Smallpox

Is Martin Luther’s “Plague Advice” Good for Covid?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Personal Statement: J-and-J in May 2020, boosted with Covid, end of December. Raging headache for days. Like a bad cold, slight fever for 2-days, have lost all sense of smell and taste….just in time [/sarcasm] to try out my wife’s Christmas present – an air fryer.

A few thoughts on a Martin Luther quote I have seen used since 2020… first, the quote fashioned by RPT

I am only writing this post because I have just seen a similar Luther quote [albeit mine is more complete] on the Facebook of someone that should know better. One commentor noted:

  • False equivalency, among other logical fallacies. — C.P.

I responded thus (with a slight addition):

Really? A quote about the Black Plague?

The Bubonic plague was a deadly pandemic that wiped out a massive chunk of population in the World during the mid-1300s. In Europe alone the plague wiped out nearly 50% of Europe’s population. Some estimates even claim that Black Death wiped out around two-third of Europe’s population. According to National Geographic the plague killed around 25 million people, almost one-third of Europe’s population (National Geographic). The plague also killed half of London’s population in almost 4 years (Sciencemag). The Bubonic plague is reported to have killed an estimated 75–200 million people (Shipman). Historians report that people died rapidly. The streets were filled with corpses mounted over each other. And the priests were too scared to perform the death rites. Florence, a city of Italy, alone is reported to have 50,000 deaths out of a population of 80,000. The mortality rate was as high as 50% during the Bubonic plague era. (Joshua Mark)

….How serious is Covid-19 exactly? And how will the outcome of the pandemic differ if vaccines were mandatory rather than optional? What additional loss of life can be expected if we do not make vaccination compulsory?

That Covid-19 is serious is beyond question. But let’s look at a few markers to help us evaluate the severity of the risk to humanity.

The deadly Spanish Flu from 1918-1920 is estimated to have killed somewhere between 20-50 million people, or close to 3% of the world’s population. By contrast, Covid-19 has so far killed about 5.3 million people in two years. That represents about 0.07% of the global population. 

How deadly is Covid-19? The overall infection fatality rate (IFR) of Covid has been estimated to be between 0.1% and 0.2%. Quoting from an analysis by Professor John P.A. Ioannidis of multiple studies which calculated inferred IFR by seroprevalence data: 

“Interestingly, despite their differences in design, execution, and analysis, most studies provide IFR point estimates that are within a relatively narrow range.  Seven of the 12 inferred IFRs are in the range 0.07 to 0.20 (corrected IFR of 0.06 to 0.16) which are similar to IFR values of seasonal influenza. Three values are modestly higher (corrected IFR of 0.25-0.40 in Gangelt, Geneva, and Wuhan) and two are modestly lower than this range (corrected IFR of 0.02-0.03 in Kobe and Oise).” (emphasis mine).

For people under 60, the IFR is much lower still. And for vaccinated people, the risk of death from Covid-19 is reduced about ten fold. 

For a vaccinated person, the risk of Covid-19 is no worse than seasonal influenza. 

And this was before Omicron, the new variant which looks set to become the dominant strain around the world in the coming weeks, and so far appears to cause much milder symptoms and a much lower fatality rate. Why are we still in panic mode?

Over the last two years, there were roughly 120 million all cause deaths. Only 5.3 million of those (less than 5% of all deaths) were Covid-19 deaths. Thanks to the media’s scaremongering, there are many people who seem to think that Covid-19 was the leading cause of death in 2020 and 2021. Based on historical mortality data we can estimate that deaths due to cardiovascular disease probably exceeded 40 million over the last two years, while cancer deaths are likely to have exceeded 20 million. That reality does not nullify or make light of the tragic 5.3 million Covid-19 deaths so far. But it helps to put Covid-19 in perspective. …..

— Arguing From The Other Side – Onne Vegter Sets Out The Case Against Mandatory Vaccines (December 2021)

AGAIN, this is in no way parallel to even the 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic. The city had reached about 50,000 residence, and over the course of the fever 5,000 died. That is 5% of that cities population. Comparing…

  • These unparalleled public health actions were enacted for a virus with an infection mortality rate (IFR) roughly similar to seasonal influenza. Stanford’s John P.A. Ioannidis identified 36 studies (43 estimates) along with an additional 7 preliminary national estimates (50 pieces of data) and concluded that among people <70 years old across the world, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.57% with a median of 0.05% across the different global locations (with a corrected median of 0.04%). — AIER

Back in June of 2020 I noted the following:

  • The CDC just came out with a report that should be earth-shattering to the narrative of the political class, yet it will go into the thick pile of vital data and information about the virus that is not getting out to the public. For the first time, the CDC has attempted to offer a real estimate of the overall death rate for COVID-19, and under its most likely scenario, the number is 0.26%. Officials estimate a 0.4% fatality rate among those who are symptomatic and project a 35% rate of asymptomatic cases among those infected*jump, which drops the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) to just 0.26% — almost exactly where Stanford researchers pegged it a month ago. — RPT

Keep in mind in March of 2020 I noted that the rates would be from 0.03% to 0.25% — not to brag or anything, but I am in the 23-studies lane-lines of the Stanford study mentioned in June. I just couldn’t differentiate between age groups, but that was assumed as the average age of deaths.

All this is to say is that to compare such an even is at best a non-sequitur. Much like the same person’s comparing

Dr. Sarfati, with whom I agree on most things, shows unfortunately his twisted logic on vaccines — all the while calling those who disagree with his position in the slightest: anti-vaxers.”

Here is his posting:

Anti-vaxers: Is there any other vaccine in history that required three doses in a year and yet still didn’t prevent transmission of the virus it was meant to protect against?

Reality: remember your childhood vaccines which kept you safe and which you are depriving your children from.

Here are the two responses I wish to note:

S.L. – I shouldn’t respond because I am not an ‘anti-vaxxer’ (I am vaccinated with every vaccine my GP recommended), but I’d just like to comment on this vaccine schedule. I (and most people my age) received FAR less vaccinations that suggested on the above or the current schedule in Australia. I received 6 vaccinations in my first five years of life in Germany in 1970: tuberculosis, smallpox, measles, diphtheria, polio and whooping cough. Some of these were boosted ONCE. So apart from the occasional influenza vaccine (which I take when the ‘season’ looks particularly ominous) I have had perhaps 15 shots in my life. My children (born in the early millennium in Australia) had many additional vaccinations but still not as many as required above. We followed the increased schedule but spaced out and separated the MMR vaccines at the suggestion of our pediatrician at the time. We also refused the HPV vaccine for both children at 14. They were not about to be sexually active. We decided (with them) that they can choose to take the HPV vaccine as adults. Both kids (19 and 22) are healthy and have always been. Same with me – though I’ve worked in education all my life i.e.. in contact with many different people every day and exposed to every ‘childhood disease’ outbreak you can think of. I have no compelling reason to accept uncritically that vaccinations requirements should have needed to go up the way they have because someone wants to improve our health. lol.

Here is my response as well… a bit shorter:

ME – I honestly do not know. Are those doses minimized due to age? And a single or two dose be given to adults? To Wit….

To support my observational question…. well, somewhat answer it — the ATLANTIC notes the following:

  • ….10 micrograms of RNA in each Pfizer shot, a third of the 30-microgram recipe that’s given to people 12 and older. Further down the road, pending another set of votes, authorizations, and recommendations, kids 4 and younger will get a wee 3 micrograms, a tenth of what their parents get…..

Historically, variola major [smallpox] has a case-fatality rate of about 30% (FDA | TIME). In the United States, the 1952 polio epidemic became the worst outbreak in the nation’s history. Of the nearly 58,000 cases reported that year, 3,145 died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis.

(FLASHBACK) Dr. Kelly Victory says delta variant is far, far less lethal

So, even if say 3 adult vaccination shots are needed for such a horrible disease… to require boosters and laws regulating Covid “vaccines,” is not where the evidence leads. The fatality rates and survivability of Covid compared and an argument for vaccinations is moot. Both in the IFR, CFR, and the efficacy of these “vaccines” for Covid are the basis to reject such logic in the OP (original post).

I have also in the past questioned the death rate and other factors are wildly overcounted.

Hospitalization Numbers:

Death Numbers:

Two examples from this post to make a point:

Example One:

A pair of gunshot deaths that counted among COVID fatalities have earned the ire of a county coroner in Colorado. Grand County, in the sparsely-populated (but breathtaking) northwestern quarter of the state, is home to fewer than 15,000 people and has been lucky enough to endure only a handful of deaths related to the Wuhan Virus.

But of those five deaths, County Coroner Brenda Bock says two actually died of gunshot wounds.

Bock sounded furious in her interview with CBS4 News in Denver, and with good reason. Grand County’s economy is heavily reliant on tourism, and as Bock told CBS4, “It’s absurd that they would even put that on there.”

“Would you want to go to a county that has really high death numbers?” she asked, presumably rhetorically. “Would you want to go visit that county because they are contagious? You know I might get it, and I could die if all of a sudden one county has a high death count. We don’t have it, and we don’t need those numbers inflated.”

Bock told CBS4 that because the victims had tested positive for COVID-19 within 30 days of having been shot, the county classified them as “deaths among cases.”

That’s a curious definition, but one required by the national reporting rules created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention….

(PJ-MEDIA)

That is literally 40%!

Example two:

  • Just one more of the many examples I could share is the New York Times getting 40% wrong of their “died from Covid-19 under 30-years old” front page news story. Mmmm, no, they didn’t die of Covid.

Another four-zero. Just sayin.

First Omicron Death (With or Of)

Promises, Promises

I.E., if masks work, why don’t they work? If lockdowns work, why don’t lockdowns work?

I think these stories are related to the non-sequitur nature of the OP… in that it is a false equivalency:

Martin Luther would surely be on the “keep society open” side considering the evidence.

Smallpox Blanket Myths and Truths

Published by Papa Giorgio

Updated a bit…

Elizabeth A. Fenn

Usually treated as an isolated anomaly, the Fort Pitt episode itself points to the possibility that biological warfare was not as rare as it might seem. It is conceivable [e.g., makes for good suspense and is merely a guess with no historical proof], of course, that when Fort Pitt personnel gave infected articles to their Delaware visitors on June 24, 1763, they acted on some earlier communication from Amherst that does not survive today.8

[8] Such a communication might have been either written or oral in form. It is also possible that documents relating to such a plan were deliberately destroyed.

→ In other words, it’s anybody’s guess if this is real history OR an author’s guess.

Even the HISTORY CHANNEL at the worst says this of the “event”:

  • For all the outrage the account has stirred over the years, there’s only one clearly documented instance of a colonial attempt to spread smallpox during the war, and oddly, Amherst probably didn’t have anything to do with it. There’s also no clear historical verdict on whether the biological attack even worked.

They continue with the “did it work” line of reasoning:

It’s not clear smallpox-infected blankets even worked.

It’s also not clear whether or not the attempt at biological warfare had the intended effect. According to Fenn’s article, the Native Americans around Fort Pitt were “struck hard” by smallpox in the spring and summer of 1763. “We can’t be sure,” Kelton says. Around that time, “we know that smallpox was circulating in the area, but they [Native Americans] could have come down with the disease by other means.”

Historian Philip Ranlet of Hunter College and author of a 2000 article on the smallpox blanket incident in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, also casts doubt. “There is no evidence that the scheme worked,” Ranlet says. “The infection on the blankets was apparently old, so no one could catch smallpox from the blankets. Besides, the Indians just had smallpox—the smallpox that reached Fort Pitt had come from Indians—and anyone susceptible to smallpox had already had it.”

The most important indication that the scheme was a bust, Ranlet says, “is that Trent would have bragged in his journal if the scheme had worked. He is silent as to what happened.”

Even if it didn’t work, British officers’ willingness to contemplate using smallpox against the Indians was a sign of their callousness. “Even for that time period, it violated civilized notions of war,” says Kelton, who notes that disease “kills indiscriminately—it would kill women and children, not just warriors.”

The “Smallpox Blanket” Myth, via Ernest W. Adams

…Now, about these smallpox blankets.

During the Siege of Fort Pitt in 1763 — 13 years before American independence — Delaware and Shawnee Indians, aroused by Pontiac’s Rebellion, attacked Fort Pitt, which was near modern day Pittsburgh. Shortly after the siege began, British General Jeffrey Amherst wrote to Colonel Henry Bouquet, who was preparing to lead a party of troops to relieve the siege, “Could it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them.” Bouquet agreed, but there is no evidence that he actually carried out the suggestion, and he indicated in a letter that he was afraid he could contract smallpox himself.

However, those besieged in the fort had already, of their own initiative, tried to infect the besiegers with smallpox and failed. During a parley, the fort’s leader, Captain Simeon Ecuyer, gave blankets and a handkerchief from a smallpox ward to two of the native American delegates, Turtleheart and Mamaltee. However, the effort evidently failed, because they came back for further talks a month later with no signs of disease, and smallpox normally shows signs within two weeks. Furthermore Turtleheart was one of the signatories in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix five years later. Modern historians believe that the blankets had been unused for too long, and any virus present on the blankets would have already died. It is also possible that the Delaware Indians who were given the blankets were immune through prior contact. Smallpox kills 30-35% of those who get it; those who survive are immune from then on.

One thing that is certain is that many native Americans had already contracted smallpox in the ordinary way, unintentionally though contacts with infected whites. There is no example of an outbreak in the Fort Pitt region following the siege. There is a documented outbreak elsewhere in the region among a different people, the Lenape, who had attacked a white settlement where smallpox was present.

So, in conclusion:

  • Infecting people with smallpox was not US government policy or practice, and the only effort to do so occurred prior to US independence.
  • The Fort Pitt event was undertaken by Captain Simeon Ecuyer of the British army on his own initiative; it was neither official British policy or official army policy. In fact, King George III’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 banned colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains because that territory belonged to the native Americans.
  • There is no evidence that it succeeded; there is some evidence that it failed, as the people given the blankets are known to have survived.

And another post by Beyond Highbrow – Robert Lindsay has the common sense commentary about the incident:

…Although we do not know how the plan worked out, modern medicine suggests that it could not possibly have succeeded. Smallpox dies in several minutes outside of the human body. So obviously if those blankets had smallpox germs in them, they were dead smallpox germs. Dead smallpox germs don’t transmit smallpox.

In addition to the apparent scientific impossibility of disease transmission, there is no evidence that any Indians got sick from the blankets, not that they could have anyway. The two Delaware chiefs who personally received the blankets were in good health later. The smallpox epidemic that was sweeping the attacking Indians during this war started before the incident. The Indians themselves said that they were getting smallpox by attacking settler villages infected with smallpox and then bringing it back to their villages.

So, it’s certain that one British commander (British – not even an American, mind you), and not even the one usually accused, did give Indians what he mistakenly thought were smallpox-infected blankets in the course of a war that was genocidal on both sides.

Keep in mind that the men who did this were in their forts, cut off from all supplies and reinforcements, facing an army of genocidal Indians who were more numerous and better armed than they were, Indians who were given to killing all defenders whether they surrendered or not.

If a fort was overwhelmed, all Whites would be immediately killed, except for a few who were taken prisoner by the Indians so they could take them back to the Indian villages to have some fun with them. The fun consisted of slowly torturing the men to death over a 1-2 day period while the women and children watched, laughed and mocked the helpless captives.  So, these guys were facing, if not certain death, something pretty close to that.

And no one knows if any Indians at all died from the smallpox blankets (and modern science apparently says no one could have died anyway). I say the plan probably didn’t even work and almost certainly didn’t kill any of the targeted Indians, much less 50% of them. Yes, the myth says that Amherst’s germ warfare blankets killed 50% of the attacking Indians!

Another example of a big fat myth/legend/historical incident, that, once you cut it open – well, there’s nothing much there…