Unmasking the Pandemic's Impact: A Conversation with Tom Beckett Kane

Analyzing the COVID-19 Pandemic: In Conversation with Author Tom Beckett Kane

In this episode of Season Seven of 'Open Forum in the Villages,' host Mike Roth interviews author Tom Beckett Kane about his debut book, 'The Reckoning: A Definitive History of the COVID-19 Pandemic.' Tom discusses his motivations for writing the book, the impact of the pandemic and lockdowns, the controversial aspects of vaccine development, and the role of media in perpetuating hysteria. They also touch upon the origins of the virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and broader societal shifts influenced by the pandemic. The episode concludes with a discussion on vaccination recommendations for seniors and the role of media in modern society.

00:00 Welcome to Season Seven
00:40 Introducing the Guest: Tom Beckett Kane
00:51 The Reckoning: A Book on the COVID-19 Pandemic
01:49 Personal Experiences During the Pandemic
03:25 The Vaccine Debate
05:25 Technological Advances in Testing
07:43 Origins of the Virus
08:24 Gain of Function Research
11:04 Alzheimer's Tip from Dr. Craig Curtis
11:58 COVID-19 Vaccine Recommendations for Seniors
20:17 Media's Role in the Pandemic
23:51 Book Release and Future Plans
25:31 Closing Remarks and Supporter Shoutouts

 Over the next several weeks, while I'm out of town, I've decided to release some reedited and improved versions of the  most popular shows in the series,  as well as some totally new episodes.  I hope you enjoy them.  I'll be back in mid-November with some new episodes

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Transcript

Unmasking the Pandemic's Impact: A Conversation with Tom Beckett Kane
[00:00:05] Speaker: Welcome to Season seven of Open Forum in the villages of Florida. In this show, we talk to leaders of clubs and interesting folks who live in and around the villages. We also talk to people who have information vital to seniors. You will get perspectives of what is happening in the Villages, Florida area.

We are a listener supported podcast. There will be shout outs for supporters.

[00:00:40] Mike: This is Mike Roth on Open Forum in the Villages, Florida. here today with author, Tom Beckett Kane. Thanks for joining me, Tom.

[00:00:50] Thomas Kane: Alright. Thank you 

[00:00:51] Mike: So your first book?

[00:00:53] Thomas Kane: This is my first book, yes. My debut book. I just felt compelled to write about that era and that time in the pandemic. It just ate at me for so long and I had to put pen to paper and that's where the reckoning came from.

[00:01:07] Mike: Tell our listeners the name of your book.

[00:01:09] Thomas Kane: So it's called the Reckoning, a definitive history of the COVID-19 pandemic. and it'll be released on October 2nd by Defiance Press,

[00:01:19] Mike: okay. is that a self-published book or are you being paid by the publisher?

[00:01:24] Thomas Kane: Defiance Press is a conservative libertarian publisher and they'll be publishing the book in, early October.

[00:01:29] Mike: or soft cover.

[00:01:30] Thomas Kane: soft cover.

[00:01:31] Mike: Available on Amazon.

[00:01:33] Thomas Kane: It'll be Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, and hopefully, Walmart. 

[00:01:37] Mike: Okay. And you're gonna get some good reviews by, the New York Times.

[00:01:41] Thomas Kane: They may not, like exactly everything I say in the book, but we'll see what happens.

[00:01:45] Mike: isn't that par for the course?

[00:01:47] Thomas Kane: Right.

[00:01:48] Mike: Okay. Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about your background, and what, motivated you, Tom to. Write a book like this about the, definitive history of the COVID-19, pandemic.

[00:02:02] Thomas Kane: Yeah, Mike. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, when, COVID first started in early 2020 when it first hit US Shores. it was an eye-opening moment. I can viscerally remember where I was in Los Angeles when I first got that text, from the state of California that Governor Newsom was issuing a 30 day stay-at-home order.

And it came as a shock. I, could not believe that the authorities were reacting in this way. that wasn't just California, it was across the nation. of course, that 30 day home order would be extended. many times. I'm a history buff, and I don't want to overstate the response that occurred, but it really clarified and put into perspective a lot of the things I had read about and learned about, early 20th century totalitarianism.

And when you read about those things, it doesn't seem all too real, You can read about millions of people killed, et cetera. But it all seemed distant and far off. for me, the 2020 pandemic and the Lockdowns, showed me that not only, have we not progressed beyond some of those more heinous episodes in history, but that we're fully capable of recreating those conditions and acting just as irrationally 

[00:03:17] Mike: So at the time, you were in the Army,

[00:03:20] Thomas Kane: I had not yet joined. I, joined the Army in 2021, so a year later. And, then, as was, forcibly vaccinated, basically pressured to do And that also gave me a feeling that this was a dramatic event where our personal freedoms, were, dramatically curtailed.

[00:03:38] Mike: on the other side of the coin, the pandemic was killing, people they had a vaccine that they, claimed was, effective. In preventing, the spread of the contagion, do you think that was, true?

[00:03:54] Thomas Kane: it's tough, Mike, because when you want to criticize anything COVID related and you want to talk about the vaccines, you're immediately put into that camp of you're a conspiracy theorist, you're a tinfoil hat person. And that's a big point of the book, is that this was a legitimate threat and that people obviously died.

People suffered, right? I, never make any claims and I don't wanna make the claim, that this was, fake, or a deliberate operation by the government to depopulate the country. Some of those more wacky claims, right? But specifically about the vaccine, it's difficult because you want to criticize the forcible vaccination of individuals,

but in doing so, you get branded into that camp of, oh, you're a conspiracy theorist. you're spreading misinformation. I think the vaccine itself was effective to an extent. As operation warp speed, which was the process in which that was developed. There issues there because it was developed so quickly, right? and whenever you do want to criticize them, the media or the establishment jumps on you and says, oh, you don't have that expertise and you're spreading misinformation.

[00:05:04] Mike: Unless you are a research scientist, the, criticism is more difficult to validate we know that vaccines in general work and, protect people from diseases starting way back at smallpox. the development of the vaccine does seem to be a little suspect because it, happened so fast. Everything in technology seems to be moving at lightning speed, especially in the world of ai. scientists developed, the vaccine using a technique called, real time polymerized chain reaction testing. This allowed them to identify the virus clearly to create a vaccine that would, make people immune to the virus. Was there something wrong with that?

[00:05:50] Thomas Kane: So yeah, the real time polymerase chain reaction testing, RT PCR. that was the main testing regime put in place to procure positive cases of COVID-19 during the pandemic. We can all remember those drive-through testing facilities called point of care.

that allowed millions of people to go at very little cost and spend very little time to see if they had COVID or not. the main difference there and what sort of, aggravated the mass hysteria that gripped the nation was that you now have the ability.

To test thousands of people at once to then send that data to the public health organizations and onto the media to blast on their screens in the lower right hand corner. We probably all remember the CNN Little Box or M-S-N-B-C or Fox News had the little box with number of new cases, 

When you talk about technological advancement, That was a dramatic leap in terms of the testing abilities. compared to only 16 years earlier when a different coronavirus came on the scene, which was sars, which also originated. In China, this a, leap in technology, dramatically increased that number of positive new cases.

If you go back to 2003 and look at the SARS epidemic that started in China, the official case count is, just over 8,000 confirmed cases. If you go today, you can go on any public health organization website. The total case count for COVID-19 is over 700 million.

And that is a very similar virus in terms of genetic and structural composition, compared to sars. Yet it's credited with infecting over 88,000 times more individuals. So it shows you the pitfall. More testing. Drove up the numbers. Drove up the hysteria, and made it seem like this was some out of control civilization ending threat.

[00:07:43] Mike: Let's talk about the origins of the virus. you say SARS came from China as well.

[00:07:48] Thomas Kane: It did originally in Hong Kong. 

[00:07:50] Mike: There's been a lot of talk about the virus originating in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. originally they talked about coming from a fish market in Wuhan. what actually happened?

[00:08:02] Thomas Kane: I think there's a video of John Stewart who was on the Stephen Colbert show, and he was talking about, where he goes, if there was an outbreak of chocolatey goodness in Hershey, Pennsylvania, what would be our first suspect as to who caused the outbreak?

It would be the chocolate factory. And so I think in Wuhan, it's pretty obvious that the coronavirus emerged from the Coronavirus lab. That was part of a legitimate scientific program, called gain of function Research 

Add an ability, add a function to a virus. And this was a practice that had been in place for two decades. It was spearheaded by Dr. Anthony Fauci, a man named Peter Daik, who worked at EcoHealth Alliance, which was originally an ecological institute, but they, transitioned into viral research.

And then finally, Dr. Shi Jung Lee at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There were legitimate reasons for this practice. This had grounds in scientific research 

Transmissible to humans originating in a bat cave, could mutate to become transmissible to humans. The rationale is that, hey, let's get ahead of this problem. Let's bring that virus into the lab. The institute virology, let's edit. Its genome to make it more transmissible to humans.

The obvious risk, is that it leaks from the lab. Now you have a problem that was of no previous concern, which is now a major issue, which is what happened with COVID 19. So I think it's pretty conclusive now that it originated from the virology and escaped. I don't think maliciously, it just escaped on accident and, we dealt with the pandemic as a result.

[00:09:43] Mike: You said that they intentionally changed the virus. From a virus that wasn't transmissible to humans, to one that was transmissible to humans, why would they do that?

[00:09:53] Thomas Kane: I know it sounds like a tinfoil hat. It sounds pretty crazy. It sounds kaka mayme, and in hindsight, right? It absolutely was. And thankfully now the Trump administration, they have ended gain of function research. Actually, if you go back to 2014 to 2016, president Obama issued a moratorium on gain of function research because these different viral, substances were leaking from labs all around the country.

You had cases. I think it was the Atlanta CDC who had a live anthrax specimen that they were housing that leaked. So people were concerned about These things, people were sounding the alarm bells about the dangers of housing infectious viruses in order to experiment on them in their defense.

in defense of Jiang Lee there was some kind of rationale there. we want to, get ahead. Of these viruses before they mutate naturally so that we can develop treatments in advance. But to say that there was no one sounding the alarm bell in the 20 years before COVID saying, maybe this isn't such a great idea.

There were those people and they refused to listen and they even accelerated their research, which resulted in the development of.

[00:11:04] Mike: Let's take a, short break and listen to, Alzheimer's tip from, Dr. Craig Curtis.

[00:11:10]  Dr. Craig Curtis: So even if you removed 100% of the amyloid, that would not cure Alzheimer's. That is true in patients with symptoms. You can remove all the amyloid, yet the symptoms will continue to progress. So what we're doing now in these prevention studies is we're trying to see if removing amyloid prior to symptoms beginning if removing all the amyloid out of your brain, whether or not that actually halts the progression into actual symptoms in Alzheimer's disease.

[00:11:42]  Warren: With over 20 years of experience studying brain health, Dr. Curtis's goal is to educate The Village's community on how to live a longer, healthier life. To learn more, visit his website, craig curtis md.com, or call 3 5 2 5 0 0 5 2 5 2 to attend a free seminar.

[00:11:58] Mike: I'm here today with Tom Kane I'd like to read into the show, a question or two that I asked of Dr. Goldberg, who's the Chief Medical Officer at Health Track, the first question I asked him was, this fall in 2025, should seniors age 60 to 80 get a COVID vaccine? what do you think he said?

[00:12:19] Thomas Kane: Leave it up to personal discretion. 

[00:12:21] Mike: What he said was, according to the CDC and its advisory committee on immunization. Practices. ACIP recommends that all adults age 60 to 80 receive a single dose of the most current form of the COVID-19 vaccine. The current form is targeting Omicron, Nimbus and Stratus variants. He goes on to say. mRNA vaccines are preferred due to their safety and efficacy, but the Novavax protein vaccine is an alternative with contraindications to the mRNA vaccines. What do you think about that?

[00:12:59] Thomas Kane: I think he is, largely correct. a main concern and a big part of my book is that those age, 60 to 80, should consider a vaccine? should have implement all of the measures, federal state and local governments recommended, like lockdowns.

Social distancing mask, wearing that was a group was at increased risk to be affected by COVID-19. So they should take every conceivable precaution the mRNA vaccine, as you probably know, was the first time that an mRNA vaccine had been, used on a massive scale.

[00:13:34] Mike: First

[00:13:35] Thomas Kane: yeah. That is the first time in history.

[00:13:37] Mike: Although most people. Aren't wearing masks today, do you think some people should be wearing masks?

[00:13:42] Thomas Kane: I think if they feel compelled to protect themselves against transmission, they absolutely should. COVID-19 aerosolized. meaning the particulates are so small that they can pass through different masks 

Masks were designed, to combat viruses that are not aerosolized. that was a large contradiction when it came to COVID 19. And the recommendations to use masks, if someone wants to wear a mask and feel more comfortable doing so, I think they, absolutely should.

[00:14:12] Mike: Yeah. 

There were some riots in 2020. do you think those were related to COVID-19 and the lockdown restrictions?

[00:14:20] Thomas Kane: Absolutely. it's a point that shouldn't even have to be repeated. I think of it in similar terms as the leak of the virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It's something that's so obvious. the fact that it needs to be repeated or even made into an argument just shows how irrationally much of the population reacted.

If you go to existing histories of the summer of 2020, you talk about the George Floyd riots most of them, if not all of them, will make maybe one or two references to the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns. It's almost like it was just a peculiar coincidence that happened and not the main driver of what occurred, right?

The histories will say something like, this was the natural buildup of, decades to centuries of racial injustice with George Floyd's death sparking those I, think that's true. To an extent, but the main concern is that when you lock down and restrict the freedom of millions of Americans and, coop them up indoors for months you're going to have a backlash.

the populace lashed out. racial injustice played a role. Police brutal people were, concerned but this was the natural byproduct of cooping up millions of Americans, for months 

[00:15:34] Mike: Tell us how you think the pandemic represented a turning point in Western democracy.

[00:15:39] Thomas Kane: So I think the virtues of democracy for many in the country, sadly, were already being questioned, We look to East Asian autocracies, like China, Korea, Japan, we see them building these incredible, huge scale infrastructure projects that they're able to build a bridge in a month, when it takes.

The United States and other western countries years, if not decades, We see our streets are filthy. our cities are in disrepair, and yet you look at any East Asian, major city and cleanest can be, we were already beginning to question.

The merits of democracy and the merits of our system. And I think the COVID 19 pandemic and what followed and how elites acted and how local and state governments reacted was the final nail in that coffin. In many respects, you can see it today, there's been a push to say, maybe we need to reevaluate the merits of democracy.

Should we even continue to follow these principles? for many, I think the pandemic. Was the, final wake up call, that we need to change course. I think it's sad. I think western democracy is a beautiful thing and we need to cherish it and protect it. but for many, that belief is becoming less and less common.

[00:16:57] Mike: I, believe in the, democracy system. could we do it better in America? Absolutely. in the communist countries, absolutely. awful. I would not put China and Japan in the same. category either, now projects in China that were built on an authoritarian basis may look nice.

The question is, will they fall down in the first earthquake? 

[00:17:18] Thomas Kane: You're right.

[00:17:19] Mike: Luckily here in America, knock wood, most of the time when there's a, minor earthquake, hundreds of buildings don't fall down, killing thousands of people. 

[00:17:27] Thomas Kane: You are right.

[00:17:28] Mike: in terms of, vaccines that are suggested for people here in America, RSV has come up recently and, flu vaccine. what do you think the effectiveness of these vaccines are?

[00:17:42] Thomas Kane: I, know a large majority of your audience is concerned about this. if you have a, preexisting condition that puts you at. an increased risk of being harmed by these various viruses. I think the vaccines are, worth looking into. You need to do your due diligence, do your homework as to whether you want to put this, recreation of the virus in your body.

For me personally, the flu vaccine, was almost a religious. event in my family, we would always get the flu vaccine every year. looking back, I think it was completely unnecessary. for someone like myself, I think it only served weaken my immune system. By taking a vaccine, you're effectively saying that I don't want my immune system to build up to fight this virus.

I want to artificially ensure that I'm protected against this virus. over the long term, I don't think they're a good idea. I think you should try. fight the virus and, vanquish it on your own. But if you feel like you're not gonna be able to do that with your immune system maybe you have, an immune system deficiency, then the vaccine is something that you should look into.

[00:18:50] Mike: in my case, I was exposed to hundreds of people every week, in the business I was in,

I. sometimes on a one time only basis, whether it was at a, trade show or a networking event, they, came to my office for training classes. as the business owner, I, offered anyone who was working for me to get a flu shot for free.

The business was gonna pay for it because I, couldn't afford my own personal absence for illness of any of my key employees. I, think it was effective for me personally. one never knows because there is no actual individual control group. when we talk about seniors, both here and across the United States, we are vulnerable as a group. Our immune systems are not working as well as they were when we were 25. I'm gonna be getting on airplanes. there's nothing worse, than sitting in a tube. at 30,000 feet with 150 to 250 other people rebreathing the air. What do you think?

[00:19:51] Thomas Kane: Absolutely. airplanes have gotta be one of the grossest, environments in existence right now. I feel like I always get a little bit sick after I enter and, leave one.

[00:20:01] Mike: In, your book, where do you suggest we, look next? You said other absurdities. What are the other absurdities?

[00:20:07] Thomas Kane: For me, and that's partly why the book was, interesting to write, is that it intersects with so many other sectors of our society and culture. the big one is the media, the role of the media in perpetuating a lot of these debacle, right? and this manipulation of statistics that occurred, you've probably heard the, famous quote, there's lies, damn lies. And then statistics. there so many issues now with this massive onslaught of data and, information that we receive where specific data points can then be leveraged to create hysteria as happened in the COVID 19 pandemic.

Just take. The infection fatality rate versus the confirmed fatality rate. the confirmed fatality rate number, was the number that was most commonly used to express how deadly the virus is, right? the problem with that is that number was grossly higher than the, amount of people that were infected in total.

So if you look at the CFR. Which is confirmed fatality rate, it's something like 0.2%, If you looked at the infection fatality rate, it's something like one to 2%, And that number was cited almost constantly by the mainstream media to express the idea that this was some incredibly deadly virus worth any and all interventions.

So for me, the media. Pounced on those specific numbers and that's what sells newspapers, right? That's what sells clicks, and that's what drives people to their websites, is saying that this is some civilization ending threat and they just drove the hysteria more. They drove the panic more with the result that our freedoms and liberties were curtail 

[00:21:53] Mike: Do you think we should go back to a media of 50 years ago that was required to show both sides of an issue?

[00:22:00] Thomas Kane: I think so. I think that would be fantastic. I'm gonna go in and improve the world when in reality, their duty in our civic.

Society is to merely report what is happening, instead it mutates into A crusading adventure to try and actually alter the conditions of reality.

[00:22:18] Mike: it's perspective, and it's, what you choose to observe, I, always take it, this way. two traffic reporters, are reporting on the traffic in la. One is looking at crowded downtown where traffic

[00:22:32] Thomas Kane: I.

[00:22:33] Mike: at one mile to three miles an hour, and he says, traffic is terrible, don't drive. And another reporter is out, someplace in the San Fernando Valley looking at the, 101 freeway, and that's moving at. miles an hour in both directions. No problem. Okay.

if you listen to both reporters, you gotta think, it's just their perspective of what they're looking at and, in these, terrible diseases like COVID. And, I don't think we can ignore long COVID. 

[00:23:04] Thomas Kane: Agreed. Totally agree. Is any sort of critic of the response to the virus, whether it was the lockdowns or social distancing measures, you're grouped into this camp that, oh, you're just denying the existence of the virus itself. You're being a conspiracy theorist when in reality, I completely agree this was a serious issue that needed to be addressed.

It was just the ways in which we responded that I think are worthy of criticism.

[00:23:27] Mike: And, the, criticism is worth noting because there were specific industries that were allowed to remain open during, COVID, I'll pick on car dealerships. They were allowed to remain open and had their employees there. they were wearing masks, but not everyone died in those industries.

We don't have, hard statistics for people in those industries to prove what really happened. Our statistics get very fuzzy, share with our, listeners, what the name of your book is and how they can get a copy of it.

[00:23:57] Thomas Kane: Yes, sir. it's called the Reckoning, a definitive history of the COVID-19 pandemic and other absurdities. it'll be out on. October 2nd. It's published by Defined Press. be on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and hopefully, Walmart. excited that it'll be coming out in, about a month or so.

[00:24:13] Mike: You said October 2nd

[00:24:15] Thomas Kane: it'll be October 2nd. 

[00:24:16] Mike: Do you have any plans to turn your book into an audio book?

[00:24:19] Thomas Kane: Yeah. So the audio book has already been recorded. I do the voiceover and the audio book, should be, released sometime around October 2nd 

[00:24:29] Mike: great. that'll be on audible.

[00:24:31] Thomas Kane: It should be. 

[00:24:32] Mike: older folks don't like to read anymore, maybe their eyes are not as good as they used to be. They listen on, Audible. I listen to most books on Audible. 

[00:24:41] Thomas Kane: Yep.

[00:24:41] Mike: With a PDF or any charts and graphs that you might have in the book?

[00:24:45] Thomas Kane: No, there are no graphics. Just text, just my words on the paper. it's funny, you mentioned that, your audience doesn't like to read. That's actually nationwide now. Reading is at an all time low. people are finding it very difficult to, pick up the book and read, especially young people, which I think is probably not a good omen for the future.

[00:25:04] Mike: I think the dissemination of information, is important and ai, can move into the area of, summarizing books. 

Reader's Digest used to have a great business in, summaries of books, a book of summaries, that hasn't really caught on yet, with, AI.

But, it's beginning AI can give you a written summary of a one hour, YouTube video.

[00:25:27] Thomas Kane: Boy. It's getting crazy. 

[00:25:29] Mike: Hey, thanks for being with us 

[00:25:30] Thomas Kane: Hey, thank you so much, Mike.

[00:25:31] Rose: Remember, our next episode will be released next Friday at 9:00 AM Should you wanna become a major supporter of the show or have questions, please contact us at mike@rothvoice.com. This is a shout out for supporters, Tweet Coleman, Ed Williams, Duane Roemmich, and Dr. Craig Curtis at K two in The Villages. We will be hearing more from Dr.

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