I had a small office in India, employing a few people. Closed it down a few weeks ago.
A side effect of covid irrationality.
@MarkGossage a population of 1.4B means at least 14M a year die. Thats at least 38K per day.
27k per day is a bit short 
Can we talk about....Ivor Cummins et al?
Carnivoor
(Vic)
#21
MarkGossage
(bulkbiker)
#23
Hi Vic
The death rate is about 7.3 per 1,000 pop so I’m there or thereabouts maybe 28,000 daily or so.
gabe
(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” )
#26
Yep Tom. I think you hit the nail on the head when you say that unscientific advice in particular areas of public health – like the dietary guidelines – are being generalised to “find the conspiracy” in every area of medicine and public health.
There are a number of threads in these forums where this has been litigated and it’s often ended in acrimony. Check these two (full disclosure, I was OP on the first one):
As @PaulL noted, we should really be asking one question: “show me the science!” On diet, the evidence is strong and fairly persuasive that the dietary guidelines and CICO lack evidence, and that the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis appears fairly convincing. And there’s a lot we still don’t know; Robert Lustig is still out there saying we should be eating whole fruit. Still, nutritional “science” has been a bit of an epic fail.
The same is not the case with pandemic epidemiology. Watch “Contagion” and you’ll notice that the movie was almost shot-for-shot what happened with Covid last year, down to the detail of people getting pissed off about mitigation measures like stay-at-home, waiting about for a vaccine that came a lot sooner than you’d have thought. The science (quite apart from the movie!) is utterly compelling and I haven’t seen a shred of evidence from anti-lockdown folks and anti-vaxxers to suggest otherwise. No matter how much of a slam dunk they think their evidence has been.
Having said that, the West bungled their response to the pandemic, which explains why people hate lockdowns so much. Nobody ever suggested lockdowns should be months long. The “hammer” was supposed to be perhaps 6-8 weeks at the beginning, followed by lighter mitigation measures. See New Zealand. The gold standard, of course, is Taiwan, which never locked down at all, but they closed their borders in January 2020. And, also of course, a whole bunch of mitigation measures were never really used properly in the West – like borders. Home quarantine isn’t quarantine. You need a hermetic facility quarantine.
Tomas Pueyo summarises the failure of the West on Covid here:
I think the West’s bungling on Covid gave a lot of gas to folks like Ivor. As I said, there should never have been endless rolling lockdowns. That was a failure because governments didn’t make the hard decisions and institute proper mitigation measures (like borders and facility quarantine and mask mandates) during the initial lockdown.
Having said that, Ivor was never a serious authority on low carbohydrate diets to begin with. He’s an engineer. Perhaps he did have a grasp on biochemistry, perhaps he didn’t, but his behaviour during Covid has utterly disqualified him from being taken seriously, in my view, on any subject. His Twitter feed is a mess of conspiracy theories, unscientific nonsense, and clickbait. He went off the deep end long ago; that thread I posted was from 12 months ago, and he’s gotten worse since.
What disturbed me more recently was that Tim Noakes, who I respect greatly, retweeted some of Ivor’s stuff with approval, and seems to think Ivor is following the science re: the pandemic. Perhaps Prof Noakes isn’t abreast of the science surrounding Covid, and he doesn’t talk about Covid much on his Twitter feed, but the very idea that one of my keto heroes is retweeting Ivor has made me question everything. Not about Covid. About low carb.
As I said a year ago, I think the low carb community’s tolerance of unqualified quacks to the point of rotating them around the various low carb conferences globally has now come home to roost. It’s done enormous damage to the cause. In my view it could help set back wider adoption of low carb by some years.
I understand there are people here who like the anti-lockdown stuff and think Ivor is great. That’s fine. I’m not picking a fight with you, we aren’t going to convince each other. But in my view the low carb community must disavow anti-science quackery from its ranks. If you are going to appeal to proper scientific studies and analysis in the area of diet, you can’t go down the path of unscientific conspiracy thinking in the area of Covid. Unspeakably damaging.
Corals
#27
I agree with a lot of what you said.
He actually did me a service by going irrational.
I think it’s the phenomenon of having followers. Followers will follow. And if you post often, for the money, or you love the sound of your voice, or whatever reason, you’ll need to talk about something.
The vloggers/bloggers are doing the same thing they criticize the government/big pharma/big tobacco of doing… (the only “big” they avoid criticizing is Big Supplement, because many of them make money from it)…: they’ve turned the pandemic into a money making machine.
My suggestion: don’t follow. Don’t be a follower. And check every claim that could be of interest to you. Sometimes even the most irrational person can teach us something. Sometimes.
Carnivoor
(Vic)
#29
Never before have people been quarantined when they are not sick.
Never before have innocents people been locked up in their own home’s on this scale.
Censorship is now acceptable and triving.
The world population has been divided in 2 camps.
Politicians have gained an unhealthy amount of power thru fear.
The dictatorship style leadership that seems to be acceptable now will inevitably lead to violence. Ranging from violent protest in the rich west to full out civil war in the poorest country’s.
Lockdowns, forced vaxs, closing borders, censorship, forcing anything really is a very dangerous path to walk.
People like Ivor Cummings are an opposition to the other extremes. Very usefull if you ask me?
MarkGossage
(bulkbiker)
#31
And for those that say sceptics are “deniers” and “anti-science”
MIT disagrees
Madeleine
#32
That’s a very cool study and it’s what I’ve seen in these conversations: lots of data and nuanced explanations among folks who oppose lockdowns. (I’m not sure all of that makes it into tweets, though, so I can see why someone who only sees tweets from someone like Ivor would think that there’s no science behind it.)
MarkGossage
(bulkbiker)
#33
Although anyone who watches Ivor’s output should be aware that the statistics he employs are almost always from “official” sources or “experts”.
He may have made one or two dodgy calls but overall his efforts have been great and a very welcome alternative to the dross on the news.
Madeleine
#35
For anyone who’s interested in a deep dive on the expropriation of human health to a small group of experts who line up with corporate interests, check out Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis. Not an easy read but absolutely fascinating. He wrote it in the 1970s and there are passages that are eerily prophetic. In some ways, we - as a society - have been laying the groundwork for all of this for a long time.
I’ll update this post with a few quotes when I have a chance.
gabe
(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” )
#36
Vic, respectfully, this is simply not true. The definition of quarantine includes people “who may have been exposed to a pathogen,” and indeed quarantines are inevitably used on people who are not sick. Australia, for instance, had a quarantine during the Spanish Flu pandemic, just as it has one now. Most other countries in the West have not had a serious quarantine, and they’ve suffered as a result.
Just go to the wikipedia entry on quarantine. Quarantines are pretty much always used against those who are not yet visibly sick. There would be no point otherwise, unless you’re talking about a disease like Ebola where victims are only contagious when they’re symptomatic.
This is the most dangerous pandemic of the post-industrial age. It’s no surprise that we have used the most effective mitigation measures at such scale.
I’ll repeat again though: the “hammer” of initial lockdown ought only have lasted a few weeks. It’s beyond disappointing that Western countries failed to implement other mitigation measures that were absolutely crucial to success, as I mentioned above. Notably, contact tracing, hermetic border closures, and facility quarantine. Over half a million people needlessly dead in the US alone because of this failure. Untold millions with lifelong maiming from long Covid or other irreparable damage.
Regarding most of the rest of your comments, Vic, I respectfully disagree. Pandemics are like wars. Nobody would object to extraordinary powers being used during wartime. But for some reason many people can’t get their heads around the use of extraordinary powers during a pandemic.
As a civil libertarian, I expect these powers to be rescinded the moment the threat level drastically reduces, and I would be the first to join you on the front lines of protest against the overuse of government power then.
We have not, by any stretch, reached that point. The pandemic will rage well into 2022 and likely 2023. It sucks, but that’s the way it is. I see Ivor’s railing against pandemic restrictions as a kind of year-long cry, rejecting reality. Not useful, in my view. Better to move through the stages of grief, reach the stage of acceptance, and come up with some constructive comments.
I’m linking again to the Tomas Pueyo article, because I think it’s critical reading: https://unchartedterritories.substack.com/p/the-fail-west
Madeleine
#39
The justification for extreme measures is numbers like these. You might be interested in CDC findings on co-morbidities (here).
A very small percentage of Covid deaths had only Covid on the death certificate. It was likely a contributing factor in deaths from other illnesses, though of course it’s hard to say to what extent someone with late-stage heart disease or renal failure was killed by any virus. How Covid contributed to the “Intentional and unintentional injury poisoning and other adverse effects” is beyond me but there are 11,000 in that category. Almost 260,000 of the 566k also had influenza and pneumonia.
Five percent had only Covid on the death certificates.
Keto_Tom
#40
There are some great contributions here in this thread, haven’t had time to read and process them all, but I thought I’d share a screenshot and try to summarise my position.
So much conspiracy talk here and elsewhere, maybe it’s true but if someone is going to make a claim then they have adopted a burden of proof - and if they want anyone else to believe them then this requires them to make their case in an unbiased fashion that puts the evidence first, not just trot out comments that suggest if you don’t “know” then you’ll never know and cannot be helped.
The time to believe a claim is when there is sufficient evidence to support it and for me a lot of what gets claimed, even if backed with data, still breaks one of the keto communities fundamental laws: correlation does not equal causation. Causation has to be demonstrated and this applies just as much in geopolitics as it does in diet.
Here’s Zoe’s latest contribution to this matter, needless to say I find it wholly unhelpful, fanning the flames of conspiracy without offering any explanations
