Pneumonia and Covid-19, and the veracity of the “one virus, one cause” paradigm
Pneumonia is one of the leading causes of death in adults and children in China. In urban areas, pneumonia is the fourth leading cause of death, and in rural areas pneumonia is the leading cause of death. A recent article in the Chinese literature estimated that each year in China there are 2.5 million patients with pneumonia and that 125,000 (5%) of these patients die of pneumonia-related illness.
As the above extract from an article published by the US National Center for Biotechnology Information states, thousands of people die of pneumonia in China every year. In Wuhan, late 2019, in response to a spate of deaths where the cause of the pneumonia could not be ascertained, it was assumed that the condition was linked to a new unknown virus. The illness was called NCIP, novel coronavirus-infected pneumonia.
The reader will shortly come to appreciate how it is that, at least in the worldview of orthodox medicine, in the absence of any evidence to pinpoint a cause of pneumonia, a virus is automatically assumed. Moreover, viruses are the be-all-and end-all when it comes to causation, with no apparent consideration of the terrain of an immune system, and how it might have been affected by toxins ingested from the environment or even introduced in the form of prescription drugs and vaccines.
Before there was a shutdown of industry, Wuhan was polluted to an extent that people in the UK cannot dream of (see the featured image). In 2019, a protest movement in Wuhan was mobilising principally against the building of a new garbage incineration plant. Of course, this was something that has been circumvented by a social lockdown in the name of a virus scare. Above all other factors, then, the discovery of a new coronavirus was incredibly politically convenient.
The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19 is the disease that it is said to cause) has since been detected and isolated, and a genome appears to have been mapped (as early as January 2020), but there is a proof disparity problem.
Take, for instance, in a paper published in February by The New England Journal of Medicine, at the termination of a section regarding the “Detection and Isolation of a Novel Coronavirus”, 2019-nCoV (as the virus is termed in the paper) is described as “the likely causative agent of the viral pneumonia in Wuhan”. What this implies is that, even though a virus was discovered in some of the Wuhan patients, there was no being certain that it caused the pneumonia. Even now, a few months into 2020, there is a question mark as to whether or not there has been adequate proof of the existence of replicated SARS-CoV-2 in the blood of infected hosts. This extract from Wikipedia perhaps presents an important clue:
Chinese scientists were able to isolate a strain of the coronavirus and publish the genetic sequence so that laboratories across the world could independently develop polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests to detect infection by the virus.
Apparently, the PCR tests being used to detect infection are not generated by material collected by domestic cases of replicated SARS-CoV-2. Moreover, there is an argument, as explained by Jon Rappoport in the article linked to here, that the standard test for detecting the virus in subsequent presumed cases of Covid-19 cannot find the abundance of a virus in a host, and thus that the host is infected. (And to be clear, an infection is the proliferation in a host of a harmful virus. Viruses can be present without being infectious).
Since SARS-CoV-2 has been discovered an idea has emerged that it is a killer in its own right. See, for instance, how Wikipedia states that “those affected by the disease are likely to develop a fever and dry cough” – but ultimately notice this: “While the majority of cases result in mild symptoms, some progress to pneumonia and multi-organ failure”.
Given that multi-organ failure can be a complication of pneumonia, what this is ultimately confirming is that Covid-19 is a causation agent of pneumonia. But is it even that? Even the dimmest layman must understand that if there is no infection of Covid-19 in a NCIP patient (which is what we should call people dying of “Covid-19”) – and we don’t know that this has been proved – then Covid-19 is not the cause of the pneumonia.
Ultimately, then, while the UK Government is announcing a grand financial giveaway to the NHS (dumping wealth into a waste sink – and we’ll get to the bottom of this on another occasion) what we should actually learn from this Covid-19 episode is not to love the NHS as a now slightly better resourced saviour, but to develop a healthy scepticism of it as a temple of the medical orthodoxy. Part of this is to arrive at a position of doubt beyond the understanding that SARS-CoV-2 is i) possibly not real, and ii) probably not the specific cause of NCIP. We should be asking the question, is it even possible for a virus to cause pneumonia?
There are three types of lung infection that turn into pneumonia: viral, bacterial, and fungal. The former is different from the other two, because the other two are their own provocateurs in terms of getting a response from the immune system. A virus is a dead piece of meat – not literally meat, but definitely not alive. Somehow, despite being dead, it breaks into the host’s own cells, and then somehow compels them to produce replications of itself, thus creating something that the body must react to. It does this over again so that the body becomes infested with virally-corrupted cells. This is why, when we are presented with the idea of a viral infection, we are supposed to think that it destroys bodily function; the invasion of a host cell is, in itself, a bodily failure caused by the virus. Moreover, examine how the following bullet point explanation for flu virus symptoms talks in terms of failure caused by the virus:
An infected person sneezes near you.
You inhale the virus particle, and it attaches to cells lining the sinuses in your nose.
The virus attacks the cells lining the sinuses and rapidly reproduces new viruses.
The host cells break, and new viruses spread into your bloodstream and also into your lungs. Because you have lost cells lining your sinuses, fluid can flow into your nasal passages and give you a runny nose.
Viruses in the fluid that drips down your throat attack the cells lining your throat and give you a sore throat.
Viruses in your bloodstream can attack muscle cells and cause you to have muscle aches.
The contrary view – that belonging to Health Freedom proponents – is that symptoms of illness can be signs of health; i.e. indicators of a working immune system. The reader is asked to notice that in the model where the body fails (demonstrated above), the virus has to be in its multitude and everywhere, whereas in the other model (demonstrated below) we can concede that there is scope for the body to be reacting in a wholesale way to a more modest intrusion:
Once inside, the virus attaches itself to the lining of your throat or nose, triggering your body’s immune system to send white blood cells. If you’ve built antibodies to this virus in the past, the fight doesn’t last long. However, if the virus is new, your body sends reinforcements to fight, inflaming your nose and throat. With so much of your body’s resources aimed at fighting the cold, you are left feeling tired and miserable…
your body develops fever to boost the effectiveness of your immune system to fight bacterial and viral invaders.
To add to this it must be said that a runny nose, of course, would be a mechanism to expel foreign bodies from the system. Also, complicated illness would come about because the immune system would be suppressed by toxins from the environment, or even from intrusive medicine. Moreover, an overactive immune system – that will manifest as complicated illness – is caused by toxins that either suppress signalling, so the body doesn’t know when to stop reacting, or also generally interfere with how components for normal function chemically communicate.
The fundamental philosophical question that begs itself is, does the body fail, or does it only react when there is illness?
Being of the school of the failing body, it is natural that the medical orthodoxy appears to believe that the body can’t very easily heal on its own, and needs external help, hence the reliance on vaccines that are thought to be required as an essential aid for building immunity. And it’s perhaps the fact that there is no vaccine for Covid-19 that is causing genuine anxiety in parts of Government and the medical establishment that are pillars of the church of allopathic medicine. The vaccine is the pre-emptive first line of defence against viruses. As well as a sample of the virus that the body is being coerced to fight (because ultimately, the method has to be based in the fact of immune system response), vaccines contain something called an adjuvant, usually (accumulatively poisonous) aluminium, which is supposed to enhance the immune system response. When one thinks a little about the information here presented, an irony manifests itself: while it appears that any vaccine doesn’t contain enough of a particular virus to trigger immune reaction, this response is nevertheless engendered by the adjuvant, which remains constant whatever the variation of the virus that is supposed to be in the vaccine.
For those in the midst of a virus-based illness, antivirals are a medicine supposed to stymie the spread of the infection. Of course, if there is a disparity between the test for a virus and reality as it exists in the hosts, there may be no viral infection for the medicine to constrain. At the same time, these antivirals are condemned as being toxic themselves by the Natural Health movement, and as such are counterproductive because of resultant compromise to the immune system.
That being said, let us argue that throughout history, until the 20th century, populations in the west where modern medicine developed have never been free of an environment that didn’t either afford a poor diet, or for ingestion, present toxic contaminates used in medical practice itself, domestic decor, personal property, or through industrial process. In this context, that there would be the development of a concept of the self-defenceless immune system is something that is perhaps unsurprising. Moreover, one could say that in the resultant medical paradigm constructed on the concept, there would be big money in viruses, and therefore vested interests ensuring that the paradigm is always sustained.
For his further contemplation, the reader is now asked to consider a number of extracts. The first is from a Philadelphia Inquirer article, the others from a scientific paper on viral pneumonia:
While flu virus can cause pneumonia directly, [William] Schaffner [infectious diseases specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center] said the “vast majority” of flu-related lung infections are caused by bacteria that move in after flu has weakened defenses in the respiratory system.
(Source).
During influenza season or a pandemic outbreak, the clinical management plan for every patient with pneumonia should include consideration of viral pneumonia. Similarly, any pneumonia in an immunosuppressed patient or elderly nursing home resident should raise suspicion for a viral cause. In patients with suspected influenza-related pneumonia, bacterial infection… should be a consideration in laboratory testing and initial treatment, because it is not possible to distinguish between viral and bacterial pneumonia with certainty on clinical examination alone…
When serious pathogens such as influenza virus are detected in a patient with pneumonia, the prudent approach is to assume that the patient has a viral and possibly a secondary bacterial pneumonia and treat accordingly.
(Source).
Treated as a whole, what these extracts tell us that in certain circumstances the medical orthodoxy assumes a viral cause for pneumonia, but that it also acts based on an automatic assumption of bacterial infection as a “secondary” condition. Moreover, there is a recognised danger of the bacterial version taking advantage of a weakened state engendered by a virus. We might not be surprised to learn, having digested this information, that in China antibacterial medicine was used on NCIP patients (search for and see Clinical Characteristics of 138 Hospitalized Patients With 2019 Novel Coronavirus–Infected Pneumonia in Wuhan, China). At what point, the layman might reasonably wonder, should any virus be considered to be incidental to what is in fact pneumonia by another trigger?
Jon Rappoport, in the article linked to above, is asking his readership to consider the implication of positive viral tests that nevertheless haven’t necessarily detected virus infection. He says that the fundamental testing has never been carried out to gauge the accuracy of the PCR testing method, so that it may well be the norm that any indication of virus infection is a statistical paper version reality that is not reflected in bodily actuality. The thing that this author takes from Rappoport’s invitation is to question the veracity of the paradigm where the presence of a virus constitutes the genesis of an illness, and to question the authority (and the right to claim authority) of those who would insist that the paradigm is “settled science”.
