How Did a Disease with No Symptoms Take Over the World?

By Lockdown Sceptics

“There are two ways in which people are controlled: first of all frighten them, and then demoralise them. An educated healthy, and confident nation is harder to govern.” – Tony Benn

Biologists tell each other stories. These stories might involve lots of acronyms and use strange and wonderful verbs and nouns but, unlike say mathematics, the mechanism by which biologists convey their science is at heart through the use of language. But unlike works of creative writing, the language used by biologists needs to be precise because bad English can lead to bad science. Which is why it jarred so much when I first read the following statement:

A third of people with COVID-19 have no symptoms.

The more technically correct statement (assuming that “a third” is accurate) is:

A third of people infected with [more correctly, testing positive for] the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus have no symptoms.

So why did the first statement raise my biological hackles so much when at first glance these two statements might appear to be essentially very similar? It is because from a biological perspective they are profoundly different. The first statement asserts the existence of a disease with no symptoms i.e., a sickness that is indistinguishable from being healthy, while the second statement asserts that a viral infection does not necessarily result in a disease. It is not a question of semantics but accuracy and mixing these two concepts up is the sort of thing that would have resulted in an ‘F’ if I were to have submitted it in an essay to one of my professors. Yet, this is exactly the inaccurate language that has been used throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and not by students learning their discipline, but by experienced senior scientists who, one assumes, are well aware of what they are saying.

One could argue that this is unimportant as surely the point is to convey the idea that you could be infectious with coronavirus and be unaware of it and the first statement is an easy way to do this for the layman. Not only does this assumption treat the public as if they were children unable to understand the nuances of infection and disease, but I’d argue that the second statement is just as easy to understand as the first. No, the reason to create a disease with no symptoms is based on a profound decision, one that I believe was made with the intention of ensuring compliance but has, since its inception, grown to dominate our entire response to COVID-19.

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Via https://counterinformation.wordpress.com/2021/06/20/how-did-a-disease-with-no-symptoms-take-over-the-world/