Notwithstanding the above, we actually can imagine a pathogen which would be as deadly as Ebola, as transmissible as the worst strain of SARS-2 and a Grim Reaper of one and all, regardless of age, health status or prophylactic measures taken.
While that might justify a sweeping economic Lockdown and government campaign to stop the spread on the grounds that society was being literally invaded by an army of fatal pathogens, the crucial point is this: The Covid has now proven itself in spades to be just the opposite of that theoretical deathly contagion.
And for want of doubt, we don’t mean modestly dissimilar. We are talking about upside-down, black and white, opposite-end-of-the-earth different.
Truly, the data below tells you all you need to know as to why the Virus Patrol is and has been dead-wrong all alone. Sweeping nonparmaceutical interventions (NPIs) have been unjustified from the get-go, as has the relentless blunderbuss campaign by the arms of the state to stop the spread of the coronavirus dead-in-its-tracks.
The reason is simple. The Covid is a pathogenic bully that hones in with malice aforethought on the very most vulnerable segments of the population. That is, those exhibiting the immunological frailties of old age, life-threatening comorbidities or rare genetic predispositions for immune system over-reaction to this viral interloper, especially in the form of cytokine storms where the human body essentially attacks and kills itself.
On the one hand, the proof that the Covid is not a universally deadly pathogen is in the aggregate pudding. Based on the overwhelming findings of serological studies (i.e blood serum tests for antibodies), upwards of 125 million Americans have been infected to date, albeit most of this number have not been symptomatic or confirmed via the wholly unreliable PCR test.
Even among the 30 million who have tested positive—including many individuals who have tested positive multiple times in order to get free of government or employer restrictions—less than 10 million have been seriously ill, fewer than one million have been hospitalized, and even by the CDC’s expansive counting system, about 525,000 have died.
That computes to a 0.4% IFR (infection fatality rate), which ain’t no Black Plague or Ebola equivalent. Full stop.
Indeed, even at this most aggregated level, the Covid does not present as a marauding army of death. In no way shape or form does it merit the “deathly” prefix that has become embedded in the vocabulary and word processors of the mainstream narrative.
In fact, even when you use age as a crude proxy for health status, there are virtually no community-spread illnesses that have the kind of extreme skew to the least healthy as shown in the table below.
This is the mortality rate per 100,000 for the period from February 1, 2020 through March 24, 2021, and the mortality figures are extracted from the CDC’s own expansive count of WITH-Covid deaths.
Population/ WITH-Covid deaths/ rate per 100,000 by Age Cohort:
- 0-17 Years: 73.2 million persons/ 238 deaths/ 0.33 per 100k;
- 18-29 years: 53.6 million persons/ 1,916 deaths/ 3.6 per 100k;
- 30-49 years: 84.5 million persons/ 20,717 deaths/ 24.5 per 100k;
- 50-64 years: 62.9 million persons/78,883 deaths/ 125.4 per 100k;
- 65-74 years: 31.5 million persons/ 115,381 deaths/ 366.4 per 100k;
- 75-84 years: 16.0 million persons/ 146,310 deaths/ 916.2 per 100k;
- 85+ years: 6.6 million persons/ 162,583 deaths/ 2,460.0 per 100k;
- All ages: 328.2 million persons/ 526,028 deaths/ 160.3 per 100k.
In round terms, the above shows that 81% of all WITH-Covid deaths have been among the 16% of the population (54.1 million) 65 years and older. By contrast, the the 64.4% of the population under 50 years (211.4 million) accounted for just 22,900 or 4.4% of the WITH-Covid deaths tallied by the CDC.
Yet it is the under 50 years population—the Kids, the socially congregating 20-30 year olds and the core working age population 30-50 years— that has borne the brunt of the Lockdowns and NPIs. Self-evidently, these measures were not imposed for their own protection since their risks of death from Covid were infinitesimal compared to the ordinary risks of life.
As shown in the table below, for instance, the risk of death from all causes other than WITH-Covid during the last 14 months for the 18-29 years cohort was 183.1 per 100,000. That’s 51X greater than the 3.6 per 100,000 risk of dying from Covid during the same period for the 53.6 million members of this most socially active and interactive cohort of the US population.
Even in the case of the core working age population age 30-49, the all causes (other than Covid) risk of death was 283.3 per 100,000 or 12X greater than the incidence of WITH-Covid deaths (24.5 per 100k).
Of course, the Virus Patrol might argue that the WITH-Covid deaths were preventable by stern Lockdowns and other NPIs, while deaths from, say, heart disease or respiratory illnesses were not. In fact, that’s exactly what the Scarf Lady argued on a weekend show this past Sunday.
Had the Donald not been such a obstinate dolt, Dr. Birx essentially claimed, and strictly followed the advice of herself and Fauci et. al, most of the WITH-Covid deaths would not have happened.
The “vast majority” of the almost 550,000 coronavirus deaths in the US could have been prevented if Donald Trump’s administration had acted earlier and with greater conviction…. “There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”
If we were Sleepy Joe, we’d probably risk a chauvinism charge and say, c’mon woman!
Here is the seven-day moving average of deaths WITH-Covid for two of the most open states (Texas and Florida) compared to the the nation’s Lockdown capital of California. For the past 370 days, the curves have risen and fallen pretty much in tandem with the normal flu seasonality, and in recent months California has taken a turn for the worse relative to Texas and Florida.
Indeed, since Governor Abbott belatedly saw the light and opened Texas completely in early March, the data are so compelling as to make a complete fool of the Scarf Lady, as shown below:
Texas: 7-day new cases average:
- March 2 (before): 6,663
- March 28 (after): 3,320
Texas: 7-day new deaths average:
- March 2 (before): 231;
- March 28 (after): 107
The fact is, there is now overwhelming proof among both the states and among different countries that the vast disparities in Covid-control regimes didn’t make any difference in mortality and other health outcomes. Dr. Birx was not talking science, she was spouting political cant.
Internationally, the case of Sweden should finally tell Dr. Fauci, the Scarf Lady and the rest of the Virus Patrol to shut-up and go home. After 14 months of firmly resisting the Wuhan Lockdown Model that was foolishly adopted in the US, the UK and throughout much of Western Europe, half of Sweden should be dead by now if the egregious fear-mongering of the Virus Patrol was even remotely correct.
In fact, based on preliminary data from EU statistics agency Eurostat, Sweden had 7.7% more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years. By contrast, countries that opted for several periods of strict lockdowns, such as Spain and Belgium, had so-called excess mortality of 18.1% and 16.2% respectively.
In all, twenty-one of the 30 countries with available statistics had higher excess mortality outcomes than Sweden.
Here’s the thing. The misbegotten one-size fits all regime adopted by the Donald’s advisors in March 2020 didn’t happen because America’s admittedly lumbering Federal and local governments weren’t capable of targeting protective measures on the nation’s 54 million or so population of the most vulnerable Americans.
For crying out loud, the Federal government (via Medicare/Medicaid) actually knows the social security numbers, preferred physicians and health facilities and medical conditions of damn near every single American over 65 years.
It could have put on a full court press of notifications, advisories about health risks, prophylactics and treatments and provided financial support and protective services wherever warranted at a tiny fraction of the fiscal and economic costs that have been incurred by the NPI strategies.
So why wasn’t this targeted approach taken?
There is a very simple and deeply disturbing answer. To wit, there was nothing in this targeted approach for publicity-hounds and wanna be power players like Dr. Fauci and the Scarf Lady, who would have otherwise soldiered on in relative obscurity in the backwaters of the Federal public health apparatus.
Worse still, once these wanna be Federal power players bamboozled the Donald (easy enough to do) and basically redefined a targeted medical challenge as a sweeping, across-the-board public health crisis, the governors, mayors and other petty officials throughout the land were unleashed to impose economic martial law, and they did so on the basis of dubious and rubbery local statues.
Needless to say, this unconstitutional, unplanned, disorganized blunderbuss of interventions turned into a totalitarian nightmare within a matter of weeks.
Even then, there was no excuse. The data from the Covid-struck cruise ship called the Diamond Princess was already in, and it showed that among even a senior citizen-aged population of about 3,711 guests and crew, of which 712 (19%) were confirmed cases or became symptomatic or ill, only a tiny fraction needed hospital care and just 14 died.
That made for a IFR of just 0.4%, assuming all passengers were infected owing to close quarters at sea. At worst, the IFR was 2.0% if you assume the improbability that only the 712 passengers who were tested and diagnosed as Covid-positive had been infected.
Moreover, among the ship’s crew of 1,045 with a median age of 36 years, there were 145 positive cases, but zero deaths.
By contrast, among the 2,666 passengers on board with a median age of 69 years, there were 567 positive cases. Yet all of the fatalities were among these far older passengers, and virtually all of those who succumbed were in their 70s and 80s.
In short, when the 14th passenger, who was in his late 70s, died on April 14th, the entire profile of the Covid had been live fire tested and demarcated: It wasn’t a deathly pathogen for society as a whole, and it was fatal for just a small subset of the elderly population over 70 years.
Needless to say, the Diamond Princess lessons never got the time of day once the White House Coronavirus Task Force was up and running, and conducting it nightly reality TV show.
Then-and-there, the public health apparatchiks turned the Federal government’s Covid response into an all-of-society political crusade to accomplish the impossible: Namely, extinguish a novel respiratory virus that by its very nature was destined to spread to most of the population, and could have been permitted to do so had it been accompanied with protective measures targeted on the vulnerable.
Under that kind of regime, real medical science would have been the driver. We are referring to hundreds of thousands of trained physicians and health care institutions providing one-patient-at-a-time care and treatments. That is, the real science would have been brought to bear on sick patients—including the kind of ad hoc improvisations and off-label treatments that quickly emerge from the decentralized medical community when a novel medical threat arises.
As it happened, by contrast, we got a clumsy, sometimes brutal social control regime targeted mainly on the healthy from the public officials who were not remotely competent to manage anything as stunningly complex and inter-dependent as the American economy and social order. And whatever their ad hocery and constantly changing advice, rules and orders were based upon, it wasn’t “the science”.
Worse still, the pseudo-science behind the NPI regime quickly got hyper-politicized once the Donald discovered that he had been bamboozled and began to let loose with randomized doubts about the undertaking that he had authorized and sanctioned.
Accordingly, within a few weeks the most extreme form of Faucist public health nonsense became the sanctioned orthodoxy among the anti-Trump political class and media organs. And wearing a mask became the very badge of honor in a purported war on the Covid that actually amounted to a political war on the Trumpian Right.
If there were any doubts, Biden removed them this week when he called upon Red State governors to reinstate their mandatory mask orders, and adopted the same misbegotten language that was used in the state-aggrandizing War on Poverty by LBJ, War On Drugs by Nixon and War on Energy by Carter, among others.
“We still are in a war with this deadly virus,” he said. “And we’re bolstering our defenses, but this war is far from won.”
Of course, in these phony wars what amounts to statistical noise is transposed into heavy duty warnings, such as CDC Director Walensky’s cry of doom Monday morning that we are facing an impending 4th wave breakout owing to some tiny squiggles in the in-coming case and mortality data.
Then again, if you can spot this incipient breakout in the chart below, your eyes are surely better than ours.
In fact, there is no uptick in the overwhelming majority of states, if such upticks of positive PCR tests results were meaningful, which they are not. Just six states, which are shown in color below, account for most of the national uptick, and these are the six most consistent and heavy duty Blue State Lockdown regimes!
Notwithstanding the meaningless statistical noise shown above, the establishment media has now been house-trained to replicate and amplify the false alarms issued by officialdom.
Here is the nonsense that the media megaphones at POLITICO were quick to issue upon Walensky’s doom pronouncement. Self-evidently, what is really transmissible is the mainstream party line, not the disease:
Covid strikes back — Pardon this interruption to the “everything is awesome” narrative. Because Covid-19 is surging again, leaving the CDC director with a sense of “impending doom” regarding a fourth wave in the pandemic.
Debbie Lai, chief operating officer of Covid Act Now, told POLITICO Nightly’s Renuka Rayasam that the country’s Covid trajectory is deteriorating: “There may be a fourth surge underway, with cases now growing in two-thirds of states versus half before the weekend.”
The numbers: New cases jumped by 11 percent over the past week to a seven-day average of about 60,000 daily cases, according to an inter-agency memo dated March 29 and obtained by POLITICO.
Likewise, a WSJ paint-by-the-numbers story obsessed on the same trivia.
The U.S. reported 507 deaths for Sunday, down from a day-earlier 741 but up from 447 a week earlier.
Well, here’s the fact of the matter. Every day about 8,200 American die on average, and more in the winter-early spring months. So the Sunday-to-Sunday difference cited by the WSJ amounts to 0.7% of the daily mortality average; it’s a statistical fluctuation, not news or information.
Needless to say, these statistical noise emissions—even though they are heralded with bated breath in the MSM—are still just plain noise. And they are also a testament to the utter lack of context in which Sleepy Joe’s war on this ostensibly “deadly virus” is being waged.
As indicated earlier, here is the mortality rates for the same seven age cohorts shown above—but this time for all causes of death except WITH-Covid. What it shows is the obvious point that mortality rates are a function of age, but that compared to the all-causes curve depicted below, the Covid skew to the very elderly is in a class all by itself.
To wit, the ratio of deaths from all causes other than Covid for the 85 and older population is 164X higher than for the 0-17 years cohort. And that’s not even in the same ballpark as the 7,455X ratio for the incidence of Covid deaths as between the oldest and youngest Americans.
Medical science and targeted help versus a blunderbuss non-science based political power grab is what the so-called Covid crisis has been about since the very beginning. It was another false crisis defined by the political class and their media subalterns to facilitate a further aggrandizement of the state.
All Causes Mortality Except Covid: # of deaths/rate per 100k, February 2020-March 2021:
- 0-17 years: 70,731 deaths/96.6 per 100k;
- 18-29 years: 98,083 deaths/183.1 per 100k;
- 30-49 years: 239,400 deaths/283.3 per 100k;
- 50-64 years: 581,170 deaths/923.8 per 100k;
- 65-74 years: 694,765 deaths/2,206 per 100k;
- 75-84 years: 840,052 deaths/5,260 per 100k;
- 85 years & older: 1,045,660 deaths/ 15,819 per 100k;
- All age groups: 3,509,979 deaths/ 1,069 per 100k
Nor are these data unique to the US. Covid is an elderly-assaulting bully the world over.
But rather than protection of the bottom two classes of the population, the Covid became an excuse for house arrest and economic and social disenfranchisement of the bulk of the population that was never in serious danger, as the chart below makes so stunningly clear.
Yet the apparatchiks who falsely seized power are not about to give it up—vaccinations, herd immunity and plunging cases notwithstanding.
That’s the real impending doom.
