Coronavirus

The UGLY Truth About The COVID-19 Lockdowns (Video Plus Transcript & Slides) — Nick Hudson

Posted on Apr 3, 2021August 13, 2022

Nick Hudson

Nick Hudson, a South African actuary who has settled into a career as a private equity investor, co-founded PANDA with four friends, professionals, who all shared an observation that data and facts about coronavirus weren’t at all as the media was portraying them. Besides taking interest in statistics and investment, Nick Hudson is also a speaker on the topics of epistemology, corporate governance, investment management, and, as of late, the pandemic.

PANDA

PANDA (Pandemics ~ Data & Analytics) is a multidisciplinary group seeking to inform policy. It is a collective of leading scientists, actuaries, economists, data scientists, statisticians, medical professionals, lawyers, engineers, and businesspeople working as a collective to replace bad science with good science.

Their key principles are that lockdowns run contrary to pre-COVID science (endorsed by the WHO and other medical bodies), that imposing restrictions on healthy people runs contrary to pre-COVID science, that poor countries and poor people within society are the worst affected by lockdowns, that it is questionable whether virus can be controlled at all (without having to completely isolate a nation for a very long time), and that implementing focused protection would provide the best natural outcome.

PANDA’s scientific advisory board includes some of the most renowned names in infectious diseases and epidemiology, such as Scott W. Atlas, Sucharit Bhakdi, Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, Scott Jensen, Martin Kulldorff, Michael Levitt, Paul E Peterson, Ellen Townsend, Michael Yeadon, and many others, some of whom have to be members in a “cryptic way” due to the controversially.

Notes

Nick gave this talk on Thursday 18th March 2021 at the inaugural BizNews Investment Conference. I immediately thought that YouTube will censor it within hours, certainly within three days. To my astonishment, it was still there one week later. I checked back on morning 1st April and it was still there, and with 350K views! I could not believe that YouTube was allowing non-WHO sanctioned material on their platform. I don’t think I’ve saw a good honest coronavirus related video last that long on YouTube.

However when I checked again later in the day, it was removed – “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines”.

Although my interest is only to uncensor voices that should be heard as part of a sufficiently broad public discourse (i.e. a fundamental underpinning of a modern democracy, something now very much out of favor with big tech), I would be willing to undersign everything Nick said. There was not a single thing I understand at this point to be inaccurate.

The second BizNews Investment conference will start 31 Aug (Central Drakensberg, South Africa). Nick will be speaking again.

Transcript

Host ➝ 00:00

Nick first came to our attention when PANDA began making some insights into the whole lockdown. He, in many ways, typifies what BizNews is about. We do not believe that our audience is stupid.

We believe our audience doesn’t have to be told what the truth is. We rather prefer providing a platform where alternate views can be presented and that our community can make up their own minds. So the intelligent lay-person approach.

Never underestimate the intelligence of your community. Never overestimate their knowledge. That’s what we work on. And that’s what we will continue doing in the future.

Everyone that we admire is an independent and free thinker. When you start with him and Michelle there, Paula Sullivan, <inaudible> and Nick and Charles Savage, and they’re all changing the world in their own way by thinking independently.

And if you recall what Steve Jobs, the late Steve Jobs, said, it was the pirates and the misfits and the oddballs who actually change the world, not the people who are made from the cookie cutters.

We believe that our community loves BizNews because of that. That all of our, what our community members are looking for is something different, something alternative, something, not just run to the mall. And that is personified in our opening address this morning by Nick, the co-founder of PANDA, an investor, private equity specialist, Nick Hudson,

Nick Hudson ➝ 01:56

Thank you, Alec. And I really applaud you for taking that approach to journalism. It’s uncomfortably rare in the whole world at the moment. And that is just a terrible state of affairs.

PANDA started off as a conversation, really. A group of four friends, professionals, economist, a doctor, a lawyer, and a little actuary. What we shared was an observation that the data and the facts, the reality of coronavirus was far, far away from what the media and public health institutions were presenting to the world.

And we saw in that problem, the seeds of a great tragedy. After some months, we realized that our South African efforts needed to internationalize. This was not a local story, and it was not only about the science.

Our advisory board now includes some of the leading lights in infectious diseases and epidemiology, Nobel Laureate. And the working team of PANDA now spans the globe and includes a great many scientists, most of whom have to be members of Panda in a cryptic fashion. That’s how bad the censorship in this world has become.

We have believed from the get go that it was wrong on a number of levels to close society down, and that it has always been time to reopen society. And we also believe that the truth only prevails if plans are taken to bring it to light.

Nick Hudson ➝ 03:46

Our world is gripped by fear. And that fear is very much the product of a false narrative. When I say it’s a false narrative, I’m telling you that every single element, every single element of this narrative is false.

The narrative says that there’s a deadly virus spreading across the planet that nobody’s immune to it, and there’s no cure.

Even asymptomatic people can spread it and are major drivers of the epidemic of disease. And unless we lockdown and wear our masks until vaccines arrive and everybody gets vaccinated, we’re all going to die.

And anybody who challenges this narrative is a lunatic, a menace, a danger to society. Hence the suppression that Alec was talking about. But it is and always has been absolutely clear to us that no element of this narrative is justified in the face of reality. The reality is that there is a virus.

It is having a meaningful impact in some regions of the world. Very few people are susceptible to generating severe disease. There are several available treatments. Asymptomatic people, in a more sensible era known otherwise as healthy people, are not drivers of the epidemic.

Lockdowns and mask mandates have been ruled out by pre-COVID science for good reasons, never recommended. They’ve been tried. They have not worked, and they have caused great harm instead of protecting the vulnerable minority. We have hurt them.

This is ground zero for the malarkey of COVID. The statement, the greatest misrepresentation of all time, two sentences, which by themselves are true.

It’s true that the case fatality rate for COVID at this time was about 3.4%. And it’s also true that the flu generally kills far fewer than 1%. In fact, most people would say 0.1% of those infected, not of the cases, the sick people who arrive at hospital. But by conflating these two separate points, CFR and IFR, Tedros was effectively lying.

And this man [John Ioannidis], the greatest, one of the greatest infectious diseases specialists in the world, picked it up a few days later, he said that the statistic causes horror and it is meaningless. And he’s right.

Five months later, the World Health Organization had no option but to publish his paper, which demonstrated the extent to which he was right, showing that the infection fatality rate for coronavirus was not 3.4%, but 0.23%. And more impressively that for people under the age of 70, it was a mere 0.05%, which is to say negligible.

Nick Hudson ➝ 07:02

People are also astonished because the media has suppressed this fact that in March, the first quarter of last year, none other than Anthony Fauci said that the consequences of COVID may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza.

He was right at the time and has been right ever since, but for reasons that are something of a mystery, he’s been wrong in terms of what he’s said ever since. The other effect that flat mortality rate hides is this very impressive statistic. That there’s a three order of magnitude difference between the infection fatality rate for young people and that for the elderly.

Further inflaming the fear is this false idea of a novel virus. The reality is that coronavirus is a very close relative, not even a separate subspecies, a very close relative of the 2003 SARS virus.

There are seven related coronaviruses known to cause disease in humans, probably many others. And for the general circulation, annual, pretty much annual global circulation. So the naming of this disease is terribly inconsistent.

This has really a rose by the name, SARS, a variant of SARS. It’s not novel, but it enabled a further porky pie.

I could talk for a whole day on the things that are going wrong in this paragraph here, Maria Van Kerhkove of the World Health Organization, a majority of the world’s population is susceptible to infection.

And that is the first of two key elements that lead to this idea that everyone is dangerous until proven healthy.

But we could see as early as February, March, that this was not the case. There was the dramatic tale of the cruise ship, deadly virus on board. The captain having to attempt a lockdown under conditions where lockdown was pretty much impossible.

And what that ship showed us, that petridish experiment that should have been seen as a godsend is that a minority of people got infected. A minority of those developed the disease and a very small minority of those, confined to the over 65, died. Only 12 people out of several thousand on board of the ship died.

Nick Hudson ➝ 09:55

So that told you very clearly that this universal susceptibility was nonsense. Another thing that makes it very clear is the startling map showing the population fatality rates around the world.

And while you can see that in Europe and the Americas, there has been an issue. In a vast region covering Africa, Southeast Asia and Oceania, the population fatality rate has been a hundred in a million, which is to say there almost isn’t an epidemic.

To put it in context in a typical year, these countries would expect to see about 10,000 deaths per million from all causes. So the hundred per million represents just 1% of annual deaths and probably be less than the number of people who annually die from influenza or pneumonia, respiratory diseases.

Nick Hudson ➝ 10:49

The wheel of published science turns very slowly and it’s caught up. There are now dozens of papers demonstrating the mechanisms and the detail and the extent of this fact that there is significant preexisting immunity from exposure to past viruses.

And that brings me to the second element that enables this doctrine of everybody being a danger. And that is the asymptomatic driver thesis. It rests on very shaky grounds.

I was absolutely aghast to find out the poor quality of the science underpinning this idea. One of the seminal papers involved one woman who reputedly infected 16 of her colleagues while asymptomatic. But a tiny little bit of investigation pulled out the reality that she was being treated for flu-like symptoms. And with that evaporates a substantial underpinning of the whole asymptomatic transmission story.

We were quite pleased on the 8th of June when the World Health Organization acknowledged this. Maria Van Kerhkove again, gets up on stage and says, the data show that asymptomatic transmission of coronavirus is very rare.

Only to be deflated the next day when she was forced back onto stage to walk back to the statement saying that there’s still much we don’t know, and our models show us that. And so on. And so on. It’s utter, utter nonsense.

Again, Fauci knew this in the first quarter, he told the world that in the history of respiratory borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks.

And again, the literature catches up and we see that in the real world data asymptomatic transmission is not a driver.

Nick Hudson ➝ 12:55

Moving onto lockdowns. Where on earth does this story come from? This man, Bruce Aylward, will go down in history as a criminal of immense stature. He takes a delegation to China, spends a few days there and returns and says to the world that everybody should copy China’s response. There was no substantive reason for him to say that.

The entire basis for saying this was the doctrine of universal susceptibility. It was clear that in China, not everybody had died. Therefore lockdowns work [sarcasm]. It is so silly.

Talk about quarantining of the healthy, the measures that are reported to be ineffective. And that should never be attempted include large-scale quarantines, border closures, school closures, mask mandates, social distancing, all of the stuff that we’ve being forced to do.

And the effect of measures are pretty much limited to isolation of the sick. And hand washing, the stuff we’ve always done. Again, the literature catches up slowly and this finding is coming thick and fast.

Non-pharmaceutical interventions, in general, especially the draconian ones, do not have a statistical impact on epidemic trajectories, whether cases or deaths, and you can even make the discernment that the most draconian interventions are pro contagion. They actually inflame the spread.

Nick Hudson ➝ 14:50

Now we saw in the data months and months ago. In May last year, it was clear what this chart shows you is that there is no relationship between the stringency of a country’s lockdown and the number of deaths per million in that country.

That statistically is called a paint splat. And it means there’s no relationship.

A relationship would look like that:

It wasn’t only in that data that we could see this fact, we could also see it in the individual curves of countries. So on the left, the UK. On the right, Sweden. UK, having locked down in a draconian fashion, Sweden having famously never locked down.

If you’ve heard otherwise, you’ve been misinformed. They have never locked down in Sweden. And a trained statistician would look at those bottom two charts and tell you straight away that there was no regime change. It’s not possible to detect the initiation or the suspension of the lockdown in the UK. The statistical pattern is identical to that of Sweden. The disease follows a trajectory of linear decline in the rate of spread as the number of infectable or susceptible individuals gets consumed by the virus. Lockdown has no effect.

Nick Hudson ➝ 16:10

I don’t really like pairwise comparisons. They’re not scientifically sound, but when they show no difference, they have some validity. Here, you have North Dakota, South Dakota pairing.

North Dakota, lockdown, business restrictions, mask mandates. South Dakota, none of the above. And the most that you can say about that curve is that South Dakota, the open society, had a flatter curve.

No country has been lied about more than Sweden. There were daily articles in The Guardian and The New York Times and The Washington Post, and even The Financial Times, warning that if Sweden did not lock down, there would be a wall of death, murder, mayhem, and the same models who put us into lockdown with their absolutely overblown forecasts predicted that if Sweden did not lock down, it would suffer a hundred thousand excess deaths by May of last year, nearly double the normally as death toll in the country, in the event, Sweden did not lock down.

Sweden

That orange bar is what they predicted. That blue bar is what actually happened. Sweden had a normal year of deaths, bang in line with the 10 year average, depending on how you do the calculation, how many years you average over, somewhere between zero excess deaths and seven or 8,000, not the hundred thousand that they were warned against. What they warned against, what they got. A massive departure.

And every, I bet you, every single person sitting here walked into this room with the belief that there was something that had gone terribly wrong in Sweden because of its refusal to lock down. It’s a lie.

Nick Hudson ➝ 17:57

What isn’t a lie, and what is very clear in the data, is that lockdowns cause a great deal of harm. We have infant mortality. We have creeping poverty. We have starvation, joblessness.

There have been gut-wrenching denials of service, failures to diagnose or even treat diseases, which are far more impactful than coronavirus. And we are now dealing with a horrible specter, especially amongst the youth, of psychological disorders, with the incidents of self-harm and suicide, suicidal ideation, expanding to levels that have never been seen before. One and a half billion children had their educations effectively terminated, or at least severely disrupted. And that is even true for the few children of the wealthy who were able to attend classes online.

Nick Hudson ➝ 19:01

And perhaps the hardest thing for me to swallow about all of this is in undergraduate epidemiology. It is a well-known finding that when you are confronted with a disease with sharp age graduation, as you are with coronavirus, measures to generally suppress the spread of the disease have the effect, reliably, of shifting the disease burden onto the vulnerable who we should be protecting. They worsen, are expected to worsen and do worsen coronavirus mortality

Nick Hudson ➝ 19:44

Closing up now with some stories on masks, because if you think the story around lockdowns is a lunatic story, this one is extreme. Here in March, we have the World Health Organization correctly telling everybody that there was no reason for the general public to be wearing surgical masks, let alone cloth ones.

masks

Three months later, an inexplicable about turn, again at the hands of Dr. Tedros. And I want you to note the date of that announcement. It is the 5th of June. It’s astonishing because on the same day, the World Health Organization published this announcement that there is no direct evidence for the effectiveness of universal masking.

The CDC did a similar about turn just a couple of weeks before. Its guidance had ruled out mask mandates, and it suddenly produced some extremely flaky science, including my favorite yet, a study of two hairdressers in Missouri who were reputedly symptomatic, wore masks, and didn’t infect their young and probably not susceptible customers. Absolute nonsense.

And it contradicted the CDC’s simultaneous publication of a study of many years of the effectiveness of masking in the case of influenza, in which there was no evidence to suggest that even surgical masks were effective with that virus.

And again, when you look at the data, we can compare the mask mandate states in orange with the non-mask mandate states in blue, in America.

And there’s no difference. Nothing. The story that this is protective of you or somebody else is probably a harmful story. What does Fauci do in response to this evidence? That the things don’t work? Let’s wear two. What a joke. Tom Jefferson, the famous epidemiologist, is correct.

Sometimes you get the feeling that a whole industry is waiting for a pandemic to occur. The reason you get that feeling is because there is one. Big pharma.

Nick Hudson ➝ 22:03

I love this woke Pope meme. It’s made up, okay. This is not fact, but it does communicate an important point that vaccines are being sold as a ticket to freedom by people who stand to make countless billions out of them.

And we get to the extreme very quickly with GAVI, the conflicted vaccine alliance telling us that nobody is safe unless everybody’s safe.

How convenient that we now have a logic that tells us that we need to vaccinate 7.8 billion people for a disease that has a mean survival rate of 99.95% for people under the age of 70. The profiteering here is naked. It is transparent.

Nick Hudson ➝ 22:59

And so we have these sad situations of teenagers who are really not susceptible, lining up to get vaccinated in their desperation to get their

freedoms back. They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. And we have this very dystopian, not a new normal but a new abnormal, a PCR test that is not capable of diagnosing infectiousness or infectedness.

It is wrong to call it a COVID test. COVID is the disease, not the presence of a virus. Inflated death numbers, media propaganda emerging from rampant disinformation by governments, not by PANDA. We have restrictions on movement and travel.

We have these ridiculous arbitrary rules. Two days ago, three days ago, Fauci’s out. Yet the evidence now shows that six feet can be reduced to three. Yeah. I mean, can you, can you even begin to take a person like this seriously? We have the looming vaccine passport, loss of personal liberties on an unprecedented level and so on.

And fear, fear, fear, fear, fear, fear of reinfection, fear of long COVID, fear of resurgences and waves and mutations and variants.

And it just is continuous and unnecessary. And it’s putting us into a very Orwellian dystopia with pictures that have never been seen in living memory in liberal democracies.

Nick Hudson ➝ 24:43

Pictures of violence, desperation, and absurdity, absolute absurdity.

If you are not seeing at the moment that the very underpinnings of our civilization are under threat here, then I beg you to consider. We have a choice. We’re up, we’ve been pushed up against the precipice. Are we going to be pushed off or are we going to push back?

Nick Hudson ➝ 25:23

I’d like you to go and read the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocates pretty much for what the guidelines said. What we knew before the world went mad. That we should pursue a doctrine or focus protection and get on with our lives.

We have expanded that in a plain English document called the Protocol for Reopening Society, which you can download from our website. Mandela was right. Courage is not the absence of fear. It’s okay to have been scared by this virus. Courage is the triumph over fear, and we all need to strive to accomplish it.

It’s a hell of a task because this is true that men think in herds and go mad in herds, but they only recover their senses one by one. It’s a tough task ahead. In order to go back to normal, we need to mount an unprecedented awareness campaign to kill this harmful narrative, this deadly narrative of fear and malarkey. And then after that, we have to do some more work. It’s not simply get rid of this fear.

We need to look very carefully at what failed, what safeguards do we need to prevent this kind of situation from ever happening again?

Thank you.

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