It is important to note at this point that the definition of a pandemic was changed 12 years earlier. Until then, a pandemic was considered to be a disease that spread worldwide, and which led to many serious illnesses and deaths. Suddenly, and for reasons never explained, it was supposed to be a worldwide disease only. Many serious illnesses and many deaths were not required any more to announce a pandemic.The following is an English translation of Dr Wodarg’s analysis, first published on wodarg.com on 18 November and replublished on Rubikon on the 19th: Die Angst aus der Klinik. Gratitude to Uwe Alschner for this translation of the original German. Some of the links are followed with an auto-generated English translation indicated by “[agEt]” (unfortunately, sometimes these do not work in Firefox).
Due to this change, the WHO, which is closely intertwined with the global pharmaceutical industry, was able to declare the swine flu pandemic in 2009, with the result that vaccines were produced and sold worldwide on the basis of contracts that have been kept secret until today. These vaccines proved to be completely unnecessary because the swine flu eventually turned out to be a mild flu and never became the horrific plague that the pharmaceutical industry and its affiliated universities kept announcing it would turn into, with millions of deaths certain to happen if people did not get vaccinated.
These vaccines also led to serious health problems: about 700 children in Europe fell incurably ill with narcolepsy and are now forever severely disabled. The vaccines bought with millions of tax payers’ money had to be destroyed with even more tax payers’ money. Already then, during the swine flu the German virologist Drosten was one of those who stirred up panic in the population repeating over and over again that the swine flu would claim many hundreds of thousands, even millions of deaths all over the world.
In the end, it was mainly thanks to Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg and his efforts as a member of the German Bundestag and also a member of the Council of Europe that this hoax was brought to an end before it could lead to even more serious consequences.
The German Bundestag has now decided by a majority to continue the emergency situation of our population, which cannot be justified by an illness. The peaceful and democratic protest against coercive measures and wantonness is still important. A cross-party opposition in the Bundestag can challenge the motion by immediately filing a constitutional lawsuit for review of norms with the Federal Constitutional Court. This text contains further arguments for such an act of legal self-defense. From early October to mid-November 2020, i.e. within only 6 weeks, the proportion of alleged Covid-19 patients in German intensive care units increased 15-fold. More than half of the beds were suddenly occupied by “Covid-19” patients. However, the overall occupancy rate remained almost unchanged. But what happened to all the other patients? And why did the Robert-Koch-Institute (RKI) find the SARS coronavirus-2 in only 4 percent of outpatients with respiratory tract disease?[1] Are there other reasons for the reported “second wave”?
Pictures from Bergamo
The images from clinics in Wuhan, Bergamo, Madrid and New York created the fear that was stronger than all reason. They were the ones who created acceptance for hard measures. The fear of Bergamo made it seem reasonable for many people that governments should restrict their freedoms.
In discussions with doctors from northern Italy and with witnesses to the events of March 2020, the Corona Committee [agEt] investigated the background to the horror images from Lombardy.[2] When frail and chronically ill people in Bergamo were taken to intensive care units for fear of Covid-19 because of the worsening shortage of nursing staff, or when they were quarantined – if they did not die there – in homes with poor care, there were not only crowded and chaotic scenes in the few intensive care units, but also a bottleneck with the undertakers. Because of the many contacts, a large part of them are said to have been in quarantine themselves. They were also forbidden to bury the dead – as is customary in Italy – but instead had to have them cremated first. Thus the bodies were stored in the facilities until the 60 or so coffins that had been hoarded were transported to the crematorium by military trucks which had been called in for help.
Many of the elderly people who had been abused in this way had only been labelled as “Covid-19 victims” after their death by post-mortem PCR tests, which are said to have had a very high false positive rate. More pictures of ventilators from the chronically overworked intensive care units, especially during the flu season, did their part.[3] Such actions produced dramatic images that shocked all of Europe. For most people they were more convincing than any epidemiological or medical report.
And in Germany? Empty hospital beds create new emergency
Bergamo was the signal for Berlin. Because at the same time as the lockdown in mid-March 2020, the fear of a collapsing hospital system was stirred up, and the mood was set by a far-fetched debate on triage, or prioritization. At the same time, many hospital beds were closed in order to be able to cope with an announced wave of epidemic victims. A shortage of beds was the alarm call of some triage prophets. Among them was one [Karl Lauterbach] who, as a politician of a government faction, was still spreading the Bertelsmann Foundation’s message in summer of 2019: Germany has too many hospital beds.[4]
Only six months later, he suddenly stirred up fears that Covid-19 would overload hospitals and promised the hospital groups a lot of money as compensation for the beds that had been kept free. Then came a summer break, in which the viruses were also given a breather and in which our clinics were allowed to collect 560 euros for each empty bed until September.[5] Since mid-March, however, many cancer and heart patients have been in need, for example, because access to inpatient treatment was also made difficult by the blocked beds and some hospitals had sent some of their staff home on furlough, short-time working.
At the beginning of April, the Federal Statistical Office registered a slight excess mortality rate as a result. Because Covid-19 patients were waited on, other patients did not get appointments and many died because they were not treated at all, or not treated in time. Although, as in other countries, the slight excess mortality did not begin until after the lockdown was ordered, the lockdown victims were wrongly attributed to the “pandemic”.
From March to September, despite an alleged epidemic emergency of national importance, the majority of beds in the intensive care units of most German hospitals were empty. They cashed for empty beds and negotiated with insurance companies and local authorities for further benefits because of the crisis.
Some clinics did not receive enough compensation for the vacancies and others were satisfied and remained silent. In order to do justice to the industry’s distribution dispute, the government, health insurance companies and the hospital industry then rowed back slightly without much ado and staggered the payment for empty beds according to clinic types and regions, which led to a slight normalization of patient flows. Here too, it became clear that clinics today are commercial enterprises and as such react sensibly – but only as such!
How do you create a second wave?
After the summer vacations, the many false positive PCR tests among the average younger travel returnees had not been reflected in corresponding morbidity statistics, it seemed that Bergamo and the political motivation boost achieved there were again remembered. What opportunities do politicians have under pressure to justify themselves to keep a frightened population at bay, as in Bergamo, in Bremen, Bielefeld or Berchtesgaden?
In northern Italy, one could once again observe that it all depends on the right pictures in the media. Whether in Mexico in 2009 or in Wuhan at the beginning of 2020, it was always the pictures that conveyed the feeling of a “pandemic”. They are obviously more effective than tables, bloodwork, confusing medical records or decent, proper epidemiology. Despite months of research, investigation, discussions with scientists, and despite decades of experience with the pitfalls of infectious disease epidemiology, after all the painstaking explanations, I am still repeatedly told: “But didn’t you see what was going on in Bergamo?”
Where do the frightening images and narratives come from
Are we deceived by the current reporting? So far, despite frequent questions, I have not found any medical professionals who have ever seen a “second wave” in seasonal respiratory diseases.
It is always possible for the media to portray distress, hectic and misery in German hospitals. The typical scenes in intensive care units have proven their worth for this. A wired body, lots of tubes, masked and protected staff, and in addition an interview with an exhausted senior physician who takes the opportunity that finally someone is interested in the hectic pace, the lack of staff, the strenuous shift work and the resulting misery for patients and staff. As a hospital hygienist and in the past even a staff spokesperson and intensive care physician, I still have a lot of sympathy for such efforts to bring out the message of overworked staff.
By the way, dying is a common occurrence in all intensive care units, and it is always and unfortunately relatively frequent. When the ward is filled up with patients over eighty, it would be a miracle if half of them could be transferred alive.
So if you move a lot of old people to intensive care units and also provide mechanical ventilation, you get Bergamo. Not to mention the risky drug trials “only for emergency use”.
Does anyone even remember the ideals of palliative care? Or was this only a temporary marketing campaign by the disease industry?
How do you get the old people into the clinics?
First, you make sure that more positive PCR results give the signal that the disease is spreading dangerously again. With around 1.5 million tests per week, nobody can really guarantee laboratory quality any more. If the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) then amplifies something until every test is positive, or if only the E gene is used in the case of a positive reaction, then this can only be detected through by the more sensitive team doctors of professional footballers or by recalcitrant public health officers. No wonder that even before the corona season, which actually only starts after the christmas season, the positive rate of SARS-CoV-2 PCR mass testing could be increased from a little over 1 percent to almost 8 percent within 6 weeks.
There are apparently big differences between the laboratories, but the RKI did not want to give any information about these differences when asked. Right from the start, the PCR test had little to do with diseases. But the secret motto still seems to be the same: More tests = more false positives. And the more careless a laboratory is, the more the people in charge are going to be happy about a high number to confirm their panic-mongering.
“Concerted Action for Care” and Covid-19
If this is noticeable, you can combine the practical with the useful and change the test strategy again. This has also been done gradually over the last few weeks. With fewer tests, more hits and more fear of the disease? Yes, that is possible. For example, if I test staff in nursing homes or clinics, it has an enormous effect.
Every “case” among the staff leads to a temporary ban on work, to contact tracing of possible contact persons and thus automatically to a reduction of the number of available staff. The already overworked personnel, who already have to work up to 60 hours per week, suffer from this. And, of course, the residents and people in need of help suffer even more. This has twice the effect if a ban on visiting relatives or friends is imposed. Everyone is constantly talking about protecting particularly the vulnerable population. However, the measures taken put the elderly and people in need of help in a precarious position and largely isolate them in their already agonizing solitude within the home.
My fellow campaigner for Transparency [International], Adelheid von Stösser, is also a courageous fighter for the rights and quality of life of the elderly and people in need of care. In her magazine for care ethics,[6] she described the extremely distressing fates of these affected people during the first lockdown and is appalled by the brutality with which hygiene plans violated the vital needs of people at the end of their lives and thus took away the courage to face life for many of those affected.
It therefore seems macabre when three ministers in the Corona crisis praise their “Concerted Action for Care” at a press conference and at the same time, by means of a lockdown, targeted testing and quarantine measures for nursing staff and by imposing visiting bans, increase the plight of dependent residents and the stress of the remaining nursing staff to an intolerable level.
Be careful, people take it upon themselves to protect you!
So if compulsory testing for employees is now prescribed “to protect vulnerable groups” in old people’s homes and nursing homes, this will certainly tear a deep hole in the care structures. With a positive rate of currently on average (!) almost 8 percent, considerable gaps in care and a deterioration in care can be expected. Was that intended when a focus for the future test strategy was put in place?
After all, the Minister of Health had just advocated strengthening these important nursing professions because of the “nursing shortage”. And now this? Whether a test is correct or false positive is certainly irrelevant for nursing staff, because healthy people who are capable of working are tested at work. You only need to find 8 percent “positive” in order to open up a huge quarantine gap among the employees and those being cared for.
From Bergamo to Bavaria – this is how it works
If then a large part of the nursing staff has to stay at home healthy but “positive”, we are getting a little closer to Bergamo. Old people and those in need of help are undersupplied due to lack of personnel, immobilized, dehydrate – increasing the risk of thrombosis and embolism! – or are “for safety’s sake” or because of a positive test result immediately admitted to hospital. Thus if now by testing the old and chronically ill are shovelled into the hospitals, one can imagine what kind of pictures this could produced for the fear mongerers. Here an alarm call from Bavaria from 11 November 2020:[7]
“Since patients/residents and staff have been systematically tested, it happens that from now on half of the staff will be eliminated because they either tested positive or were contact persons. This was the case in the hospital in Schongau, where 600 employees were sent to quarantine for at least 10 days at the end of October and the clinic was temporarily closed. What this means for the patients who are in that hospital and cannot be transferred to other hospitals so quickly can only be guessed”.
The tests – a win-win business at the expense of third parties
Anyone who wants to fuel these emergency and panic situations to make us afraid, therefore, only has to ensure that more testing is done on an outpatient basis and in nursing homes. In facilities this is simply ordered by the local authority, then the “positive-domino” game starts soon on a country-wide level all by itself. In addition, the family doctors can easily be tempted into collaboration: More money! This is now being printed en masse and no-one seems to bother. A doctor indignantly told me what effect this has. He writes:
“At first there was not a cent for the tests and many colleagues (almost all of them in our region) did not test at all. Now we get more money (15 Euro) for a test (duration 1 min) with healthy people than for a complete abdominal sonography with acute abdomen (15 min for 12 Euro). That is why now all of a sudden testing is being done everywhere”.
Our health care system is controlled “with the golden rein”, as the impartial Chairman of the Joint Federal Committee (GBA) Professor Joseph Hecken once explained to me. This means that money is used to incentivize what patients are then being prescribed or have to pay for.
Profit Center Hospital
Financial disincentives apparently have an even more devastating effect on hospitals. Especially in the large hospital firms Diagnosis Related Group compensation models, pushed by illusionary leftwing health economists, have resulted in money being the main driver for management decisions. There, institutionalized – i.e. legalized – corruption is flourishing. More and more expensive services are being provided and cashed in on through bonus payments for doctors in charge, monopolization of supply chains or clever cooperation with pharmacies, medical device manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies. Not because patients absolutely need them, but because this can optimize the financial results of the hospital as a clinical profit center.
“If we don’t achieve a double-digit return, we’ll close this place down,” the managers of the Helios chain told me bluntly during a visit together with Karl Lauterbach at their clinic in Damp on the Baltic Sea. My real concern at the time was that this clinic should open up more to improve the inadequate emergency care in the countryside, but I was probably too naïve, as my colleague Karl Lauterbach, then a member of the supervisory board of the Rhön-Kliniken as well as a sitting Member of the Bundestag, reproachfully told me with a cynical smile.
But it was not only in the governing parties that the large health care companies had and still have a deeply rooted lobby. Now in the Corona crisis this has paid off. In my opinion, such lockdown nonsense is only performed and supported by someone who expects something from either the power or the money or both, or who is afraid of losing it if he refuses. In the health care industry, everything runs most smoothly, or like clockwork, with golden reins.
Wages of the fear-makers
Thus most hospitals take part in the Corona Hype anyway already, because their lobby ensured since March that a large part of taxpayer’s money thrown out of the window for Covid-19 landed with the hospitals.
In the beginning, in March 2020, they achieved that a corona premium of 50 euros per day was paid for every bed occupied. The aforementioned empty bed fee of 560 euros per day was also quite ingenious. For each newly installed intensive care bed, there was even a 50,000 euro bonus. Even if they were not used, many houses took this business with them. Empty beds need little staff and still bring good money in Corona times. After the first lockdown turbulences, there was not much to notice of Covid-19 in the inpatient sector. The occupancy rate of intensive care units in Germany averaged 50 to 75 percent from March to the end of September 2020. This has hardly changed so far other than the diagnoses reported, which indeed have changed.
The new strategy
A gear shifted. Hospitals on Oct. 12 received additional financial incentives retroactive to Oct. 1, 2020, making occupancy of vacant beds more profitable again, but only for Covid 19 cases that tested positive. According to § 5 paragraph 3i KHEntgG for 2020 (Corona additional cost surcharge agreement (Corona-Mehrkostenzuschlags-vereinbarung) 2020) the legislator granted them significantly higher surcharges. At the same time, the medical controlling service was ordered to turn a blind eye in the “emergency” situation and only check less than half as much as before what is being done with our money. For every case of treatment with a positive test result and for every case with clinical symptoms which can be interpreted as Covid-19, there will be an additional 100 Euro Covid-19 special fee per day from October 1, 2020 until the end of the “epidemic emergency of national importance”.
This attractive offer, parallel to the orgy of testing in nursing homes and in view of the expected allocations of suspected Covid-19 cases, came just in time and has apparently been used by the clinics to a surprisingly large extent since October 1. Even if the utilization of the intensive care units did not change significantly overall – if only because of the shortage of personnel – the proportion of “Covid-19 cases” rose sharply to an average of about 50 percent. From the beginning of October to mid-November, i.e. within only 6 weeks, this was a 15-fold increase!
The ratio of Covid-19 cases on mechanical ventilation of 56 percent is alarming. Hopefully, many of the 2010 mechanically ventilated patients are in this statistic only because of a positive test result, i.e. with and not primarily because of Covid-19. Invasive ventilation of patients treated as Covid-19 has now become a life-threatening additional risk worldwide.
I would like to know from the health insurance companies how the age distribution of intensive care patients has changed since mid-September and what is the situation with the proportion of patients from old people’s homes. I am still waiting for these data. The insurance companies paying for all of this should have stumbled over this development long ago, but the departments responsible for monitoring misconduct in the health insurance companies seem to prefer not to look too closely at this “Great Reset” of bed occupancy.
The above shows once again that hospitals have primarily mutated into commercial enterprises in which economic thinking determines decisions. As a welfare state, however, we are a community of solidarity. We make our contributions in solidarity to the best of our ability to help those who need help. This is also the principle of our health system. It is based on the principle of solidarity and has also been a public duty in the area of administration and ensuring that care is tailored to needs. If cities, districts and federal states leave the provision of basic health care to large monopolists and thus rid themselves of their responsibility for the sick and elderly, then soon it will no longer be a question of health at all, but only of money, and companies will know this better than the people’s representatives.
The “Great Reset” in the health service seems have long been implemented. The “Economic Hitmen” have long been under us and, what we experience now, is only a symptom of this in the last decades of progressive de-regulation of public welfare. When the common good abolishes itself, well organized egoists with a paternalistic gesture take over the regime and democracy will have a hard time.
But I have a dream!
Sources and Notes: