In the long history of idiotic government decisions, this has to be the Holy Roman Emperor of moronic policy making..
Now that we’re heading into our seventh week of government-mandated lock-down, I thought it might be useful to keep together in one place, the best of the contrarian voices on the Great Commie Flu Debacle of 2020.
At the outset, what troubled me most about the global response to Covid-19 was the absence of an interdisciplinary approach. Surely, at least a few world leaders must have asked the question, “what human misery will be caused by asking the world not to go to work, not to attend weddings, not to worship?” People seem to forget that economies, and political systems, are very human realities. The economy is how we feed, clothe, house and educate our children. Even if this virus were to kill three million Americans, should the other 324 million be asked to endure a decade long Great Depression and the abridging of their freedoms? Even on my death bed, struggling to breath through a ventilator, I don’t think I would ask the rest of the world to stop so as to give me a few more years on the planet.
So, bottom, line, even if this were the black death, we should have have put a human price on imprisoning our culture and destroying our economic systems.
But, as it turns, out this was a cruel, or perhaps criminal, joke. A con job.
On February 28, about two weeks before our own little business started hemorrhaging cash, as fearful school districts began cancelling field trips, Dr. Anthony Fauci was concluding (before he went into full panic mode), that this epidemic would be something like a seasonal flu in the New England Journal of Medicine. From the article..
…This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza..
Within days, however, the official models were predicting very dire mortality rates. First they were predicting 2.2 million American deaths and then they settled on the more “reasonable,” but still frightening, 100,000 to 240,000 deaths within two weeks, “if we do everything almost perfectly,” observed Dr. Deborah Birx on March 30, 2020. As of this writing, April 27, 2020, nearly four weeks later, the worldometer total for American deaths stands at 55,843, a number that is likely grossly inflated even in a country that didn’t meet Dr. Birx’s standard of perfection. Many states did not lock-down, require masks, or forbid handshakes. Even when Covid-19 as the cause of death is presumed (as opposed to confirmed), even when hospitals have a financial incentive to over-report, we’re barely over the half-way mark on the low end of their “perfect world” prediction.
Early on in the crisis, Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, quietly damned the breathless scaremongering of Anthony Fauci when he observed “our profession hasn’t been as honest as it should have been” and “Dr. Fauci doesn’t know the mortality rate.” (In the measured speak of the academic world, this is as close as you get to calling someone a “quack.”) As Dr. Bhattacharya observed, we can’t know the mortality rate until we know how many people have been infected and recovered naturally. You need the denominator and Dr. Fauci didn’t have it.
Some highlights from the Dr. Bhattacharva interview..
–The virus is deadly — make no mistake — but predictions of death between 50,000 and 2 million is not precise enough a range to warrant shutting down the economy capriciously..
–A worldwide Depression will kill lots of people too, maybe far more
–Some of his colleagues thanked him for his honesty and admitted he had given voice to what they were thinking; others thought it “irresponsible” to let the public know how little they know..
Well, sure enough, study after study came in confirming that the Covid-19 virus has been around for longer than we thought and infected far more people than originally assumed. The Stanford study indicated that there were 50 to 80 times more recovered infections than positive (currently active) cases. This, of course, put the original pseudo-mortality-rate in perspective. Instead of something really ugly like “3.5% of the people get this are going to die,” it became something like “0.1 to 0.3% of the people who get this are going to die.” And this makes the great pandemic of 2020 something like the seasonal flu. Similar results were found in Los Angeles and New York.
Throughout the “crisis,” people have been talking about an “explosion in the number of cases,” which means absolutely nothing. If you have an “explosion in the number of tests,” as we have, you will have an explosion in the number of cases. What you really need to count are dead bodies, and those that are truly dead as a direct result of the virus, but since we’re not likely to be told the truth there, the acid test is just “death from all causes.” If this a real world-changing pandemic, you would have to think that American deaths would be on the increase. As Harvard trained George Gilder observed
The latest figures on overall death rates from all causes show no increase at all. Deaths are lower than in 2019, 2018, 2017 and 2015, slightly higher than in 2016. Any upward bias is imparted by population growth.
You can’t just manufacture corpses and that’s probably what we should continue to look at — how many dead bodies are piling up from all causes. If it increases, dramatically, there’s a problem, but that’s not happening and we may actually be merely prolonging the death curve. Who knew that the best thing young people could do to protect old people from this virus is go to the beach, go to school, go to restaurants. Let the healthy expose themselves, build herd immunity, and protect the broader population.
Quoting Gilder:
An egregious statistical horror story of millions of projected deaths, suffused with incense and lugubrious accents from Imperial College of London to Harvard School of Public Health, prompted the pols to impose a vandalistic lockdown on the economy. It would have been an outrage even if the assumptions were not wildly astronomically wrong.
Flattening the curve was always a fool’s errand that widened the damage by flattening the economy and retarding herd immunity.
We were told by the “experts” that “flattening the curve” would never actually reduce the total number of deaths, but slow them down so that hospitals wouldn’t be overwhelmed. Welp! It looks like some ER rooms are nearly empty, and health care workers are being laid off. In the ever fevered and radicalized imagination of Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, this is all just about profit, but she ignores the people who can’t get cancer screening, hip replacement, eye exams — while Dr. Fauci emptied the hospitals for an epidemic that never took place.
America needs to open back up NOW, with a vengeance, and we need our leaders to solemnly promise they will never subject us to such enormous overreaction in the future.
