Monday, April 27, 2020

Michael Hoffman joins Coronavirus shutdown protest in Idaho

Marching for Freedom in Idaho

Constitutionalists: Author and activist Michael Hoffman (in gray hat, sun glasses and tie at upper left) joins others in the march for freedom in Idaho Sunday

Liberty-loving Idahoans: demonstrating along I-95 for the Constitutional right of peaceable assembly for purposes of commerce, which has been eliminated by Gov. Brad Little



Yesterday I was proud to march in Coeur d'Alene arm-in-arm with fellow, freedom-loving dissenters, calling for the great state of Idaho to completely reopen and develop herd immunity. 

We protested Governor Brad Little's unconstitutional ban on our First Amendment right to peaceably assemble to engage in worship, commerce and fraternization. 

The Governor permitted liquor stores to remain open while he commanded churches to close — that's a Soviet model of governance. Whether or not he’s a nice guy or well-intentioned, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We need to speak truth to power. 

Candidates for county sheriff and state legislature appeared and spoke briefly and supportively. A retired, middle-aged NYPD officer marched with us along with his wife. He had an AR-15 rifle slung on his back. He and the Mrs. relocated to Idaho five years ago to raise their children here.

Some marchers wore pistols. I am always unarmed, but I guess you could say we obtain "herd immunity" from Cryptocracy-zombie mass shooters, by the patriotic Idahoans around us who are armed. I fully support an armed citizenry.

The protest opened with prayer by a local pastor, which included prayer for the governor.

We marched along I-95 to much horn-honking and encouragement from passing cars.


The protest had been barely advertised.  Talk about “grassroots” — it was organized by a working class lady living out in the country with no prestigious “credentials” other than her love of liberty. We spotted a tiny item about the forthcoming protest in The Coeur d'Alene Press last week. I imagine if it had been massively publicized we would have had 2,000 or more in attendance.

If you need science facts in the ongoing Coronavirus lockup debate, see:


 It is excellent, including the informed comments from several readers.
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Sunday, April 26, 2020

Stanford Medical School Prof. Dr. John Ioannidis questions the shutdown

The Bearer of Good Coronavirus News

Stanford scientist John Ioannidis finds himself under attack for questioning the prevailing wisdom about lockdowns

By Allysia Finley April 25, 2020 
The Wall Street Journal

Excerpts (below) from this article are published here for non-commercial informational purposes, in accordance with the “Fair Use” doctrine of Section 107 of the United States Copyright Act (Title 17)

Update April 27: Michael Hoffman joins Coronavirus shutdown protest in Idaho

Defenders of coronavirus lockdown mandates keep talking about science. “We are going to do the right thing, not judge by politics, not judge by protests, but by science,” California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom said this week. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer defended an order that, among other things, banned the sale of paint and vegetable seeds but not liquor or lottery tickets. “Each action has been informed by the best science and epidemiology counsel there is,” she wrote in an op-ed.

But scientists are almost never unanimous, and many appeals to “science” are transparently political or ideological. Consider the story of John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford’s School of Medicine. His expertise is wide-ranging—he juggles appointments in statistics, biomedical data, prevention research and health research and policy. Google Scholar ranks him among the world’s 100 most-cited scientists. He has published more than 1,000 papers, many of them meta-analyses—reviews of other studies. Yet he’s now found himself pilloried because he dissents from the theories behind the lockdowns—because he’s looked at the data and found good news.

In a March article for Stat News, Dr. Ioannidis argued that Covid-19 is far less deadly than modelers were assuming. He considered the experience of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined Feb. 4 in Japan. Nine of 700 infected passengers and crew died. Based on the demographics of the ship’s population, Dr. Ioannidis estimated that the U.S. fatality rate could be as low as 0.025% to 0.625% and put the upper bound at 0.05% to 1%—comparable to that of seasonal flu.

“If that is the true rate,” he wrote, “locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.”

...Early in his career, he (Dr. Ioannidis,) realized that “the common denominator for everything that I was doing was that I was very interested in the methods—not necessarily the results but how exactly you do that, how exactly you try to avoid bias, how you avoid error.” When he began examining studies, he discovered that few headline-grabbing findings could be replicated, and many were later contradicted by new evidence.

Scientific studies are often infected by biases. “Several years ago, along with one of my colleagues, we had mapped 235 biases across science. And maybe the biggest cluster is biases that are trying to generate significant, spectacular, fascinating, extraordinary results,” he says. “Early results tend to be inflated. Claims for significance tend to be exaggerated.”

An example is a 2012 meta-analysis on nutritional research, in which he randomly selected 50 common cooking ingredients, such as sugar, flour and milk. Eighty percent of them had been studied for links to cancer, and 72% of the studies linked an ingredient to a higher or lower risk. Yet three-quarters of the findings were weak or statistically insignificant.

Dr. Ioannidis calls the coronavirus pandemic “the perfect storm of that quest for very urgent, spectacular, exciting, apocalyptic results. And as you see, apparently our early estimates seem to have been tremendously exaggerated in many fronts.”

Chief among them was a study by modelers at Imperial College London, which predicted more than 2.2 million coronavirus deaths in the U.S. absent “any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour.” The study was published March 16—the same day the Trump administration released its “15 Days to Slow the Spread” initiative, which included strict social-distancing guidelines.


Dr. Ioannidis says the Imperial projection now appears to be a gross overestimate. “They used inputs that were completely off in some of their calculation,” he says. “If data are limited or flawed, their errors are being propagated through the model. . . . So if you have a small error, and you exponentiate that error, the magnitude of the final error in the prediction or whatever can be astronomical.”

“I love models,” he adds. “I do a lot of mathematical modeling myself. But I think we need to recognize that they’re very, very low in terms of how much weight we can place on them and how much we can trust them....They can give you a very first kind of mathematical justification to a gut feeling, but beyond that point, depending on models for evidence, I think it’s a very bad recipe.”

Modelers sometimes refuse to disclose their assumptions or data, so their errors go undetected. Los Angeles County predicted last week that 95.6% of its population would be infected by August if social distancing orders were relaxed. (Confirmed cases were 0.17% of the population as of Thursday.) But the basis for this projection is unclear. “At a minimum, we need openness and transparency in order to be able to say anything,” Dr. Ioannidis says.

Most important, “what we need is data. We need real data. We need data on how many people are infected so far, how many people are actively infected, what is really the death rate, how many beds do we have to spare, how has this changed.”

That will require more testing. Dr. Ioannidis and colleagues at Stanford last week published a study on the prevalence of coronavirus antibodies in Santa Clara County. Based on blood tests of 3,300 volunteers in the county—which includes San Jose, California’s third-largest city—during the first week of April, they estimated that between 2.49% and 4.16% of the county population had been infected. That’s 50 to 85 times the number of confirmed cases and implies a fatality rate between 0.12% and 0.2%, consistent with that of the Diamond Princess.

The study immediately came under attack. Some statisticians questioned its methods. Critics noted the study sample was not randomly selected, and white women under 64 were disproportionately represented. The Stanford team adjusted for the sampling bias by weighting the results by sex, race and ZIP Code, but the study acknowledges that “other biases, such as bias favoring individuals in good health capable of attending our testing sites, or bias favoring those with prior Covid-like illnesses seeking antibody confirmation are also possible. The overall effect of such biases is hard to ascertain.”

Dr. Ioannidis admits his study isn’t “bulletproof” and says he welcomes scrutiny. But he’s confident the findings will hold up, and he says antibody studies from around the world will yield more data. A study published this week by the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health estimated that the virus is 28 to 55 times as prevalent in that county as confirmed cases are. A New York study released Thursday estimated that 13.9% of the state and 21.2% of the city had been infected, more than 10 times the confirmed cases.

Yet most criticism of the Stanford study has been aimed at defending the lockdown mandates against the implication that they’re an overreaction. “There’s some sort of mob mentality here operating that they just insist that this has to be the end of the world, and it has to be that the sky is falling. It’s attacking studies with data based on speculation and science fiction,” he says. “But dismissing real data in favor of mathematical speculation is mind-boggling.”

In part he blames the media: “We have some evidence that bad news, negative news [stories], are more attractive than positive news—they lead to more clicks, they lead to people being more engaged. And of course we know that fake news travels faster than true news. So in the current environment, unfortunately, we have generated a very heavily panic-driven, horror-driven, death-reality-show type of situation.”

The news is filled with stories of healthy young people who die of coronavirus. But Dr. Ioannidis recently published a paper with his wife, Despina Contopoulos-Ioannidis, an infectious-disease specialist at Stanford, that showed this to be a classic man-bites-dog story. The couple found that people under 65 without underlying conditions accounted for only 0.7% of coronavirus deaths in Italy and 1.8% in New York City.

“Compared to almost any other cause of disease that I can think of, it’s really sparing young people. I’m not saying that the lives of 80-year-olds do not have value—they do,” he says. “But there’s far, far, far more . . . young people who commit suicide.” If the panic and attendant disruption continue, he says, “we will see many young people committing suicide . . . just because we are spreading horror stories with Covid-19. There’s far, far more young people who get cancer and will not be treated, because again, they will not go to the hospital to get treated because of Covid-19. There’s far, far more people whose mental health will collapse.”

He argues that public officials need to weigh these factors when making public-health decisions, and more hard data from antibody and other studies will help. “I think that we should just take everything that we know, put it on the table, and try to see, OK, what’s the next step, and see what happens when we take the next step. I think this sort of data-driven feedback will be the best. So you start opening, you start opening your schools. You can see what happens,” he says. “We need to be open minded, we need to just be calm, allow for some error, it’s unavoidable. We started knowing nothing. We know a lot now, but we still don’t know everything.”

He cautions against drawing broad conclusions about the efficacy of lockdowns based on national infection and fatality rates. “It’s not that we have randomized 10 countries to go into lockdown and another 10 countries to remain relatively open and see what happens, and do that randomly. Different prime ministers, different presidents, different task forces make decisions, they implement them in different sequences, at different times, in different phases of the epidemic. And then people start looking at this data and they say, ‘Oh look at that, this place did very well. Why? Oh, because of this measure.’ This is completely, completely opinion-based.”

People are making “big statements about ‘lockdowns save the world.’ I think that they’re immature. They’re tremendously immature. They may have worked in some cases, they may have had no effect in others, and they may have been damaging still in others.”

Most disagreements among scientists, he notes, reflect differences in perspective, not facts. Some find the Stanford study worrisome because it suggests the virus is more easily transmitted, while others are hopeful because it suggests the virus is far less lethal. “It’s basically an issue of whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist. Even scientists can be optimists and pessimists. Probably usually I’m a pessimist, but in this case, I’m probably an optimist.”

Ms. Finley is a member of the Journal’s editorial board. 

Read more at

COMMENTS FROM READERS

Counter-intuitively, locking down America could make a pathogen worse. In the 1918 breakout of the a Spanish flu, many large U.S. cities legislated strict lock-down regulations. In 1919 when the pathogen re-surged into communities, it came back even more lethal than when the pathogen first caused chaotic concern. People died within a day of becoming ill. Did the isolation strategy actually cause the pathogen to become stronger?  Like an antibiotic killing all of a bacterial infection except that which has mutated a resistance to the antibiotic, resulting in antibiotic resistant strains re-populating the host. Did the 1918-1919 lock-downs, which separated both the healthy from the ill, cause the pathogen to actually strengthen? Could we, by dramatically changing the environment, actually be creating an environment which strengthens what we fear? - Dennis O'Neil
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In many politicians' minds the worst thing that could happen is to relax all the restrictions and...nothing happen. No massive death count or overwhelmed hospitals.  When all this is over and people are bankrupt or businesses failed remember, it wasn’t the virus that shut down the economy and forced people to stay at home, It was the politicians. Rodney Hall
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The lockdowns have done a great job at only one thing. Delaying heard immunity for at least a year. That’s the main reason the virus may return. The virus won’t be defeated until the non-vulnerable population is widely exposed. The vulnerable can stay in shelter, but they may have to do so for the rest of their lives, or until there’s a vaccine. In some immuno-compromised people, a vaccine may not work. That’s the tough truth of the matter. Joseph Breton
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..we have taken steps based on the advice of “experts” who don’t know very much about this virus at all, steps that have no evidence of efficacy, such as “social distancing,” wearing masks too ineffective to filter out the 0.3 micron size of the virus, and telling people to stay home. We can’t all stay home until no one dies. Protect the 80+ year olds, that’s fine. But even for those folks, we have no evidence that socially isolating them will actually protect them and cause no other harm. The pandemic will stop when enough people get it and develop immunity to it; then the virus will not be able to spread. Eventually, there may be a vaccine or a medication to combat this, but we don’t know if that will ever happen, let alone in the near future. Meanwhile, normal life needs to resume, the sooner the better.  Jay Sigel


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Please, someone cite something to refute the following: “For virus and disease, never before in the history of humankind that we know of, have we made the decision to quarantine the healthy.” Yes, during a time of war, with bombs reigning down, those that are healthy and not hurling the bombs will quarantine themselves (shelter) and heed the warnings and edicts from those in authority to shelter in place. But not for medical pandemics.  While there is a history of quarantining large groups that may be infected or using infection as an excuse to quarantine groups like during the bubonic plague and yellow fever, we have never totally locked down free people to stop spreading a virus. It is ludicrous.  This is a failed experiment and it must end now.  - Ed Garwinter
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The thought of hiding out in our houses until this thing passes is insane. Currently there is no cure, no vaccine and it may never happen. Herd immunity can be achieved and we should focus on that strategy now; rather than cowering in fear and hoping this bug will somehow go away and we will somehow avoid casualties. ...We don’t live in a risk free society. Nature will take its course  whether we hide in our homes or get back to work. - William Fris
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Policy should never be dictated by scientists. They are as biased and blind as members of the general public. Dr. Fauchi has never answered the question of how many unnecessary deaths are being caused by this quarantine. By the way, I am a retired Chemical Engineer. - Erick Matzke
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Solve the problem? That’s hubris. We can’t even “solve” the common cold. Despite billions poured into R&D, there is still no vaccine for HIV. Flu shots kind of, sort of work, but not all the time, and have to be reinvented every year. We have to adapt. Wash your hands. Stop shaking hands. Wear a mask if you’re sick. But the lockdown is pure insanity.  -Felix McAllister
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With a vaccine at least a year away - some vaccines take decades - the quickest path through this is to build herd immunity, which requires social interaction. Here in Ohio, hospitals are very underwhelmed, and the problem - if you can call it that - is limited to the large cities.  We can afford less social distancing to build herd immunity and get the economy going again and still not overwhelm hospitals. - Jason Bowman
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Coronavirus is not killing 2,500 people daily. 2,500 people are dying daily, and some (not all) of whom also happen to have coronavirus, which is not necessarily their cause of death.   
- Joseph Breton
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Read more at https://www.wsj.com
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Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Tyranny in America: Playground Protestor Faces Six Months in Jail

Sara Brady of Meridian, Idaho could be sentenced to 6 months in jail for visiting a closed playground in defiance of the unconstitutional edict of “royal” Governor Brad Little. 

 in defiance of the command of the monarchial Governor Little.

Facebook Betrays Freedom and the Internet’s Mission
 In conformity with the Establishment’s conformist statist media, CEO Mark Zuckerberg caved in to intense pressure from the Washington Post (aided by the New York Times) and announced a ban on publicizing peaceable assembly and protest as guaranteed by the Bill of Rights — when the governor of the state objects to the exercise of the people's Constitutional rights.

The legacy media have shamed Facebook into instituting censorship of First Amendment activity:

The NY Times wrote, “The protests against state shelter-in-place orders are being coordinated by a handful of provocateurs on Facebook." 

The Washington Post stated: ‘The coronavirus is a perfect subject for online opportunists who instill a deep distrust in all authority, while promoting a seductive, conspiratorial alternate reality." 

To the New York Times and the Washington Post

Do you know how ridiculous you appear? All the protests were "coordinated by a handful of provocateurs on Facebook"? Talk about “alternative reality”! 

Our peaceful protest in Sandpoint, Idaho contra Gov. Brad Little's shelter in place order, was "coordinated” by local concerned citizens, and not exclusively or mainly by “gun groups” as the Post hysterically alleges. 

The New Left in the '60s and early '70s had a healthy distrust of the authority of the state. Now you promote allegiance to it, and subscribe to wild conspiracy theories that deny the fact that the American people may have a legitimate Constitutional grievance. 

No hidden sinister motive: it's called civil liberties activism. Henry David Thoreau would have joined us. 

We don’t “distrust all authority” as you recklessly allege. We are however, vigilant toward any man-made authority that usurps the rights which Thomas Jefferson stated were “endowed by our Creator."

Quit demonizing your fellow Americans, who happen to be your political opponents! 

As constitutional patriots we possess a healthy skepticism toward bureaucratic authority which usurps our inalienable, God-given rights, and we dare to doubt the disinformation of the corporate media. Our skepticism is the essence of what it means to be an American. 

Your support for extremist monarchial, or worse, Soviet-style state authority, threatens the sacred rights of the individual, for which our forefathers and foremothers fought, and bequeathed to their posterity as our irrevocable American heritage

Michael Hoffman
Former reporter, New York bureau of the Associated Press  



Tuesday, April 07, 2020

Physician Theatens to Deny Care to Coronavirus Dissidents

Idaho Physician Theatens to Deny Care to Coronavirus Dissidents

By Michael Hoffman

APRIL 8 UPDATE: 
Sheriff Wheeler answers Dr. Burnett — scroll down this page
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In a letter published in the Bonner County Daily Bee newspaper:

Addressed to Idaho State Rep. Heather Scott, and Bonner County Sheriff Daryl Wheeler, both of whom have protested "shelter in place" limitations on our Constitutional rights to peaceful assembly, the physician informed them:

 In the “event that you will require hospitalization (and)...a ventilator...because of your behavior, you have relinquished your claim to these scare resources.” 

— Robert J. Burnett, MD 
Kootenai Health 
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho

Dr. Burnett is a "Medical Director" at Kootenai Health (north Idaho's largest hospital) 

One can’t help asking the question, has he perhaps in the past allegedly denied full care to patients who offended this physician’s strongly held ideological views? 

We have the right to ask. In this reporter's view, if his remarks, as published in the Bonner County Daily Bee newspaper are accurate and representative, then his license to practice medicine should be suspended, pending a thorough investigation. We cannot have physicians playing God with the lives of dissidents and protestors who may come under their care. 
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Kootenai Health 

Tel. (208) 625-4001

2003 Kootenai Health Way 
Coeur d’Alene, ID 83814

E-mail: comments@kh.org

John Ness, C.E.O.

Karen Cabell, D.O. Chief Physician Executive

Terence Neff, MD, Chairman of the Board of Trustees
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Idaho Board of Medicine
PO Box 83720 
Boise, Idaho 83720
info@bom.idaho.gov
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Idaho’s Patriot Sheriff Answers Doctor Who Said He Would Not Treat Him

We wish to thank all of the readers of this blog who have contacted the physician’s employer to register a complaint about his professed intent to commit malpractice. Direct action is often a difficult thing to prod Internet screen watchers into undertaking, yet it is action in the real world that continues to do the most good. In this vein, any donation you care to send to keep our Truth Mission in the black in these hard times, will be gratefully received: https://revisionisthistorystore.blogspot.com

Idaho's Patriot Sheriff Daryl Wheeler, who has questioned the constitutionality of government mandates with regard to the Coronavirus hysteria, has answered Dr. Robert Burnett, a medical director at Kootenai Health (the area’s largest hospital). Burnett is the physician who said he would refuse to treat the sheriff if he gets the virus, as retribution for the sheriff having questioned the panic. 
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Below is my response to Dr. Robert J. Burnett’s letter, “Officials’ comments threaten others’ health”, as published on April 5, 2020, in the Bonner County Daily Bee.

Dear Dr. Burnett

If I, or any of my family acquired an illness a year from now, would you ‘do no harm’ to us? Why should anyone ever trust their health to someone who arbitrarily determines the application of the quality of medical treatment based upon a difference of personal opinion on your part?

simply called for our Honorable Governor Little to call the Idaho Legislators back into session with the goal of debating the issue and the governor’s action to it. Legislators can call expert witnesses and determine the best path forward to preserve both our collective health, and our rights enshrined in our Constitution. I made no claim as to being a medical professional. 
Thankfully my approach to carrying out the duties of Sheriff is not based upon a capricious nature, nor emotion. I, and my deputies abide by the call of duty that this office receives 24/7/365. We place ourselves in any number of hazardous — including medical situations, daily and will continue to do so.

Dr. Burnett, we’re both first responders, and as such in facing the dangers of the unseen, we selflessly take that challenge for the sake and safety of those we respectively serve in our given professions. As a personal pledge to you, you will receive the same quality of service as any other citizen of Bonner County. I will be honored to serve you today, as I was my very first day in office.
Thank you for your consideration,

DARYL WHEELER
Bonner County Sheriff
Coeur d’Alene Press, April 8, 2020, page A-4 
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