Huge foreign loans are given to sovereign nations by the World Bank, IMF and the likes. But the conditions that come attached to these loans are seldom told by governments to their citizens.
A recent case in Belarus has exposed the conditions laid by these agencies for loans being provided for COVID-19. The President of Belarus has exposed that the World Bank coronavirus aid comes with conditions for imposing extreme lockdown measures, to model their coronavirus response on that of Italy and even changes in the economic policies which he refused as being “unacceptable”.
Additional conditions which do not apply to the financial part are unacceptable for Belarus, Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko said when speaking about external lending during a meeting to discuss support measures for the real economic sector on the part of the banking system, reported Belarusian Telegraph Agency, BelTA.
Aleksandr Lukashenko asked the participants of the meeting how things were with the provision of foreign credit assistance to Belarus.
“What are our partners’ requirements? It was announced that they can provide Belarus with $940 million in so-called rapid financing. How are things here?” the head of state inquired.
At the same time, he stressed that additional conditions which do not apply to the financial part are unacceptable for the country.
“We hear the demands, for example, to model our coronavirus response on that of Italy. I do not want to see the Italian situation to repeat in Belarus. We have our own country and our own situation,” the president said.
According to the president, the World Bank has showed interest in Belarus’ coronavirus response practices.
“It is ready to fund us ten times more than it offered initially as a token of commendation for our efficient fight against this virus. The World Bank has even asked the Healthcare Ministry to share the experience. Meanwhile, the IMF continues to demand from us quarantine measures, isolation, a curfew. This is nonsense. We will not dance to anyone’s tune,” said the president.
Belarus is one of the only European countries that has not implemented strict coronavirus containment measures. The no-restriction situation is such that even the non-essential services remain open. The football league of Belarus is still being played. The only restriction kind-of step that Belarus took till now is that the school holidays have been extended.
Lukashenko is of the opinion that a complete lockdown was completely unnecessary. Similar, views have been expressed by many renowned scientists as well. Recently, an Indian doctor has debunked the official narrative on Coronavirus. He emphasizes that ‘stress affects health’ and said that fear isn’t necessary because eventually people will develop natural immunity to this virus. He is one of the few people to advocate the opinion that life must continue uninterrupted.
The President of Belarus is not the first one to have exposed the pressure exerted by global agencies amidst the coronavirus crisis to further their agenda.
Earlier, in a shocking development the President of Madagascar made a sensational claim that the WHO offered him $20m bribe to poison COVID-19 cure called COVID-19 Organics made from Artemisia.
The Tanzanian President kicked out WHO from the country after Goat and Papaya samples came COVID-19 positive. Days after the Tanzanian move, Burundi also kicked out WHO Coronavirus Team from the country for interference in internal matters.
It was also revealed in an intercepted human intelligence report that Bill Gates offered $10 million bribe for a forced Coronavirus vaccination program in Nigeria. After which, an Italian politician demanded the arrest of Bill Gates in the Italian parliament. She also exposed Bill Gates’ agenda in India and Africa, along with the plans to chip the human race through the digital identification program ID2020.
Authored by Isabel van Brugen via The Epoch Times,
Herd immunity to COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP virus, could be achieved with fewer people being infected than previously estimated, new research suggests.
According to an Oxford University study (pdf), the herd immunity threshold (HIT) may be lower than previous estimates because many people may already be innately immune to COVID-19—without ever having caught the disease.
A team of researchers from the University of Oxford’s Zoology Department, led by Professor Sunetra Gupta, produced a model that suggests as little as 20 percent of the population may need to be resistant to the virus to prevent a resurgence of an epidemic.
The study, which was published on July 16, is yet to be peer-reviewed.
“It is widely believed that the herd immunity threshold required to prevent a resurgence of SARS-CoV-2 is in excess of 50 percent for any epidemiological setting,” the paper says.
The researchers suggest that many people may have already built up some degree of resistance to the virus from exposure to seasonal coronaviruses, such as the common cold.
Herd immunity is achieved when enough people in a population have immunity to an infection to be able to effectively stop that disease from spreading. It lowers the chances of the virus being transmitted from person to person and reaching those who haven’t been infected yet.
Colorized scanning electron micrograph of cell (green) heavily infected with coronavirus particles (purple), commonly known as SARS-CoV-2 or novel CCP virus, isolated from a patient sample, photo published on March 16, 2020. (NIAID)
People can become immune to certain viruses after surviving infection or being vaccinated. Typically, at least 70 percent of a population must be immune to achieve herd immunity. But how long immunity lasts varies depending on the virus.
“Here, we demonstrate that HIT may be greatly reduced if a fraction of the population is unable to transmit the virus due to innate resistance or cross-protection from exposure to seasonal coronaviruses,” wrote study authors Jose Lourenco, Francesco Pinotti, Craig Thompson, and Gupta.
“These results help to explain the large degree of regional variation observed in seroprevalence and cumulative deaths, and suggest that sufficient herd immunity may already be in place to substantially mitigate a potential second wave,” they added.
The researchers said that when people who are resistant to a virus mix with non-resistant people, the HIT drops significantly.
“Given the mounting evidence that exposure to seasonal coronaviruses offers protection against clinical symptoms, it would be reasonable to assume that exposure to SARS-CoV-2 itself would confer a significant degree of clinical immunity,” the researchers suggest.
“Thus, a second peak may result in far fewer deaths, particularly among those with comorbidities in the younger age classes.”
More than 14.7 million people have been reported to be infected by the CCP virus worldwide and at least 610,000 have died, according to a tracking map by Johns Hopkins University, although the figures are believed by some experts to be unreliable owing to inaccurate data from China.