Am I the only one who is totally horrified by the appalling lack of journalistic inquiry about COVID-19? And the media’s shutting down of any voice that might question the official lines?
Of course, this new coronavirus represents brand-new medical territory. Medics and scientists are feeling their way to an understanding of the highest risk factors and the probable progression of illness. Of course, we all need to take care.
But universally, the press has just gone to sleep. Almost no members of the press, in my view, are asking the right questions.
Here are the biggest questions in my mind:
One: how do the current death rates overall compare to the overall daily death rates in prior years and prior months? Are more people dying or are all people who die just assumed to die from coronavirus?
Some evidence shows that our death rate hasn’t changed, but that many deaths, particularly among the old, are automatically being recorded as a COVID-19 death.
Recently, a British paper wrote, in an offhand remark, that most care patients dying are automatically being recorded as a coronavirus fatality, without a shred of evidence, because care homes are not given testing kits with which to confirm diagnoses.
Two: How does the death rate from COVID-19 compare with the death rate from ordinary flu? Figures and graphs just a few weeks ago in the Daily Telegraph showed that many more people die from seasonal flu. No one has picked up the story and really investigated further.
Three: Why aren’t we clocking up the actual death rate from the virus, compared to the total number of cases, in all the countries with rigorous testing facilities as the more accurate indicator of the fatality rate?
Four: Why are we setting up more hospitals when many hospitals are about one-third empty, at least in the UK?
Five: Why, when private companies offered to provide millions of testing kits, to organizations like Public Health England, which makes decisions on behalf of the NHS, turn them down?
Six: In the absence of any medical solution (like an effective anti-viral or a vaccine) why are doctors not experimenting widely with substances like intravenous vitamin C? A few doctors in China, New York and private practice have had encouraging results. What have hospitals to lose if they give it a go?
And let’s say they don’t believe it would work. All of medicine understands the power of the placebo effect.
Placebos have been shown to work 60-70 percent of the time. So if patients were told they were getting medicine intravenously, even if it wasn’t especially active, it would undoubtedly improve outcomes.
Seven: Why are few journalists not only NOT investigating many known virus killers like vitamin C, ionizers, iodine, NAC, ginkgo biloba and more, but actively discrediting them?
This lack of information is symptomatic of an enormous shift in the press’s notion of its role in society. When it comes to health, newspapers, news agents and now even social media seem to believe that their role is to ‘protect’ the public by censoring information that departs from the standard medical line.
And today’s journalists have mostly forgotten their weighty role as the Fourth Estate to delve behind the lies and the pap of industry and governments.
They have forgotten that it is their duty to question authority even when it is inconvenient or deviates from party line.
These days, with national newspapers hemorrhaging readers, they increasingly rely on advertising from powerful industries like the pharmaceuticals. The media itself has now become the party with powerful vested interests to protect, with journalists largely just a mouthpiece for the Establishment.
And of course, search engines and social media have now got in on the act. Google has changed its algorithms, so that information about alternative health has virtually disappeared.
Facebook and other social media are actively removing proven information about holistic substances like vitamin C as a preventative or treatment for COVID-19, calling it ‘fake news.’ Like most of the major newspapers in the US and Britain both Google and Facebook have major ties to pharmaceutical companies.
Controlling how its readers should treat their illnesses is emphatically not the media’s job, particularly when influenced by its own financial considerations.
But it is the media’s job to stop taking dictation from governments or the drug industry and to ask the hard questions, now more than ever.
(For some information the media isn’t telling you, listen to our four free webinars on Supercharging yourself again the coronavirus: https://getwell.solutions/covid-19-webinar/)