The Latts

I’m starting a new group; The Latts. Lateral Thinkers. There seem to be so few of us around.

Covid19. When it started in Wuhan around January 2020, we examined it and decided that it was like a new Flu variant but very nasty and possibly lethal to the vulnerable - the elderly, diabetic and those with underlying health issues.

Not the “killer plague” painted by the media, which loves exaggerating the reality to get a good story, but an essentially trivial virus that could be terminal for a few.

So we bought masks (my expensive one took 6 weeks to arrive - from China). We took precautions.

I reckon I caught it in February 2020 at the excellent stage version of Upstart Crow when a woman seated directly behind me coughed throughout - so much so that I left in the interval. I got bad flu symptoms, stayed in bed for 4 days, ate Paracetamol, drank water and recovered, although for months I suffered mild aches and pains.

Then I watched as the media - traditional and social - went into Inflation Overdrive, with Governments of countries over reacting to the over hype.

Instead of making sure the vulnerable were isolated and protected, and treated well if infected, they took different methods from lockdowns to panic. Thousands died but nearly all were those who would have died from a bad flu season.

In the winter of 2017-2018 in England and Wales, the wrong flu vaccine was given and 50,000 died in three months. Had that not been rectified and had the “flu season” lasted for a full year, 200,000 would have died in the 12 months. A couple of tiny media mentions was all that got.

Months later they found an antidote test. I took it (very expensive). Negative. “That means you never had Covid” said my (very expensive) Doctor. “No”, I replied, being a lateral thinker, “it just means I don’t now have antibodies”. A few weeks later they announced antibodies faded after a few months.

Like Doctors, “experts” fuelled the PanicDemic without lateral thinking or common sense.

I went off the moment the first Lockdown was lifted and spent four months in the sun in South Europe.

Back for six more months of self isolation Lockdown Two thinking; they are over reacting like crazy.

Had both doses of the Pfizer vaccine. I’m now, again, swimming in the sunshine, away from the media induced madness.

But I worry. Not about Covid (I shall have the booster jab in September) but about Flu, which I think has been ignored as everyone has worshipped Emperor Covid’s New Suit. I bet they won’t have “tweaked” the flu vaccine this year. I bet the jab I get for Flu in September won’t work. I bet there’s a FLU pandemic this winter, killing millions.

Of which, being 76 and diabetic, I may be one.

I which case this may be my final post so please remember; it won’t just be me dying. It will be Lateral Thinkers. And Common Sense.

Let's hope you are wrong on the flu pandemic but officially it will be hard to discern from Covid, which has become a very useful catch all to place blame externally for a host of ills; India doing very well currently in not having to answer for the state of its health service.

I was recently randomly selected by Imperial College to take an antibody test and I had the highest levels (both of short and long term antibodies). This I put down entirely to clear and healthy thinking on the subject as well as a daily brisk walk and consumption of kiwi fruit Actually I suspect I had it early last year as well.

I was happy to "help" but again what will be the outcome from this? What will lower or higher levels lead to? So much blurs what should be the only consideration: how many lives lost is Covid currently responsible for and can this justify restrictions?

Will we see future restrictions if a handful are dying in autumn and we are told antibody levels are too low we just can't take the risk!?

Silly? Well...we have seen far sillier.

I stress WYOT I know nothing about "testing" flu variants but I suspect there has been a huge amount of it in the past and would not be surprised if virtually none has happened since COVID took over in media importance. Since I'm also not a doctor or scientist, my fear that flu might well adapt in a totally different direction to Covid could be stupid and uninformed. We shall have to wait until the season starts in late Autumn early Winter. But if, for example, the next flu outbreak is not stopped by the vaccine (unlikely but who could have predicted the 2017-2018 disaster?) and if it affects other areas than the respiratory tract (heart, arteries, digestive abilities, nasal passages, sleep patterns) - then nobody will be able to scream Covid. And hundreds of thousands could die. We have taken our eye off the ball whilst looking in the wrong direction.

I worry about the flu too.
I expect there are lots like me who decided that flu getting past my deluxe ppe and rabid anti-baccing was beyond remote, but that the pharmacist who licks your carrier bag would be quite likely to breathe covid on me while she administered flu vaccine in a glorified air tight cupboard, so I didn't bother.

So do I get it soon, and risk it running out before the end of the flu season, or wait for a bit and hope that my immune system has a chance to come out of its coma before the onslaught?

How do they know what they need to tweak if nobody has had it?

I put myself in the lateral thinking brigade. I think this why IQ testing indicates that I am a "genius" despite everybody who knows me laughing their heads off!
Those tests just rely on that sort of thinking, and it doesn't matter if you are stupid in every other way.

Doctor King, Honey, advises you to wait for the flu jab until September/October. Hopefully, by then, it will have dawned on "experts" that my points are valid and they will have tweaked like mad. At least it may be that even if we do get flu, the vaccine will limit the seriousness. I'm reckoning on both a booster Pfizer and a flu jab in time for the winter and I'm keeping fingers crossed that the Apocalypse doesn't happen.

Yes I do see the concerns about flu adaptation. I wonder - even if it turns out to be a "normal" flu death season in 21/22 - how acceptable these deaths will now be to people? How many demanding we shut down to save Granny? How many wanting to be furloughed again in the name of flu so they don't have to do any work?

Many people simply cannot believe the reality of the 2017-2018 winter three months. Multiply it by 4 (if they had not corrected the vaccine and reached spring & summer); you get 200,000 dead - FAR worse than Covid in the entire UK.

It's been noticed (in tiny print at the bottom of stories) that flu deaths have dropped to nothing. Nobody seems to understand - this means that 95% of the deaths attributed to Covid were actually flu deaths. Has humanity - or society - overdosed on the stupid pill?

The reason that flu deaths are apparently zero is because covid trumps all. Covid is clinically indistinguishable from flu (same symptoms) so the only way to confirm covid is with a PCR test, which we know is hopelessly flawed. And when the PCR test comes back (false) positive, lo and behold you are a covid case, not a flu case. I do hope that despite the covid testing madness the govt is still keeping up with flu strain monitoring to get the flu vaccine right this winter. Unlike the trivially different covid „variants“ (0.3% genetic change) the govt likes to scare and threaten us with, flu „strains“ are significantly different and do escape immunity leading to the bad flu seasons that JK mentioned.

JK2006 wrote:
It's been noticed (in tiny print at the bottom of stories) that flu deaths have dropped to nothing. Nobody seems to understand - this means that 95% of the deaths attributed to Covid were actually flu deaths. Has humanity - or society - overdosed on the stupid pill?


No, it can mean that masks, handwashing and distance is exactly how you prevent flu, but pretty crap for covid.

Although, right at the beginning they seem to have dismissed a lot of covid as flu, even though the symptoms are not the same.
So maybe the real number of flu cases going into January 2020 was very much lower than usual? Who knows?

Kantilver wrote:
The reason that flu deaths are apparently zero is because covid trumps all. Covid is clinically indistinguishable from flu (same symptoms) so the only way to confirm covid is with a PCR test, which we know is hopelessly flawed. And when the PCR test comes back (false) positive, lo and behold you are a covid case, not a flu case. I do hope that despite the covid testing madness the govt is still keeping up with flu strain monitoring to get the flu vaccine right this winter. Unlike the trivially different covid „variants“ (0.3% genetic change) the govt likes to scare and threaten us with, flu „strains“ are significantly different and do escape immunity leading to the bad flu seasons that JK mentioned.

If it was flu there would be no rising cases at the moment because we are well out of flu season.

(I am sure there is a lot of jumbled diagnosis going on though)

There is a lot of jumbled everything on the subject.

Flu spreads in the same way as Covid. They are both respiratory illnesses spread by airborne particles primarily. So why is it that flu but not Covid has apparently disapeared? I don't know, but assume it must be something to do with categorisation at death as well as the restrictions not being particularly effective.

I can't see why they would be effective for flu but not Covid; other than the simple observation that no one has been looking for flu since Covid took over and perhaps Covid may be more highly infectious than flu.

Also, are we only storing the problem up? Scientists are now concerned that no one has built up immunity to flu so many will be very vulnerable to it next year.

www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/ne...w-so-far-this-season

This only makes sense if people have genuinely been only dying of Covid and not flu, of course. But it is to be hoped - to avoid JK's apocalyptic flu scenario - that this is being looked into.

Either way, I agree that vaccines are the only effective measure we have to deal with flu & covid. And it wilk be effective with, sadly, some vulnerable dying each year from both. People do, after all, die of things.

Wyot wrote:
There is a lot of jumbled everything on the subject.

Flu spreads in the same way as Covid. They are both respiratory illnesses spread by airborne particles primarily. So why is it that flu but not Covid has apparently disapeared? I don't know, but assume it must be something to do with categorisation at death as well as the restrictions not being particularly effective.

I can't see why they would be effective for flu but not Covid; other than the simple observation that no one has been looking for flu since Covid took over and perhaps Covid may be more highly infectious than flu.

Also, are we only storing the problem up? Scientists are now concerned that no one has built up immunity to flu so many will be very vulnerable to it next year.

www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/ne...w-so-far-this-season

This only makes sense if people have genuinely been only dying of Covid and not flu, of course. But it is to be hoped - to avoid JK's apocalyptic flu scenario - that this is being looked into.

Either way, I agree that vaccines are the only effective measure we have to deal with flu & covid. And it wilk be effective with, sadly, some vulnerable dying each year from both. People do, after all, die of things.


I was reading somewhere that the flu particles are like a football that falls to the ground, compared to covid which is golf ball size and hangs in the air.


My front path tested positive recently. I have had so much fun with those DIY tests.

Honey wrote:
[quote]Wyot wrote:


I was reading somewhere that the flu particles are like a football that falls to the ground, compared to covid which is golf ball size and hangs in the air.

My front path tested positive recently. I have had so much fun with those DIY tests.

So if we all stop sitting or laying and walk with a significant stoop so our heads are beneath the golf ball but above the football, we can eradicate this virus? I can see Hancock's poster campaign now!

New variant growing but deaths down to nothing; someone, somewhere at some time will start thinking - "if we tested for flu, would millions have mild doses? And would it matter as long as vaccines dampened down symptoms?"

Noooooo. Too much to hope. Lateral thinking and common sense? God forbid.

JK2006 wrote:
New variant growing but deaths down to nothing; someone, somewhere at some time will start thinking - "if we tested for flu, would millions have mild doses? And would it matter as long as vaccines dampened down symptoms?"

Noooooo. Too much to hope. Lateral thinking and common sense? God forbid.

I have a feeling that when the very last person is vaccinated, and it is all over, they will just invent something else to torment us with.

Yesterday, my son, his wife, her parents, us, and three children were sitting at a giant restaurant table between open doors.

We were at one end, and our co-grandparents (who are lovely but we don't really know them) were right at the other end of the table. MORE than two metres away.

The staff insisted that we were more than two households, and moved all four of us grandparents to a separate small table away from the doors, where we breathed in each others faces.

I demand a medal for holding my tongue.

Crackers isn't it. Basically no one is dying and everyone is vaccinated; yet it is still all we hear about. This backs up my belief that this has always been about far more than the virus. Not meaning a conspiracy; rather media-fuelled politics. What we are seeing now is the politics of trying to move on. It is very tiresome.

Wyot wrote:
Crackers isn't it. Basically no one is dying and everyone is vaccinated; yet it is still all we hear about. This backs up my belief that this has always been about far more than the virus. Not meaning a conspiracy; rather media-fuelled politics. What we are seeing now is the politics of trying to move on. It is very tiresome.

I am troubled by their unwillingness to actually curtail the virus, IF they think it is dangerous enough to lock people up and destroy their businesses.

Twice, we have been within a hair's breadth of eliminating it completely here, and they have jolly well encouraged the spread instead of letting it die off.

I cant see how, if some countries have vaccinated practically nobody, we will not be bombarded with "variants" that escape the vaccination (imaginary or real) till kingdom come.

There must be a reason why they want it dragging on, when it is fairly simple, to have extreme quarantine measures for essential travel just until everywhere else catches up?

It is like having mice in your house, and killing most because you can live with a few of them, and being surprised when in no time at all you are overrun again.

So, in frustration, I am swinging from being appalled at lockdowns to actually wishing a more extreme version, if only it would stop the nonsense.
I am demented by it.

It's never going to be eliminated or "die off" Honey. It's here for keeps. I think a lot is made of variants when all viruses mutate and non of the variants have been proven to be more dangerous. It's just a nasty, flu like bug. It will kill a handful every year, no more, now we have vaccines. But I agree with your frustration at the restrictions confusion; whatever view you take - just take it and be decisive.

So Wyot you don't think it's nothing to do with Great Reset and controlling the population ?