Letter: Mighty doctors rightly admonished us simpletons

Posted 8/19/21

While open dialogue about COVID is censored and punished across major social media platforms, and the free exchange of information is policed by fact-checking apparatchiks and filtered by an openly …

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Letter: Mighty doctors rightly admonished us simpletons

Posted

While open dialogue about COVID is censored and punished across major social media platforms, and the free exchange of information is policed by fact-checking apparatchiks and filtered by an openly partisan, popular search engine, a group of Barrington medical professionals — in rebuke of a recent editorial against masks in our schools — has admonished us simpletons to have an “honest conversation” about the pandemic with them, the experts.

Of course, an honest conversation begins with the “ignored medical facts” that SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated and COVID-19 is a blanket term for different diseases with different causes; but we know our interlocutors, toeing the line, would pan that preamble as “inflammatory, erroneous and irresponsible.”

We can rely on their expertise, then, similarly to omit from an honest conversation the litany of studies that disprove the effectiveness of masks and even demonstrate the harm of their prolonged use. And a good bedside manner also forbids them to mention how many hundreds of thousands of dollars the American Academy of Pediatrics — “no link to big government” — receives from pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer, a company which, in addition to total immunity from negligence, fraud or malice, has demanded sovereign assets, e.g. military bases, as collateral in vaccine deals with Argentina and Brazil.

On our next visit to the office for our quarter-hourly booster shot, perhaps one of these well-informed clinicians could tell us why the vaccinated are overwhelming majority of Israel’s hospitalized COVID cases, notwithstanding the country’s high vaccination rate.

Fortunately, the public forum is not their narrow consultation room; and here, recourse to a second opinion is not limited to one of their referrals.

During the 2018-2019 flu season, the CDC estimated that children (ages 5 to 17) made up 21.5 percent of flu cases; compare that to 14.3 percent of COVID cases mentioned in the practitioners’ letter. That same age group also accounted for 4 percent of flu hospitalizations; compare that to 1.3-3.5 given for COVID. And yet, we weren’t masking up (or locking down) for that school year. But what most significantly determines a disease’s severity is its mortality rate, which the panel from Barrington has neglected to provide. However, the comparison is moot because influenza, as of 2020, has all but disappeared (and we’re assured it’s nothing to do with misdiagnosis).

Chest pain, shortness of breath and brain fog in children are all likelier symptoms of choking on masks during recess than COVID, long-COVID, longer-COVID, eterna-COVID or any other new bait for a fat research grant. Our kids are not fragile, shrinking invalids, spared certain death only by the interdicts of beloved authorities; they are robust, developing humans, from whom irreplaceable life experiences at school (as elsewhere) were stolen last year, by old hypochondriacs, power-grabbing killjoys and avaricious pill-pushers.

With independent judgment, East Bay Newspapers held school officials answerable to students for their lack of creativity, innovation and courage, and incidentally suggested a similar poverty among our keepers, who prefer inpatients to free citizens, hence the rebuke.

Zachary Cooper
Bristol

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Mike Rego has worked at East Bay Newspapers since 2001, helping the company launch The Westport Shorelines. He soon after became a Sports Editor, spending the next 10-plus years in that role before taking over as editor of The East Providence Post in February of 2012. To contact Mike about The Post or to submit information, suggest story ideas or photo opportunities, etc. in East Providence, email mrego@eastbaymediagroup.com.