doctors going along too readily?
Or how do you measure the two, or is that an irrelevant question?
I don't see a big difference, you know, publicly funded health care system versus privately, more privately funded health care system.
I don't see a big difference.
They both have behaved very badly.
For example, in the province of Quebec here in Canada, the great majority of deaths are in homes for the elderly.
And what happened was, in preparation for this thing, because of all the predictions, they sent a lot of people that should be in hospital, that were in care, into these homes.
And this caused a lot of deaths.
And it's a catastrophe.
So they were emptying the beds in preparation for a peak of people needing very intensive care.
And the peak never happened.
And yet, these fragile persons were shipped off to other places, and many of them have died.
And many of them brought infections with them as well.
So it's been a huge public health catastrophe in Canada, where more than half of the deaths, in any case, are in these care facilities for the elderly.
Yeah, sure, sure.
Well, we're going to have to go, but I really want to thank you for being with us today.
It's very informative.
And if you check with our website, the Ron Paul Institute website, you can get some more information.
But thank you for coming on.
And let's all stay in touch because I think you have very, very valuable, important information.
It was a pleasure to be here.
Thank you for having me.
Wonderful.
And I want to thank our viewers today for tuning in.