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Feb. 26, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:50
The Truth About the Coronavirus - SPREADS!
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
This is the truth about the coronavirus developments.
A lot has been going on.
Let's get right to it. So, coronavirus cases now for the first time are emerging faster at a faster rate outside China than inside China.
The first case of coronavirus in Pakistan has been confirmed by officials and this is a big challenge because Pakistan lacks significant resources when it comes to dealing with public health emergencies.
Iran is now one of the epicenters of the coronavirus outbreak with the second highest death toll after China.
US universities are cancelling study abroad programs in Italy and urging students to return to the US amid soaring coronavirus cases.
A flight attendant for Korean Air who worked several flights out of Los Angeles International Airport has been diagnosed with coronavirus.
Cruise ship has been denied entry to Jamaica and Cayman Islands amid coronavirus fears.
83 individuals who had traveled to China are being monitored for possible coronavirus infection in Nassau County, Long Island, New York.
And in an unprecedented move, Israelis advised to avoid all travel abroad Over coronavirus.
Russia, of course, closes borders.
It has only a couple of cases.
But I guess open borders and globalism, well, it's a cult and it doesn't matter how many bodies pile up.
The borders remain open.
Let's look at the numbers.
Coronavirus cases, 81,396.
There is significant reason to have skepticism about this.
We'll go into that shortly.
Deaths 2,771.
Recovered 30,359.
Total cases flattening out.
Total deaths, there's a slight flattening out as well.
Now, this is from the Epoch Times.
Leaked documents reveal coronavirus infections up to 52 times higher than reported figures in China's Shandong province.
The novel coronavirus outbreak in eastern China's Shandong province is much worse than what has been officially reported according to a series of internal government documents obtained by the Epoch Times.
Each day from February 9th to February 23rd, Shandong authorities underreported.
The number of infections, according to internal data compiled by the Shandong Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, CDC, the CDC kept a tally of the number of people who tested positive for the virus during nucleic acid testing using a diagnostic kit to test patient samples and detect whether they contained the virus's genetic sequence.
The CDC's daily new infection numbers ranged from 1.36 times to 52 times greater than the officially published data by the Shandong Health Commission and China's National Health Organization.
As of February 25, the Shandong government stated that there were a total of 755 infections in the province, but the internal document showed that 1,992 people had tested positive for the virus via nucleic acid testing as of February 23.
Now, the government publicly stated that there were four newly diagnosed coronavirus patients on February 22, but the internal document said that there were 61 positive tests that So, again, I'll put the sources to all of this below.
This is a time of mass churning of information.
I cannot, of course, as an individual, vouch for the reliability of all of this.
Please check out the sources for yourself.
From the New York Times, this is February 26th.
Today, 4.18 p.m.
Eastern Standard. Coronavirus live updates.
Cases rise in Italy and Iran and spread to other countries.
People with potential exposure are in quarantine around the world.
This is the 83 mentioned before in Nassau County.
The epidemic has begun in Germany, the health minister said, after new infections apparently were contracted there.
New cases of the coronavirus popping up across Europe, dozens of infections in Iran, stoking fears about an uncontrolled spread in the Middle East.
Global market jitters continuing after a steep slide.
American health authorities warning that it was a matter of when, not if, the epidemic would reach the United States.
A toxic political climate in Washington complicating the public health challenge.
Boy, it's a good thing they spent all of that time on Mueller's Russia collusion investigation and all that impeachment stuff, thus fraying and decaying the relationships between the parties because...
Well, there's always a curveball in life.
They call it in the elections the October surprise.
I guess this is the December toxicology report, and the Democrats have burned up any political goodwill they might have from the Republicans.
For what? For nothing.
Less than nothing. In the European Union, which prides itself on open borders, new cases were recorded in Austria, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece and Spain.
Most were tied to Italy, where the authorities have been struggling to contain an outbreak that has infected at least 325 people, most of them in the north near Milan.
Hotels in Austria, France and the Canary Islands of Spain were locked down this week after guests tested positive for the virus or were suspected of having it.
The steps to limit contagion differed from place to place, but large group gatherings were often the first things to be cancelled when the virus had been detected.
In China, the authorities cautioned that the falling infection rate may be only a temporary reprieve, while South Korean officials scrambled to contain the largest outbreak outside China.
The U.S. military confirmed that one soldier stationed in South Korea had tested positive.
So... This is a fellow named Dr.
Siegel. Reports from Nebraska Biocontainment Facility, coronavirus may be, quote, more contagious than the flu.
We'll get more into this in a little bit.
Fox News Medical A team member Dr.
Mark Siegel said Wednesday the coronavirus is appearing to be more contagious than the flu.
Reporting from Omaha, Nebraska, Siegel said he has received wide-ranging access to the University of Nebraska's biocontainment facility where Americans infected with the virus are being treated and quarantined.
Dr. Siegel reported, quote, one is suffering, this is two patients being treated, one is suffering from that severe pneumonia we've been talking about and is possibly or probably on the antiviral treatment we are studying so intensely.
The others, there are 15 in total.
One came in last night on Medivac and was reunited with her spouse.
They are in adjoining rooms.
He says that people are wearing protective gear almost all the time.
One thing they told me that's really striking, he said, they think this virus may be actually more contagious than the flu.
That's why the CDC is concerned about community spread here, because it's looking like it's even more contagious than we thought.
So here is an article from Vox.
Deadly pathogens escape the lab over and over again.
And this is really astonishing.
In 1977, the last case of smallpox was diagnosed in the wild.
And that moment came at the end of a decades-long campaign to eradicate smallpox, a deadly infectious disease that killed about 30% of those who contracted it.
From the face of the earth, about 500 million people died of smallpox in the century before it was annihilated.
But in 1978, the disease cropped back up in Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
Janet Parker was a photographer at Birmingham Medical School.
When she developed a horrifying rash, doctors initially brushed it off as chickenpox.
After all, everyone knew that smallpox had been chased out of the world, right?
Parker got worse and was admitted to the hospital where testing determined that she had smallpox.
After all, she died of it a few weeks later.
How did she get a disease that was supposed to have been eradicated?
Well, it turned out that the building that Parker worked in also contained a research laboratory, one of a handful, where smallpox was studied by scientists who were trying to contribute to the eradication effort.
Some papers reported that the lab was badly mismanaged with important precautions ignored because of haste.
The doctor who ran the lab died by suicide shortly after Parker was diagnosed.
Somehow smallpox escaped the lab to infect an employee elsewhere in the building.
Through sheer luck and a rapid response from health authorities, including a quarantine of more than 300 people, the deadly error didn't turn into an outright pandemic.
And this, by the way, is an article from 2019, from March of 2019, so 10 months or so, nine months before COVID-19.
All over the world, bioresearch labs handle deadly pathogens, some with the potential to cause a pandemic.
Sometimes researchers make pathogens even deadlier in the course of their research.
Research into viruses can help us develop cures, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, okay, I got it.
So how do they find their way out of the lab?
The U.S. government controls research into, quote, select agents and toxins, end quote, that pose a serious threat to human health, from bubonic plague to anthrax.
There are 66 select agents and toxins regulated under the program and nearly 300 labs approved to work with them.
New biology techniques also allow for more controversial forms of research, including making diseases more virulent or more deadly to anticipate how they might mutate in the wild.
Come on. This is going to kill a lot of people, this COVID-19, and the idea that, well, it was worth the risk because we could have dealt with something that might have mutated in the wild.
Oh, not true, I will say, to keep myself on the right side of sailors' language.
Human error. The 1978 smallpox death was caused by carelessness.
Poor lab safety procedures and badly designed ventilation.
In 2014, as the Food and Drug Administration did clean up for a planned move to a new office, hundreds of unclaimed vials of virus samples were found in a cardboard box in the corner of a cold storage room.
Six of them, it turned out, were vials of smallpox.
No one had been keeping track of them.
No one knew they were there. They may have been there since the 1960s.
Panicked scientists put the materials in a box, sealed it with clear packing tape, and carried it to a supervisor's office.
This, of course, is not approved handling for dangerous materials.
It was later found that the integrity of one vial was compromised.
Luckily, not one containing a deadly virus.
So you can read all of this if you, I don't know, don't feel like sleeping tonight.
This is the government.
This is the government.
In 2014, a researcher accidentally contaminated a vial of fairly harmless bird flu with a far deadlier strain.
The deadly bird flu was then shipped across the country to a lab that didn't have authorization to handle such a dangerous virus where it was used for research on chickens.
The potential exposure of 75 federal employees to live anthrax was another one after a lab that was supposed to inactivate the anthrax samples accidentally prepared activated ones.
In 2008, a sterilization device malfunctioned and unexpectedly opened, exposing a nearby unvaccinated worker to undisclosed pathogens.
Anyway, you can just go on and on.
This is terrifying.
In the UK, a recent investigation found more than 40 mishaps at specialist laboratories between June 2015 and July 2017.
You know, that's two years in a shade.
That's not a lot of time.
One every two to three weeks!
Beyond the breaches that spread infections were blunders that led to a dengue virus, which kills 20,000 people worldwide each year, being posted by mistake.
Staff handling potentially lethal bacteria and fungi with inadequate protection.
And one occasion where students at the University of the West of England unwittingly studied live meningitis-causing germs which they thought had been killed by heat treatment.
Anyway, on and on and on it goes.
You tell me how this is possibly worth it.
How this is possibly worth the risk.
So... Ralph Barrick, an infectious disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last week, this is November 9th, this is 2015, published a study on his team's efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of SHC014 coronavirus found in horseshoe bats in China and the backbone of one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome in mice.
The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and cause disease in mice, according to the team's results which were published in Nature Medicine.
The results demonstrate the ability of the SHC014 surface protein to bind and infect human cells, validating concerns that this virus or other coronaviruses found in bat species may be capable of making the leap to people without first evolving in an intermediate host.
They also reignite a debate about whether that information justifies the risk of such work, known as gain-of-function research.
Quote, if the new virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory.
Quote, Simon Wayne Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, told Nature.
In October 2013, the U.S. government put a stop to all federal funding for gain-of-function studies with particular concern rising about influenza, SARS, and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.
And, uh... Yeah.
Barrick's study on this SCH-014 chimeric coronavirus began before the moratorium was announced and the NIH allowed it to proceed during a review process, which eventually led to the conclusion that the work did not fall under the new restrictions.
That's great. Let's stop doing this stuff.
Oh, you're doing this stuff?
Yeah, keep doing it.
Sure. Sounds like a really great idea.
Engineer a virus with the surface protein of the coronavirus found in bats and the backbone of one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome in mice.
Have you people never seen a horror movie?
This sounds like the backdrop where the TV is playing to give you all of the cheesy backstory of the pandemic.
Movies. My God.
All right. Now, this is not good.
So, some of these recovered COVID-19 patients in Guangdong Province have tested positive again.
This is about 14% of patients who recovered from the novel coronavirus were discharged from hospitals in southern China's Guangdong province, and they were tested positive again in later checkups, according to the local health authority.
A positive test suggests the recovered patients may still carry the virus, adding complexity to efforts to control the outbreak.
Yeah, I could see how that would add a little complexity in efforts to control the outbreak.
So, you've recovered.
You're still carrying the virus.
Does that mean you're still infectious?
I assume so. Does that mean you can ever be not infectious?
Well, that's not good.
That's 14% of patients.
Now, to my lovely friends in Australia.
Well, it's coming.
It's just how long it takes to come.
So, a virologist at the forefront of coronavirus research has warned Australians to stock up in essentials to prepare for home quarantine and school and work closures when the new coronavirus sweeps through the country.
Associate Professor Ian McKay of the University of Queensland said in his opinion a pandemic was inevitable and it was only a matter of time before SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the deadly COVID-19, ripped through the Australian population.
The virus is too well entrenched in many countries around the world, he told 3AW's Neil Mitchell.
It's coming. It's just how long it takes to come.
China has slowed things down, so we've got time to prepare.
We owe them for that. But it will get here eventually.
Professor McKay, who helped develop coronavirus tests for use in Australia, said the government had failed to advise citizens on how to prepare for what's coming.
Now, you know why? See, this is the thing, Professor McKay.
The government is too busy chasing people down for offensive tweets, and it's too busy telling people that the real danger...
It's not some weird Franken-virus cooked up in a lab in Wuhan.
No, no, you see, the real danger is that the Earth might be a degree or two warmer in 100 years.
That's where the massive amount of scientific research and energies and focus has been poured in.
The real danger, you see, the American government hasn't been talking about any of this or dealing with any of this or having any kind of punishment for weird countries that are...
Trying to Franken-mutate us into the next dimension?
Because you see, the real problem is that there were some Russian bots who bought a couple of thousand dollars worth of ads on Facebook before the 2016 election because the government always gets things right and has everything in proper focus.
So, again, I will put that below.
You may have noticed this.
Iran's deputy health minister and an MP have both tested positive for the new coronavirus, proving privilege is no barrier to the disease.
Well, I don't know how much privilege you actually have in Iran.
This is a...
I'll turn the sound off for this.
So this is a worker, a medical worker, waddling down the corridor of a hospital after a long...
And brutal shift.
This is a nurse at Queen Minha Hospital fighting on the front line since February 11th.
This is exhausting. And of course, when you're this tired, you know, get sleep, people.
Get your rest.
Because as far as I'm no doctor, but my understanding is that it really does help your immune system when you're well rested.
So yeah, this is a 46-year-old nurse, no sip of water or meal all day trying to deal with this hellish virus.
All right, how does the coronavirus kill and how many people would it kill?
And, you know, I'm not trying to freak everyone out here.
I'm just, you know, don't shoot the messenger.
This is important stuff. You know, I said from the very beginning, I covered all of the stuff to do with Ebola.
I covered a lot to do with other, quote, virus outbreaks that were going to be deadly and take us all down.
And I'm pretty good at assessing this stuff now.
And I said from the very beginning, this was the real deal.
I said, because, you know, You can look at the numbers.
You can look at the lack of containment.
You can look at the fact that it's a totalitarian government that's more interested in covering its own ass than informing the world and dealing with the problem.
This could all have been dealt with, in my humble opinion, very early on if they'd been honest and contained people at the very beginning, but no.
This is part of what I talked about in my documentary.
I'll link to it below. Hong Kong Fight to Freedom.
There is a cover your ass and don't report bad news because of shooting the messenger culture in China.
I knew this was going to be a big deal and also I knew it was going to be a big deal because the media largely ignored it for the first couple of weeks and said it wasn't a big deal and that's, you know, we're in this late Atlas Shrugged upside down world where the only reason you know something is important is you're told it's not.
So, coronavirus infections attack the respiratory tract, can lead to illnesses like pneumonia or the common cold, and we talked about this with SARS before.
So, the infection triggers fever and coughing.
It then leads to shortness of breath.
In severe cases, such as pneumonia, the end-cough infection could lead to gastrointestinal problems as well as kidney failure, according to the CDC. And again, you can look to this in more detail.
A leading Chinese virology team compared the genetics and proteins of the new virus NCARV and SARS. The team then warned the Wuhan NCARV poses a significant public health risk for human transmission because, as I talked about before, it has the ability to bind to a protein found on the surface of most human proteins.
Quote, people need to be reminded that risks, risk and dynamic of cross-species or human-to-human transmission of coronaviruses are also affected by many other factors.
So they are, coronaviruses are zoonotic, meaning they are transmitted between animals and people.
And again, you can look at this in more detail.
And while diarrhea is common in people infected by coronavirus, the fecal-oral route does not appear to be a common mode of transition.
Leading U.S. health experts reportedly predicted in October that a new coronavirus could kill up to 65 million people in a year in a warning issued three months before the recent outbreak in China.
Boy, it's a good thing that I'm not into conspiracy theories or...
That would be kind of a doozy.
Like, what are the odds that right before this outbreak in China...
There was a big warning about a new coronavirus.
Experts at the prestigious Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security modeled a hypothetical pandemic on a computer program as part of research last October.
Hypothetical coronavirus outbreak, it took 18 months to wipe out 65 million people around the world.
Dr. Eric Toner, a senior researcher at Johns Hopkins, said he wasn't shocked when the news of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan first came out in late December.
Really? Really? So he said, I have thought for a long time that the most likely virus that might cause a new pandemic would be a coronavirus.
We don't yet know how contagious it is.
We know that it is being spread person to person, but we don't know to what extent.
And preventive measures, I've talked about those before, and I don't believe it's going to kill that many people, but, well, it's going to kill a few.
All right. So, the coronavirus outbreak has left many experts wondering how many people may catch the infection.
Virtually unheard of just two months ago, the COVID-19 strain has spread well beyond its epicenter in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
More than 80,300 cases being confirmed globally, as we talked about, and a Harvard doctor has predicted That between 40 and 70% of people all over the world could catch COVID-19 within the next year, with the vast majority of cases being mild.
Other experts have questioned this claim, stressing it is too early in the outbreak to predict how it may play out.
So, that is not good.
This is Mark Lipsitch from Harvard, predicts that within the coming year, some 40 to 70% of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19.
But he clarifies emphatically this does not mean we all will have severe illnesses.
And again, this is a possibility.
There is no way to know for sure as yet.
And yeah, just giving you the facts.
A fourth Diamond Princess passenger has died after the coronavirus quarantine.
This came out just yesterday.
Four passengers that were on board Princess Cruises...
Diamond Princess during a coronavirus quarantine have died, according to a Japanese broadcast outlet, NHK, Reuters, and the New York Post report.
The passenger was a Japanese citizen in their 80s.
It was not confirmed in the report whether or not they had tested positive for the virus.
three other Japanese passengers from the Diamond Princess have died after being quarantined for coronavirus.
The economic effects, I was, of course, talking about this weeks ago, but the economic effects, the interruptions to the business-to-business supply chain, the fact that the last antibiotics manufacturing plant in America closed the fact that the last antibiotics manufacturing plant in America closed down in 2004 and 80% of America's antibiotics come from Please double up on your prescriptions if you don't mind me saying so.
Not that I'm giving. Any medical advice whatsoever, but it might be valuable to do so.
And the coronavirus has wiped out $1.7 trillion in stock market value in just two days.
The S&P lost an estimated $1.737 trillion in value in two days.
Stocks cratered again on Tuesday as investors fled riskier assets amid intense fears about a slowdown in global growth caused by the deadly coronavirus.
The Nasdaq Composite fell 2.8% on Tuesday and joined the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average in turning negative for the year.
So, yeah, economic activity is slowing.
I guess the only plus that I can find is a friend of mine in China has told me it's great to go camping because you can finally see the stars over China.
So, yeah. That is, you know, we're all going to get to know our families and friends just a whole lot better.
And we're going to remind ourselves what's really important in life over the next little while because things are going to slow down.
So for my friends here in Canada, Coronavirus updates.
This is from the National Post.
Stockpile food and meds in case of infection, Canada's health minister says.
Oh, I guess it's not just me giving health advice to get your meds, Canada's health minister says.
It's good to be prepared because things can change quickly, Minister Paddy Hadjou.
Oh, that's unfortunate.
That really sounds like a sneeze.
So, you know, it's good.
It's good that we're paying godforsaken firstborn kidney rates of taxation in Canada so we can get Patty to tell us it's good to be prepared because things can change quickly.
Yeah, so, you know, wonderful.
Because, you know, if she wasn't telling us that, we'd just be staring at the wall waiting to die.
So she also suggested people should do what they can to ease the burden on a health care system in the meantime by staying home if they're sick, washing their hands, and getting flu shots.
So, that's important.
As the virus spreads to more countries, Health Minister Paddy Hajdu said travelers should recognize there could be a risk if they leave Canada.
It's important that people know that international travel may have exposed them to the novel coronavirus, and they may not know.
So, anyway.
Norway's public health agency said on Wednesday that one person had tested positive So, I also wanted to point out that there have been people who have...
Had the virus without symptoms for up to 42 days, from what I've been reading.
Here in Italy, you can see these shelves are bare.
In what way, possibly, could they be considered bare?
And what could they be bare of?
Well, of course, it's Italy. The pasta shelves are empty!
What's happening? There wasn't this much panic when World War II started, tells this Italian fellow.
Oh my god.
So, yeah, people are stockpiling in Italy, which of course has significant numbers of cases.
Here is something that's interesting.
This is being put on Twitter as if it's a real thing.
It does appear to be a training exercise, which is why the man starts and stops.
So this is a training exercise.
A person tries to escape...
A checkpoint and you can see the truck, the beast car ahead, pulls ahead And this guy comes out as part of this training exercise.
He yells, he rips off his mask, obviously exposing everyone to...
They butterfly his net, butterfly net his head, and then they take him down.
And this is how they're training to deal with people.
And so, you know, for all of the low brains out there who we're talking about, it's just like the cold.
Yeah, good luck getting this kind of response the next time you get a couple of sniffles and you're on your way to get some neocitrine.
So yeah, they are really working hard to come in, and now you can see them decontaminating everything, and that's what they're working on.
Incubation, yeah, so I wanted to talk about this.
There is now a question of whether coronavirus has a longer incubation period than previously believed.
Chinese media now reports that one patient was diagnosed 42 days after she returned home from Wuhan.
While a new study led by China's top coronavirus experts found the virus incubation period could be as long as 24 days.
So 24 days, I'm not really sure about the difference.
I'm sure you lovely listeners will illuminate me in the comments below, but that's a long-ass incubation time, and that, of course, the longer the incubation time, the more likely it is to spread because you don't know that you're unwell.
And last but not least, let us look at adaptation.
This is an unknown place.
I don't think this is staged.
I checked the comments, but here you can see a barber.
And said barber is doing his combing and his haircuts from a distance.
This could be a comedy show.
This could be real. But this is the kind of adaptation that people are going to have to get used to for quite a considerable period of time.
So... Thank you, everyone, so much.
I hope that you find these helpful.
Thank you for sharing this information, whether directly or indirectly, just verbally.
I really do appreciate it.
Please, please help out in what it is that I'm doing.
You can do so at freedomain.com forward slash donate.
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