Last month on the 23rd, a young female nurse from Fukuoka, aged 26, was found dead on her sofa. Her lunch box was seen packed and ready near the front door. But, she was lying in rigor mortis on her sofa, foaming at the mouth, bleeding at the nose, the food from her stomach lying all around.
She died two days after receiving the experimental gene therapy that she took on our behalf. Part of the reason for her death may have been the experimental therapy (although nobody seems to die after a vaccination these days). But, there is a deeper reason.
She died on the altar of fear, a sacrificial lamb to the gods of fear-mongering who, refusing to leave from our lives every day since March 2020, shout at us through the television, smart media platforms, and announcements at work.
Hardly any day goes by without hearing the number of infections, clusters, and dead people, and admonitions to wash your hands, wear a mask, and keep a safe distance from others.
When a staff member receives a positive test, we panic and start splashing the alcohol, and line up contacts for more testing. We do all that with a test whose manufacturers and drug regulatory agencies clearly state that it does not actually detect an infection.
I apologize to the two staff members who had to pass by my class to check whether I was wearing a mask or not. It seems that we are in a war-like situation and have to keep an eye on dissidents all the time. It is ironic that this happened inside a center of higher learning.
Let me state that I am not opposing the wearing of masks. I also wore them when I got sick with the flu a few years ago. I remember forcing my 3 little children to wear them outdoors when the nuclear explosion on March 2011 sent radioactive dust to our region. I did that out of tremendous concern for the ill effects of inhaling radioactive particles into their bodies. I forced them to do that for a full three months till I personally verified that the situation was safe. I do have sympathy and understanding for the people who chose to wear masks.
However, the situation we face today is not because of a deadly pathogen, but because of misinformation. When incomplete information is relentlessly pushed day and night, it receives a name most befitting — propaganda.
My job as an academic is to critically assess information. It is the academic who provides society with a primary defense against the adverse impacts of misinformation, and it is for this reason that academic freedom is treasured in all democratic societies. But, with academic freedom also comes the responsibility to evaluate a situation from multiple aspects.
I am carrying out this responsibility and am continuing at it everyday. I have not seen any evidence that we are facing a life-threatening situation that needs us to maintain this state of fear.
It seemed at first that we could all be fearful for two weeks till the curve flattened, then it was going to be just for three months more. Without noticing it, fear now has become our New Normal, and receives an upgrade every festive season.
I feel very lucky to live in Japan, but the situation in other developed countries involve severe restrictions on personal freedoms including medical freedoms. I am deeply grateful that the Japanese Constitution protects society against unreasonable threats to liberties.
I am not alone in my opinion, which you may dismiss as quirky and unqualified. Thousands of scientists worldwide are fighting this misinformation, which is resulting in a human medical experiment on a scale we have not witnessed in our lives before.
These include Nobel prize winner Michael Levitt of Stanford University, Luc Montagnier the Nobel laureate virologist from France. These include professors from prestigious universities all around the world such as Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, and John Ioannidis of Stanford University, Carl Heneghan, Tom Jefferson, and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, and Sucharit Bhakdi and Karin Moelling from Germany.
Even the gentle giants of the Japanese science community have warned about the dangers of rushing to conclusions based on incomplete analysis, and about the dangers of poorly tested medical interventions.
Should we not wonder why we are not hearing such voices more often, from expert immunologists such as Japanese Nobel Laureate Tasuku Honjo or from expert virologists such as Masayuki Miyasaka?
Why have the voices of leading scientists that offer alternative perspectives suddenly become anti-scientific? Why are social media giants censoring the voices of these prominent scientists? These are the questions we must be asking, instead of silently accepting the messages of fear and the contortions to our perfectly all right Normal.
Karin Moelling received the highest honour of the German state, the "Order of Merit of Berlin" for her contributions to virology. But, now she is an outcast, because she criticizes the fear-based approach that we adopted since 2020. Sucharit Bhakdi has an h-index of 84, John Ioannidis has an h-index of 214. Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson are leaders in the Evidence-Based Medicine movement. Why are they all of a sudden anti-scientific?
My conscience does not allow me to take part in a fear campaign that is bringing severe consequences to most living people on Earth. … I am opposing the fear, because the costs of maintaining this fear are much more than being in our Old Normal. In Japan, the number of suicides among young women and school students have become staggeringly high in the New Normal. Why can't we see that we are killing the young, while claiming to save the old?
Most of us working in the university have a steady salary, but pretty much every small- to medium-scale commercial operation is seriously suffering. How long can we close our eyes to this communal harakiri, because we don't feel the pinch? Do we think that economies run on printed money, and not on commerical activities?
Japan’s closest friend, the USA has 22 out of its 50 states not imposing any mask mandates. Yet, why is it that a constitutionally illegal mandate has been brought into existence at a small university located in a rural corner of Japan?
Is itt because a 60–140 nano meter long virus, smaller in dimension than the wavelength of UV radiation (100–400 nano meter) is miraculously confined by a cloth mask?
Or is it because we have found some empirical evidence that the masks are working?
There is hardly any Japanese person, including elementary school children who does not wear a mask. Sincerity is a hallmark of the Japanese personality, and most people religiously follow the sanitation measures, even outdoors in the hottest weather of the Japanese summer. Then, why is the curve never flattening?
If the masks are indeed working, then why are the positive testing rates in US states that mandate masks not different from states that do not mandate masks?
The answer seems to be that, regardless of what we do or not do, the PCR tests are going to keep at its games of fear-mongering. My not wearing a mask or others wearing one does not seem to make any difference. … [P]erhaps the most important life saving measure would be for all of us, the stakeholders of the Normal life, to allow free and fair public and scientific discourse into the conditions that have brought us into this dystopian nightmare.
Most sincerely yours,
saji
