The SARS-CoV-2 Crisis: Has Medicine Finally Entered a Reductionist Era?

Systems Thinking About SARS-CoV-2

“…In my opinion we need more journalists interested in accurately informing the public about the complex facts associated with SARS-CoV-2; we further need more politicians willing to be advised from a much broader spectrum of industry-and financially independent scholars than just a few selected virologists and epidemiologists with putative financial or other conflicts of interest. Finally, we need more interand transdisciplinary science (62), in particular as retrospective analyses indicate that some drastic policy decisions had no clear benefit (63,64), and may even have caused more harm than good (43,59,65). My hope is that the critical systems perspective on the COVID-19 crisis presented here may be considered for the improvement of both public health and individual well-being.…”

Identifying factors associated with COVID-19 related deaths during the first wave of the pandemic in Europe

“…Non-pharmaceutical interventions were widely hailed in modeling studies as having prevented higher incidence figures of cases and deaths ( 41 – 43 ). While this might be true for some countries and some single interventions, several authors are skeptical ( 44 – 49 ). Careful modeling studies for Germany, for instance, show that, although Germany was comparatively early to react – first measures were introduced on March 8 and shortly after this a full country lockdown was enacted – the peak of the infection and of the reproduction numbers was reached in nearly all 420 German districts on or around March 8 and thus none of the non-pharmaceutical interventions could have been causally related to the reduction of cases, and hence deaths ( 50 , 51 ).…”

Medicine, Money, and Media: A Case Study of How the Covid-19 Crisis Corrupts Disclosure and Publishing Ethics

“…We became critical of this mainstream narrative for different reasons early in 2020. Rainer J. Klement, a multidisciplinary natural scientist with a Ph.D. in physics, became suspicious about the media fear campaign, the denunciation of individuals questioning the mainstream narrative and its inherent reductionism completely ignoring self-responsibility and an intact immune system from the very beginning (Klement, 2020a(Klement, , 2020b(Klement, , 2020c. He also began to study test accuracy and noted that the PCRtest employed was too unspecific, producing too many false positives (Klement & Bandyopadhyay, 2020).…”

“…He also began to study test accuracy and noted that the PCRtest employed was too unspecific, producing too many false positives (Klement & Bandyopadhyay, 2020). Together with virological and other specialists, he queried the solidity of the original PCR-test published by Drosten's group (Borger et al, 2020;Corman et al, 2020;Klement, 2020bKlement, , 2020cKlement & Bandyopadhyay, 2020). This test was submitted on January 21 st , 2020, accepted on January 22 nd , and published on January 23 rd , 2020, and hence probably holds the record in speeding through peer review of all scientific papers published.…”

“…Using these assumptions, these models derived estimates of up to 2.5 million future fatalities for the US and 400,000 to 500,000 for Germany and the UK if no NPIs were put in place. He pointed out in Blogs and some smaller published pieces that the actual data do not fit the mainstream narrative (Kuhbandner et al, 2020b(Kuhbandner et al, , 2022, 2020b. Trying to raise this point with officials at the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, the official office of public health, or with state officers of the ministries of the interior or health was unsuccessful.…”