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The say hindsight is a great thing. In January 2020 a serious respiratory infection was going through China and Italy. There is no doubt it would be a serious infection for all vulnerable people whose immune system might be compromised by a variety of issues, Ebola it was not. The Ebola virus had caused an epidemic in Africa 2014 – 2016 and exposer meant almost certain death. Nevertheless this was how the media presented the Corona Virus as it made its way through China and Italy. The public started to panic, then the politicians. No one had a clue what to do, so they just took the path of least resistance, to appear as they knew what they were doing. On March 17 the British Governments chief scientific adviser announced “the suppression plan”; shutting down social life in Britain for 12 weeks. Most developed countries with the exception of Sweden had similar “lock downs”. For the pharmaceutical industry this was a massive business opportunity as the only infections diseases developed countries have to deal with since the sixties are seasonal flu.
Up until the 50s childhood infections were a normal part of the development of the immune system. For thousands of years the evolutionary process of “natural selection”, selects the strongest of the species to procreate. Unfortunately infections have always affected the poorest in society the worst, which in developing countries, where sanitation is poor, children are malnourished and many don’t even have access to clean water, almost everyone is at risk. In the sixties when Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba, one of the first health interventions he introduced were vaccine programmes. They had a very positive effect on infant mortality rates, the benefits far outweighed any risks. Cuba became the model on preventing diseases in children and in doing so keeping people at work in developed countries, which is good for the economy. In Cuba almost every child would be vaccinated, their heath care system is excellent and comparable to any developed country. Fidel would boast; “We are a poor country, but we die of rich country diseases”. The fact Cuban children have similar rates of allergy, particularly asthma as developed countries and that vaccines have risks is not given much consideration. To be fair this is the case all over the world, where the biomedical model dominates all discussions about “health”. Medicine is the study and treatment of disease. The business model of the pharmaceutical industry is suppressing symptoms, where people are considered healthy in the absence of symptoms, rather the ability of ones immune system to cope with infection. It is in the industry’s benefit to have people on drugs for as long as possible. Most post graduate education for medical doctors is provided by the industry and the scientific research promoting these products is often, no more than public relations masquerading as science. Its a business whose purpose is to make a profitfor shareholder’s not public health. We saw this with OxyContin and the opioid crisis in the US or Vioxx to name two. The fear surrounding covid pandemic provided the pharmaceutical industry the opportunity to make billions.
From the beginning I was fairly relaxed about the Corona Virus. I did my masters dissertation on “informed consent and vaccines in 2004 and observing what happened on the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship gave me hope. As the virus was hitting Italy on February 5 , a man with symptoms tested positive for covid on the cruise ship. There were 3711 people on the ship, many of them English, the perfect petri dish to observe how deadly the virus was as infection had a prodromal period of nine days so chances were all the passengers had come in contact with the virus by the time the first person tested positive. No country would allow these people to disembark the ship, for fear of spreading this “deadly virus”. The passenger’s and crew had to remain on the ship for 6 weeks. By the time they got off the ship only 697 people were identified as being symptomatic, out of those only 7 people died. It was clear the risk was not the same for everyone, but nuance was secondary to the industries seeing potential for profit, they had the corporate media banging the drum on their behalf, claiming to be following “science” as if scientists were the new evangelists. To complicate matters, presidential election was looming in the US, which only polarised opinions on the way of dealing with the virus to the extremes. Common sense was ignored by the righteous, who cherry picking the “evidence” to support their particular bias.
If you have money and an detached house, its relatively easy to lock down, if you are having to work every day to earn money to feed your family its impossible, so locking down was virtually impossible in the developing world. The media largely ignored this fact as it did not suit the narrative they were pushing on behalf of advertisers. I was in Tanzania last year, it wasn’t the virus that hurt them most, it was the fact that tourists could not visit because they were all locked down in.
Sweden was an outlier and decided not to lock down The logic being, healthy people being exposed to viruses develop natural immunity which is the strongest protection For example most people over sixty have never had a measles vaccine, as they would have caught measles as a child and gained life time immunity. The problem Sweden did not deal with effectively were the large institutional care homes where many vulnerable people were living and when the virus entered these place many residents became ill and died.
By the time the corona virus had crossed the Atlantic there was total confusion and things looked bad, especially in Brazil which got a lot of coverage and has been described as the country with the worlds worst covid strategy In fact most of south and central America and poor regions in the North were faced with similar problems. For the political opposition to Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, the pandemic presented an opportunity to create civil unrest, 24 months after rioting and an attempted coup had caused the deaths of 240 people over a two week period. Political opinion in Nicaragua has been extremely polarised, since the overthrow of the Samoza dictatorship in 1979 and as in most countries that introduce democracy.
While everyone agreed Somoza had to go, there are very different views on the way forward. One would think this was unique to Nicaragua which the western press describes as a repressive regime. For every example of what is termed repression in Nicaragua, there are plenty of examples in US and Europe the main areas imposing sanctions on Nicaragua. The fact is no one cared about Nicaragua from 1990 – 2006 when there was a conservative government friendly to the interests of the US and did nothing for the poor. Then Daniel Ortega wins the election in 2006 and the subsequent elections and the western corporate media would have you believe all those elections are rigged, because the guy who won is a socialist. The opposition wanted a lock down for the simple reason they have the means to lock down for a few weeks and the poor who support the Sandinista government don’t.
I do find it interesting how the oppositions media reacts to events, then to read their articles twelve months later with hindsight. Ever single word on these sites are negative and does not reflect my experience in Nicaragua. The journalists say they are banned from Nicaragua, so who are they talking to, their sources are rarely named and it certainly was not Julian Assange who was locked up in a UK jail for reporting on the Iraq war. The opposition media, claims to support “human rights” and claim the “Daniel Ortega regime” murders its own people, but then criticises Daniel for supporting the Palestinian resistance, while the Israeli government tries to ethnically cleanse Gaza and murders 42,000 people, mostly women and children. I can only conclude the Nicaraguan opposition sees to reflect the interests of the US political establishment, rather than the interests of the Nicaraguan people.
On March the 18th 2020 the first case of corona virus was detected in Nicaragua, it was reported in an opposition blog, that the Nicaraguan Government was ignoring all advice, they were an outlier ( when in fact as I will show later they had begun a massive education plan of what to expect) This is the last paragraph in the blog: “While Ortega is silent and hidden from the public, the government’s management of the pandemic has been assumed by Murillo, who, through her daily monologues in official media and written press releases, has given directives contrary to the indications to contain the virus, such as promoting big crowds of people at pro-government rallies and recreational activities and refusing to declare a preventive quarantine”.
Two days later another anti Sandinista media outlet “Nicaragua Today” reported All signs indicate that the Daniel Ortega regime is not in favour of quarantine, the closing of borders or a more extreme measure or declaring a State of emergency. How ironic that a supposedly “repressive” regime was not acting repressively as the rest of the world was. So now the apparently relaxed attitude of the government to the virus, could be used to create fear, while the government wanted people to stay calm and not start panic buying. This media is stating the opposite “hundreds of Nicaraguans launched into supermarkets to stock up on food”. At same time as criticising the state for not being repressive on Covid; later qualifying the comment with; ” what the regime is looking for is for a coronavirus spike to occur, which generates alarm in the population, with the aim of legitimizing their state of siege, de facto, that is to say, “it will use the coronavirus to legitimize their repression, in the sense that it will limit that nobody mobilizes for any reason”
Having passed on all their information to the international press, The Guardian on April 8 went with the headline President nowhere to be seen as Nicaragua shuns coronavirus curbs But in the battle against coronavirus, Daniel Ortega has been invisible, sparking wild speculation over whether Nicaragua’s septuagenarian leader is self-isolating, bed-bound in hospital – or might even have died, which came from a report in the right wing anti Government La Presna published in Nicaragua on April 6. You expect this kind of journalism from the Sun newspaper but not the Guardian but they have form on Nicaragua.
Interestingly the same journalist wrote all these articles, he is Nicaraguan and lives in Miami. he started out writing for the opposition website is vehemently anti government and supplied similar articles to the Washington post and El Pais in Spain and others. Presumably he got his figures from “The COVID-19 Citizen Observatory” ,an opposition group who were posting graphs and figures every day during the pandemic. They claim to be; “a collaborative effort of an interdisciplinary team with information provided by organizations, networks, and citizens in general, which wishes to contribute to filling the information gap on the COVID-19 situation in Nicaragua. Our team is made up of volunteers, medical professionals, communication, research, engineering, computer science and students who contribute from their professional tools to make this effort a reality. We report on “suspected” cases of COVID-19 and public health situations that affect the population related to COVID-19.
The UK and US, the media avoided these type groups who were using anecdotal evidence to play down the impact of Covid in the western world, when it supported the narrative they were spinning against a government they disapproved of, anecdotes were reliable information. Anyone who has ever been to Nicaragua would know how difficult it would be for the government to provide accurate information on the effects of covid, never mind a few key board warriors with no obvious funding source. This information was not going to help anyone it was designed to cause political unrest as we saw in the rest of the world, with people who opposed lockdowns, masks and vaccines. The fact is Nicaragua was perhaps the only country doing the right thing on every level, one is reminded of the saying; Better to walk alone than follow the crowd in the wrong direction.
While doctors in the developed world who questioned lock down masks or refused vaccines were loosing their jobs, according to the NGO called “Human Rights Watch” the opposite was happening in Nicaragua stating “Nicaraguan authorities have fired at least 10 health workers!” for voicing concern about the Daniel Ortega government’s management of the Covid-19. They don’t give any names and presumably if true they would have been easily identified without names. I a number doctors about this, not one was aware of anything like this, in fact as with the vaccine when it came it was a matter of personal choice whether to have it or not. The Guardian described this in April 2021 with the headline “Nicaraguan ruler Ortega rolls out vaccination campaign amid secrecy and doubt” This was at a time when most people had figured out the vaccine was not stopping transmission and would not stop the pandemic in the summer of 2021 as hoped. The article is criticising the Nicaraguan Government as it had only 341,000 doses for six and a half million people. This was because they left it up to indivbiduals to choose and did get an other million vaccines from China for those that wanted to be vaccinated.
The bit of the article that amused me most was that: “A member of the Nicaraguan Academy of Science, stated no efforts were made to test and trace the spread of the illness. As deaths surged between April and July 2020, local media reported that officials concealed the scale of the disaster by falsifying death certificates to say that Covid victims had instead died of diabetes, pneumonia or other illnesses. That helps to explain how – officially at least – Nicaragua has suffered the lowest rate of Covid-19 fatalities in the region!”. The “Local Media” referred to in the article is the journalists own blog all an editor had to do was click the link. Secondly, if the Nicaraguan covid deaths were in fact low, because the Government had the sense to make a distinction between a pathology which was the main cause of death, rather than an infection which tipped them over they edge, they should be congratulated for it and with hindsight every country in the world would wish they had done the same as they would have had a more sensible covid strategy. As all this was going on in April 2021, John Perry (an Englishman living in Nicaragua) goes into more detail and debunks the corporate medias propaganda campaign against this small central American Country
You have to laugh, much of the opposition and their journalists are based in Miami, where Republican Governor Ron De Santis began challenging President Bidens approach to Covid twelve months into the pandemic, probably not even realising he was embracing the Daniel Ortega approach to Covid, stared 12 months earlier. I am certain you wont read that in any of the opposition blog, lets face it Ignorance is bliss”.
The fact is the Nicaraguan government initially focused on an education program, with health professionals and volunteers visiting 1.2 million households in the last week of March 2020, at the time they had close links with Taiwan and getting early advice from them. In addition the disturbances of 2018, meant tourism had flatlined so there were not that many foreign tourists bringing covid into Nicaragua. Additional information being distributed via TV and internet. The government’s response to the crisis was stated to be an attempt to keep the pandemic under control whilst allowing the country to continue normal activity without lockdown. The government’s approach was explicitly published on 25 May, in its “White Book”, a publication explaining its approach to controlling the outbreak. In the document Nicaragua’s approach is likened to that of Sweden: “With the increasing abandon of the “lockdowns”, all the countries of the world will have to combine defence against the Coronavirus with the functioning of society, just as Nicaragua and Sweden have done from the beginning.” The Nicaraguan government regarded the use of lockdowns as impractical as most Nicaraguans need to leave home each day to earn enough to survive. The government’s response started in January 2020, when it established Covid wards in 18 hospitals, put health checks in place at the country’s points of entry with mandatory quarantines. Almost five million house to house visits by “health brigades” were conducted to provide information to residents. Children returned to school after the Easter 2020 break as normal, government employees returned to work and most activity continued with minimal limitations. President Ortega said Nicaraguans “haven’t stopped working, because if this country stops working, it dies.” In addition the were giving Ivermectin ( an anti parasite drug, the media described as “horse medicine”)and hydroxychloroquine both were used effectively in the developing world when Pfizer were charging $22 dollars for each dose and would not allow the developing world to copy the apparent gold standard of the covid vaccine to save the poor.
If you study world data on Covid Nicaragua made the correct sensible decisions. They monitored the border early, even though tourism was low. The virus came into the country and people developed natural immunity, deaths of vulnerable people spiked in summer of 2020 and tailed off, which is how its always been with pandemics. I have no doubt political efforts in developing countries “to flatten the curve” did not help and May even have made the situation worse in 2020 as there was little natural immunity to a whole range of viruses and bacteria people would normally be exposed to. In fact a study in the British Medical Journal looking at 43 developed countries shows that as one would expect that excess mortality rates increased in 2020, but surprisingly they also increased even more in 2021 (13%) and at (8%) in 202, when it would have been reasonable to expect a fall as covid would have taken the most vulnerable in society in 2020 and as we were told the vaccine was saving millions of lives, when introduced in late 2020 in developed countries.
During the pandemic I texted with a number of friends in Nicaragua to find out if the Guardian report’s were true. One of the people I contacted was Stephen Sefton. An Irishman who has been living in Nicaragua since the 90s and runs an adult education programme in Esteli. I Interviewed him about many aspects of life in Nicaragua in July. This is his take on the Covid Pandemic
Knowing what we know today about the reporting of the Covid Pandemic and the lack of curiosity of the corporate media, to even question the PR mantra “we are following the science”. this piece of wishful thinking in the New York Times is funny;
” A string of recent deaths across Nicaragua including mayors, judges, police officials, sports figures, university rectors and government bureaucrats — is pointing to the chilling reality that the coronavirus is devastating this Central American country, although the government is not publicly acknowledging it. To critics of the government, the deaths are a result of President Daniel Ortega’s haphazard and politicized response to the pandemic with no encouragement of wearing masks or social distancing measures, and little testing and no stay-at-home orders or shutdowns. Instead, the government has encouraged large gatherings. “They were the only ones going around without masks,” said Dora María Tellez, a former health minister under the Sandinistas who broke with the party, “as the mask came to be considered a sign of opposition. Francisco Aguirre Sacasa, a former Nicaraguan ambassador to Washington, said the deaths of the public officials were strikingly obvious when you looked at the National Assembly and saw a lot of empty chairs in the Sandinista side. You can’t just ignore that,” he said. “You can’t hide it. You can’t cover that up,” he added. “It is obvious, obvious, that Sandinistas have been dying.”
The New York Times using empty chairs to estimate death rates from Covid in Nicaragua? You could not make it up. The blind were leading the blind and laughing at the ones who knew where they were going.
