“COVID-19.” Say it aloud and get ready for a firestorm of responses.
This virus has impacted almost everyone in America, so it should have served to bind us together. Instead, COVID has done nothing but wreak destruction and division in its path.
Lack of information, misinformation, conflicting information, prejudicial media hype, social media shadow banning, big pharma, and governmental hypocrisy surrounding this pandemic have not helped. Regardless, COVID-19 is a deadly virus that has negatively infected us in more ways than one.
During this entire pandemic, I’ve been reluctant to voice my opinions on masks, vaccines, mandates, and the like on Facebook, or even in public to a large extent. My reluctance stemmed from several issues.
First of all, this virus is real! It has killed way too many people, including my father-in-law, my cousin, and several friends. Secondly, I have family and friends who have worked tirelessly on the medical frontline from day one of this pandemic. They have given of themselves with love and determination even though doing so put their loved ones at risk. Plus, my adult children, other friends, and family have also been on the frontline as teachers and merchants. They too are exhausted and weary, heartsick actually.
That’s why I decided early on to keep my mouth closed. I also remained quiet because what I think really doesn’t matter in the scheme of things; my opinions won’t really change hearts or minds. I even urged friends on both sides of the COVID issue who were vocal and opinionated to be quiet.
The truth is, I also kept quiet out of fear. I can pretend it was caution or wisdom, but the truth is that the unknown nature of COVID frightened me. I like to get the facts, examine them through the lens of Scripture, and then make a decision.
But let’s get real. If you know me, you know I like to be in control at all times, and I couldn’t even get my bearings in the midst of this pandemic.
So, most of the time, I kept my mouth shut – until I got a shocking wake-up call a couple of weeks ago.
On a reputable medical website, a co-worker was researching the controversial drug ivermectin for possible discussion on a radio show. The information he sought on the medical site was repeatedly blocked, even after restarting his computer multiple times.
Honestly, that was not new. (At AFA, we’ve dealt with blocking and banning for months now.) But this day was even more frightening than usual because the medical website was immediately and repeatedly replaced with an open information page from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
At that moment, it became obvious to me that we are no longer living in a world where personal research is truly possible. We are now only privy to certain information. Granted, it may not be the government that is outright censoring our information, but our governmental leaders are not protecting our rights to information or free speech either.
Instead, they are turning a blind eye to the entities doing the censoring, thereby encouraging it. Which means we are basically living under totalitarian rule when it comes to media censorship in America.
I was furious. Evidently, even as journalists, we were deemed too uneducated or too naïve to read potentially dangerous information and disseminate it for ourselves. And evidently, these mainstream information providers (and our government, by default) believe we might need to stick with state-run sources, from sites like the CDC – for our own safety, of course.
Well, alright. So be it! If this was going to be our new norm, then I decided to turn the tables and use this governmental-based information (or misinformation, as the case might be) to look for holes in our government’s safe, secure, and purely “scientific” claims about COVID.
And boy, was I shocked by what I found.
To start with, anyone who types in the word “ivermectin” will immediately be directed to a site similar to this: https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-should-not-use-ivermectin-treat-or-prevent-covid-19. I could have started here, but I began my research with the CDC’s own website and then ventured to their sister site of the World Health Organization (also known as WHO), as well as the U.S. Census Bureau.
I had no real agenda. I was merely looking for inconsistencies. But what I found made me so angry. From these three sites alone, here is just one example of startling government-sanctioned-and-approved information I found as of mid-September.
Over the entire African continent:
Of 1.34 billion citizens,
5.8 million Africans have been infected with COVID.
And a little over 141 thousand have died,
Creating a death rate of .0001 among the total population,
With a current vaccination rate of less than 3%.
Over the entire United States:
Of 332.6 million citizens,
41 million Americans have been infected with COVID.
And 657 thousand have died,
Creating a death rate of .0019 among the entire population,
With a current vaccination rate of 54% fully vaccinated (and 76% with one shot).
Wait a minute! According to sources gathered and approved by our government, sources we are allowed to have and use, Africa, one of the poorest continents in the world (with four times as many citizens as the United States) has exponentially fewer people dying from COVID when compared to America.
Do you mean to tell me, that with all our technology, medicine, and wealth, Americans are much more likely to die from the virus than people from one of the poorest and least medically advanced continents on earth? How is that possible?
And get this! The continent of Africa has less than a 3% vaccination rate, compared to our 54% rate of vaccination. (Actually, more than 70% of Americans had received at least one COVID vaccination by mid-September.)
What is the difference between our COVID death statistics and those of Africa?
Maybe it is the rural nature of many of the African countries. Maybe African citizens are more spread out, have virtually no outside contact, and therefore, the actual viral spread is not as great.
OK, that premise sounds feasible until we look smack-dab at the current death rate among Africans. “The numbers do not lie,” according to our health officials. And the numbers plainly show that Africans are not dying from this virus.
Plus, if rural location and lack of contact were the driving factors with these COVID numbers, then lots of rural places and/or highly quarantined spots in America should be faring better with the virus.
Well, maybe Africans are simply healthier and have fewer comorbidities. Again, the WHO provided readily available information that helped dispel this assumption.
Malnutrition, HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis (TB), Malaria, other insect-borne diseases, Cirrhosis, heart disease, and lower respiratory diseases contribute to deaths on a routine basis in Africa. So, that rules out fewer comorbidities as the reason behind Africa’s lower death rate from COVID.
And it’s definitely not the vaccination rate within Africa.
In fact, WHO officials have been scrambling to reach their set goal of vaccinating at least 10% of the continent’s population by the end of September, and they are failing – according to their own information. And yet, even with their admitted failure, Africans are still surviving and faring much better than Americans who have contracted COVID.
Hmmm, it is quite puzzling.
Could it all come back to that one simple medical page that my colleague was trying to view? Surely not. Relevant and potentially lifesaving information would never be withheld from us. We are Americans!
Get real! Just because ivermectin won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 2015 does not mean that it could lessen the deathly effects of COVID – could it?
If that were the case, our nation’s medical officials would freely offer such information to us. Our medical leaders would want us to have the best and most viable treatments options available. They would give us the facts and statistics about all available medicines, and then want us to consult our own trusted doctors and make an educated and informed medical decision for ourselves.
Oh, but they did. These same governmental websites provided the statistics for us, but then conveniently failed to mention what they already knew from past research.
The WHO African Programme for Onchocerciasis Control has been going on for decades, with a goal of continually administering ivermectin to people throughout the continent of Africa in order to totally eradicate the parasitical disease of Onchocerciasis.
And according to their own 111-page report from 2015, they were quite successful, and they made plans to continue their dual efforts of medication and education about the prevention of deadly parasitical diseases that ravage people throughout the continent.
OK, but here in America, we are too advanced as a nation to ever believe a medicine that was created to kill intestinal parasites could help block the proteins in the cytokine storm of COVID. That is ludicrous. We are talking about a deworming medicine!
Yes, ivermectin is used around the globe to eradicate Onchocerciasis and other parasitical infections, as well as to help eradicate diseases from bed bugs.
But get this! ivermectin is also used worldwide to help with rosacea, epilepsy, other neurological diseases, and asthma.
Isn’t that last one – asthma – interesting?
According to a February 15, 2017, article in The Journal of Antibiotics, biological researcher Andy Crump reported on a 2011 medical study investigating the impact of ivermectin on allergic asthma symptoms in mice which found that ivermectin “significantly curtailed recruitment of immune cells, production of cytokines….”
Alright, now, people. We are too ignorant to understand cytokines and all the medical information that surrounds this term. In reality, we should not even be reading these medical articles. It is way too dangerous for the average American to try and read such advanced documentation. We should wait and let our government decode and decipher this info for us.
Just because ivermectin significantly curtails the production of cytokines in asthma, does not mean it would or could do the same when used to combat COVID.
Alright, we will forego examining or questioning this research on the effects of ivermectin on cytokine storms until Fauci and his highly educated team can dumb it down and fully explain it to us lowly proletariats.
While we wait, let’s delve further into Crump’s article which details the positive results of ivermectin when used as an antiviral against HIV and encephalitis. And as an antibacterial, it was successfully used with tuberculosis and STDs.
But let’s look at something even more amazing than that. According to Crump’s 2011 study, ivermectin is having promising results in tackling cancers, including breast cancer. And in use against human ovarian cancer, ivermectin was shown to inactivate proteins known to contribute to the growth of mutated cancer cells.
Wow! After two years of COVID, words like cytokines and proteins have to make us wonder. Could it be true? Is it even a possibility that ivermectin might be much more than a dewormer for horses and cows?
No! Of course not! If that were the case, then the greatest scientists in the world would be rushing to discover the truth behind these (and other, many other) studies done on ivermectin, studies completed, discussed, and hailed way before this pandemic began.
Whatever the case, we need not worry. Just because we are more likely to die from COVID than citizens of Africa, there’s really not even a need to question why.
We do not need to compare our COVID stats to Africa, or India, or Vietnam, or any other nation, especially ones taking advantage of medicines like ivermectin.
We simply need to trust the “science” and trust our governmental medical experts to feed us their alternate science in edible soundbites that we can swallow and digest.
We simply need to stick to our own little piece of the American dream. After all, we are not smart enough to ask informed or intelligent questions. We need to let our medical leaders do what they do best – protect us.
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Which leaves me with one final question: Who is going to protect us from our protectors?
