Dr Matt’s Newsletter March 18th – “Light in the Darkness”
Supporting healthy social interactions and diversity of health choices
Even in the darkest moments, there are lights shining if we notice them. These include the families in my practice and some others that helped me get through the past 3 years without feeling like the only “crazy” one who saw the Emperor’s real clothes, or lack thereof.
Another of these “Lights in the darkness” is Bobbie Anne Clark who is set to challenge New York’s Quarantine Camp Law – again…
Closer to home, a beacon for supporting individual health choices is Jonathan Emord who is running for US Senate in Virginia as I outlined on February 25th. You can meet him in person at campaign events near Leesburg and Richmond in two weeks. If you do attend, please say hello to him and his family, if they are there with him, and tell them “Dr Matt sent you” 😊. You can register at the links above.
Although many prominent people shone lights in the darkness, there were also many “unsung heroes” like Tanya, the head nurse at a local assisted living facility, who was there in spring 2020 when the vast majority of her staff stayed home. Musicians like Adam Melia bring light to adult senior living facilities with musical shows all around northern Virginia to help bring people back together.
Today’s newsletter sections include:
Inspirational quote from the Bible “Light in the Darkness”
Music of the week – Adam Melia lightening up an assisted living facility, and St Patrick’s Day reminded me of another example of light from darkness: men and women who fled the famines of the 1800’s bringing their culture with them, including their music.
Community Building: Jonathan Emord for US Senate: campaign rallies including near Leesburg, Virginia on March 31st. A chance to meet like-minded folks who are against social isolation as a public health policy.
Dark News and Light News: New York Governor appeals to keep the “Quarantine Camp law” in place so they can confine anyone against their will at any time if they determine them to be a “health threat”, including children. Where is the “Light News”, you ask? Attorney Bobbie Anne Cox and people challenging this law, of course...
Research of the week – Sweden receives its rewards. Despite being criticized by people like Anthony Fauci for allowing young people to socialize almost normally, Sweden had the best health outcomes of all nations in a recent study.
Yours truly, one moment at a time.
Matt Irwin
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Inspirational quote from the Bible
2 Peter 1:19
“You will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts”
In painful moments, by sitting fully in the present, we take a step back from the anger, sadness, and pain, and we can see a glimmer in the darkness. In eastern spirituality this is symbolized in the Yin-Yang symbol: even in the darkest place, there is some light.
Music of the week
Adam Melia bringing seniors back together
First Light: Adam Melia with “Shake Rattle and Roll”. Adam and Andrea Melia own Nashville Standard Presents, a small music production company that provides live entertainment for a variety of private events and active adult senior living facilities. Specializing in the great American music from the first half of the 20th century, they also provide a lecture series and storytelling services. Find out more at www.nashvillestandardpresents.com
Irish Dance comes to America - St Patrick’s Day was yesterday, reminding me of the millions of young men and women who fled the Irish famines of the 1800’s. They traveled across the seas of the world seeking a livable life, and many of them settled in America.
James Gallway and The Chieftains: Classical flute virtuoso James Gallway teams up with one of most well known Isish traditional groups, “The Chieftains” for some old time jigs and reels.
Roscommon / Toss The Feathers
The Butterfly
You may recall Robin Bullock from my newsletter on February 25th: Here is his version of the Irish ballad, Loftus Jones Deborah Marie
Community Building – Jonathan Emord for US Senate
As stated in my newsletter on February 25th, Jonathan strongly favors people’s individual choices for their health, and has defended this right in court for decades with multiple successful challenges to the FDA and other healthcare bureaucracies. He thus naturally has opposed vaccine mandates from the very beginning.
Since my last update, he has received several endorsements: Dr. Robert Malone who now lives in Virginia, former presidential candidate and long-term congressman in the Libertarian party, Ron Paul, and former congressman Barry Goldwater, Jr.
You can read some of the endorsement statements on his website. He asked me to help to spread the word on several upcoming rallies, including in Richmond March 30th and Leesburg March 31st. They are a chance to enjoy some musical entertainment (Dr Matt’s favorite part) as well as meet other like-minded folks who are against social isolation and vaccine mandates. He sent me this very clear and straightforward statement:
“We want all health freedom advocates in Virginia to be in attendance… We need them to show their support by attending these rallies and grabbing media attention for the demand that all vax and mask mandates be ended immediately.”
Dark News and Light News of the Week: New York Governor appeals to keep the “Quarantine Camp law” in place so they can confine anyone against their will at any time they determine them to be a “health threat”, including children, parents, and grandparents.
Where is the “Light News”, you ask? Attorney Bobbie Anne Cox and people like the judge who initially ruled in favor of the people of New York, of course...
You can read about the Governor of New York’s incredible bad judgement on Bobbie Anne’s Substack:
For me, one of the darkest places was the entire year of 2020, and the “lights in the darkness” included the parents the kids in my practice who braved the social isolation protocols to let them play with my toys. There were also many prominent researchers and healthcare practitioners who began to speak out, but to find them you needed help because the light was “shadow banned” and “blotted out”.
There is another group of people who shone their light during this time: certain specially gifted staff at assisted living facilities and nursing homes, who came in to work despite everyone else staying home. I have visited facilities for the past 18 years as a hospice doctor. The facilities I know well all stayed open despite staff shortages, unlike many around the world that were forced to shut down in mid-”pandemic” and health departments and military units were called in to re-locate all their residents. Even successful facilities like the ones I visited were like ghost towns; they were forced by social isolation protocols to have all the residents confined to their rooms for most of an entire year, with no family or other visitors allowed. A year is a very long time, and many people with fragile health deteriorated and “died” - allowing their spirits to be released with a likely sentiment of “Thank God I got out of that crazy place”.
Our hospice team was also very limited by social isolation protocols. Only the nurses and myself were allowed in, and even then not in every facility. Two of the seven facilities i regularly visited required “virtual visits” from our hospice nurse as well as myself. Both of these had extreely large numbers of positive cases. In one facility one of our hospice patients tested positive three different times, each time with minimal symptoms. This facility at one point had 42 positive cases all at once after the residents had all been “fully vaccinated”. the other had 21 of 25 residents positive in June 2020, well before any vaccine or “milder variants” were thought to exist. Of the 21 positive cases, four were already in hospice and all had mild cases. the index cases was hospitalized with a urine infection that had spread throughout her body, and doctors were surprised she tested positive for covid-19 because she had no respiratory symptoms. On the phone her daughter said to me “I think she was a false positive”. Sadly, she passed away a few weeks after returning to her facility, with no hospice chaplains, social workers, volunteers, or hospice nursing assistants.
Although our nursing assistants still helped people in private homes, these understaffed facilities needed their help more than ever to help care for their most fragile residents. Yes, “Dark” is a very good description of how I felt.
This made nurses like Tanya at one facility, and Rebecca at another, even brighter lights. They wore many hats and came in every day to make sure things did not fall completely apart.
One of the “Darker” aspects of this time is that I knew that the tests were the real source of panic, and that the vast majority of “excess deaths” would have been avoided if people had gotten normal high-quality healthcare and caregiving instead of isolation, quarantines, and healthcare disruption. This topic will be covered in more detail in my next newsletter, “A Review of the evidence”.
Research summary of the week: Sweden – the Pariah of Europe – had the best health outcomes of all nations according to a new review summarized in UK news source, “The Spectator”. This news was provided by a parent of two of my very cute pediatric patients who visited me last week.
One thing very few people ever mention is that Sweden could have done even better if they had avoided even the “low-key” social isolation protocols, which were mainly voluntary, and if they had allowed elderly people and people with fragile health access to family and normal caregiving. Families were locked out of the facilities in Sweden just like every other country. On the positive side, the majority of Swedish children never missed a day of in-person school, and in Sweden masks were never a part of the ”new normal”.
In the graphs below you can see that other Scandinavian countries, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland, also had some of the best outcomes in the world. All of them adopted milder approaches, re-opening schools for in-person classes after only a few weeks or at most a few months, and none of them wore masks. A randomized study in Denmark of mask wearing with over 6000 participants showed no statistically significant difference in covid-19 rates, reviewed in a paper I wrote in 2021. Despite attempts to censor and “shadow” ban this dramatic news, it gave some “light in the darkness” to many people about the safety of breathing the air.
Below is a bar graph and a quote from the article. The article discussed research methodology and provided some another models with adjustments that took Sweden out of the top spot, although still well in the top ten, and placed fellow Scandinavians Norway and Denmark in front of them as well some countries with strict lockdowns.
“The only real way of counting this would be to look at ‘excess deaths’, i.e. how many more people die every month (or year) compared to normal. That data is now coming through. Using the most common methodology, Sweden is at the bottom.”
How to explain that some countries with strict lockdowns did well despite them? I am confident that keeping at least a minimum of caregivers in place for people with fragile health, and avoiding harsh inpatient treatments such as early ventilator use which was designed to protect other patients and staff from people’s breath. Canada kept the majority of their care homes working, with some notable exceptions, which is one reason they did much better than the US. The US was filled with long-term care catastrophes, especially in New York City and New Jersey, which were sadly praised by Anthony Fauci for “doing it right”.
Denis Rancourt et al, featured in my newsletter on February 11th, point out that countries with higher percentages of people with fragile health were much more at risk, and that states with milder social isolation mandates had reduced mortality. They also point out the tragedy of “isolation deaths”, including in Canada, but argue that this effect was much less in Canada because Canada has a very low percentage of people with fragile health when compared to the US. However, I would argue that the care of people with fragile health, while still challenged and disrupted in Canada, was nothing like the disruption happened in New York, New Jersey and several other regions of the US.
In the United States, if you took out the data from New York City and New Jersey where the worst long-term care catastrophe occurred, there was not a significant increase over prior years. I described this in detail in a mostly completed paper from 2021 that summarized US and Canadian mortality, showing that the seven states with no stay-at-home orders all had milder increase in weekly peak mortality during spring of 2020 than they had experienced in influenza seasons from prior years.
Here is a quote from the other British article that supported Sweden’s “less is more” approach:
“The lack of rules allowed for people to use their judgement while minimising economic and social damage. Sweden’s GDP fell by 2.9 per cent in 2020, while Britain’s collapsed by 9.4 per cent. The cost of the various Covid measures is best summed up by the debt mountain: an extra £8,400 per head in Britain, and £3,000 in Sweden.
Swedish schools kept going throughout, with no face masks. [Most] Swedish children went to school as normal. That’s not to say there weren’t absences as the virus spread; it was common to see a third, at times even half of the class absent due to sniffles or suspected Covid. But there were no full-scale closures and, aside from some suspicions about minor grade inflation (the average maths grade sneaked up to 10.1, from 9.3), there is no talk in Sweden about educational devastation. In Britain, there is calamity and cover-up.
Dr Matt’s Take: As usual, my heart skips a beat when describing the past three years, but I have also learned more than ever about the value of standing firm in nonviolent resistance. This can include “no comment” when asked to join an ideology that is unhealthy, as well as “speaking out” as recommended by Mattias Desmet.
One way counter the unhealthy social isolation protocols is simply to do the opposite. This includes, as always, taking care of each other when we are ill, no matter what “super virus” is supposedly on the loose…
Tender Loving Care is the light that breaks the darkness.
References:
1: Simmons M (March 10, 2023). Sweden, Covid and ‘excess deaths’: a look at the data. The Spectator.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sweden-covid-and-excess-deaths-a-look-at-the-data/
2: Observer March 14, 2023. Was Sweden right about Covid all along?
https://www.observer.ug/news/headlines/77139-was-sweden-right-about-covid-all-along
Great info!! Thanks, Doc!