The Times of Israel (Blogs) | Dec. 9, 2020

Corona decline: Great Barrington Declaration works

The case of the German University town of Tubingen!

Most people have heard of Tubingen, the 89,000 inhabitants old and famous university town, located in the south-west of Germany in the state of Baden-Wurttemberg, 50 km south of Stuttgart. You might recall Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling, the strange Protestant spirit or even the late Ernst Bloch and many others, including myself, just kidding – seriously: I was a student there and a member of local antifascist groups in the early 1990s.

On Oct. 10./11. 2004, Jerusalem’s Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA, Prof. Robert S. Wistrich, Dr. Simcha Epstein, Dr. Schaul Baumann) held a conference in Tubingen: “The Cultural Side of Antisemitism between Enlightenment and the Shoah“. The entire book of that event is now online available for free.

In 2020 the German and Israeli establishment runs riot and proofs its irrational agenda, mainly Bibi’s closure of the economy and culture, or Merkel’s and Bavarian prime minister Soder’s equally irrational and antidemocratic policies. Politicians all over the world failed to realize that it is a good sign when young people (under 60) go to work, take the harmless virus, establish a herd immunity, as we all do every winter with all kinds of viruses.

Young people do not get sick and even if, after a few days they are fine again, just look at the data from the World Health Organization (WHO): The tiny number of 0,05 percent of people under 70 infected with Corona, die (Prof. John Ioannidis, WHO Bulletin: “Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 inferred from seroprevalence data“).

People without serious preconditions have close to no risk from Corona – without ignoring the fact that we all can get sick or injured or die every single day, life is a risk. Smoking, obesity might be dangerous, too – and being intimated 24/7 ever since March 2020 by the politics of propaganda, irrationalism, anti-hope and panic, might be the most dangerous result of the year 2020 and the years to come. The flu is more dangerous for that part of the population, while Corona is more dangerous to the elderly.

However, take Nobel Prize Laureate (2013) in Chemistry, Prof. Michael Levitt from Stanford University. Alongside with Prof. Martin Kulldorff and Prof. Jay Bhattacharya he was one of the experts Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis spoke to on Sept. 24, 2020, when DeSantis planned lifting Corona restrictions in his state the following day. Levitt’s father was from Lithuania, his mother from the Czech Republic, he once served a few weeks in the IDF in 1985 and is against lockdowns. During the roundtable with DeSantis, Levitt was pretty cool and said, that he knows about the risks of life. Being 73 years old now, he just bought a motor bicycle, because it is fun, it is his life, his decision and his well-being. Our governments worldwide, though, have become nanny-states who dictate us our daily life. I say this not as a capitalist libertarian, but as a left-winger, to be sure.

Contrary to the antidemocratic policies of Germany or Israel, the UK and America, there is another approach that really seems to be working: The city of Tubingen.

Take this: while the number of Corona infections (the so-called 7-days-incidence, a fake number, as the huge amount of asymptomatic cases, which is 6-10 fold the official number, is not counted!) in the age group 60+ in all of Germany currently is 128 cases per 100,000 people, in Tubingen the number for people 65+ it is 10 (ten) and for people over 75 years – the most vulnerable group – it is zero (0)! This is what the Bild boulevard newspaper reports on December 8, 2020. Many German newspapers report about this remarkable Tubingen story how to fight Corona!

How has this come? Well, ever since April 2020 there exist taxis for the elderly instead of public buses. More recently, they introduced reserved shopping hours for the old and elderly, 9-11 am. Tests for all medical health workers and staff in nursing- and elderly homes are done on a regular basis, a PCR test every 14 days and in between every 3 or 7 days a flash test. Cost-free FFP2 masks for all people 65+ are distributed by the town (with no or not much support by the federal or regional government). Equally cost-free rapid tests for relatives, who want to visit their loved ones.

This translates pretty much to the measures promoted by the famous Great Barrington Declaration by Prof. Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford), Prof. Sunetra Gupta (Oxford) and Prof. Martin Kulldorff (Harvard). They signed the Great Barrington Declaration on October 4 and ever since 38,154 medical practitioners, 12,717 medical & public health scientists alongside 686,184 concerned citizens have signed that document.

Tubingen’s major Boris Palmer urges chancellor Merkel and all politicians to change course. While the number of infected elderly and old people (most with pre-conditions, to be sure) in all of Germany even rose during the latest and ongoing lockdown, Tubingen is different and has much lower numbers.

Merkel’s Corona policies will ruin the entire country, it will kill many more people than Corona ever could. Lockdowns kill, they destroy businesses, but even more importantly, they destroy us as social-beings, they deny that human beings are social beings and not machines. You can put your car in your garage for a few weeks and after that it will just roll like before. Human beings are not machines. I just remind my readers to Erwin Chargaff (born 1905 in Czernowitz, he died 2002 In New York City), who argued in 1990 (during a series of lectures by several contributors, given in Hannover in Germany) against the change of our portray of human beings ever since the modern times, and against the comparison of human beings and machines. Already then, Chargaff, who was a chemist, argued against mass testing in the US and the maniac to control all aspects of our life. He said this in 1990, as if he anticipated 2020!!

The mainstream Corona policies are completely out of touch with reality: We have plenty of ICU beds in Germany (almost the same number ever since August 2020, many thousands beds still empty). Look at the dark blue area in this graph below, this indicates hospitalized people in Germany in ICU beds. Pretty much the same number ever since August 2020, between 21,000 and 22,000 patients. However, look at the strange decline of the free beds still available, the light blue area: a decline from some 9000 free beds to some 5000 free beds, while the occupied beds just vary smoothly.

That is irrational! It will be result of the failure of the German government to have enough staff and medical health workers available. That might be a severe and not surprising, but shocking long-term failure of German Minister of Health Jens Spahn.

Thanks to the panic driven, antidemocratic Corona policies of Merkel and the establishment, we have millions of people with mental health problems, people get stomach ache, headaches, physical problems as all swimming pools in town are closed, no culture, no events, no cinema, no theater, no concerts, no pub, nothing. That destroys people without saving a single  83-year-old from a severe flu like Corona. For people under 70, Corona is less dangerous than Influenza, says the WHO.

You cannot put people in their prison cells like students in tiny apartments or small families in a two-bedroom with no escape from the violent father or husband etc. Merkel did not learn the lesson from Corona. She acts like a religious fanatic, the same holds for all prime ministers of the 16 German lands, headed by Bavarian Soder, or for Bibi, Macron, Johnson, Biden.

Tubingen, though, indicates that there is a serious way to deal with Corona.

However, we are not sure, if the much more liberal and protective measures taken by the local government are the reason for the tiny numbers of Corona cases there. Perhaps it is the environment near the small but nice river Neckar or the old philosophical spirit of the town, or even the good Swabian food (with restaurants closed, not really convincing an argument).

Focused protection as promoted by the Great Barrington Declaration might indeed be the realistic solution to our maniac Corona world.

As it is unlikely that German courts rule against the unscholarly PCR-test. On the other side,  the Lisbon Court of Appeal ruled against the PCR test and against quarantine, based on that dangerous test:

The PCR test ‘is unable to determine, beyond reasonable doubt, that such positivity result corresponds, in fact, to the infection of a person by the SARS-CoV-2 virus’, said the Lisbon Court of Appeal“.

As we all know by now, the cycle threshold of the PCR test is crucial, the Ct-value. If it is above 26 or maximum 30, it indicates that a person is not only not sick, but also will not at all make another person sick. Most laboratories worldwide use a Ct-value of 35, 37 or even 40, without indicating this to the people!

German courts, though, so far refused to rule against the not validated and unscholarly PCR test. They also reject to rule against the equally unscholarly 7-days incidence and the unconstitutional shutting down of theaters, restaurants, public life etc. Why is the 7-days incidence stupid? Because we have 6-7 times more asymptomatic cases in all countries, as Prof. Matthias Schrappe and his working group point out. Schrappe spoke before the Health Committee of the German Parliament about the failure of the German Corona policies. If people run riot, like in Germany today, about incidences of 200 or more, that is ridiculous – the real number is 6-7 times higher! That is very good news, as we still have so few cases of Corona. Most people these days just die with and not of Corona. This is a rather criminal and not ethical or scholarly way of categorizing a patient as Corona patient – a simple positive PCR test might be enough, regardless if that person is in hospital due to a heart attack, a car crash or a lethal cancer disease and became PCR positive just in his or her ICU bed, for example.

The official Corona cases are around 65 million, which is nonsense. In fact, we have over 750 million Corona cases worldwide, says the WHO. Got it? The more people are touched by Corona, the better – because most people not even get slightly sick, but build herd immunity, which is essential when it comes to a new virus. Corona is mainly an asymptomatic disease, which almost exclusively is a threat to the old and very old people with pre-conditions.

Despite the fact, that we do not have a medical crisis at all, no excess mortality in Germany, this Tubingen solution might be our only answer at hand to fight the Biden-, Trudeau-, Merkel-, Macron-  Bibi- or Johnson-style hygiene or vaccination state…

For my English and New England friends: V-Day will always remain May 8/9, 1945, the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, and not that day in December 2020, when the UK started vaccinating its population. Just saying.

Finally, Zionists should be on the forefront to attack authoritarian, anti-working class and irrational policies, taken by Bibi or the entire Western world these days. Zionists could align with the Tubingen approach, without ignoring the previous anti-Israel stance of the major of that university town.

About the Author
Dr Clemens Heni is director of The Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA)