Two speakers question official COVID death counts, citing an Italian study suggesting 99% of reported deaths were incidental rather than caused by the virus. They discuss the difficulty finding reliable excess mortality data and contrast strict lockdown policies like the Philippines' age-based restrictions with Sweden's approach of letting individuals assess their own risk.
So, uh, I am going to challenge you and me because I, I have agreed with you at the very beginning of COVID You said that this was another example of hysteria. I agreed with you then. What is your position now in retrospect?
Well, I think I made some mistakes early on regarding, uh, I'm regarding various factors of how this would progress, but it's hard to say what mistakes because clearly there is mass hysteria going on here, including that we don't know— we have no idea whatsoever how many people have died of this disease. An Italian study found that 99% of so-called COVID deaths were with COVID not of COVID That is to say, there were other cofactors that could have been responsible. Which is to say that if you take something like half a million people have died worldwide, the actual number could be as low as 5,000 worldwide.
We really have 500,000, and you know what, we never will. Right. Well, I have announced that it is very difficult to find the deaths numbers and, and excess deaths numbers for 2020 on the internet. The CDC does not appear to have published them, and it would be interesting to compare them to, to previous years. What in retrospect do you think most countries should have done as opposed to what they did?
Basically, most countries probably could handle the, the so-called Swedish example where you put responsibility on the individual, which is really actually the entire, uh, purpose behind the article that I've just published in the American Conservative, in which I note that what the United States government has done, and governments actually everywhere, is desperately, desperately tried to take responsibility away from the individual. They do not trust individuals. They only trust heavy-handed government actions, which, which actually go so far as to, to fit the Marxist dialectic of of the, the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat.
That's what they did. It's correct. So in practicality, that would mean the government would say, look, if you are of a certain age, and especially if you have a certain set of comorbidities, you should do X. But if you are young and if you are healthy, then go about your life normally. Is that essentially what you think would be the best advice?
Yes. And yet where I live, the Philippines, happens to go— it's, it's pretty much the most authoritarian government in the world regarding COVID. And it is the law here that if you are under 15 or over 65, for that matter, you cannot leave the house. And it's been that law for over a year, and it's going to be that law indefinitely.
Oh my God, hold on, I did not know that.
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