YouTube issued a statement Tuesday regarding the removal of a video press briefing with Accelerated Urgent Care doctors Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi.
The video was the first of two videos playing the entire briefing from a press conference last week. YouTube pulled it for violating community guidelines.
“We quickly remove flagged content that violate our Community Guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act
against that guidance,” said the statement.
Joseph Russomanno, a mass communication law professor at Arizona State University said the doctors’ controversial comments played a role in the video being removed.
“It would seem to me what YouTube’s concern is the potential harm that this video may contain,” said Russomanno. “If you look at it the content of it is contrary to what most members of the medical communty are saying about COVID-19.
According to a 2017 federal court case involving conservative non-profit organization PragerU versus YouTube, the video-sharing platform contended that the First Amendment should not dictate how they moderate content on their platform. The court ruled in favor of YouTube who removed PragerU videos that were made with a conservative perspective.
The video went viral, reaching over 5.46 million views, and sparked debate over recommendations to lift the shelter-in-place order.
Tucker Carlson which did a follow up on April 30th and called a turning point.
“When all is said and done. This video removed may be regarded as a turning point in the way we live in this country.”
It was a main stream news story. The only justification had different conclusions than those in power. According to Carlson, “Our media is no longer challenging power they are colluding with power. Big technology companies are about power.” those in charge. It was a form of dissent. Google has officially banned dissent. There can be no dissension. Fact based is no longer accepted. See his summary.
Below is an edited version of the transcript of the original transcript that captures Physicians said. Abridged to 2000 words from original of 3045 Words. Link to full transcript is found and end.
California Physicians Call for Immediate re-opening of Economy
Owners of Urgent Care Clinic site data indicating that it is time to re-open to avoid an even worse healthcare outcome from the continued shutdown. This is closer to the Flu in terms of its fatality. And is of very little risk to those young and healthy.
Dr. Daniel W. Erickson of Bakersfield, California, is a former emergency-room physici
40 years of hands-on experience in dealing with viruses and respiratory infections.an who co-owns, with his partner Dr. Artin Massih, Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield.
They tested many thousands of people and discovered for themselves what epidemiologists around the world are saying: COVID-19 came here earlier than previously believed, is more ubiquitous, and ultimately for the general population less deadly than we thought.
They went public with their findings, which are not generated out of a predictive model but rather the actual facts of the case. In the course of their press conference they conclude with the need to open up immediately, on grounds of health and human rights.
Below are excerpts of the interview.
“The data is showing us it’s time to lift (the stay-at-home orders) so if we don’t lift, what is the reason?”
We’d like to look at how we’ve responded as a nation, and why you responded. Our first initial response two months ago was a little bit of fear: [the government] decided to shut down travel to and from China. These are good ideas when you don’t have any facts. [Governments] decided to keep people at home and isolate them.
Typically you quarantine the sick. We’ve never seen where we quarantine the healthy.
If you look at California—these numbers are from yesterday—we have 33,865 COVID cases, out of a total of 280,900 total tested. That’s 12% of Californians were positive for COVID.
The initial models were woefully inaccurate. They predicted millions of cases of death—not of prevalence or incidence—but death. That is not materializing.
What is materializing is, in the state of California is 12% positives. You have a 0.03 chance of dying from COVID in the state of California.
Does that necessitate sheltering in place? Does that necessitate shutting down medical systems? Does that necessitate people being out of work?
96% of people in California who get COVID would recover, with almost no significant continuing medical problems.
Two months ago we didn’t know this. The more you test, the more positives you get. The prevalence number goes up, and the death rate stays the same. So [the death rate] gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And as we move through this data—what I want you to see is—millions of cases, small numbers of death.
Extrapolate data, we test people, and then we extrapolate for the entire community based on the numbers. The initial models were so inaccurate they’re not even correct. And some of them were based on social distancing and still predicted hundreds of thousands of deaths, which has been inaccurate.
In New York the ones they tested they found 39% positive.
How many deaths do they have? 19,410 out of 19 million people, which is a 0.1% chance of dying from COVID in the state of New York. If you are indeed diagnosed with COVID-19, 92% of you will recover.
A Summary of Testing Results
“We’ve tested over 4 million… which gives us a 19.6% positive out of those who are tested for COVID-19. So if this is a typical extrapolation 328 million people times 19.6 is 64 million. That’s a significant amount of people with COVID; it’s similar to the flu. If you study the numbers in 2017 and 2018 we had 50 to 60 million with the flu. And we had a similar death rate in the deaths the United States were 43,545—similar to the flu of 2017-2018.
“As for the Flu, we always have between 37,000 and 60,000 deaths in the United States, every single year. No pandemic talk. No shelter-in-place. No shutting down businesses.
“We do thousands of flu tests every year. We don’t report every one, because the flu is ubiquitous and to that note we have a flu vaccine. How many people even get the flu vaccine? The flu is dangerous, it kills people. Just because you have a vaccine doesn’t mean it’s going be everywhere and it doesn’t mean everyone’s going to take it… I would say probably 50% of the public doesn’t even want it. Just because you have a vaccine—unless you forced it on the public—doesn’t mean they’re going to take it.
Norway vs. Sweden.
Norway has locked down; Sweden does not have lock down. What happened in those two countries?
Sweden has 15,322 cases of COVID—21% of all those tested came out positive for COVID. About 10.4 million.
So if we extrapolate out the data about 2 million cases of COVID in Sweden. They did a little bit of social distancing; they would wear masks and separate; they went to schools; stores were open. They were almost about their normal daily life with a little bit of social distancing. They had how many deaths? 1,765. California’s had 1,220 with isolation. No isolation: 1,765.
Norway:. 4.9% of all COVID tests were positive in Norway. Population of 5.4 million. So if we extrapolate they have about 1.3 million cases.
Deaths as a total number, were 182. So you have a 0.003 chance of death as a citizen of Norway and a 97% recovery.
The secondary effects of COVID-19 are worse.
Child molestation is increasing at a severe rate. we have seen multiple cases of children who have been molested due to angry family members who are intoxicated, who have no paycheck. Spousal abuse: people coming in here with black eyes and cuts on their face. obvious abuse of case. These are things that will affect them for a lifetime, not for a season. Alcoholism, anxiety, depression, suicide. Suicide is spiking; education is dropped off; economic collapse. Medical industry suffering. These things will affect people for a lifetime, not for a season.
How the immune system functions.
“The immune system is built by exposure to antigens: viruses, bacteria. When you’re a little child crawling on the ground, putting stuff in your mouth, viruses and bacteria come in. You form an antigen antibody complex. You form IgG IgM. This is how your immune system is built. You don’t take a small child put them in bubble wrap in a room and say, “go have a healthy immune system.”
“Sheltering in place decreases your immune system. This is immunology, microbiology 101. This is the basis of what we’ve known for years. When you take human beings and you say, “go into your house, clean all your counters—Lysol them down you’re gonna kill 99% of viruses and bacteria; wear a mask; don’t go outside,” what does it do to our immune system? Our immune system is used to touching. We share bacteria. Staphylococcus, streptococcal, bacteria, viruses. Sheltering in place decreases your immune system. And then as we all come out of shelter in place with a lower immune system and start trading viruses, bacteria—what do you think is going to happen?
Initially the response, fine shut it down, but as the data comes across you must modify, because the first thing you do is, you want to make sure you limit liability—and deaths—and I think what they did was brilliant, initially.
The fallacy of being protected and PPE
“Nobody talks about the fact that coronavirus lives on plastics for three days and we’re all sheltering in place. Where’d you get your water bottles from? Costco. Where did you get that plastic shovel from? Home Depot. If I swab things in your home I would likely find COVID-19. And so you think you’re protected.
“Do you think you’re protected from COVID when you wear gloves that transfer disease everywhere? Those gloves have bacteria all over them. We wear masks in an acute setting to protect us. We’re not wearing masks. Why is that? Because we understand microbiology; we understand immunology; and we want strong immune systems. I don’t want to hide in my home, develop a weak immune system, and then come out and get disease.
“We’ve been to hundreds of autopsies. You don’t talk about one thing, you talk about comorbidities. COVID was part of it, it is not the reason they died folks. When I’m writing up my death report I’m being pressured to add COVID.
Why is that? Why are we being pressured to add COVID? To maybe increase the numbers, and make it look a little bit worse than it is. COVID didn’t kill them, 25 years of tobacco use killed.
Getting Rid of the Virus
“There’s two ways to get rid of virus: “either burns itself out or herd immunity. For hundreds of years we relied on herd immunity. Viruses kill people, end of story. The flu kills people. COVID kills people. But for the rest of us we develop herd immunity. We developed the ability to take this virus in and defeat it and for the vast majority 95% of those around the globe.
The building blocks of your immune system is a virus and bacteria. There’s normal bacteria in normal flora that we have to be exposed to bacteria and viruses that are not virulent are our friends. They protect us against bad bacteria and bad viruses.
Do we need to still shelter in place? Our answer is emphatically no
Do we need businesses to be shut down? Do we need to have it, do we need to test them, and get them back to work? Yes, we do. The secondary effects—the child abuse, alcoholism, loss of revenue—all these are, in a significantly more detrimental thing to society than a virus that has proven similar in nature to the seasonal flu we have every year.
We need our hospitals back up. We need our furloughed doctors back. We need our nurses back. Because when we lift this thing, we’re going need all hands on deck. We’re essentially setting ourselves up to have minimal staff in hospitals, and we’re going to have significant disease. That’s the wrong combination.
Because the data is showing it’s time to lift. I think we need to open up the schools start getting kids back to the immune system you know and the major events the sporting events these are non-essential let’s get back to those slowly let’s start with schools let’s start with cafe Rio
The Irony of Keeping Costco open, but small business closed
“I can go into Costco and I can shop with people and there’s probably a couple hundred people but I can’t go in Cafe Rio so big businesses are open little businesses are not….
“ Eventually we treat this like we treat flu. Which is if you have the flu and you’re feeling fever and body aches you just stay home if you have coughing or shortness of breath—COVID is more of a respiratory thing—you stay home. If you have no symptoms you should be able to return to work. Are you an asymptomatic viral spreader?
“If you keep the economy shut down You’re going to cause financial ruin, domestic violence, suicide, rape, violence and what are you going to get out of it?
So we need to treat this like the flu, which is familiar, and eventually this will mutate and become less and less virulent…
If you’re healthy and you don’t have significant comorbidities and you’re not immunodeficient or elderly, you should be able to go out without any gloves and without a mask.
If you are those things you should shelter in place and wear a mask and gloves.
I don’t think everybody needs to wear the masks and gloves because it reduces your bacterial flora… and your bacterial flora and your viruses your friends that protect you from other diseases [if they] end up going away and now you’re more likely to get opportunistic infections that are hoping you don’t have your good bugs fighting for you
Original Article: 3045 Words.
Edited to 2004 Words.
The original article/text came from AIER – American Institute for Economic Research
https://www.aier.org/article/open-up-society-now-say-dr-dan-erickson-and-dr-artin-massihi/
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