Comment on Review of “The Surge” with Dr. Lela Lewis and Friends by Sean Pitman.
I just think that Adventist healthcare providers should be held to a higher standard. And, generally speaking, I think that the vast majority of medical providers and scientists, in this country and around the world, have it right on this one. In this country, 98% of medical doctors are either fully vaccinated or on their way to being fully vaccinated. That’s not for no good reason. I’ve seen what COVID-19 can do with my own eyes. I’ve also seen and heard from doctors that I know personally that the significant majority of those who are currently getting really sick and are being hospitalized and dying due to COVID-19 infections (including the Delta Variant) are those who are unvaccinated (within a particular age category). I mean, the weight of empirical evidence is quite clear at this point – particularly when it comes to doctors and medical scientists who see what’s going on and who carefully study these things. So, I find it particularly disappointing when a handful of outspoken Adventist medical providers, in particular, go around publicly promoting ideas about COVID-19 and the mRNA vaccines that simply aren’t true – false ideas that really are putting people at an increased risk of serious injuries and death.
Sean Pitman Also Commented
Review of “The Surge” with Dr. Lela Lewis and Friends
First off, Dr. John Barthelow Classen (as discussed in the comment just above yours with Inge Anderson), while being an immunologist, is also a well-known anti-vaxx conspiracy theorist. He has a long history of claiming that other vaccines also cause “more harm than good” (Link). He also wrote an article (February 8, 2021) arguing that mRNA vaccines can produce “prion disease” – which is sheer nonsense. Many of his other anti-vaxx conspiratorial papers can be found on his website (Link).
Also, the papers that he publishes, that he claims are “peer-reviewed”, although supposedly in different journals (such as the journal of “Microbiology & Infectious Disease” or the journal of “Trends in Internal Medicine”) show exactly the same format – strongly suggesting that he is, in effect, self-publishing these papers while claiming that they are “peer-reviewed” – by using what is known as a “predatory journal”. And, surprise surprise, it turns out that the actual publisher of these papers, Scivision Publishers, is included in Beall’s list of publishers of predatory journals.
“Predatory publishing (also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing) is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and without providing editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not.” (Link)
In any case, if you actually read through the paper that you reference, claiming “more harm than good”, that claim simply isn’t supported at all. It all depends upon what one defines as “severe”. Regardless, when it comes to actual hospitalizations and deaths, for the Phase 3 clinical trials of the mRNA vaccines, there is no evidence to counter the conclusion that the mRNA vaccines ended up being highly effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 compared to the placebo arms of these trials.
In short, this guy just isn’t credible and his arguments make no sense given the data that we have in hand. There simply isn’t anything in the mRNA vaccines that would make them remotely comparable to the risks associated with the actual viral infection itself. The actual “spike protein” produced by the mRNA vaccines is modified to make it much less biologically active (i.e., frozen in the “pre-confirmation state) and almost all of it remains local at the site of injection. In comparison, the live COVID-19 infection also makes spike proteins that are much more biologically active and the live virus goes everywhere throughout the body involving and disrupting pretty much every organ system you have. Where then is the mechanism whereby the vaccine could be more harmful than the disease? There just isn’t such a mechanism. It just doesn’t exist. So, the mRNA vaccines are not only amazingly effective at preventing severe COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations, and death, they also are far far FAR safer than getting infected by COVID-19 – when it comes to every single risk factor one can name.
Review of “The Surge” with Dr. Lela Lewis and Friends
The dosage doesn’t matter much within this range (and the TOGETHER Trial used a dose of 400 μg/kg/day). There is also no evidence for “synergism” between ivermectin and other drugs used in McCullough’s early-treatment protocol (or other such protocols such as the MATH+, I-MASK+ and I-RECOVER Protocols) – despite him making this very same argument (Link).
The problem, as mentioned in my article, “You can’t just throw together drugs that don’t work at all by themselves and expect that they will suddenly work if used in combination – Dr. Vincent Iannelli explains (Link). There just is no scientific evidence or any kind of mechanism for this when it comes to efforts to save ivermectin as providing some kind of benefit against COVID-19.
See also a recent review of the Cochrane Review of ivermectin: Link
Review of “The Surge” with Dr. Lela Lewis and Friends
Yes, I generally agree with Dr. Damania (Dr Zdogg) and have watched many of his videos. He’s a good place to start researching a topic if he has actually made a video about it.
Recent Comments by Sean Pitman
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Thank you Ariel. Hope you are doing well these days. Miss seeing you down at Loma Linda. Hope you had a Great Thanksgiving!
The Flood
Thank you Colin. Just trying to save lives any way I can. Not everything that the government does or leaders do is “evil” BTW…
The Flood
Only someone who knows the future can make such decisions without being a monster…
Pacific Union College Encouraging Homosexual Marriage?
Where did I “gloss over it”?
Review of “The Naked Emperor” by Pastor Conrad Vine
I fail to see where you have convincingly supported your claim that the GC leadership contributed to the harm of anyone’s personal religious liberties? – given that the GC leadership does not and could not override personal religious liberties in this country, nor substantively change the outcome of those who lost their jobs over various vaccine mandates. That’s just not how it works here in this country. Religious liberties are personally derived. Again, they simply are not based on a corporate or church position, but rely solely upon individual convictions – regardless of what the church may or may not say or do.
Yet, you say, “Who cares if it is written into law”? You should care. Everyone should care. It’s a very important law in this country. The idea that the organized church could have changed vaccine mandates simply isn’t true – particularly given the nature of certain types of jobs dealing with the most vulnerable in society (such as health care workers for example).
Beyond this, the GC Leadership did, in fact, write in support of personal religious convictions on this topic – and there are GC lawyers who have and continue to write personal letters in support of personal religious convictions (even if these personal convictions are at odds with the position of the church on a given topic). Just because the GC leadership also supports the advances of modern medicine doesn’t mean that the GC leadership cannot support individual convictions at the same time. Both are possible. This is not an inconsistency.
