One Man's (Data-Driven) Journey From Zombie Apocalypse To Lockdown-Skeptic

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via
OutOfTheCave.io,

A couple of recurring conspiracy theory themes keep
being circulated to me, they are specific to Canada but I’m sure
these are typical across all locations.� I find these
maddening because there is plenty of factual, well sourced and
scientifically verified counterfactuals to draw from when being
critical of the near universal mishandling of pandemic response by
national governments worldwide.

For lockdown skeptics, embracing or amplifying fact-free
hysterical conspiracy theories makes them look like lunatics, so
they should stop doing that.

Allow me to dispense with the two big Canuck-themed conspiracy
theories and then inject some much needed sanity into the
conversation via a recent Triggernometry
podcast with guest Ivor Cummins.

These conspiracies are:

#1) The Federal Government RFP to build “internment
campsâ€

Sent to be multiple times privately. “Have you heard about the
interment camps?â€. Etc. They all refer to this actual, Canadian
federal tender #6D112-202772/A
“Service Provider(s) for Federal Quarantine / Isolation
sites†which really does exist.

It sounds bad, doesn’t it. “Federal Quarantine / Isolation
Sites†you mean like this kind of thing, nationally?

That’s actually a screen grab from Amazon’s
Utopia series, which is a reboot of an earlier BBC
series by the same name. I haven’t finished watching the
Amazon version, but the BBC was originally about an elite cabal’s
conspiracy to depopulate the planet by creating a false pandemic
and then releasing a vaccine that would make people who took it,
sterile. Pretty far out,  huh?

Anyhoo, back to reality and the Canadian RFP for “The
Interment Campsâ€. If you actually read
the tender, you would see that the specification calls for 
bids to provide “Lodging for up to 1600 people spread across
Canadaâ€.

1600 people. Nationwide. And mostly in hotel rooms. You can
argue whether or not the government has the right to detain people
in the midst of a public health crisis. You can even debate if
COVID-19 really would be a public health crisis if cooler heads
prevailed (more on that below).

What you can’t argue, is that lodging for 1600 people,
nationwide, are “internment campsâ€, because they’re not.

Apparently MPP Randy Hillier asked about this in Parliament
“and was kicked out of the caucus for asking about themâ€. Nice
try, Hillier did bring it up in provincial session. But he had
already been kicked out of the PC’s in 2019 for mocking autistic
children. He now sits as an independent (as a friend of mine far
more plugged into Conservative politics once remarked to me “I
often wonder myself where do we actually get these clowns from?â€
He was referring to career politicians in general).

#2) Liberal Party Whistleblower leaks “Great Reset†plan to end
private property globally

I see this one more on social media, it purports to be a leak
from a Liberal Party whistleblower which was posted to an indie
website nobody had ever heard of before this, and a lot more people
have heard of since. I won’t link to it here.

It outlines a plan from within the PMO (Prime Minister’s
Office) “Strategic Planning Committee†to begin introducing
more lockdowns this fall, and then faced with the emergence of with
a new strain of COVID in 2021 (“COVID-21â€) engineer, in concert
with national governments worldwide, a global economic collapse.
The collapse would be followed by a debt jubilee and the
implementation of UBI, with recipients of debt relief and UBI
renouncing their claim on private property for the remainder of
their lives.

All of this based on an anonymous email (purportedly) sent from
a throw-away protonmail account. As I pointed out to the first few
people who sent me this, it is so absent of corroboration or
attribution that believing it is entirely, 100% faith based. It is
totally devoid of evidence.

I can tell you that the only references to the PMOs “Strategic
Planning Committee†seem to be in connection with this purported
leak. It’s almost as if it doesn’t really exist and it’s not
a thing. In Canada, committees are convened by the House of
Commons, not the PMO (although it’s possible they informally call
their groupings “committeesâ€). The list of House of Commons
Committees is here, and there is no Strategic
Planning Committee in the list.

I can also tell you that wiping out everybody’s debt also
wipes out a lot of other people’s assets, and most of those
people whose assets are other people’s debts are: banks, pension
funds, endowments and other forms of Big Money. And I don’t think
they would sit still for a political drive to wipe out gigantic
chunks of their assets. I’ve said it before, and plan to expand
on it in the future: “Thank God for Big Moneyâ€. Because if you
can count on at least one class of participants to act
semi-rationally when faced with uncertain outcomes and
trade-offs, it’s that.

Now it’s understandable that these kinds of rumours would run
rampant, with the likes of the Davos crew in The World Economic
Forum calling for using the COVID-19 pandemic as a type of “Great
Resetâ€

…as I remarked on Facebook, it is hard not to imagine Herr Von
Schwab delivering this speech wearing a monocle and a red
armband.

Yet all this posturing is endemic to the type of catabolic
collapse the existing power and institutional structures are facing
today. As Jesse and Charles and myself frequently observe in
our Axis Of Easy podcasts, we are transitioning from the Age of
Nation States into an era of Network States and while it is too
early to tell what this going to look like, today’s political
class and plutocrats are trying hard to make sure they’re still
the ones in charge after this huge tectonic phase shift.

Usually however, that doesn’t happen. When societies
transition from one form of organizational structure to another,
leadership changes as well. That could be why there is such a push
to the hoop to keep a lid on things “as they are†over these
past few years and the polarization and disarray is simply the old
order turning into dust in the wind…

Enough conspiracy, let’s stick to data and science to end the
lockdowns…

There is no shortage of science and data to challenge
the flawed policies of the nation states whose basic playbook has
been: lockdown, close economy, print money, ignore data, and double
down.

This may be a good time to quickly outline my arc of how my
views on the pandemic shifted over time.

My journey from Zombie Apocalypse to lockdown skeptic

I began monitoring the reports of a new virus emerging out of
China in January. On January 23rd I emailed a friend advising him
to go out tomorrow and pick up some N95 masks, and by the first
week of February I was stocking up food, medical supplies, cash,
and weapons. I was expecting a full breakdown of the global supply
chain and a collapse of the global economy.

Based on early reported numbers of an R0 around 3.1 with an IFR
of 5%, it looked like we’d see doubling times of 15 days. By
March all three levels of government, city, province and national
were reporting case rates and fatalities daily. I put together a
spreadsheet and using those numbers as a model I forecasted Toronto
to have 1.7M cases by the end of June. If the IFR really was 5%, or
even 3%, it would mean between 51,000 and 136,000 fatalities.

This was terrifying, so as the world started locking down, it
seemed to make sense. In fact I was wondering why we were still
allowing inbound flights from hotspots like China? There were
rumblings from The Clerisy like the New York Times that blocking
flights from China would be racist. This was the early innings
of the politicization that was to follow.

But then, a curious thing happened. The rate of change
in infections and fatalities started coming down,
drastically.

By June it was clear to anybody following the data that
this was, at least for now, largely in the rearview
mirror. I had been in touch with an old friend who now ran
IT for several hospitals. In January he was trying to get
administrators to take COVID seriously. By May, they had built 4
additional ICUs across the hospitals and they were sitting empty.
Worse, resources were being denied to other medical uses. He was
beginning to wonder if maybe this wasn’t going to be as bad as we
both originally thought.

Then, over the summer despite the clear slowdown in the severity
of the pandemic, the policy response to it intensified. And then it
all became political. Questioning the efficacy of continuing the
lockdowns became associated with being alt-right. Pro-Trump. Or
worse. A Narrative War ensued. If you questioned official
policy, you got deplatformed. I documented numerous
instances of this over on
AxisOfEasy.

Now we’re in the fall and the case counts are back up and
Second Wave Hysteria is in full effect. The only problem is, the
fatality rate is on the floor. Another problem is
this shouldn’t be a problem. It should be good news!

The fatalities are up slightly with the season, but nowhere
close to tracking the case counts as they did in wave 1. This could
be for a number of reasons (more testing, the most vulnerable were
hit in wave 1, etc) but no matter how you slice it, the graphs
pretty well everywhere look like this:

That spike on the deaths chart in early October was from a data
adjustment from the previous 75 days. Source here.

In this case, we’re talking about the Province of Ontario,
which has to date nearly 70,000 cases total and slightly over 3,000
deaths. Nothing like the 1.7M cases and 50K to 136K fatalities my
original model predicted.

What does that mean?

It means my model was wrong!

Which is ok, and fortunate, in fact. Now I’m not an
epidemiologist, so I’m allowed to get my models wrong. But what I
did do, that policy makers and experts are not doing, is
re-examining the premises in the face of new data.

The Imperial College / Neal Ferguson model that inspired much of
the global lockdowns is an extreme example of this. It turned
out to be total shitcode, but it hasn’t impacted the policy
response. Not one bit.

There is no justification for more lockdowns

Which brings us to the Triggernometry podcast I mentioned above,
which I never did get around to adequately explaining. It’s a
great conversation with those merry comics Konstantin Kisin and
Francis Foster and their guest this episode: biological engineer
Ivor Cummins.

When you challenge the prevailing orthodoxy around
anything COVID, it’s not uncommon for people to hysterically
shriek at you that have to follow science and look at the
data! Well, that’s what Cumins has done and here’s the
upshot of what he (and many others) have found:

• We should not have locked down over the summer. With cases and
  fatalities down it was the ideal time to let the virus spread
  amongst the low risk population to get further toward herd
  immunity.

• Forcing mask wearing at the nadir of the pandemic (the summer)
  was a flawed policy that leaves no exit strategy. We’re basically
  in masks forever now.

• 40 years of published science indicates that masks (especially
  surgical and cloth masks, as opposed to N95) don’t make much of a
  difference when it comes to these types of pathogens, but four or
  five hastily rushed papers from over the summer of this year say
  otherwise.

• The argument against pursuing a herd immunity strategy because
  of the so-called “long timersâ€, people who get COVID, and
  experience ongoing, long term and possibly life long effects is not
  a compelling argument. Statistically these cases are low, but more
  importantly they are not unique to COVID-19. We always have these
  edge cases with long term effects in seasonal flus and other
  diseases.

• The fatality curve is playing out along established
  patterns regardless of whether their were lockdowns or not.

• The first lockdown was understandable. A second one is
  completely unjustified.

Unfortunately what has happened is this has become about
politics and ideology instead of public health. The real world,
long term health effects of lockdowns and a crashed economy, the
mental health issues, suicide, domestic violence and substance
abuse are very real, and have now surpassed the damage being caused
by the virus itself. I seem to remember two doctors in California
who warned this would happen who
were deplatformed and vilified for saying it.

The science and the data are out there, but those who
push it forward are frequently accused of “reading what they want
to see in the dataâ€. If you revisit the two charts I
posted above, that clearly show how case counts have diverged from
fatalities, which are flat, I was told exactly that by people when
I posted those charts a month ago.

Them: You’re just seeing what you want in that data.

Me: Aren’t these two curves clearly diverging, and one is
flat?

Them: Just wait two weeks.

Me: Aren’t you literally extrapolating what you want to see in
the data by saying that?

Them: These alt-right denialists are too much.

Well the two weeks, four weeks, six weeks everybody keeps
telling me to wait for their extrapolation to kick in have come and
gone and we can clearly see that the worst of the COVID-19 induced
destruction is in the rear-view mirror. If the numbers change and
new data emerges that changes things, I will modify my opinion
accordingly. That’s the way it’s supposed work. 

But we live in an age where policy makers working off of
hypothetical models and career politicians with zero real world
experience no economic skin in the game are egged on by
billionaire monopolists philanthropists and their pet projects
in narcissism re-imagining society.  They don’t know how
to do anything other than double-down on failure while everybody
else bears the consequences.

We need to reopen the economy and start picking up the
pieces from all the other collateral damage we’ve
caused.

Here is the entire Triggernometry video, I highly recommend
watching it and circulating it among your colleagues.