The coerced economic “shutdowns” – enforced with fines, arrests, and revoked business licenses – are not the natural outgrowth of a pandemic. They are the result of policy decisions taken by politicians who have suspended constitutional institutions and legal recognition of basic human rights. These politicians have instead imposed a new form of central planning based on an unproven, theoretical set of ideas about police-enforced “social distancing.”
Then an Israeli professor plotted the rates of new coronavirus infections of the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Italy, Israel, Switzerland, France, Germany, and Spain. Irrespective of whether the country quarantined like Israel, or went about business as usual like Sweden, coronavirus peaked and subsided in the exact same way. In the exact, same, way.
Remember what grandma always said?
A virus will run its course.
Important quote:
In a new study titled “Full Lockdown Policies in Western Europe Countries Have No Evident Impacts on the COVID-19 Epidemic,” author Thomas Meunier writes, “total deaths numbers using pre-lockdown trends suggest that no lives were saved by this strategy, in comparison with pre-lockdown, less restrictive, social distancing policies.”
The article points out that nearly 75 percent of COVID deaths occur in patients over sixty-five years of age, of which 90% have other conditions.
But it’s important to insert here that there were huge flaws in how they counted COVID deaths which vastly inflated the death count.
A 2025 update shows that nearly half of COVID deaths were not due to COVID at all!
The article goes through numerous studies all coming to the same conclusion. Similarly to the history of vaccines, lockdown areas had already experienced a downward trend in deathsbefore these effects could be seen or showed the same trend as the previous year. Similar to vaccine proponents taking credit for trends already occurring before vaccines were given, lock-down proponents are taking credit for trends already observed before lockdowns were enforced.
The author of the article gives us a reminder that is helpful for Lyme patients as well:
With economic output crashing worldwide and unemployment soaring to Great Depression levels, governments are already looking for a way out. Don’t expect to hear any mea culpas from politicians.
Saying they got it wrong just isn’t in the cards for politicians.
FREE: The Lyme Times For Lyme Awareness Month in May
In honor of Lyme Disease Awareness Month, the COVID-19 Issue is open access – freely available to all. The hope is you will enjoy and share these issues with your family and friends. Without you, Lyme Disease Organization would not be where they are today, and they’re so thankful for all of your support. (Click on link for access)
LYME CARDITIS SYMPTOMS MAY GO UNDIAGNOSED IN MEXICO
Lyme carditis symptoms can be a serious complication of Lyme disease. While the condition is well-recognized in the United States, officials in Mexico are reluctant to acknowledge Lyme disease in their country. In a letter entitled “Advanced AV-block: Is it time to consider Lyme carditis as a differential diagnosis in Mexico?” physicians describe the challenges of proving that a patient has Lyme carditis. [1]
The authors highlight the case of a 23-year-old woman who presented to their hospital “with a chief complaint of dyspnea and chest pain and was found to have a third degree AV-block on the electrocardiogram (ECG).”
A temporary pacemaker was implanted. And after an exhaustive work-up for other causes, the woman was eventually tested for Lyme disease. While Lyme carditis symptoms can be difficult to recognized, test results were positive by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) two-tier Western blot criteria.
Unfortunately, despite a three-week course of intravenous ceftriaxone, the woman required a permanent pacemaker. “At 3-month follow-up, she was still dependent on pacing,” writes Carrizales-Sepulveda and colleagues.
They argue that the woman lived in an endemic region and had visited the hospital with complaints consistent with Lyme carditis symptoms four weeks earlier. The authors cite the CDC, pointing out that “a region can be considered as endemic for [Lyme disease] if: at least two confirmed cases have been previously acquired or in which established populations of a known tick vector are infected with B. burgdorferi.”
However, the medical community in Mexico has been reluctant to acknowledge Lyme disease as a possible cause of the woman’s heart block. Officials argue “there is no convincing evidence that Borrelia burgdorferi is present in Mexico.”READ MORE: Which treatment guidelines should you follow for Lyme carditis?
Despite such resistance, Carrizales-Sepulveda and colleagues report “a seroprevalence of 6.2% for the Northeast region of Mexico and 3.4% for Mexico City, using a two-tier approach with enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and western blot (WB) as recommended.”
Unfortunately, these results were dismissed as false positives, the authors write.
Furthermore, their Lyme carditis diagnosis was questioned with officials suggesting “the advanced AV-block that our patient presented had another cause that was not thoroughly investigated,” Carrizales-Sepulveda explains.
The authors recommend that Lyme carditis be considered as a possible diagnosis for patients living in Mexico.
“We agree that in our country other causes should be ruled-out first, however, there is no reason to leave out [Lyme carditis] as a diagnosis,” they write.
“[Lyme disease] in our country might be under looked, underdiagnosed, and underreported.”
Carrizales-Sepulveda EF, Jimenez-Castillo RA, Vera-Pineda R. Advanced AV-block: Is it time to consider Lyme carditis as a differential diagnosis in Mexico? J Electrocardiol. 2020.
Opinion: We are infectious disease experts. It’s time to lift the COVID-19 lockdowns
Canada needs a hospital capacity-based approach to guide local lifting and reintroduction of restrictive measures as necessary
By Neil Rau, Susan Richardson, Martha Fulford, and Dominik Mertz
The past two months have shown that with major sacrifices, the community transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus could be slowed down. In Canada, we can rightfully say that we were able to “flatten the curve” to avert a northern Italy or New York City scenario. Now we face the unintended consequences: delays in medical care for non-COVID-19 patients, educational impacts, the looming pandemic of mental-health issues, and massive economic repercussions. Widespread restrictions certainly cannot be sustained until an effective and safe vaccine is widely available, which may not occur for years, if ever. And the virus is unlikely to disappear from Canada or the world any time soon. (See link for article)
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**Comment**
The first question that comes to mind is why would we want community transmission to slow down? It’s long been known and accepted that viruses run their course. Why not just get it over with? The more people exposed to a virus, the quicker herd immunity is reached. Many epidemiologists are stating that “flattening the curve” only extends it. For sure, the elderly and infirm should protect themselves, but the more healthy people exposed, the better.
Epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski, points out the CDC director, Dr. Redfield, presented data which should have had people jumping to their feet. There were 3 spikes in the 2019-2020 flu season:
late December (influenza B)
late January (influenza A)
early March (COVID-19)
For this last peak to happen patients had to go through a 7 day incubation period and then have symptoms. Then in early April (4 weeks later) infections were already down. At his point the government should have stated it had been overly cautious, but they didn’t want to admit their error and now there are 30 million unemployed in the US and companies going bankrupt. https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2020/05/16/we-could-open-up-again-and-forget-the-whole-thing/
Author John Nathaniel Aucott, Director of the Johns Hopkins Lyme Disease Research Center, Associate Professor of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University
Disclosure statement
John Nathaniel Aucott receives funding from the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation.He is affiliated with the Bay Area Lyme Foundation as a member of their Scientific Advisory Board.
Her symptoms started quickly: neck pain, extreme fatigue and intermittent fever and chills. The woman had been healthy until then, and since she enjoyed gardening and landscaping at her rural Maryland home, she wondered if a tick bite might have given her Lyme disease although she had not noticed the telltale bull’s-eye skin lesion.
Her doctor told her it was likely just a virus. The next day, she felt worse and went to the emergency room, where she was diagnosed with mononucleosis.
The woman, a nurse in her 40s, returned to the emergency room a few weeks later with breathing trouble and low blood pressure. Doctors tested her for Lyme disease and found it had spread to her heart, a rare manifestation of Lyme disease that can be fatal.
Antibiotics resolved her heart and respiratory symptoms, but the fatigue, as well as joint pain and trouble concentrating, continued. Doctors told her it was just the recovery process, but the symptoms were debilitating and didn’t go away. It wasn’t until several months later, when she got a second opinion, that she was diagnosed with post-treatment Lyme disease, a known complication of Lyme disease.
“I felt dismissed and abandoned,” she later told me. “No one stopped to listen to my story and advocate for me.”
Her experience gives insight into a highly controversial medical term: chronic Lyme disease.
Because there are no definitive tests or treatments for this condition, patients who have symptoms can be dismissed by the medical establishment. Many are denied medications such as antibiotics they believe can control the chronic infections they suspect they have.
I am the former chair of the tick-borne diseases working groupat the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a medical researcher who has studied chronic Lyme disease for 20 years. It has become obvious to me that the problem is deeper and more complex than the polarized debate over the controversy would make one believe.
My colleagues and I have closely followed the health of Lyme disease patients as they recover, and what we have discovered runs counter to the mainstream teaching about Lyme disease. Doctors still often don’t know how to accurately diagnose patients with Lyme disease, and patients don’t always get better, even when they are diagnosed and treated. Physicians lack the diagnostic tools for early diagnosis or for documenting cure of the disease.
Studying this subgroup of post-treatment Lyme disease patients who are treated for Lyme disease but don’t get better is a clue on my way to find to understand chronic Lyme disease. While it may not provide definitive answers yet, we hope it will add to the body of knowledge about this perplexing set of conditions that are likely diverse in origin.
Yes, I Can Function With Chronic Illness. No, You Can’t Judge My Pain Off That.
A woman with chronic illness and pain describes the decades of struggle and fighting it took for her to be functional, and why we can’t judge someone’s pain off their ability to function or not. themighty.com
The chronic Lyme controversy
Lyme disease, first identified in the United States in the 1970s, has grown into a health epidemic as the ticks that transmit it to humans expand their range. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now estimates that about 300,000 people in the U.S. become newly infected every year now. The symptoms can be debilitating, including neurological symptoms, extreme fatigue and muscle and joint pain.
When symptoms linger long after a diagnosed patient receives the standard antibiotic treatment, like the nurse in Maryland experienced, the patient may have a condition called post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, a subset of chronic Lyme disease. Many experts in the field estimate about 10% to 20% of patients diagnosed with Lyme disease get this syndrome.
The controversy around chronic Lyme disease emerged when patient advocacy groups and some doctors began to use the term to describe patients who had nonspecific symptoms such as fatigue and pain, and testing did not always show that they had been exposed to Lyme disease.
At the heart of the controversy is the question: Can a person have a chronic bacterial infection that may not show up on tests?
These patients are frustrated with a medical establishment whose focus is on evidence-based treatment in a field where evidence is often lacking. Without a diagnosis by the establishment, these sick patients are often dismissed and can’t get treated, leading to a sometimes toxic environment as they fight for treatment.
Symptoms without evidence
My training in infectious diseases didn’t prepare me for the patients I started seeing after moving to a Lyme-endemic region in 1996. Patients that I had treated for well-documented Lyme disease were experiencing chronic joint pain, neurological symptoms and extreme fatigue, yet most lacked “objective measurable manifestations” of Lyme disease, like abnormalities in blood tests or radiologic imaging evidence of tissue damage.
It was, and still is, uncomfortable telling patients that we don’t know exactly what is going on or how to best treat their illness. My chronic Lyme patients were sicker and had less hope than the AIDS patients I worked with, but the underlying mechanism of illness remained elusive.
Part of the challenge is the lack of definitive tests for chronic Lyme disease. After treatment with antibiotics, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease – Borrelia burgdorferi – is rarely detected, yet symptoms often continue.
There are several theories about why symptoms might continue for months if not years. Some of the bacteria might be able to evade the immune system, bacterial residue might remain that trigger ongoing inflammation or a severe initial infection, delayed treatment or coinfections from the tick bite, such as babesiosis, might lead to an uncontrolled and ongoing overreaction by the patient’s immune system.
Without laboratory findings, however, most doctors are uncomfortable with diagnosis and treatment of chronic Lyme disease.
This may be because Lyme disease symptoms can be mistaken for those of other illnesses, such as chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and depression. Doctors also recognize the public health risks of antibiotic overuse and the potential risk to patients from long-term antibiotic treatments.
A group of doctors has championed the care of patients with chronic Lyme disease and developed guidelines for their care. Some of their practices have been criticized, especially long-term intravenous antibiotics which have the potential for serious side effects. Yet it is not uncommon for patient anecdotes and experience to report that long-term antibiotic therapy and other complementary care interventions have helped despite the lack of FDA approval or randomized trials to support their use.
Diagnosing the syndrome
Our research has shown that post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome can be meticulously identified in patients with previously treated Lyme disease by a constellation of quality-of-life symptoms, including fatigue, sleep disturbance, musculoskeletal pain and cognitive problems, and by the severity of those symptoms.
However, the holy grail for diagnosing post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome – and sorting out chronic Lyme – would be a blood biomarker to identify the biology of the disease in patients. Molecular markers are rapidly being discovered that provide insights into the mechanisms of disease that show the potential interplay of both microbial and host inflammatory responses that may cause ongoing symptoms in previouslytreated Lyme disease patients.
Once molecular markers are established, this will set the stage for new treatment trials.
The true extent of this insidious epidemic is still unknown, but it is clear, based on my experience and work, that it no longer accurate to simply argue that chronic Lyme disease doesn’t exist.
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**Comment**
One of the fairest pieces I’ve read in a long time.
My only correction:
Researchers keep saying it’s only 10-20% that go on to have persistent symptoms. This percentage is based upon those who are diagnosed and treated early. There’s a much larger group (nearly everyone I work with) that is diagnosed and treated late. According to Microbiologist Holly Ahern, this larger group constitutes 40-60% of patients. For an accurate percentage, you need to add both groups together to get a full picture of who remains with symptoms. According to Ahern, up to 60% of ALL patients go onto have persistent, sometimes life-long symptoms:https://madisonarealymesupportgroup.com/2019/02/25/medical-stalemate-what-causes-continuing-symptoms-after-lyme-treatment/
The reason this distinction needs to be made is 1) patients will be taken more seriously when authorities know many people are affected by this. 2) it is much more likely research monies will be directed toward an issue involving more people 3) it’s important to be accurate in science.
I would like to highlight a few thoughts in the article that hit a cord with me:
My colleagues and I have closely followed the health of Lyme disease patients as they recover, and what we have discovered runs counter to the mainstream teaching about Lyme disease.
My chronic Lyme patients were sicker and had less hope than the AIDS patients I worked with.
The true extent of this insidious epidemic is still unknown, but it is clear, based on my experience and work, that it no longer accurate to simply argue that chronic Lyme disease doesn’t exist.
