John Schroeter - COVID-19: A Devils Choice: How We Got Here. How Well Get Out

The issue of Covid-19 has touched almost everyone on the globe. Lockdown policies have been thrust upon us widely with the gloss of science backing them. Now, more than ever, we urgently need to look behind the headlines at whether we are being told the truth about the virus. In this thoughtful book, John Schroeter does an excellent job of distilling the science that is not being heard. It is a much needed counter to the doomsday narrative that weve all been fed. This book gives me renewed hope for our future.

Dr. Simon Thornley, Public Health Physician, lecturer and researcher in the section of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at The University of Auckland, NZ

There is much consternation and chaos during this global pandemic caused by the coronavirus. There is widespread fear and confusion. What is much needed are voices of clarity, courage, and compassion. Rumi taught us, The wound is where the light enters you. We need to embrace this collective wound and emerge stronger, more resilient, and more humane. The underpinnings for this are to be anchored in science coupled with spirituality in its most heart expanding sense. John Schroeter has just brilliantly succeeded in that venture. Kudos to him for masterfully penning this. This a must read. I was most informed and inspired!

Dr. Sanjiv Chopra, MBBS, MACP; Professor of Medicine; Former Faculty Dean Continuing Education, Harvard Medical School, bestselling author

Weve simply got to be more optimistic to get out of this mess. There is so much doom and gloom in the media and yet the statistics are really looking so good now. We are coming out of the pandemic together and Johns text illuminates the clear path forward. Lets follow the path he plots and move forward in a safe and yet ambitious way. We can do this together!

Professor Karol Sikora, MA, PhD, MBBChir, FRCP, FRCR, FFPM, Chief Medical Officer

There may or may not be one best way for societies to minimize the many potential harms of COVID-19 some resulting directly from infection, others indirectly from interdiction efforts. There are clearly many ways to get it wrong. The paths to total harm minimization are illuminated by thinking past the simplistic reflexive responses, considering options both intuitive and otherwise. Well informed consensus is good; premature consensus is the death of insight.

David L. Katz, MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP, FACLM; Founding Director (1998-2019), Prevention Research Center, Yale University / Griffin Hospital; President, True Health Initiative; CEO, Diet ID

C oronaviruses are a large family of viruses that usually cause mild to moderate upper-respiratory tract illnesses, like the common cold. The third novel coronavirus to emerge in this century (after SARS and MERS) is called SARSCoV-2. It causes coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19, which emerged from China in December 2019 and was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020. Since then, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has, under the pretext of public health and safety, advocated extreme social isolation measures, i.e., near-universal lockdown, to forestall the spread of infection until a vaccine can be found. This strategy has had the two-fold effect of 1) precluding natural herd immunity, and 2) devastating the life-sustaining economy, and thus imperiling the health and wellbeing of vastly larger numbers of persons than a coronavirus could ever conceivably inflict. The proposed COVID-19 vaccine does not yet exist, and may, in fact, never be realized. Notwithstanding, the lockdown persists, and, while being relaxed in some areas, is also being enforced with increasingly aggressive behavior and population controls in others. Many epidemiologists, several of whom are world renowned, have publically stated that had we opted for herd immunity at the outset, the pandemic would already be behind us. Instead, we remain trapped in an open-ended nightmare scenario that not only promulgates fear and misery, but actively seeks to silence dissenting voices. These responses not only have nothing to do with public health and safety, they actually exacerbate the crisis, deepening its effect in both the short- and long-term via widespread collateral damage. Could there, then, be another agenda at work?

Come now, let us reason together.

Weve all seen the signs reading, We are in this together. They are proliferating everywhere as people the world over endure the pandemic lockdown. While this is a comforting sentiment, the truth is we are only in this together if we can engage in intellectually honest dialog and debate regarding the course of events. There can be no togetherness when dissenting voices that question authorities or challenge a dictated narrative are suppressed, marginalized, ridiculed, and libelously smearedand particularly so when credible dissenting voices arise from critical thinking processes that integrate scientific rigor and are supported by preponderances of compelling data. It is in this spirit, and out of love and concern for the truthand with the object of eliciting itthat the following 100 points are put forward for your consideration, public discussion, and deliberation.

But first, behind all the arguments, behind all the numbers, behind all the talk of viruses, comorbidities, suffering, and death, are peoplehuman beingsutterly unique and irreplaceable miracles of life. People we love, know, admire, value, and miss. Its easy to lose sight of the individual when we scale in the abstract a pandemic with its dehumanizing statistics and models and curves. But we also know that life on this planet has a shadow sidea harsh reality that includes disease and death. Every day in the U.S. alone, 8,000 people die from any number of illnesses or events. Day after day. Year after year. Death is a fact of life. And yet every life is precious.

It is out of respect for life that Dissenting Voices has produced this documenta response to the work of those who clearly seek to exploit fear for their own ends. If any of these 100 points err, they err on the side of life and love and the passionate pursuit of human flourishing and freedom; of the banishment of fear and ignorance; of voicing a counterpoint to the horrendous public policy decisions to which the world has been subjected. The rest we leave with you.

| There is no universal definition of a COVID-19 death. This is problematic, because the ability to define a problem is the first step toward solving it. Strictly speaking, people do not die from COVID-19 infection; they die from complications that are aggravated by the disease. For the infected, these complications typically, if not exclusively, comprise severe underlying chronic medical conditions.

| Older individuals with pre-existing health issues such as hypertension, obesity, diabetes, respiratory system disease, and cardiovascular disease present particularly high-risk profiles.

| Actual causes of death for those who also happen to have tested positive for COVID-19 include such conditions as pneumonia, sepsis, and/or acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). A study published April 22, 2020 in