Juno News - July 22, 2023


On C2C: How PCR tests and flawed death counts stoked pandemic fears


Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

156.18336

Word count

2,051

Sentence count

3

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the Andrey Lawton Show, Dr. Andrew Lawton sits down with Dr. Gleb Lysic of the C2C Journal to discuss his essay, "A Simple Meat and Potato recipe for Making a Pandemic," and to discuss the concept of pandemic amnesty.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 you're tuned in to the andrew lawton show
00:00:05.920 we're going to be talking with gleb lisik of the c2c journal in just a few moments time here
00:00:14.680 but i just want to talk about this in the context here because he put forward a great essay
00:00:20.240 in c2c journal in which he talked about a simple meat and potato recipe for making a pandemic and
00:00:29.920 he talks about this in basically two main pieces of detail one is the reliance on pcr test you
00:00:37.560 remember pcr test they were all the rage through 2020 and 2021 and kind of into 2022 as well you
00:00:45.200 used to have to do one if you wanted to get back into your own country and also the over reporting
00:00:50.520 of covid death numbers both of these things were crucial pieces of evidence that the government
00:00:57.360 relied on in explaining just how dangerous and dire things were and these things ultimately became
00:01:04.520 the cornerstones of the pandemic narrative that really carried much of the last three years so
00:01:12.040 it's a very thoughtful piece and as i've said on the show it's a bit challenging sometimes when we
00:01:16.420 had to live through this to want to stay in this terrain for so long but i also believe there is
00:01:23.120 generally speaking a sense of justice that people need a lot of folks are not prepared just to live
00:01:28.420 and let live and offer that so-called pandemic amnesty i saw a video from some ostensibly right
00:01:35.780 of center commentator uh today giving an apology for comments he made about unvaccinated people for
00:01:42.200 example earlier in the pandemic and i watched this apology video and i was but it offered no sense of
00:01:48.520 why it was wrong and no sense of why he believed what he believed and what changed now i'm a big
00:01:54.040 believer that if someone is going to go through an evolution in how they think and how they approach
00:01:58.920 an issue we should encourage it and we should welcome it but you've got to show your work and
00:02:03.920 you've got to explain what it is that has actually changed as opposed to just demanding forgiveness
00:02:09.020 because you realize that whatever view you had a year ago or five minutes ago is no longer in vogue
00:02:15.360 with the audience that you have now and i think that's the key thing here whenever anyone's talking
00:02:22.240 about the idea of pandemic amnesty so we'll talk about this in the context of this essay here
00:02:28.480 with gleb lysic who's a c2c contributor and also a researcher and it professional gleb good to talk to
00:02:35.920 you thanks very much for coming on today so i mean you've actually distilled a very complex concept
00:02:42.080 into fairly simple terms here but am i understanding your point correctly that you feel the two sort of
00:02:48.880 big data issues that we saw here came down to the pcr tests and the related but also distinct phenomenon
00:02:56.640 of the death counts yeah that's pretty much was the idea right um the covet waters were very very murky
00:03:06.720 uh and uh there are all all kinds of things that come into equation the uh government response the
00:03:13.040 officials uh the media uh hospitalizations the bands hospital band utilization and stuff like that
00:03:23.280 so so many things so to me it was important to distill this to those
00:03:29.920 uh key concepts that pretty much drove everything else right so we had cases and we had deaths cases would
00:03:39.440 uh estimate the scale of that uh let's call it a disaster right uh and the deaths would estimate
00:03:50.160 the severity everything else was kind of in between or supported by all those numbers
00:03:56.080 so that's why i wanted to uh take all those side components out of the equation and just plug the
00:04:08.320 major numbers in and present them in a way that not only highlight the aspects of this covet pandemic
00:04:18.640 but would also apply to any pandemic going forward because ultimately if we're going to have another
00:04:27.760 one it will be gauged by the same numbers cases and deaths that's it yeah and and i think both are
00:04:35.440 challenging i mean originally cases were the thing that everyone cared about because you know cases were
00:04:41.040 the way you'd measure how widespread something was in in a community and at a certain point when
00:04:47.280 i forget which wave it was i don't know if it was omicron or something when we saw cases just
00:04:52.640 completely swell but deaths continued to be in decline and uh you know the idea of at that time
00:04:58.320 taking anything meaningful of cases when people myself included were testing positive despite having
00:05:04.560 zero symptoms of anything so i mean that is not a meaningful positive result and and whether it's that
00:05:11.280 it's a false positive or your case is so mild that you don't even know you have it to me is not
00:05:18.400 necessarily relevant there but people were still trying to make policy on that and saying well the
00:05:22.800 high cases mean we need to keep mask mandates in place we need to keep x y and z in place
00:05:27.920 yeah you hit uh the nail on the head uh i think it was around uh january 2022 when uh omicron was at its
00:05:38.480 best and the cases were through the roof and people started wondering like why are we really counting
00:05:46.000 those right and how are we counting that and is it the effort and counting that brings up the cases up
00:05:54.240 or is it actually the cases themselves or the disease so it was becoming very apparent and laughable that
00:06:01.840 counting cases the techniques of counting cases they demand for cases or forcing everybody to test
00:06:10.240 was what was driving the case numbers as soon as they stopped counting cases disappeared
00:06:15.840 is your view on the pcr test that it was being used for something that it was never intended to
00:06:25.280 be used for and that the the issues that you've identified were more accidental or or was your view
00:06:31.520 that this was being deliberately used because it would give this number that would then support all
00:06:38.000 of these policies the government wanted to put in i guess the question is was this and it was this
00:06:42.240 something that was a byproduct of a bad policy or was this a policy that was designed in your view to
00:06:47.760 be more manipulative in my personal opinion and again i'm not claiming to be the final instance of
00:06:54.640 everything so everybody can anybody can read the article and make up their own mind i'm not trying to
00:06:59.520 draw any conclusions but since you're asking me personally i think it was a deliberate attempt there's
00:07:05.760 absolutely no way for me how um a medical a science a scientist or expert in uh pcr testing for example or
00:07:17.200 any of the testing of in sort would legitimately authorize pcr to be a clinical diagnostics tool
00:07:26.240 judging from that it was totally inappropriate to use it as a clinical diagnostics tool you can use pcr and
00:07:32.480 a pcr is a great technology right that allows you to let's say estimate the presence of certain
00:07:39.120 pathogen within the population because it's totally probabilistic so you can apply it to masses and come
00:07:46.480 up with a probabilistic estimate of how much of that particular pathogen virus or whatever is present
00:07:52.320 within a certain group of population but when it comes to clinical diagnostic deciding whether a particular
00:07:58.960 person is sick it has a disease it totally fails to do its job because it's a probabilistic tool it's never
00:08:09.440 been designed for clinical diagnostics that's not very it's uh the the very inventor of this technology
00:08:17.120 questioned that um not specifically for covet but for viruses in general right so to me it's absolutely
00:08:25.440 impossible how a medical medically knowledgeable person can make a decision to use pcr for clinical
00:08:35.520 diagnostics which inevitably follows that it was a deliberate attempt to exaggerate cases through
00:08:43.760 misuse of the pcr and i said at the beginning when we look at cases and deaths that the two are are
00:08:51.120 different but they're very related because uh the case that the pcr testing and you know for example
00:08:57.520 you couldn't go to a hospital with a broken leg without getting a covet test meant that all of a
00:09:02.080 sudden people that never would have been tested on their own were getting logged as covet hospitalizations
00:09:08.080 and if something happened where you died we know that there was this issue of people dying with covet
00:09:13.760 versus of covet which messed with the numbers and i mean you had some uh stories in the us where
00:09:19.600 someone you know went in with a motorcycle accident that killed them and they were logged as a covet death
00:09:24.800 because they happen to have covet or something like that and and you had government say oh you know
00:09:29.200 we're trying to do our best to to filter these cases out but the two really are interconnected in the
00:09:34.800 sense that someone gets a pcr test uh someone is a covet case someone dies of something all of a sudden
00:09:41.280 the natural instinct is to log them as a covet death regardless of what killed them yeah uh and i can
00:09:49.360 even share my personal story and i'm sure many people would probably know someone um with whom
00:09:58.080 something similar happened so my wife's aunt in moscow russia right i'm not talking about canada anymore
00:10:04.720 i just it because it's been pretty much all over the world in moscow so my my wife's aunt she was very
00:10:11.920 very um unhealthy individual with tons of various diseases um she was she had difficulties moving
00:10:23.280 around the home the home and um pretty much she needed help from someone else like she could not be on
00:10:31.120 her by herself so finally she she got to the point where she had to be brought into the hospital
00:10:37.600 in 2020 uh for something completely different not not covered at all right she had enough other problems
00:10:45.360 to be worried about so after about a week or two i don't remember exactly but she was finally diagnosed
00:10:53.200 with covet uh basically the test came up positive from which point she got moved from this
00:11:00.800 uh ward whatever she was in into the covet ward and she died there and i handled the story right wow
00:11:10.480 um yeah i have i have other other personal stories to share but this is just an example of what was
00:11:16.720 happening in hospitals people were tested basically daily in 2020 2021 for covet because of the
00:11:25.040 the pcr test nature obviously sooner or later it would give you a positive result which triggers moving
00:11:33.280 the person to a different world where they would be treated uh from from covet or get no treatment at
00:11:42.320 all as as in initial stages of disease uh that was the advice don't do anything pretty much right
00:11:48.720 uh as opposed to being treated from what they suffered from so it was completely mistreatment of
00:11:55.680 the people that got them killed in those covet words i'm not talking about covet treatment i don't want
00:12:04.240 to go in that area yet but that's pretty much the very very common scenario you get moved to the covet
00:12:10.080 ward you know you're not you're you're mistreated and you die and the death certificate says you died from 0.79
00:12:15.920 covet well because the pcr test was positive well sir i mean it's certainly a simple and logical concept
00:12:22.400 you've put forward here gleb you know uh cases plus deaths equals the story of the pandemic but if
00:12:28.720 each of those premises is fraught with its own uh data challenges then we we are seeing exactly what
00:12:34.640 you've described here and what you go into more detail in in your essay in c2c journal making a pandemic
00:12:41.280 a simple meat and potato recipe and again we've only really scratched the surface here but
00:12:45.840 i would encourage people to read that for themselves gleb lysic thank you so much for
00:12:49.520 coming on good to talk to you thank you thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show support the
00:12:54.880 program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news