‘We could open up again and forget the whole thing,’ Dr. Knut M. Wittkowski, Chief of epidemiology and research at Rockefeller University

21

Big Tech is shutting this expert down.

NYP: Big Tech companies are aggressively tamping down on COVID-19 “misinformation” — opinions and ideas contrary to official pronouncements.

Dr. Knut M. Wittkowski, former head of biostatistics, epidemiology and research design at Rockefeller University, says YouTube removed a video of him talking about the virus which had racked up more than 1.3 million views.

Wittkowski, 65, is a ferocious critic of the nation’s current steps to fight the coronavirus. He has derided social distancing, saying it only prolongs the virus’ existence and has attacked the current lockdown as mostly unnecessary.

Wittkowski, who holds two doctorates in computer science and medical biometry, believes the coronavirus should be allowed to achieve “herd immunity,” and that short of a vaccine the pandemic will only end after it has sufficiently spread through the population.

“With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity. About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won’t even have recognized that they were infected,” he says in the now-deleted video.

“I was just explaining what we had,” Wittkowski told The Post of the video, saying he had no idea why it was removed. The footage was produced by the British film company Journeyman Pictures.

“They don’t tell you. They just say it violates our community standards. There’s no explanation for what those standards are or what standards it violated.”

‘We could open up again and forget the whole thing’

Epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski on the deadly consequences of lockdown.

By: Spiked, 15th May 2020:

Governments around the world say they are following ‘The Science’ with their draconian measures to stem the spread of the virus. But the science around Covid-19 is bitterly contested. Many experts have serious doubts about the effectiveness of the measures, and argue that our outsized fears of Covid-19 are not justified. Knut Wittkowski is one such expert who has long argued for a change of course. For 20 years, Wittkowski was the head of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at The Rockefeller University’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science. spiked spoke to him to find out

spiked: Is Covid-19 dangerous?

Knut Wittkowski: No, unless you have age-related severe comorbidities. So if you are in a nursing home because you cannot live by yourself anymore, then getting infected is dangerous.

We had the other extreme in Switzerland, which was hit pretty hard. There was one child that died. People believed that this child was born in 2011. In fact, it was born in 1911, and that was the only child that died. It was a mere coding error. Somebody with the age 108 was coded as aged eight.

spiked: How far along is the epidemic?

Wittkowski: It is over in China. It is over in South Korea. It is substantially down in most of Europe and down a bit everywhere, even in the UK. The UK and Belarus are latecomers, so you do not see exactly what you are seeing in continental Europe. But everywhere in Europe, the number of cases is substantially declining.

spiked: Have our interventions made much of an impact?

Wittkowski: When the whole thing started, there was one reason given for the lockdown and that was to prevent hospitals from becoming overloaded. There is no indication that hospitals could ever have become overloaded, irrespective of what we did. So we could open up again, and forget the whole thing.

I hope the intervention did not have too much of an impact because it most likely made the situation worse. The intervention was to ‘flatten the curve’. That means that there would be the same number of cases but spread out over a longer period of time, because otherwise the hospitals would not have enough capacity.

‘There is nothing unprecedented about the virus itself’

spiked

Now, as we know, children and young adults do not end up in hospitals. It is only those who are both elderly and have comorbidities that do. Therefore you have to protect the elderly and the nursing homes. The ideal approach would be to simply shut the door of the nursing homes and keep the personnel and the elderly locked in for a certain amount of time, and pay the staff overtime to stay there for 24 hours per day.

How long can you do that for? For three weeks, that is possible. For 18 months, it is not. The flattening of the curve, the prolongation of the epidemic, makes it more difficult to protect the elderly, who are at risk. More of the elderly people become infected, and we have more deaths.

spiked: What are the dangers of lockdown?

Wittkowski: Firstly, we have the direct consequences: suicides, domestic violence and other social consequences leading to death. And then we have people who are too scared to go to the hospitals for other problems like strokes or heart attacks. So people stay away from hospitals because of the Covid fear. And then they die.

spiked: Were hospitals likely to be overrun?

Wittkowski: Germany had 8,000 deaths in a population of 85million. They had 20,000 to 30,000 hospitalisations. In Germany, that is nothing. It does not even show up as a blip in the hospital statistics. In Britain, the highest hospital utilisation was about 60 per cent, if I am not mistaken.

In New York City, it was a bit higher. The Javits Congress Center was turned into a field hospital with 3,000 beds. It treated just 1,000 patients in all. The Navy ship sent to New York by President Trump had 179 patients but it was sent back because it was not needed. New York is the epicenter of the epidemic in the United States, and even here at the epicenter, hospital utilisation was only up a bit. Nothing dramatic. Nothing out of the ordinary. That is what happens during the flu season. People have the flu, and then there are more patients in the hospitals than there otherwise would be.

spiked: Are we on the way to reaching herd immunity?

Wittkowski: All the studies that have been done have shown that we already have at least 25 per cent of the population who are immune. That gives us a nice cushion. If 25 per cent of the population are already immune, we are very quickly getting to the 50 per cent that we need to have what is called herd immunity. We will actually get a bit higher than that. So we have flattened what otherwise would have been a peak, and if we now let it run, even if the number of cases would increase a bit, it would not get as high as it was, because we already have enough immune people in the population. So it is not going to spread as fast as it could have spread in the beginning.

spiked: Should we worry about a second spike?

Wittkowski: This is an invention to justify a policy that politicians are afraid of reversing.

spiked: Should people practice social distancing?

Wittkowski: No.

spiked: Why not?

Wittkowski: Why? What is the justification for that? People need to ask the government for an explanation. The government is restricting freedom. You do not have to ask me for justification. There is no justification. It is the government that has to justify what it is doing. Sorry, but that is how it is.

spiked: How did we get this so wrong?

Wittkowski: Governments did not have an open discussion, including economists, biologists and epidemiologists, to hear different voices. In Britain, it was the voice of one person – Neil Ferguson – who has a history of coming up with projections that are a bit odd. The government did not convene a meeting with people who have different ideas, different projections, to discuss his projection. If it had done that, it could have seen where the fundamental flaw was in the so-called models used by Neil Ferguson. His paper was published eventually, in medRxiv. The assumption was that one per cent of all people who became infected would die. There is no justification anywhere for that.

Let us say the epidemic runs with a basic reproduction rate of around two. Eventually 80 per cent of the population will be immune, because they have been infected at some point in time. Eighty per cent of the British population would be something like 50million. One per cent of them dying is 500,000. That is where Ferguson’s number came from.

But we knew from the very beginning that neither in Wuhan nor in South Korea did one per cent of all people infected die. South Korea has 60million people. It is about the same size as the UK. How many deaths were in South Korea? Did they shut down? No. The South Korean government was extremely proud to have resisted pressure to drop the very basic concepts of democracy.

The epidemic in South Korea was over by March, the number of cases was down by 13 March. In Wuhan they also did not shut down the economy. Wuhan had restricted travel out of the city. They stopped train services and blocked the roads. They did not restrict anything social within the city until very late. We have seen, then, in Wuhan and South Korea, if you do not do anything, the epidemic is over in three weeks.

Knowing that the epidemic would be over in three weeks, and the number of people dying would be minor, just like a normal flu, the governments started shutting down in mid-March. Why? Because somebody pulled it out of his head that one per cent of all infected would die. One could argue that maybe one per cent of all cases would die. But one per cent of all people infected does not make any sense. And we had that evidence by mid-March.

spiked: Just to clarify, cases are different from people infected?

Wittkowski: Cases means people who have symptoms that are serious enough for them to go to a hospital or get treated. Most people have no symptoms at all. But waking up with a sore throat one day is not a case. A case means that someone showed up in a hospital.

spiked: The UK government was also heavily influenced by the situation in Italy. Why did that go so wrong?

Wittkowski: What we saw in Italy was that the virus was hitting those who were both old and had comorbidities, so lots of people died. But the median age of those who died in Italy was around 81 years. It is not that children or working people were dying. It was the elderly in nursing homes – not even the elderly living by themselves mostly. We saw lots of deaths and that scared people. But then, Italy did an illogical thing. It closed schools so that the schoolchildren were isolated and did not get infected and did not become immune. Instead, the virus spread almost exclusively among the old, causing more deaths and a higher utilisation of hospitals. And that is mind-boggling.

Very early on, we knew from China and we knew from South Korea that this is an epidemic that runs its course, and there was nothing special about it. But when it hit Italy, we stopped thinking about it as an age-stratified problem, and instead lumped everyone all together. The idea that if we did not shut down the schools the hospitals would have been overwhelmed does not make any sense. I frankly still cannot fully understand how our governments can be so stupid.

spiked: Governments say they are following the science. Is that really true?

Wittkowski: They have the scientists on their side that depend on government funding. One scientist in Germany just got $500million from the government, because he always says what the government wants to hear.

Scientists are in a very strange situation. They now depend on government funding, which is a trend that has developed over the past 40 years. Before that, when you were a professor at a university, you had your salary and you had your freedom. Now, the university gives you a desk and access to the library. And then you have to ask for government money and write grant applications. If you are known to criticise the government, what does that do to your chance of getting funded? It creates a huge conflict of interest. The people who are speaking out in Germany and Switzerland are all independent of government money because they are retired.

spiked: Did the Swedish scientists get it right?

Wittkowski: Sweden did the right thing. And they had to take a lot of heat for it. Now compare Sweden and the UK. The only difference is that Sweden did fine. They did have a problem. They had a relatively high number of deaths among the nursing homes.They decided to keep society open and they forgot to close nursing homes. Remarkably, the politicians acknowledged that it was a mistake to extend that open concept to nursing homes. The nursing homes should have been isolated to protect the elderly who are at high risk. But I think the Swedish government is doing well to even acknowledge that mistake.

The first death in the United States was in a nursing home in Seattle. And that was by the end of February. So everybody knew that we were expecting the same thing that we had seen in Italy – an epidemic that hits the elderly. But until just this week in New York State, the government told the nursing homes that if they did not take in patients from hospitals, they would lose their funding. So they would have to import the virus from the hospitals.

One third of all deaths in New York State were in nursing homes. One could have prevented 20,000 deaths in the United States by just isolating the nursing homes. After three or four weeks, they could have reopened and everybody would be happy.

That would have been a reasonable strategy. But shutting down schools, driving the economy against the wall – there was no reason for it. The only reason that this nonsense now goes on and on, and people are inventing things like this ‘second wave’, which is going to force us to change society and never live again, is that the politicians are afraid of admitting an error.

spiked: Is this easier to see in hindsight?

Wittkowski: What I am talking about is not hindsight. The epidemics in Wuhan and South Korea were over in mid-March. In March, I submitted a paper to medRxiv, summarising all of that. At least towards the end of March, the data was there, and everybody who wanted to learn from it could.

On 17 April, Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, presented data at the coronavirus presidential briefing at the White House. And there was one plot that he presented. And I looked at it and asked why people were not jumping to their feet. Why were people not understanding what they were looking at? The plot was the data from the ILINet. For 15 years, hospitals have counted every person who shows up with an influenza-like illness – fever, coughing, whatever. There were three spikes in the 2019-2020 flu season. The first was in late December – influenza B. The next was in late January – an influenza A epidemic. And then there was one that had a peak in hospital visits around 8 March – Covid-19. For the peak to happen on that day, those patients have to go through a seven-day incubation period and then have symptoms. But they do not go to the hospital with the first symptoms. If it gets worse over three days, only then do they go to a hospital.

Four weeks later, on 8 April, the number of new infections was already down. In time for Easter, our governments should have acknowledged they were overly cautious. People would have accepted that. Two weeks’ shutdown would not have been the end of the world. We would not have what we have now – 30million people unemployed in the United States, for example. Companies do not go bankrupt over a two-week period. Two months is a very different story. If you have to pay rent for two months for a restaurant in New York with no income, you will go bankrupt. We see unemployment, we see bankruptcies, we see a lot of money wasted for economic-rescue packages – trillions of dollars in the United States. We see more deaths and illness than we would otherwise have had.

And it is going on and on and on, just because governments are afraid of admitting an error. They are trying to find excuses. They say they have to do things slowly, and that they have ‘avoided 500,000 deaths’ in the UK. But that was an absurd number that had no justification. The person presenting it pretended it was based on a model. It was not a model. It was the number of one per cent of all people infected dying. And nobody was questioning it. And that is the basic problem.

spiked: People will say that the interventions in South Korea – like contact tracing – were more effective.

Wittkowski: How many orders of magnitude, take us from 500,000 to 256, the number of deaths in South Korea? To have that kind of effect you would have to put everybody in the UK into a negative pressure room. It is totally unrealistic to even consider a reduction from 500,000 to 256.

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DemocracyRules
DemocracyRules
3 years ago

May 18, USA, Good Progress:
comment image

Daily new infections are dropping off [green line on right panel], daily mortality now down to 1,000 per day [blue line], number of recovered is increasing [pink line on left], and the end is in sight. S. Korea now has fewer than 10 new cases per day, so few that they can do contact tracing on every case that appears. That’s how we beat smallpox.

Jay
Jay
3 years ago
Reply to  DemocracyRules

Propaganda for the useful idiots, From a useful idiot!

DemocracyRules
DemocracyRules
3 years ago
Reply to  Jay

Jay: Yes idiocy rules the day. However, even if we consider these graphs to be full of errors [which they probably are], the conclusion is still there, that the epidemic is going away. Even if these graphs are totally faked, the people who are doing the faking are admitting that the epidemic is going away. That’s why I posted this. You are not the only skeptic here. But these graphs have good news, no matter what way we look at it.

bobbycdot
bobbycdot
3 years ago

ah, BUT we should NEVER forget anything about all this non-sense

DemocracyRules
DemocracyRules
3 years ago
Reply to  bobbycdot

bobby: Agreed, more germ warfare from China and others is inevitable, and we must get rid of the politics from this fight.

DemocracyRules
DemocracyRules
3 years ago
Reply to  DemocracyRules

comment image

spfoam1
spfoam1
3 years ago
Reply to  bobbycdot

We should never forget this mass murder for political power scheme. We should never forget who was behind it. We should never stop digging for details because a lot of evil people are involved and we need to know who they are.

Jay
Jay
3 years ago

Fear Strikes
1938 – War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast Causes Panic, There going to Kill Us all!
2000 – Y2K is going to destroy everything!
2001 – Anthrax is going to Kill Us all!
2002 – West Nile Virus is going to Kill Us all!
2003 – Sars is going to Kill Us all!
2005 – Bird Flu is going to Kill Us all!
2006 – Ecoli is going to Kill Us all!
2008 – Financial Collapse is going to Kill Us all!
2009 – Swine Flu is going to Kill Us all!
2012 – The Mayan calender Predicts the World ending!
2013 – North Korea is going to Cause WW3!
2014 – Ebola Virus is going to Kill Us all!
2015 – ISIS is going to Kill Us all!
2016 – Zika Virus is going to Kill Us all!
2018 – Tsunami, Indonesia battles fake news as hoaxers spread panic
2020 – Corona Virus going to Kill Us all!

The Truth is, FEAR is going to Kill Us all!
Turn off the TV, and wash your hands!

oceanfloor1
oceanfloor1
3 years ago
Reply to  Jay

This one is the equivalent of War of the Worlds, the Mayan Calendar, and since Y2K didn’t destroy everything it has now spread far and wide!

anonQ
anonQ
3 years ago

I knew this was a load of bull from the beginning when the government started the social distancing, etc because of what I learned in jr high school, but never could i explain it in such a succinct manner as Dr Wittkowski. Allot of people knew thet in order for the body to develop an immunity to a virus it has to be exposed to the virus. But those voices were looked upon as crazy. I totally agree with the doctor that to hide (social distance, wear masks and shelter in place) only prolongs the existence of the problem of people getting sick.

spfoam1
spfoam1
3 years ago

The central bankers (and a big tag team) spent a century devaluing the dollar to make it so precious that it would become the sole focus of the population, and they spent a century programming the population to value a dollar and what it brings them so much that they lose sight of, or forget, what made us a great nation. They intended to ruin us from the start. They set us up to die, but they screwed up because their hitman lost the election. They’re trying everything to erase that screw up, including mass murder by virus to rig the next election. They find themselves in between the population and the dollar that they made so precious, and that situation is throwing a spotlight on the whole stinking ruthless scheme to take the WH. Now they want us to get on with our lives and forget the whole thing while they plan the next mass murder. A lot of people are beginning to see who set this bloodbath up in the first place and they’re thinking about adding the right people to the body count, and these ruthless MFs know it.

If you don’t understand the role of the central bankers, and understand that the Democrat Party is their political power in the USA, you probably think this comment comes from some kind of weird conspiracy theory….

tituspullo
tituspullo
3 years ago

i remember a famous british politician said something like “the purpose of an education is to know when someone is talking rot to you”. our problem is that most americans are now brainwashed by their government school indoctrination, are not educated, and are unable to smell bullshit. luckily, i managed to get a decent public education, got a masters in engineering, and worked in an oil company research center so that i learned to evaluate data, sift out obvious biases, and make good decisions because if i didn’t things would fall down and people would die and i would be fired. climate change and this virus lunacy lit up my bullshit meter from day one, and for good reason. this is obviously just the latest coup attempt by the democrat lifers in DC (the deep state) and the DNC. this guy go it right

Worsethanitlooks
Worsethanitlooks
3 years ago
Reply to  tituspullo

The problem you correctly articulate is far more insidious and the villain is much larger than DC Democratic lifers. The global elites are trying to undermine the power of nation states. They envision a borderless future world of 8 BILLION potential customers and consumers. In this new world, rule of law, civil liberties, and the Constitution are for the little people and the old battle between capitalism and communism is a relic of the 20th century. In this godless, borderless model, what the Chinese do to control their population is no ones business. The global economy never closes.
Amazingly, ordinary people around the world have instinctively realized that something is very wrong and have responded by electing nationalist right-leaning leaders in a number of countries including the US. This is good symbolic move but the elites control most of the worlds assets.
WWIII will not be fought between nations but between the masses and the elites.

oceanfloor1
oceanfloor1
3 years ago

It’s in the hands of the politicians now, specifically those on the Left who know what an invaluable tool of control FEAR is. And that a fool and his freedom are soon separated.

Worsethanitlooks
Worsethanitlooks
3 years ago

Life before evil social media and global MSM:
https://nypost.com/2020/05/16/why-life-went-on-as-normal-during-the-killer-pandemic-of-1969/

Yes, the 1969 Flu pandemic killed far more people, nothing was shut down, and life went on. Social distancing is a recently developed, totally unvetted theory for how to respond to a viral pandemic. Like globalism, its another great example of how the elite market largely reckless ideas that benefit few at the expense of everyone else.

In the age of Big Tech-controlled social media and multinational-owned MSM, history, facts and real-life experiences no longer matter. The truth is whatever elites say it is.

We are under attack from controlling elites, not viruses. I don’t remember the 1969 flu pandemic and few do. I was too busy watching the Amazing Mets win it all and Neil Armstrong do the impossible.

spfoam1
spfoam1
3 years ago

It’s amazing how many really smart, educated “patriots” in important positions come out of the woodwork after it becomes safe and fashionable to do so, or necessary to do so.

felix1999
felix1999
3 years ago

I AGREE!
OPEN UP.

Those at risk know who they are.
Stop punishing the entire country for the small percentage that are at risk!

felix1999
felix1999
3 years ago

This fear is also grooming our kids to be OBEDIENT to government no matter how ludicrous their demands are! Adults have to stand up to them to set the proper example when it comes to government tyranny and that is what this is.
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Roma Mikhasev
Roma Mikhasev
3 years ago

Total Recall..

DVader
DVader
3 years ago

Forget the 90,000+ dead (so far) and more piling up daily?

Scott Kennedy
Scott Kennedy
3 years ago

He is not the only doctor that has had his videos taken down by Youtube for speaking the truth or what the left does not want you to know.

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