COVID 19 Conspiracy theories

Fact: Videos are short and easy to watch and conspiracy theories are easy to make. Hard work is digging up PEER REVIEWED JOURNALS for scientifically proven facts.

A video is circulating on facebook/watsapp and is confusing both doctors and the general public alike. It is filled with misinformation and distorted facts.

It includes bits from 2 urgent care physicians Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi – who are owners of urgent care centres themselves. They claim to have tested 5000 patients for COVID 19 in which they found 6 % positive patients for SARS COV 2. They want to generalize this number to the rest of the population thereby suggesting that the death rate is way lower than what is being stated currently and compared it to the death rate of the flu.

For example if there are 10 patients that die out of 1000 that are infected, the death rate would be 1 %. By increasing the denominator saying there are way more people that are infected , one can artificially lower the death rate. Fact remains that Influenza was there for years. We didn’t get our ICUs run over by them. The American Academy for Emergency Medicine (AAEM) and American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) has denounced these two physicians’ statements as “reckless and untested musings inconsistent with science and epidemiology regarding COVID 19. As owners of local urgent care clinics, they used biased non peer reviewed data to advance personal financial interest”

The same physicians then go on to comment on the hygienic theory. They say that we need bacteria and viruses exposure to maintain our immunity. And if we lock ourselves in our house, our immunity will lower down and we will get infected. As per the Hygienic theory, if you boil your water, disinfect everything around you regularly, don’t allow your children to play in mud etc, then your immune system goes up instead of going down , to the point that in such population, the chances of allergies and autoimmune conditions are much more prevalent.

Staying at home for a few months is not going to kill the millions of bacteria that are on each and every person’s skin as we speak nor is it going to destroy your flora. We are still getting adequate exposure by going to the grocery stores/ doing the essentials etc. These physicians are fixated on the idea of greater immunity with greater exposure which in a pandemic situation is very dangerous.

They wanted lockdowns to be lifted on 22 April 20. The whole idea of the lockdown is so that our healthcare systems are not overrun by COVID 19. If our hospitals get filled with COVID 19 patients then what about the patient who gets a stroke, an MI or a sub arachnoid hemorrhage. What if we just don’t have enough beds to even admit them, let alone provide them with urgent/intensive care. COVID 19 has the potential to break the backbone of our health system.

Bill Gates  is a special target for people with minds that are particularly attracted to conspiracy theories. The Melinda and Gates foundation are working on projects like building clean energy nuclear plants that would substitute coal and oil and oil. In Africa as part of their humanitarian work and uplifting the condition of women they introduced greater access Depo-Provera injections  where working women are at quite a disadvantage particularly in the rural areas. Unwanted pregnancy in many cases can be a financial, physical and emotional disaster for a woman who is already supporting a family of three or four children.

The Gates foundation is working on dozens of vaccines for COVID-19 which they have clearly stated that they would not patent in case it is approved. They are aiming to eradicate polio which will only be the second infectious disease ever to be relegated after small pox. One is amazed at the logic presented …. I mean even the argument should have some basis rather than being a complete farce…. Let me present their argument.

Bill Gates was making software, now he is making vaccines so he wants to alter our software through microchips within these vaccines. Whether billionaires should be glorified or whether they should exist at all due to their ability to evade the rules that are set out for the rest of the public, is a separate topic and can be taken at up at a later time. This states the facts and in no way is an attempt to glorify the products of capitalism or billionaires. Educated people fail to realize that while making these claims they are putting themselves in the same basket as a vendor who was told by his local mullah to refuse the polio vaccine because its a Jewish conspiracy to make us infertile. Its laughable at best. People all over the world who are business tycoons, fund research including that related to healthcare and medicine. Bill Gates happens to be one amongst hundreds of such people.

CAUSE OF DEATH COVID 19:

Nobody is being pressured or forced to write COVID 19 on death certificates. If a patient with no significant past medical history is admitted with typical respiratory symptoms and physical signs and CXR  then even if the COVID swab is negative , it is clinically relevant to think about COVID 19 in the current scenario. There have been many cases in which the third or fourth swab tested positive. The swab does not negate the whole clinical picture which the doctor assess. If a patient had multiple co morbidities and he/she died with COVID positive test then you can add all those contributory diagnoses to the death certificate.

As a clinician you can not say for certain which one leads to the other. You can only give your clinical judgement regarding the most likely Primary and secondary cause of death.  At the same time , if a patient with a road traffic accident with head injury is admitted and he/she unfortunately dies due to subsequent cardiac/respiratory failure then we don’t just label it as COVID-19. Its another false claim made in this video that somehow people are being forced to write COVID-19 as cause of death. I have personally filled out many such death certificates and I have not come across a single instance where I was forced into doing any such thing.

Dr. Judy Mikovitz is another character in this video who has been a source for the much of the misinformation in the documentary Plandemic. Mikovitz is a discredited biochemist / ex research scientist who has made absurd and unscientific claims and promoting conspiracy theories with no evidence. If you watch the documentary , you get a clear sense of a person who has got some scores to settle because she was fired/ jailed. Anyways, we will stick to science rather than the person involved. But I admit , sometimes it gets difficult not to take both into account.

I will state her main arguments here.

1. Why Italy was hit hard by COVID….

According to her it was due to the flu vaccine of the previous year because it was grown in a dog’s cell. Dogs have corona viruses so that’s why….

2. She blames the flu vaccine to be responsible for causing greater predisposition to COVID 19 (37 % greater chance) and cites a study done in military recruits one year back.

3. She completely distorts the facts of the military study which showed that those who got vaccinated had lower incidence of influenza and overall virus infections in general. It did show that amongst those individuals incidence of coronaviruses increased but it was not SARS COV 2. Its important to understand that the novel SARS COV 2 is just one of a family of coronaviruses. The flu that we had last winter could have been coronavirus.

4. She states that just like her revolutionary discovery for Chronic Fatigue syndrome (aka murine endogenous retroviruses which was discredited by the way), SURAMIN was a potential treatment for Autism and it was shelved.

5. Hospitals are getting grants for each COVID patient. Its a grant bundle and is not restricted to COVID. Its there for a number of conditions eg Cystic fibrosis, hematological malignancies at our hospitals. The point she is trying to make is that there is a business model in place which is benefitting at the cost of the patient. Well that can be looked into and improved upon. Since its not strictly a scientific fact. We will leave it at that.

The other gentleman in this video claims to be a doctor BUT is not. He is a chiropracter who is very angry at why hydroxychloroquine / quinine is not being recommended. If you watch his full video, he recommends a tonic water that contains quinine for preventing/treating COVID 19. One bottle of that tonic water contains about 80 mg of quinine per each liter. At the dose recommended, you would require 12 bottles of 1 liter tonic water every 8 hours. That is the result when you don’t have sound basic medical knowledge. It can result in making absurd claims that initially seem fascinating but in reality can turn out to be quite the opposite and harmful in certain cases.