These are part of my Rapid comments. I must repeat that I am not a doctor in medicine. However, the history of Human civilisations shows that public hygiene is the main contributor to Human health taken collectively. I also take prof. Testart’s warning on the necessary role of citizens very seriously.
1 ) The virus SARS-CoV-2 is new in Humans. My personal conviction is that it is an artificial laboratory creation that led to the death, coming with a strange flu exhibiting a strange form of pneumonia, of more than 10 000 American soldiers; this seemed to have caused the closure of the military lab at Fort Detrick by CDC in July-August 2019 before any signs of Covid-19 illness in China. My personal conviction is that the exhumation of some of these dead soldiers is necessary to establish the complete evolution history of this new virus which is known today to have various strains. In particular that of Patient 4 in Italy and that of Patient 31 in South Korea neither of whom had been in contact with Wuhan or China. My personal conviction is that the blame game is not useful. Not even for electoral purposes given that neoliberal monetarist policy failures are now to patent to occult. Instead the urgency should go into the reinforcement of the control of armament treaties, especially for intermediate nuclear weapons, for bio-weapons and for the use of military space, which should be strictly defensive if at all.
As far as bio-weapons are concerned the control treaty should include unannounced and intrusive verification. In this way, Level 4 laboratories would transform into useful preventive civilian entities following proper international protocols and deontological rules. Let us not forget that since 9/11 the USA has spend some $ 100 billion on such military research and other nations are doing likewise, albeit with less funds. These treaties should now receive diplomatic priority at all levels. Humanity will survive SARS-CoV-2 but It would be foolish to ignore the warning.
2 ) Is the control App useful and/or necessary? I have touched on this issue already (http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/commentaire-rapide-sur-les-nouvelles-apps-de-monitorage-social-introduites-la-faveur-de-la-crise-sciemment-male-geree-du-covid-19-8-avril-2020/ )
If such Apps were necessary, the minimal respect for democracy and for privacy – both necessary to preserve social psychic health and the libre arbitre of individuals, hence their responsibility – should imply that they be under strict public control. In this case, this would imply control by public health-care systems, under the supervision of the Parliament and with the possibility for citizens to appeal, at any time, to an independent citizens’ democratic committee to denounce and request the immediate correction of any possible abuse. In our generalised surveillance society, this would include redress from malign abuse, including those suffered at the hands of incompetent, corrupt and ill-intentioned members of security services. Moreover, such public control would impede the privatisation of these sensitive social and health data. We all remember Cambridge Analytica, and we know that this is only the tip of the iceberg. With public control, any violation of secrecy and privacy becomes a criminal offence.
The question however is whether such Apps are necessary and useful to deal with the current and, potentially, with others pandemics. My answer is definitively negative. What is urgent is the mass availability of testing and that of PPE as well as some basic rules of behavior to be adjusted according to the evolution of the current contamination rate, for instance social distancing.
Of course, Covid- 19 is a new and largely unknown virus which exhibits clinical manifestations that do puzzle many bed-side doctors. In an uncertain context, the trick is to optimise the control of the pandemic on the basis of what we know and of what we learn as we go.
We have an idea of the exponential rate of propagation (Rt) of the new virus. We know that a majority of the population is seemingly unaffected while carriers of chronic diseases especially in the older population are greatly at risk. We know that many can be , asymptomatic but contagious. We know that Prof. Raoult’s treatment – chloroquine derivatives plus antibiotics – if administrated by doctors in the very early stages of contagion is highly effective. Indeed, in his last report Prof. Raoult mentioned 10 deaths for 2620 patients treated, the best score for mortality rate, as far as we know. We know that in order to apply Prof. Raoult’s protocol on a regional and national basis, we need massive testing capacity in tandem with citizens’ self-monitoring – fever, dry cough, diarrhea, fatigue etc. Massively applying Prof. Raoult’s method seems to drastically diminish the hospitalisation rate of contaminated subjects. It remains to be seen if patients’ so treated are or not less likely to redevelop the illness, given the rapid lowering of the level and eventual elimination of the viral load. We also learned that dealing with oxygen saturation early when patients are hospitalised can still reduce the number of patients needing reanimation. Under the current ventilator protocol released patients often seem to come out with heavy sequels – fibrosis, cardiac complications etc. -, which could perhaps be avoided at least in part. (See Whistleblower: COVID-19 Patients Need Oxygen Therapy Not Ventilator, by Tyler Durden ,Tue, 04/14/2020 – 00:05 https://www.zerohedge.com/health/whistleblower-covid-19-patients-need-oxygen-therapy-not-ventilator (see video in link) Vedi pure :Do COVID-19 Vent Protocols Need a Second Look? , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elgct0nOcKY&feature=emb_rel_end. These links were already quoted in my http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/covid-19-fatti-lattuale-gestione-della-crisi-sanitaria-sulla-tragica-matanza-delle-cittadinei-14-aprile-2020/ .See also a recent article on the matter: « Coronavirus, ossigeno ozono terapia come cura: l’appello » Utilizzata in diversi ospedali italiani, sarebbe utile per contrastare i sintomi gravi da Covid-19 e liberare le terapie intensive, https://notizie.virgilio.it/coronavirus-ossigeno-ozono-terapia-cura-appello-medici-1382100?ref=virgilio )
What would the Apps do? They would likely be downloaded on some kind of device, probably the cell-phone. The Bluetooth technology, which does not include geolocalisation, does not insure privacy in the least, since an eventual cookie or malware can transfer the contact data stored in the device. The Apps would trace the circulation of the device at an unspecified radius from other Apps and come up with the mapping of such potential contacts. It will not tell anything on what the carrier of the devise touches or if s/he wears a mask, gloves and other such crucial information. It does not tell you if the carrier is positive to Covid-19. Only the testing does that. In particular, it does not tell you if the carrier is asymptomatic. If a carrier is tested and turns out to be positive, what does the Apps add to the information s/he can provide without it on the actual circulation and contacts in the last 2 weeks? Consequently we can ask: what is the use of such a device? Only social control and the potential commoditisation of private and sensitive social and health data. It is thus totally un-useful.
Instead, it appears well in tune with a known individual and – dominant – groups pathology which is common with what can be called « control freaks ». More dramatically, this control propensity is directly connected to profoundly totalitarian thought offered « once again » as a solution to the current socio-economic and financial crisis, one which the current sanitary crisis helped catalyse, but one which did precede it. We will come back on this issue below.
It thus seems that the Apps are neither necessary nor useful. It suffices to instruct citizens to adopt some specific common sense precautions – measuring fever, watching for symptoms etc and to be ready to contact their family doctors if they think they are ill with Covid-19, just like they would do for any other illness. However, the Health-care system must be ready to react even before individuals test positive; this can be done with massive testing using Prof Raoult’s efficient – and cheap – protocol and with the targeted and organised confinement of the contaminated persons.
I must underline that the great expert in this domain, prof. Raoult, said from the beginning that total confinement was an archaic measure. We now understand why. But this supposed a degree of preparedness: namely readily available stocks of PPE and of derivatives of chloroquine and antibiotics and proper instructions to the population. Given that – this was in my view criminal negligence on the part of our Western governments – many weeks were lost, my personal belief is that total confinement is now necessary to block the otherwise exponential contagion rate and to prepare for the targeted confinement strategy with readily available testing and stocks of PPE.
Total confinement cannot be conceptualised only as a simple function of the management of the Rt function – namely slowing the waves of gravely contaminated people that are hospitalised and those among them who end-up in reanimation units. This would imply a cynical intention to achieve an elusive « herd immunity » in a less dramatic fashion, but with the inescapable insurance of killing the same amount of most vulnerable persons, albeit in slower motion. As President Mélenchon and the France Insoumise insist, the end of the « total » lockdown must be carefully planned to preserve the lives of the citizens. It just happens that doing so is the only rational way to lower socio-economic and health-care costs to the minimum especially, with the progressive re-opening of social and economic activities.
Indeed, given that Prof. Raoult’s treatment lowers the viral load, it seems to be, together with massive testing, the only way to control and defeat the inevitable second wave, if not the predictable third wave in Autumn, at least if that new virus behaves like other mutable viruses. (I am intrigued by Prof. Montagnier’s affirmation that this being a fabricated virus Nature will normally reject it, but I am not able to judge this intriguing information which deserves to be clarified by people who are scientifically able to do so.)
Note that, as we said in point (1), the total history of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is not known yet. Many strains, particularly from the early stages of its evolution in Humans in the USA, are not known. But we generally know that viruses are mutant and that vaccines cannot be really effective when the knowledge is scare. This aside from the fact that vaccines, when properly tested, often fail – and Bill Gates does not have a good record on that nor on any of his other philanthropic-speculative capital initiatives. Good and safe vaccines take years before proving themselves and must be renewed with each mutation. See « We’ve never made a successful vaccine for a coronavirus before. This is why it’s so difficult » By Jo Khan for the Health Report https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2020-04-17/coronavirus-vaccine-ian-frazer/12146616 .
This does again militate in favor of Prof. Raoult’s protocols – massive testing and a curative approach – together with the eventual modification of the hospital protocols to take new knowledge into account – for instance, the question of the oxygen saturation vs ventilators.
3 ) Control freaks and totalitarian merchant of Venice minds. I have watched with dismay M. Jacques Attali – whom I consider as a « pitre » in the strictly conceptual Marxist psychoanalytic sense exposed in my Pour Marx, contre le nihilisme – Livres-Books section of my old Jurassic site www.la-commune-paraclet.com – in one of his usual performance. He now openly wishes for the militarization of the US society and economy to avoid what seems an ineluctable imperial dismise, at least if the United States of America does not adopt my program briefly spelled out in the Foreword and Appeal here http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/test/ . Of note is the program’s insistence on ending over-representation of known minute and otherwise insignificant groups – even Jesuits had understood that this blocks social mobility and ends up worse than congenital idiocy – and on the the adoption of a new anti-dumping definition based on the « global net revenue » of the household. Attali’s et al., utterances on the alleged usefulness of some forms of euthanasia can also be checked against the current forced triage in the hospital intensive care units …
This saddens me : it comes after the disastrous allegedly self-proclaimed « awakened nihilists » 9/11 ploy and management. And, in fact, it confirms my worst fears about the exclusivist return engineered in some temple loving quarters, demonstrated and denounced in the aforementioned book as well as in my essay « Le lit du néo-fascisme » in the section Fascism, Racism and Exclusivism of the same site. In brief, today like yesterday, for some people seriously deprived of any historical memory, the solution to the structural crisis of capitalism seems to be a return to Mussolini-Sarfatti’s fascism, that is in its pre-1938 version. It is just unbelievable. In my country, this runs frontally against Article XII of the Transitory and Definitive provisions of the Constitution born of the Resistance which forbids any form of fascism. Similar provisions are integral to all our constitutions as well as in the Universal Declaration of Fundamental Social and individual Human Rights of 1948.
Now just consider the philanthropic capitalist Bill Gates. In US history, the rich soon developed philanthropy in order to avoid paying their fair share of taxes and thus to expand their own influence through many Foundations and other Think-Tanks astutely paid out of the public purse. Bill Gates is certainly not the garage genius he is made out to be, but he quickly understood the potentiality of such philanthropic capitalism. As we all know, he merely was authorised by the system to massify the technology developed for the Pentagon under General Taylor; it was based on a communication nodal network capable to survive a massive nuclear strike. Yet, this technology only became useful outside of military and campus intranets with the invention of the Web by the CERN. France had developed a highly successful public technology known as Minitel. To transform telecommunication into a public sphere once again, Minitel should be re-visited and updated; in fact, the only thing it would need is a universal interface which would allow it to communicate with other systems, public or private. This would solve many pending issues such as privacy and commoditisation issues as well as the so-called digital divide …
However Bill Gates quickly understood the profit that could be made year after year with vaccines. Even if they were not properly tested. Larry Summers had explained that delocalizing polluting industries in India or in other developing countries was beneficial not only because labor was cheap but also because the reparations due for the damages imposed on the population – for instance at Bhopal – would cost a fraction compared to what they would cost in the USA or in the developed West – for instance the Three Miles Island disaster!
Monsanto and others quickly realised that if they could get away with patenting living organisms, they could create very lucrative captive markets, for instance forcing peasants to buy both the seeds and the pesticides that go with them every year, thus losing control over their own seed production, diminishing agricultural and cultural wealth, and, in the process, trading the agricultural and food sovereignty against agricultural « security », presumably achieved through derivatives slapped on futures markets and on food stuffs!! (See my Book III in the aforementioned site as well as the pertinent articles in its International Political Economy section.)
Poor African and Asian populations, especially kids, just like Covid-19 patients hospitalised because some criminal idiots had suddenly destroyed PPE stocks and declared chloroquine to be dangerous, are used in extremis to test Big Pharma’s expensive drugs and vaccines.
Likewise the European Commission is tolerating the preventive destruction of European Internet platforms, together with their revenues as well as their potential for the development of local jobs in Open source software developments, when it tolerates Facebook’s captive market strategy. One can easily understand that the owner of a platform can block the use of its publishing services to a person that has not signed in as a member, but not that a third person would be blocked from reading a site without being a member. This goes frontally against any competition rule in the UE see : http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/lettera-aperta-alla-commissaria-europea-margrethe-vestager-si-prega-mettere-un-termine-alla-captive-market-strategy-delle-gafa-ed-imprese-simili/
In the same vein as Attali and others such ilk, Bill Gates is on record for his wish to see the whole world population under control through tracking Apps and devises, not for their own good insured by disinterested and not for profit public agencies, but with the declared aim to restrict citizens mobility if they are not vaccinated, presumably with his own vaccines! Talk about creating captive markets!
This typical perversion is even contrary to liberal competitive capitalism or to the Sherman Act. Robert Kennedy denounced this trend. As a former professor I must underline the pathological and anti-democratic – i.e. vulgarly exclusivist – character of such thinking. It must not be tolerated. And to make sure that this neo-Nietzschean Talmudist thinking is eliminated from the public democratic sphere, this pathology must be cured at its roots, namely substituting private Big Pharma with public Pharma care, making illegal the private patenting of living organisms, and re-deploying the kind of progressive fiscal policy that had been implemented by the New Deal under FDR and by the now partially dismantled European Social State right after WWII.
See :
a ) Robert F Kennedy Jr. Exposes Bill Gates’ Vaccine Agenda In Scathing Report , by Tyler Durden , Sun, 04/12/2020 – 23:00,Authored by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Chairman, Children’s Health Defense, https://www.zerohedge.com/health/robert-f-kennedy-jr-exposes-bill-gates-vaccine-agenda-scathing-report
b ) Note 1 ) The Paper Of Record Says Feel Sorry For Bill Gates, Who’s Been Targeted With Conspiracy Theories ,by Tyler Durden ,Fri, 04/17/2020 – 20:20 https://www.zerohedge.com/health/wsj-feel-sorry-bill-gates-whos-been-targeted-conspiracy-theories
(See the incorporated video at 34:20. Gates wants a certificate to determine who had the vaccine, and restrict mobility accordingly. Is this a captured market ? In a strange Nazi-like drifting he also advocate and finance projects to tattoo people, like the one pursued by some research team in the MIT. One might be reminded of the « Island of Dr Moreau » starring Marlon Brando … This amounts to being worse than the caricature! See ; « PJ TV : “Le monde d’après…” – Invité Jacques Attali . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zcf4qqWvGE&t=1070s )
The video on B Gates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe8fIjxicoo&feature=emb_title
See also ‘Bill Gates is continuing the work of Monsanto’, Vandana Shiva tells FRANCE 24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNM833K22LM )
4 ) Proto-totalitarian tracking versus public health-care and front line neighborhood clinics.
In my essay on health-care available in http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/health-care-between-cuts-and-corruption-victim-of-choice-for-neoliberal-and-monetarist-fiscal-federalism-may-2016-translated-april-6-2020/ , I tried to show how new and well-used technologies can move us a long way toward a very powerful preventive medicine based on front line clinics.
This would rely on family doctors offices, most of which would be grouped together in neighborhood clinics fitted with ordinary labs and radiography capabilities. This would alleviate Emergency Wards. Such a clinic would also be attached to the Emergency Ward so that the preliminary triage done by specialised nurses with MAs would direct people either to the clinic or to the Emergency which would then decide to hospitalise or not. The neighborhood clinic would allow doctors to be paid monthly instead of the costly current business-like practice of fee for Taylorised medical services. In such a way doctors will be able to spend more time with their patients. The numerus clausus would be abolished. There would be rotations which would make life simpler for everyone involved, and therefore also a night watch, perhaps insure by nurses with an MA and by a doctor who would be available on call. But patients’ examination would only be part of the job, as half of the working hours of the doctors – within a Reduction of the working week legislation – would be spent on research. In fact, everyone would specialize and with the data available in the Ministry’s servers, and therefore securely stored, doctors would have access to vast databases in their specialisation. In this way, aside from being generalists, they would develop both practical and research experience. They would become the core of a new mass preventive medicine. Which could be linked with public research for drugs and with large academic studies. In other words, devising control Applications is useless from a health point of view. But the new preventive medicine would be necessary to avoid an excessive medication of the population. Contrary to what is done to health-care within the neoliberal monetarist logic – see Note 11 of my essay – it is not necessary to discourage and punish people who go to the Emergency “for little sores” with long waiting lines that can extend to 10-12 hours in many instances. Instead the attached front-line clinic could take care of these patients and could even specialize in the study of these physiological and social disorders which translate into real suffering for the people involved, not just passing sores that can be ignored because they are not profitable for Big Pharma – or to put it more precisely not profitable outside the medical sphere while being quite costly in the paramedical sphere, which is socially shameful.
With the new epidemics, this preventive health organisation based on public front-line clinics has itself become an emergency.
Conclusion. I invite everyone to think with one’s own head and, in particular, to be awake to the fact that many people are now trying to use the health aspects of the structural socio-economic and financial crisis to force a « return » to a « society of new domesticity and of new slavery ». I have already stressed that, in the police-mafia and crooked judges dominated Calabria, we are already there with a rate of employment oscillating between 39 % and 42 % of the total population capable to work, before the current crisis. Italy’s is following the same road to private serfdom and tyranny as is the USA today.
I invite everyone to take a good look at the many programs invented by FDR’s New Deal, an experiment that was unfortunately reversed when Wallace lost the Democratic primaries to the cold-warrior Truman. It went from collective bargaining and unionisation of the labor force – counterweights – to social housing, public infrastructures and public utilities, public schools and university, the Glass Steagall Act of 1933, etc, etc and the leisure and cultural initiatives including its support to actors, writers and others artistic creators, as testified by Steinbeck.
Faced with the question of the choice between authoritarian « return » or democratic and socially-based alternatives, Lord Keynes, one of the Cambridge Apostles and one far from being a socialist, did not hesitate to take his clue from Emile Pacault and Paul Lafargue to envisage the « Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem ( note: of unemployment due to productivity growth ) for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us! » in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren in https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1930/our-grandchildren.htm
I have discussed the need to transcend the destructive neoliberal monetarist dismantling of the Welfare or Social State through its deepening in my Keynesianism, Marxism, Economic Stability and Growth – 2005 – the only book that did really predict the subprime crisis of 2007-2008, pointing to the desegregation of the four pillars of finance and to the devastating impact of financial « montages ». In the main outlines, the proposed deepening of the Welfare State, as it existed at its apex before 1973-1974, does remain the only lasting and peaceful way out of barbarity and out of purported and sickening philo-Semite Nietzschean returns to the society of new domesticity and new slavery.
Compare this with the unashamed proposal to manipulate pandemics to achieve a World police government under direct military control, see : « Attali : une petite pandémie permettra d’instaurer un gouvernement mondial ! », https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GZBY3ow5q0 . (you can use Google translate, if you need to)
See also : « Tiens, tiens… Attali en 2009 : « une petite pandémie permettra d’instaurer un gouvernement mondial »… » 14 Mar 2020Christine TasinLiberté d’expression, Mondialisation, République et laïcité https://resistancerepublicaine.com/2020/03/14/tiens-tiens-attali-en-2009-une-petite-pandemie-permettra-dinstaurer-un-gouvernement-mondial/
Contrary to the pathological wishes of so many scarecrows, all people of good will – to borrow an expression from Immanuel Kant’s essential The Metaphysics of Morals – should work to make tomorrow happier and more egalitarian than today and than yesterday. (1)
Paul De Marco, former professor of International Relations- International Political Economy.
1 ) To make myself happier let me now quote among others, and with a thought for Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and Gerard Winstanley’s celebration of the « Brotherhood of Man »: a) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOgFZfRVaww; and b ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMewtlmkV6c c 0 and in a negation of the negation spirit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CPac2SXBo4
COVID-19 = BREAKING A LANCE FOR DEMOCRATIC HEALTH-CARE AND SOCIAL HAPPINESS, April 20, 2020
Posted: 20th Aprile 2020 by rivincitasociale in Another America is possible, Commenti rapidi, SARS-Cov-2These are part of my Rapid comments. I must repeat that I am not a doctor in medicine. However, the history of Human civilisations shows that public hygiene is the main contributor to Human health taken collectively. I also take prof. Testart’s warning on the necessary role of citizens very seriously.
1 ) The virus SARS-CoV-2 is new in Humans. My personal conviction is that it is an artificial laboratory creation that led to the death, coming with a strange flu exhibiting a strange form of pneumonia, of more than 10 000 American soldiers; this seemed to have caused the closure of the military lab at Fort Detrick by CDC in July-August 2019 before any signs of Covid-19 illness in China. My personal conviction is that the exhumation of some of these dead soldiers is necessary to establish the complete evolution history of this new virus which is known today to have various strains. In particular that of Patient 4 in Italy and that of Patient 31 in South Korea neither of whom had been in contact with Wuhan or China. My personal conviction is that the blame game is not useful. Not even for electoral purposes given that neoliberal monetarist policy failures are now to patent to occult. Instead the urgency should go into the reinforcement of the control of armament treaties, especially for intermediate nuclear weapons, for bio-weapons and for the use of military space, which should be strictly defensive if at all.
As far as bio-weapons are concerned the control treaty should include unannounced and intrusive verification. In this way, Level 4 laboratories would transform into useful preventive civilian entities following proper international protocols and deontological rules. Let us not forget that since 9/11 the USA has spend some $ 100 billion on such military research and other nations are doing likewise, albeit with less funds. These treaties should now receive diplomatic priority at all levels. Humanity will survive SARS-CoV-2 but It would be foolish to ignore the warning.
2 ) Is the control App useful and/or necessary? I have touched on this issue already (http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/commentaire-rapide-sur-les-nouvelles-apps-de-monitorage-social-introduites-la-faveur-de-la-crise-sciemment-male-geree-du-covid-19-8-avril-2020/ )
If such Apps were necessary, the minimal respect for democracy and for privacy – both necessary to preserve social psychic health and the libre arbitre of individuals, hence their responsibility – should imply that they be under strict public control. In this case, this would imply control by public health-care systems, under the supervision of the Parliament and with the possibility for citizens to appeal, at any time, to an independent citizens’ democratic committee to denounce and request the immediate correction of any possible abuse. In our generalised surveillance society, this would include redress from malign abuse, including those suffered at the hands of incompetent, corrupt and ill-intentioned members of security services. Moreover, such public control would impede the privatisation of these sensitive social and health data. We all remember Cambridge Analytica, and we know that this is only the tip of the iceberg. With public control, any violation of secrecy and privacy becomes a criminal offence.
The question however is whether such Apps are necessary and useful to deal with the current and, potentially, with others pandemics. My answer is definitively negative. What is urgent is the mass availability of testing and that of PPE as well as some basic rules of behavior to be adjusted according to the evolution of the current contamination rate, for instance social distancing.
Of course, Covid- 19 is a new and largely unknown virus which exhibits clinical manifestations that do puzzle many bed-side doctors. In an uncertain context, the trick is to optimise the control of the pandemic on the basis of what we know and of what we learn as we go.
We have an idea of the exponential rate of propagation (Rt) of the new virus. We know that a majority of the population is seemingly unaffected while carriers of chronic diseases especially in the older population are greatly at risk. We know that many can be , asymptomatic but contagious. We know that Prof. Raoult’s treatment – chloroquine derivatives plus antibiotics – if administrated by doctors in the very early stages of contagion is highly effective. Indeed, in his last report Prof. Raoult mentioned 10 deaths for 2620 patients treated, the best score for mortality rate, as far as we know. We know that in order to apply Prof. Raoult’s protocol on a regional and national basis, we need massive testing capacity in tandem with citizens’ self-monitoring – fever, dry cough, diarrhea, fatigue etc. Massively applying Prof. Raoult’s method seems to drastically diminish the hospitalisation rate of contaminated subjects. It remains to be seen if patients’ so treated are or not less likely to redevelop the illness, given the rapid lowering of the level and eventual elimination of the viral load. We also learned that dealing with oxygen saturation early when patients are hospitalised can still reduce the number of patients needing reanimation. Under the current ventilator protocol released patients often seem to come out with heavy sequels – fibrosis, cardiac complications etc. -, which could perhaps be avoided at least in part. (See Whistleblower: COVID-19 Patients Need Oxygen Therapy Not Ventilator, by Tyler Durden ,Tue, 04/14/2020 – 00:05 https://www.zerohedge.com/health/whistleblower-covid-19-patients-need-oxygen-therapy-not-ventilator (see video in link) Vedi pure :Do COVID-19 Vent Protocols Need a Second Look? , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elgct0nOcKY&feature=emb_rel_end. These links were already quoted in my http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/covid-19-fatti-lattuale-gestione-della-crisi-sanitaria-sulla-tragica-matanza-delle-cittadinei-14-aprile-2020/ .See also a recent article on the matter: « Coronavirus, ossigeno ozono terapia come cura: l’appello » Utilizzata in diversi ospedali italiani, sarebbe utile per contrastare i sintomi gravi da Covid-19 e liberare le terapie intensive, https://notizie.virgilio.it/coronavirus-ossigeno-ozono-terapia-cura-appello-medici-1382100?ref=virgilio )
What would the Apps do? They would likely be downloaded on some kind of device, probably the cell-phone. The Bluetooth technology, which does not include geolocalisation, does not insure privacy in the least, since an eventual cookie or malware can transfer the contact data stored in the device. The Apps would trace the circulation of the device at an unspecified radius from other Apps and come up with the mapping of such potential contacts. It will not tell anything on what the carrier of the devise touches or if s/he wears a mask, gloves and other such crucial information. It does not tell you if the carrier is positive to Covid-19. Only the testing does that. In particular, it does not tell you if the carrier is asymptomatic. If a carrier is tested and turns out to be positive, what does the Apps add to the information s/he can provide without it on the actual circulation and contacts in the last 2 weeks? Consequently we can ask: what is the use of such a device? Only social control and the potential commoditisation of private and sensitive social and health data. It is thus totally un-useful.
Instead, it appears well in tune with a known individual and – dominant – groups pathology which is common with what can be called « control freaks ». More dramatically, this control propensity is directly connected to profoundly totalitarian thought offered « once again » as a solution to the current socio-economic and financial crisis, one which the current sanitary crisis helped catalyse, but one which did precede it. We will come back on this issue below.
It thus seems that the Apps are neither necessary nor useful. It suffices to instruct citizens to adopt some specific common sense precautions – measuring fever, watching for symptoms etc and to be ready to contact their family doctors if they think they are ill with Covid-19, just like they would do for any other illness. However, the Health-care system must be ready to react even before individuals test positive; this can be done with massive testing using Prof Raoult’s efficient – and cheap – protocol and with the targeted and organised confinement of the contaminated persons.
I must underline that the great expert in this domain, prof. Raoult, said from the beginning that total confinement was an archaic measure. We now understand why. But this supposed a degree of preparedness: namely readily available stocks of PPE and of derivatives of chloroquine and antibiotics and proper instructions to the population. Given that – this was in my view criminal negligence on the part of our Western governments – many weeks were lost, my personal belief is that total confinement is now necessary to block the otherwise exponential contagion rate and to prepare for the targeted confinement strategy with readily available testing and stocks of PPE.
Total confinement cannot be conceptualised only as a simple function of the management of the Rt function – namely slowing the waves of gravely contaminated people that are hospitalised and those among them who end-up in reanimation units. This would imply a cynical intention to achieve an elusive « herd immunity » in a less dramatic fashion, but with the inescapable insurance of killing the same amount of most vulnerable persons, albeit in slower motion. As President Mélenchon and the France Insoumise insist, the end of the « total » lockdown must be carefully planned to preserve the lives of the citizens. It just happens that doing so is the only rational way to lower socio-economic and health-care costs to the minimum especially, with the progressive re-opening of social and economic activities.
Indeed, given that Prof. Raoult’s treatment lowers the viral load, it seems to be, together with massive testing, the only way to control and defeat the inevitable second wave, if not the predictable third wave in Autumn, at least if that new virus behaves like other mutable viruses. (I am intrigued by Prof. Montagnier’s affirmation that this being a fabricated virus Nature will normally reject it, but I am not able to judge this intriguing information which deserves to be clarified by people who are scientifically able to do so.)
Note that, as we said in point (1), the total history of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is not known yet. Many strains, particularly from the early stages of its evolution in Humans in the USA, are not known. But we generally know that viruses are mutant and that vaccines cannot be really effective when the knowledge is scare. This aside from the fact that vaccines, when properly tested, often fail – and Bill Gates does not have a good record on that nor on any of his other philanthropic-speculative capital initiatives. Good and safe vaccines take years before proving themselves and must be renewed with each mutation. See « We’ve never made a successful vaccine for a coronavirus before. This is why it’s so difficult » By Jo Khan for the Health Report https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2020-04-17/coronavirus-vaccine-ian-frazer/12146616 .
This does again militate in favor of Prof. Raoult’s protocols – massive testing and a curative approach – together with the eventual modification of the hospital protocols to take new knowledge into account – for instance, the question of the oxygen saturation vs ventilators.
3 ) Control freaks and totalitarian merchant of Venice minds. I have watched with dismay M. Jacques Attali – whom I consider as a « pitre » in the strictly conceptual Marxist psychoanalytic sense exposed in my Pour Marx, contre le nihilisme – Livres-Books section of my old Jurassic site www.la-commune-paraclet.com – in one of his usual performance. He now openly wishes for the militarization of the US society and economy to avoid what seems an ineluctable imperial dismise, at least if the United States of America does not adopt my program briefly spelled out in the Foreword and Appeal here http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/test/ . Of note is the program’s insistence on ending over-representation of known minute and otherwise insignificant groups – even Jesuits had understood that this blocks social mobility and ends up worse than congenital idiocy – and on the the adoption of a new anti-dumping definition based on the « global net revenue » of the household. Attali’s et al., utterances on the alleged usefulness of some forms of euthanasia can also be checked against the current forced triage in the hospital intensive care units …
This saddens me : it comes after the disastrous allegedly self-proclaimed « awakened nihilists » 9/11 ploy and management. And, in fact, it confirms my worst fears about the exclusivist return engineered in some temple loving quarters, demonstrated and denounced in the aforementioned book as well as in my essay « Le lit du néo-fascisme » in the section Fascism, Racism and Exclusivism of the same site. In brief, today like yesterday, for some people seriously deprived of any historical memory, the solution to the structural crisis of capitalism seems to be a return to Mussolini-Sarfatti’s fascism, that is in its pre-1938 version. It is just unbelievable. In my country, this runs frontally against Article XII of the Transitory and Definitive provisions of the Constitution born of the Resistance which forbids any form of fascism. Similar provisions are integral to all our constitutions as well as in the Universal Declaration of Fundamental Social and individual Human Rights of 1948.
Now just consider the philanthropic capitalist Bill Gates. In US history, the rich soon developed philanthropy in order to avoid paying their fair share of taxes and thus to expand their own influence through many Foundations and other Think-Tanks astutely paid out of the public purse. Bill Gates is certainly not the garage genius he is made out to be, but he quickly understood the potentiality of such philanthropic capitalism. As we all know, he merely was authorised by the system to massify the technology developed for the Pentagon under General Taylor; it was based on a communication nodal network capable to survive a massive nuclear strike. Yet, this technology only became useful outside of military and campus intranets with the invention of the Web by the CERN. France had developed a highly successful public technology known as Minitel. To transform telecommunication into a public sphere once again, Minitel should be re-visited and updated; in fact, the only thing it would need is a universal interface which would allow it to communicate with other systems, public or private. This would solve many pending issues such as privacy and commoditisation issues as well as the so-called digital divide …
However Bill Gates quickly understood the profit that could be made year after year with vaccines. Even if they were not properly tested. Larry Summers had explained that delocalizing polluting industries in India or in other developing countries was beneficial not only because labor was cheap but also because the reparations due for the damages imposed on the population – for instance at Bhopal – would cost a fraction compared to what they would cost in the USA or in the developed West – for instance the Three Miles Island disaster!
Monsanto and others quickly realised that if they could get away with patenting living organisms, they could create very lucrative captive markets, for instance forcing peasants to buy both the seeds and the pesticides that go with them every year, thus losing control over their own seed production, diminishing agricultural and cultural wealth, and, in the process, trading the agricultural and food sovereignty against agricultural « security », presumably achieved through derivatives slapped on futures markets and on food stuffs!! (See my Book III in the aforementioned site as well as the pertinent articles in its International Political Economy section.)
Poor African and Asian populations, especially kids, just like Covid-19 patients hospitalised because some criminal idiots had suddenly destroyed PPE stocks and declared chloroquine to be dangerous, are used in extremis to test Big Pharma’s expensive drugs and vaccines.
Likewise the European Commission is tolerating the preventive destruction of European Internet platforms, together with their revenues as well as their potential for the development of local jobs in Open source software developments, when it tolerates Facebook’s captive market strategy. One can easily understand that the owner of a platform can block the use of its publishing services to a person that has not signed in as a member, but not that a third person would be blocked from reading a site without being a member. This goes frontally against any competition rule in the UE see : http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/lettera-aperta-alla-commissaria-europea-margrethe-vestager-si-prega-mettere-un-termine-alla-captive-market-strategy-delle-gafa-ed-imprese-simili/
In the same vein as Attali and others such ilk, Bill Gates is on record for his wish to see the whole world population under control through tracking Apps and devises, not for their own good insured by disinterested and not for profit public agencies, but with the declared aim to restrict citizens mobility if they are not vaccinated, presumably with his own vaccines! Talk about creating captive markets!
This typical perversion is even contrary to liberal competitive capitalism or to the Sherman Act. Robert Kennedy denounced this trend. As a former professor I must underline the pathological and anti-democratic – i.e. vulgarly exclusivist – character of such thinking. It must not be tolerated. And to make sure that this neo-Nietzschean Talmudist thinking is eliminated from the public democratic sphere, this pathology must be cured at its roots, namely substituting private Big Pharma with public Pharma care, making illegal the private patenting of living organisms, and re-deploying the kind of progressive fiscal policy that had been implemented by the New Deal under FDR and by the now partially dismantled European Social State right after WWII.
See :
a ) Robert F Kennedy Jr. Exposes Bill Gates’ Vaccine Agenda In Scathing Report , by Tyler Durden , Sun, 04/12/2020 – 23:00,Authored by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Chairman, Children’s Health Defense, https://www.zerohedge.com/health/robert-f-kennedy-jr-exposes-bill-gates-vaccine-agenda-scathing-report
b ) Note 1 ) The Paper Of Record Says Feel Sorry For Bill Gates, Who’s Been Targeted With Conspiracy Theories ,by Tyler Durden ,Fri, 04/17/2020 – 20:20 https://www.zerohedge.com/health/wsj-feel-sorry-bill-gates-whos-been-targeted-conspiracy-theories
(See the incorporated video at 34:20. Gates wants a certificate to determine who had the vaccine, and restrict mobility accordingly. Is this a captured market ? In a strange Nazi-like drifting he also advocate and finance projects to tattoo people, like the one pursued by some research team in the MIT. One might be reminded of the « Island of Dr Moreau » starring Marlon Brando … This amounts to being worse than the caricature! See ; « PJ TV : “Le monde d’après…” – Invité Jacques Attali . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zcf4qqWvGE&t=1070s )
The video on B Gates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe8fIjxicoo&feature=emb_title
See also ‘Bill Gates is continuing the work of Monsanto’, Vandana Shiva tells FRANCE 24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNM833K22LM )
4 ) Proto-totalitarian tracking versus public health-care and front line neighborhood clinics.
In my essay on health-care available in http://rivincitasociale.altervista.org/health-care-between-cuts-and-corruption-victim-of-choice-for-neoliberal-and-monetarist-fiscal-federalism-may-2016-translated-april-6-2020/ , I tried to show how new and well-used technologies can move us a long way toward a very powerful preventive medicine based on front line clinics.
This would rely on family doctors offices, most of which would be grouped together in neighborhood clinics fitted with ordinary labs and radiography capabilities. This would alleviate Emergency Wards. Such a clinic would also be attached to the Emergency Ward so that the preliminary triage done by specialised nurses with MAs would direct people either to the clinic or to the Emergency which would then decide to hospitalise or not. The neighborhood clinic would allow doctors to be paid monthly instead of the costly current business-like practice of fee for Taylorised medical services. In such a way doctors will be able to spend more time with their patients. The numerus clausus would be abolished. There would be rotations which would make life simpler for everyone involved, and therefore also a night watch, perhaps insure by nurses with an MA and by a doctor who would be available on call. But patients’ examination would only be part of the job, as half of the working hours of the doctors – within a Reduction of the working week legislation – would be spent on research. In fact, everyone would specialize and with the data available in the Ministry’s servers, and therefore securely stored, doctors would have access to vast databases in their specialisation. In this way, aside from being generalists, they would develop both practical and research experience. They would become the core of a new mass preventive medicine. Which could be linked with public research for drugs and with large academic studies. In other words, devising control Applications is useless from a health point of view. But the new preventive medicine would be necessary to avoid an excessive medication of the population. Contrary to what is done to health-care within the neoliberal monetarist logic – see Note 11 of my essay – it is not necessary to discourage and punish people who go to the Emergency “for little sores” with long waiting lines that can extend to 10-12 hours in many instances. Instead the attached front-line clinic could take care of these patients and could even specialize in the study of these physiological and social disorders which translate into real suffering for the people involved, not just passing sores that can be ignored because they are not profitable for Big Pharma – or to put it more precisely not profitable outside the medical sphere while being quite costly in the paramedical sphere, which is socially shameful.
With the new epidemics, this preventive health organisation based on public front-line clinics has itself become an emergency.
Conclusion. I invite everyone to think with one’s own head and, in particular, to be awake to the fact that many people are now trying to use the health aspects of the structural socio-economic and financial crisis to force a « return » to a « society of new domesticity and of new slavery ». I have already stressed that, in the police-mafia and crooked judges dominated Calabria, we are already there with a rate of employment oscillating between 39 % and 42 % of the total population capable to work, before the current crisis. Italy’s is following the same road to private serfdom and tyranny as is the USA today.
I invite everyone to take a good look at the many programs invented by FDR’s New Deal, an experiment that was unfortunately reversed when Wallace lost the Democratic primaries to the cold-warrior Truman. It went from collective bargaining and unionisation of the labor force – counterweights – to social housing, public infrastructures and public utilities, public schools and university, the Glass Steagall Act of 1933, etc, etc and the leisure and cultural initiatives including its support to actors, writers and others artistic creators, as testified by Steinbeck.
Faced with the question of the choice between authoritarian « return » or democratic and socially-based alternatives, Lord Keynes, one of the Cambridge Apostles and one far from being a socialist, did not hesitate to take his clue from Emile Pacault and Paul Lafargue to envisage the « Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem ( note: of unemployment due to productivity growth ) for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us! » in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren in https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1930/our-grandchildren.htm
I have discussed the need to transcend the destructive neoliberal monetarist dismantling of the Welfare or Social State through its deepening in my Keynesianism, Marxism, Economic Stability and Growth – 2005 – the only book that did really predict the subprime crisis of 2007-2008, pointing to the desegregation of the four pillars of finance and to the devastating impact of financial « montages ». In the main outlines, the proposed deepening of the Welfare State, as it existed at its apex before 1973-1974, does remain the only lasting and peaceful way out of barbarity and out of purported and sickening philo-Semite Nietzschean returns to the society of new domesticity and new slavery.
Compare this with the unashamed proposal to manipulate pandemics to achieve a World police government under direct military control, see : « Attali : une petite pandémie permettra d’instaurer un gouvernement mondial ! », https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GZBY3ow5q0 . (you can use Google translate, if you need to)
See also : « Tiens, tiens… Attali en 2009 : « une petite pandémie permettra d’instaurer un gouvernement mondial »… » 14 Mar 2020Christine TasinLiberté d’expression, Mondialisation, République et laïcité https://resistancerepublicaine.com/2020/03/14/tiens-tiens-attali-en-2009-une-petite-pandemie-permettra-dinstaurer-un-gouvernement-mondial/
Contrary to the pathological wishes of so many scarecrows, all people of good will – to borrow an expression from Immanuel Kant’s essential The Metaphysics of Morals – should work to make tomorrow happier and more egalitarian than today and than yesterday. (1)
Paul De Marco, former professor of International Relations- International Political Economy.
1 ) To make myself happier let me now quote among others, and with a thought for Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and Gerard Winstanley’s celebration of the « Brotherhood of Man »: a) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOgFZfRVaww; and b ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMewtlmkV6c c 0 and in a negation of the negation spirit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CPac2SXBo4