Recipes against Anxiety

Covid-19 Mortality Has Been Overestimated

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Why official expectations and facts are so different, with fatal consequences for all

One of the contradictions in the whole Corona pandemic is the obviously drastic-high death rate at the beginning in China triggered by the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak and the comparatively harmless situation here. What happened in China produced panicky predictions in the early modellers. These, in turn, were wrong by orders of magnitude, and none of these drastic predictions came true. Why? The well-behaved schoolboy answer to this question is: Yes, because we took drastic action like lockdowns and so on. This answer is wrong, as I have discussed many times before. So why the contradiction? In this post, I will shed light on these two aspects. That there were drastic events in China is shown by the careful research of Sharry Markson in her book “What really happened in Wuhan”. That there was no extraordinary excess mortality in our country is shown by a new, very careful analysis by Rockenfeller and colleagues from Germany.

Sharry Markson – What really happened in Wuhan

In the beginning, I thought like many colleagues I know: maybe the reports from China were wrong or exaggerated. Since I read Sharry Markson’s book, I disagree [1]. A careful review is not my aim here. But this much can be said: the book is perhaps one of the best journalistic books I have read on the subject. Sharry Markson is an Australian journalist who has talked extensively to Chinese whistleblowers, to US politicians and to intelligence people from different services, and in this book she sets out her findings in an extremely exciting way – a thriller could hardly be more exciting and is more often worse written than this book.

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Dangerous Rituals: Face Masks – More Harm Than Good

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This is a slightly modified version of an article that first appeared in Nexus magazine and the accompanying text to my contribution at the “Long Night of Masks”, the MWGFD Mask Symposium. 

Face masks are nocebos

Face masks are extremely powerful, ubiquitous nocebos. Nocebos are psychological stimuli that cause harm via psychological, neurological or immunological processes.

Face masks, in fact, trigger fear. This is because their presence is coupled with the message: “A powerful killer virus threatens us always and everywhere! We must all protect ourselves!” This message is a message of fear. For the very first public-media response to the pandemic was to spread fear [1]. Once fear is firmly installed, it is very quickly evoked again and again. The face masks are a visible symbol of the pandemic and psychologically conditioned stimuli that induce fear. And they do so extremely quickly and without our being able to resist them – because the emotional evaluation of sensory stimuli always occurs temporally before the conscious semantic analysis. This is because all sensory channels have an anatomically direct pathway to the amygdalae (sing. Amygdala), the small paired brain centres in the diencephalon responsible for threat evaluation. When “threat” is registered there, the entire mental apparatus is primed to perceive, act and explore behavioural alternatives accordingly. Worse still, involuntary physiology, autonomic processes such as blood pressure regulation, heartbeat and immune modulation, is also affected accordingly.

How quickly and unconsciously this can happen is shown to us by a now famous psychological experiment conducted some years ago:

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Risk-Benefit Ratio of Covid-19 Vaccination

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Thoughts on Easter, the risk-benefit ratio of Covid-19 vaccination and key sources of information

No matter how you feel about Easter, whether you actively celebrate it as a Christian, with nostalgic memories of hunting for Easter eggs as a child, or whether you are a modern, science-oriented person who thinks Easter beliefs are superstitions: It is a holiday and should be celebrated. The arrival of spring was already celebrated in pre-Christian times. Christianity has given these ancient feasts a new face with the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. What was ever truly alive – that is, standing in the fullness of God – does not die. At best, it is transformed. Or rather, it is resurrected into new life. That is Easter, and that is what is to be celebrated.

We have received a small Easter present, I think, in that the German Bundestag has rejected compulsory vaccination by a large majority. You can find out here how the parliamentary groups voted: the majority of SPD and Greens voted in favour of compulsory vaccination, most representatives of CDU, AfD, FDP and Die Linke voted against it. I suggest you write to your MPs, either thanking them, or admonishing and reminding them again. You can filter the results to see the MPs who represent your constituency and how they voted, and then write an email. Maybe our MWGFD action helped; because we sent our exit strategy to all MPs. You can download it there and send it again to the MPs who voted for compulsory vaccination, perhaps with a few more personal words.

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Will we survive death?

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Death, the killer virus SARS-CoV2 and our collective fear

Recently, US philanthropist Robert T. Bigelow, who runs his own institute, offered what is believed to be the highest amount of money awarded for frontier research, if not in the scientific enterprise at all; only the Nobel Prizes are higher, as far as I know. A total of 1.8 million dollars is to be awarded for a text that irrevocably proves that death does not mean the absolute end of consciousness. The award ceremony is taking place in Las Vegas, Nevada, these days.

Bigelow is an aerospace entrepreneur who used to work on remote Earth habitats for NASA and still has many contracts with all sorts of aerospace companies and makes his money from them. He probably experienced a conversion experience of his own, much like astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who, while flying back to Earth from the Moon, famously described the beauty of the Earth and its embeddedness in a cosmic whole as a spiritual experience that changed him. Mitchell went on to found the “Institute of Noetic Sciences” in Petaluma, California. Much like Bigelow: He founded his own institute and has used his money over the years to fund academics who tread unusual paths, such as Charlie Tart, who studies extraordinary states of consciousness.

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