My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
And today, instead of a very large glass of wine, I am going to have a very small cup of coffee with Minnie Mouse.
Here is the thing. I am not a Russian troll. I am an Israeli, which possibly is even worse than being a Russian. So, I am an Israeli. I was born and raised in Israel. I studied medicine. I started attending the university, Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology at age nine.
And over the years, I had brushes with medicine. I am not licensed to practice. But I had brushes with the medicine, the latest of which was I founded the Healthcare Committee in the Republic of Macedonia. I was a founding member of the committee for two years. And one of the things we did in this committee was develop epidemiological models.
My post-graduate academic degrees are in physics and in philosophy. I am a professor of psychology in several universities, in Russia, in Nigeria, in other countries. And I am a professor of finance in several countries, including Nigeria and other places.
So, this is my background, more or less. I am heartbroken to disappoint some of you, but I was not sent by the FSB, which is the successor to the KGB. And I give you my solemn word, I am not going to interfere in the 2020 elections, possibly because there are not going to be any.
Okay, let's get to business.
And the business, of course, is the pandemic.
Now, imagine the following. Imagine someone were to put a clock online, and the clock were to show you how many people got infected with a common, with a regular flu, with influenza. Any of the influenza viruses, there are quite a few strains competing every year, and they mutate and they change. That's why we need a new vaccine every year.
So, imagine that someone were to put a clock, and to show you how many people get infected, and how many of these get hospitalized, and how many of those hospitalized die.
And now, I'm telling you, it would look like a walk in the park. Last year, 650,000 people died of flu, and its complications, most, in most cases pneumonia, all over the world, worldwide. That's 650,000 people. In a typical flu season in the United States, there are 40,000 people who die of the flu, 40,000 people. And yes, the flu kills the young and the old, mostly the old, but the young and the old, people without pre-existing conditions and people with comorbidities.
So, it's very similar in its mortality or fatality profile. It's very similar to COVID-19, because COVID-19 is a member of a family of coronaviruses. These are the viruses that give you as a gift, every year, annual gift, the common cold. Coronaviruses cause the common cold, yes.
So, if someone were to put a flu clock up there, there would have been a panic which would have dwarfed the COVID-19 panic. People die. It's a fact of life. It's a welcome fact of life. People should die. People should make place for future generations. Hand the torch, so to speak.
People have a productive life. They leave behind a legacy in terms of love, in terms of children, in terms of, I don't know, my case, books. And then they have to say goodbye. They have to depart this world.
And there are various agents that facilitate our departure. COVID-19 is just the latest in an extremely long chain, the chain of being, the chain of dying. Death used to be an integral part of our daily life in the past. But now we have banished death. We don't want to die. We want to remain immortal.
So, the flu killed last year 650,000 people. That is nine times higher than what COVID-19 has done hitherto. And you know what? The flu had already killed four times as many people this year than COVID-19 in this season. Should COVID-19 prove to be a seasonal virus, it would actually be a very weak seasonal virus. It would have killed one fourth, will have killed, I'm sorry, one fourth of flu victims.
Anthony Fauci of Celebrity Renown just announced that he thinks that 25% to 50% of the population in the United States is already infected. This is the case. The mortality rate, the case fatality rate is very, very low. Much, much lower than even I say. I think it's about 0.7 or something.
If he is right, it would mean that the mortality rate is one tenth of this. As low as the flu and lower than the flu.
Anthony Fauci cannot have it both ways. He cannot on the one hand warn us that SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19 is much worse than the flu, much more dangerous than the flu, much more transmissible, much more contagious, much more lethal, much more fatal, much more deadly. And on the other hand, he contradicts himself by saying, well, you know what, half the population is infected and there are so few deaths. He should adopt a consistent scientific position.
We don't know yet how many people are infected.
I agree with him on that.
We lack a lot of information.
It's curious that we are making no efforts to collect and to garner this information, that we don't have clinical trials, incidence trials, randomized trials, you name it.
It's very curious because other countries have been doing this. Iceland, for example, is conducting a population-wide trial.
Yeah, but you say Iceland is small. Yes, but every city, municipality, town and state in the United States can do this.
It's critical to gather data.
But you know what? It stands to reason that half the population is infected because that's a conclusion Italian researchers have reached.
And these are the figures that we are beginning to see in the United Kingdom where 20% of the population is infected and in Iceland and so on and so forth. In Germany where there's a lot of testing going on, I think about 130,000 or 150,000 tests a day.
We're beginning to see that actually the virus is much more widespread than we have ever imagined. And this is what viruses do. They infect at the speed of light. Herpes burst on the scene two years later, 90% of the global population had herpes. Today, HPV, human papilloma virus is 70, 80% of a population.
When it started, no one heard of it. AIDS, which is very difficult to transmit because you need to sleep with a guy or with a girl. AIDS has infected 75 million people.
So viruses spread. Viruses spread if you don't, you know.
So this virus by comparison is not very virulent.
So why the panic and the hysteria in hospitals? What's going on? Why are they so flabbergasted and panicked and hysterical?
Well, first of all, it's good for budgets.
You know, panic pays.
So it pays to panic.
You see, if I look at the figures, I'm at a complete loss. I'm a mathematical physicist. That's my training.
One thing I know well is mathematics. So I can't figure it out.
I'm also not particularly stupid. I'm being taught.
Put the two together and I still can figure it out. Maybe I need more than 190 IQ. I don't know.
Here's the thing. 1,800 people die every single day in Italy of natural causes. A day, mind you, every single day. 1,800 people.
In the totality of the pandemic, in four months in Italy, 16,000 people had died. Now let's assume that all of them had died in the last two months. That's something like an extra 300 deaths a day. So it raises the tally from 1,800 to 2,100. Even that is highly optical.
Why?
Because many of the people who had died of COVID-19 or with COVID-19, we don't know yet, should have died anyhow. They were above the age of 81. 50% of them were above the age of 51. They would have been counted among the 1,800 that I mentioned before.
But even let's assume for a minute, let's go with the Italian government. Let's assume that all of them died of COVID-19 and only of COVID-19. No comorbidities, no other complications, nothing. COVID-19 killed them. That's another 300 bodies a day. On top of 1,800 bodies.
This is what brought the Italian economy, government and state to its knees.
Is this, am I supposed to believe this nonsense?
The state of New York has about 6,000, I mean, sorry, New York City has about 6,000 deaths a month. That's about 500 deaths every more or less a day. So 6,000 deaths a month. That's 200 deaths a day. 500 deaths on a very, very slow week, about 1,500 to 2,000 deaths in a typical week. This is the range.
But the average is 5.8 deaths per thousand population. It's about 6,000. In the entire pandemic until now, which has been raging for almost two months in New York. 3,000 people died. 3,000 people died.
So that's like another two weeks of deaths.
Why can't New York cope with it? Why can't we cope with a surge of 12,000 deaths in two months to 15,000 deaths? Why these extra 3,000 deaths ruin the system, compromise the system? Why our systems are so badly designed that they cannot cope with a surge of 20%?
Our electrical networks can cope with surges of 400% in demand. 400%.
Our stock exchange is built to cope with surges of 10% per trade. I mean, all our systems are built with redundancies, with shock absorbers, with ameliorators, with relays. All our systems are built to cope with a surge in phone traffic, with a surge in internet traffic.
It's a fact.
We're still using the internet and internet usage is almost double.
Why only the healthcare system is not built to cope with a minor blip?
Because listen, 20% is within the variational range, the variance in a typical year. It's nothing. It's simply nothing.
It's like a bad seasonal flu. Take into account that many of these dead would have died anyhow. They're old. Something is wrong in this picture.
Either we are being egregiously light.
People realize there's a lot of money in this panic. There's hundreds of billions of dollars coming from the International Monetary Fund from the World Bank, $2.2 trillion from the American government, hundreds of dollars from other governments. There's a lot of money sloshing around. Everyone wants to pretend that the problem is much, much bigger than it is because the bigger it is, the more money you get.
There is a monetary incentive here to exaggerate, to characterize the situation beyond human comprehension.
I've been receiving letters and comments on YouTube from people living in Ecuador. I'm kidding you're not. They were writing to me that there are carpets of bodies in the street. Bodies are uncollected in rubbish dumps. Hospitals are collapsing and disintegrating. I thought at the very least the bubonic plague had attacked Ecuador.
Then I went online and I found out that Ecuador has 700 cases of which something like 40 people died in two or three months. 40 people died in Ecuador in two or three months.
Why the whining and carping and exaggeration? Why the lies?
Why the lies?
The burden is not distributed equally among all hospitals. Many, many hospitals, I would venture to say the majority of hospitals, are empty because operations have been cancelled, optional procedures have been cancelled, elective procedures have been cancelled. So many things have been cancelled that people are going to die of not getting treatment for real conditions because of this imaginary COVID-19 attack of the Spider-Man.
Most hospitals are in under capacity. Most hospitals are empty.
There are a few, of course, metropolitan hubs, gigantic hospitals that collect patients from entire regions. These hospitals are badly overburdened, also hospitals in hotspots, hospitals possibly in New York, hospitals in Lombardy region, northern region in Italy.
Undoubtedly, there are hotspots, like in Paris, like in northern Italy, like in New York nowadays, perhaps Illinois. There are hotspots.
And within these hotspots, the bigger hospitals, and even I would say the medium-sized hospitals, obviously they're burdened. They lack equipment, they lack PPE, protective guard for the personnel, they lack medical supplies, they should be heard, of course.
But it is not a system-wide situation. It's a lie. It's a deception to pretend that this is a system-wide situation.
The virus is already five months old. That's it. It's reaching its peak. It has peaked out in Italy. It has peaked out in Spain. It is peaking out in the United Kingdom although it doesn't look like it. It's peaking out everywhere, with one exception, the United States, because it started late there. In two weeks, it will peak in the United States.
Why is it peaking?
Social distancing? I don't think so. I think the majority of the population is anyhow infected.
It's peaking because viruses, any virologist will tell you, that viruses have a life cycle. They are self-limiting. And they very often mutate in ways which are detrimental, which render them less virulent, less fatal. This is exactly what happened with SARS. SARS destroyed itself. No one destroyed SARS. SARS self-destroyed. Same happened with MERS. MERS, another virus, is destroyed.
We are very lucky that viruses are self-limiting. They maintain a delicate balance with their hosts. They don't kill all the hosts. They don't spread too wildly. Nature takes care of it. No one is quite sure why.
People ask me what viruses are intelligent. They're sentient. They know what they're doing. Of course not. The nation has these checks and balances. And we are only at the very beginning of understanding them.
That's the science of ecology. And that's what environmentalists are worried about. We are unsettling these inbuilt, hardwired mechanisms.
But viruses have them. It's a fact. Had it not been a fact, we would have all been dead long ago. It's a problem.
This panic is a problem. Because we are killing people. It's not only about the economy. The economy is stupid. It's we are killing people. We are killing people by not giving them medical treatment that they require. We are killing people by isolating them socially. We are killing people by creating mental health disorders, domestic violence. People are already shooting and killing their families. We are killing people. This is an abnormal, not natural environment that we are putting people in.
One indication that COVID-19 may actually be a flu-like virus is the fact that it hops, it jumps from one species to another. In one of my videos I said that sooner or later COVID, I mean SARS-CoV-2 will jump to pets, to cats and dogs.
Cats, more likely. And I was flooded with wise crackers and wise guys telling me how stupid I am. It will never infect animals and so on. But here we are. A tiger in a zoo has contracted COVID-19. The virus is jumping. It jumped from bats to pangolins, from pangolins to Chinese and from Chinese to humans. And now it's jumping from humans to tigers. And it's going to jump back from tigers to humans. This is what the flu does. The flu jumps from humans to pigs and back to humans.
The flu peregrinates, moves among a pool of species. And COVID-19, I mean SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 is doing exactly the same. It's jumping between species, among species. It's a zoonotic virus within, and the whole thing is zoonosis.
Now, the virus jumps to other species, mutates within these species and tries to reinfect humans.
And the good news is that this is precisely what the flu virus does. These mutations within other species actually render the virus less deadly, less lethal, less infectious.
If you mutate, if you adapt perfectly to a pig, you would be hard-pressed to infect humans. Well, at least most humans, some humans are pigs. If you adapt well to a bird, it would be difficult for you as a virus to infect a human after that.
So these mutations are actually in the long run, beneficial.
People ask me, how do viruses mutate? They are nothing but packages of RNA, proteins and nucleic acids. How do they mutate?
Well, it's not that they mutate. Mutation is a misunderstood term. Mutation is a part of natural selection.
Here's what happens. Environment changes. For example, we introduce a vaccine or we introduce a treatment. The environment changes or we develop immunity, herd immunity. The environment changes.
And so many, many of the viruses die off. They can propagate, they can't replicate within the cells, so they die off.
But a few of the viruses are in a teeny, teeny way different to their brethren.
So the vast majority die off and there's a tiny, tiny number of viruses that survive. And they survive. These viruses are a bit mutated, a bit different to the other viruses. And so they survive and they are the ones who now replicate because they can cope with a vaccine, they can cope with a medicine, they can cope with immune people and they're the ones that replicate and they propagate and they create a new pandemic.
And so this is mutation. Mutation is not something that happens to an individual, but something that happens in populations. It's something that selects, it's a part of natural selection, it selects the strongest, it selects the fittest. And they're the ones who create the next pandemic. And it's an endless race.
There's a new pandemic, we invent a new vaccine, a new treatment, people get immune to the new strain, another mutation and so on. It's a never ending race.
That's what happens with the flu, influenza. For centuries, I mean, viruses are adapting, the flu viruses are adapting, we're adapting, they're adapting, we're adapting, they're adapting, we're adapting.
The good news is that we have Dr. Fauci, the viruses don't.
I'm very grateful that this virus targets the old because had it targeted the stupid, we would have been left with no humanity.
So we should be grateful. I don't know but we should be grateful. It's the first time I propose stability, the first time that I sympathize with Donald Trump. I mean, I was the first in March 2016 to suggest that the guy is a grandiose narcissist. I gave an interview to American Thinker, which is a conservative website, believe it or not. And there I said that I warned before he became, before he announced his candidacy actually, I warned that the guy is a serious, seriously deranged grandiose narcissist.
But it's the first time that I find myself in full agreement with him.
He is being pushed around by the medical establishment. He's been pushed around by interest groups, pharmaceutical industry. Everyone has a lot of money, a lot. And he's been pushed around, of course, by the Democrats. He's been pushed around and he does his best. He offers resistance, at least my head off, I admire him for that. It takes either courage or extreme insensitivity to do what he's doing. I should hope it's the first.
We are heading into the last two weeks of the pandemic. Within about 10 days or two weeks, the number of new infections will have leveled off and gone down and the number of deaths will have collapsed.
In the United States, the number of dead people, the victims of COVID-19, will be nowhere near 100,000. I think this number is wrong by a factor of five, at least.
The panic will abate, if not kept high artificially, like introduction of masks. These are artificial measures to maintain the panic.
But the panic will abate.
And then what?
We will look around at the wasteland that we had created with our own hands. This is by far the most self-destructive episode in human history, perhaps second only to World War II. It defies belief what we had done to ourselves. We're going to pay a price for years and decades to come.
No, we are not. I'm not going to be here. I'm not going to make YouTube videos in 10 years.
But the next generations will. We settle them with bills that can never be paid. A ruined planet, a destroyed economy, gender vertical, no relationships, ugly world, civil wars, displaced people, 70 million refugees, diseases plenty.
Wow. Did we do a good job? Should they be grateful to us?
Look at these ungrateful kids. They're not wearing masks to protect us. We gave them so much. We gave them so much for the future.
What we did, we took the future away from them. We absconded with the future.
But isn't this typical narcissistic, selfish, egotistical, boomer behavior? They were unlucky to be born to us. Pity.