'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. All nations and ages have been subject to them. Britain has trembled like an ague at the report of a French fleet of flat-bottomed boats; and in the fifteenth century the whole English army, after ravaging the kingdom of France, was driven back like men petrified with fear; and this brave exploit was performed by a few broken forces collected and headed by a woman, Joan of Arc. Would that heaven might inspire some Jersey maid to spirit up her countrymen, and save her fair fellow sufferers from ravage and ravishment!
Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered. In fact, they have the same effect on secret traitors, which an imaginary apparition would have upon a private murderer. They sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public to the world. Many a disguised Tory has lately shown his head, that shall penitentially solemnize with curses the day on which Howe arrived upon the Delaware.
From “ The American Crisis, No. 1 ”, by Thomas Paine, 1776
As the months drag on, the bat virus that the folks in charge added four amino acids to so that it would kill humans more easily has badly underperformed, with a mortality rate only roughly that of the seasonal flu.
Which has not, to this moment, stopped an irrational, hysterical populace from wearing their do-nothing masks, and lurching away from one another while walking wild-eyed down the street.
But the game is turning, has turned, as you can see from the current headline below which reads "NPR: “Mounting Evidence” Suggests COVID Not As Deadly as Thought . Did the Experts Fail Again ?
The ’ experts ’ may have subjected us to a blunder greater than any since the Iraq War."
Now, this is a huge press release, in that National Petroleum Radio is what’s beaming through expensive, retro-styled headphones into the skulls of most of the zombies in the Park Slope Food Co-Op line.
I believe they may all practice social distancing for the rest of their days, because they so love the hair shirt, particularly the feel of it .
I’m busting on them because I love the Co-Op, and now have to walk a half a block farther to Key Foods, where there is, I must note for the record, no line.
In this week’s news, NPR has rebranded the biggest crime in human history as a " blunder ", as opposed to what it is: a cold-blooded, murderous social engineering “Confidence game” played upon a biblical multitude of wholly-credulous rubes.
But I’ll take it.
Not having it all their own way, continued:
June 15, 2020 - Viewpoint: Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis’ COVID-19 controversy illustrates the politicization of science
Ioannidis went on to say that preventing people from working or leaving their homes could cause more harm than the virus itself.
YouTube pulled one of Ioannidis’ interviews, saying that it contained “medical misinformation.”
In politicizing Ioannidis’ work, both the left and the right have failed to understand or acknowledge the critical questions he is raising."
The conspiracy is unmasked, here, as it can be seen that both left and right are united in their support of the Confidence game.
The article continues:
“Ioannidis’ views on lockdowns, far from aligning with a Trumpian desire to benefit Wall Street , are consistent with his longstanding body of work, which has regularly pointed out how researchers often downplay or ignore the harms of medical interventions.”
It’s a careful bit of tradecraft, where the " far from aligning with Trump" ruse-line shakes the doll of Wall Street, trying to confuse you into not noticing that the " researchers " are not aligned with any particular political party, but rather work directly for the medical Establishment.
The article continues:
“Locking ourselves in our beautiful mansions and continuing with our videoconferences practically does nothing for nursing homes and chronically badly prepared hospitals . . . It also kills the poor, the disadvantaged . . .” He has cautioned that protracted lockdown will cause starvation, violence, poverty, and deaths that could exceed the number of lives saved by avoiding Covid-19 infections."
The creation of the virus and the response to its release are both parts of a gigantic Confidence game created to kill the poor and the disadvantaged. To drive starvation, violence, poverty and death.
They figure the rubes will never notice.
But notice, they have, and noticing, they are. An article below tells us that, “by 1966, 73% of all Americans said they had great confidence in the leaders of the medical profession. From that peak, public trust in the U.S. medical profession has steadily eroded; by 2012, only 34% of Americans expressed confidence in our medical leadership.”
Where they Satanically inverted it, to avoid saying that two thirds of Americans do not have confidence in our medical leadership. And that was prior to the virus gambit.
This huge drop in public confidence in medical leadership is very significant, in that cons, or “confidence games”, require a rube or mark to have “confidence” that the criminal who has put on fair guise is not, in fact, a criminal.
The public hasn’t quite gotten their heads around medical leadership being comprised exclusively of bloodline-linked generational Satanists. But the majority distrust them, nonetheless. And an expose of that leadership’s, er, social and religious practices will obviously not help things for our literally blood-drinking and about-to-be former dark masters, who have ruled us from the shadows, well, all the way back to Babylon, and before.
Not all medical professionals are generational Satanists, of course. But the leaders up at the top of the control pyramids all are.
We can see how a majority of the populace knew that the fix is in from the top, way back in 2012. Only they haven’t been marching in the streets up until quite recently.
And now, here in 2020, this article is being read aloud in some hidden briefing room by an oppressed minion who is inwardly smirking at his hated masters’ impending demise.
Jeff Miller, Brooklyn, New York, June 25, 2020
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April 3, 2020 - Oregon - OHA stops providing certain data about hospitalizations and hospital capacity because it doesn’t trust the data .
On Thursday, officials stopped providing that information and did not explain why. On Friday, after being asked by journalists, OHA said there were “data quality issues” but declined to give specifics.
April 24, 2020 - UK - Coronavirus: why public trust is an issue for news media but don’t trust those polls
Another opinion poll is out showing low levels of ‘trust’ in British journalists in the middle of a crisis where news media will be crucial for public information. But this is not the problem you might think it is. In some ways it’s worse.
April 30, 2020 - UPMC doctor argues COVID-19 not as deadly as feared , says its hospitals will shift back to normal
A UPMC doctor on Thursday made a case the death rate for people infected with the new coronavirus may be as low as 0.25% — far lower than the mortality rates of 2-4% or even higher cited in the early days of the pandemic.
Dr. Donald Yealy based it partly on studies of levels of coronavirus antibodies detected in people in New York and California, and partly on COVID-19 deaths in the Pittsburgh region. The studies found that 5-20% of people had been exposed to the coronavirus, with many noticing only mild illness or none at all, he said.
“We’ve learned that way more people, far, far more people have actually been exposed to the infection without any knowledge of it. That makes the overall death rate much lower ,” said Yealy, who is UPMC’s chair of emergency medicine. “Many people just didn’t feel sick at all and recovered without difficulty.”
May 12, 2020 - Support for lockdown hinges on politics and trust in media
May 14, 2020 - Analysis: The Public Doesn’t Trust Or Support Trump’s Coronavirus Response
May 15, 2020 - Nearly a quarter of the people Colorado said died from coronavirus don’t have COVID-19 on their death certificate
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment announced a change to how it tallies coronavirus deaths amid complaints that it inflated numbers
Nearly a quarter of the people reported as coronavirus deaths in state statistics don’t have the virus listed on their death certificates — at least not yet — the state Health Department said Friday, adding more uncertainty to how many people the virus has killed in Colorado.
May 19, 2020 - Washington State - Dori: Is state exaggerating COVID-19 death numbers ?
Jay Inslee is constantly talking about “data” — about how he is using facts and statistics to help guide him as the state recovers from a devastating economic meltdown. But what if his data is greatly exaggerated? And what would be the reason for the state cooking the books on such a vital matter?
In a stunning analysis of the actual numbers, the Freedom Foundation claims that our state Department of Health has over-reported the actual death count from coronavirus, perhaps by as much as 13%.
Freedom Foundation research indicates the DOH’s reported COVID-19 death total is inflated due to state’s practice of counting every person who tests positive for COVID-19 and subsequently dies, even if the death was not directly caused by COVID-19.
What this means is that, if a person tests positive for coronavirus in March, and then dies in a car accident in May, the state is calling that a coronavirus death. The state of Colorado was using the same shady calculations for their death count until they were busted last week by local media there.
That leads to the obvious question: For a governor who talks incessantly about facts and data, what is the political motivation to exaggerate our state’s COVID-19 death count?
(Being the member of a tribe of bloodline generational Satanists who are the avowed enemies of humanity. - ed)
June 15, 2020 - Viewpoint: Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis’ COVID-19 controversy illustrates the politicization of science
Is John Ioannidis’ controversial study a ‘black mark’ on scientific integrity?
By many measures, John Ioannidis is a lion of medical science. The Stanford University professor is the author of some of the most cited journal articles in medical history. His research in statistics and biomedicine has arguably changed the practice of medicine. A 2010 article in The Atlantic said “Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. ” And you would never know any of this from reading comments about him today.
It started on March 17, when Ioannidis published an opinion essay in STAT saying that the data on Covid-19 were not sufficient to know the disease’s true prevalence and fatality rate. He also argued that scientists were in the dark with respect to which distancing and lockdown measures work, which don’t, and what the measures’ downstream harms might be. All of which was true — even if his very early estimate that as few as 10,000 might die in the U.S. turned out to be wrong. Ioannidis went on to say that preventing people from working or leaving their homes could cause more harm than the virus itself.
It was this last bit that set off the firestorm of criticism. A typical comment on Twitter came from Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, who called the essay “content-free, logic-free drivel.” For detractors, Ioannidis’ argument that the data on both the virus and lockdowns were insufficient was tantamount to saying, “Do nothing.”
As swift and punishing as the reaction was, it was perhaps unsurprising. Science can be a rough and tumble arena, where researchers sling arguments at one another with abandon. They routinely criticize one another’s methods, statistical analyses, and conclusions. And in this case, the stakes were extraordinarily high. One early estimate suggested that 2.2 million people in the U.S. alone would die if Covid-19 was left unchecked.
But the attacks on Ioannidis from the medical community and the popular press are different. They are tinged with partisanship, with each side appearing to embrace the math that serves their political allegiances. Ordinarily sober-minded researchers have attacked Ioannidis’ methods with hyperbolic and emotional arguments that suggest it’s not so much his science but his questions that they dislike.
In politicizing Ioannidis’ work, both the left and the right have failed to understand or acknowledge the critical questions he is raising. In doing so, they impede our ability as a nation to respond in a way that minimizes deaths, not just from the disease, but from our reaction to it.
From the beginning of the pandemic, there has been uncertainty surrounding two crucial pieces of information about Covid-19: its prevalence, or the percentage of the population infected with the disease; and its infection fatality rate, the percentage of infected people who die. Many early estimates placed that rate at around 1 percent, roughly 10 times deadlier than the seasonal flu.
In April, a couple of weeks after Ioannidis’ essay appeared in STAT, he and 16 other researchers conducted a study in Santa Clara County, California, to better define the infection fatality rate. The researchers tested the blood of 3,330 participants and found that 50 had antibodies to Covid-19, indicating that they had been infected with the virus — many of them without even knowing it. This finding suggested that the prevalence of Covid-19 in Santa Clara County was far higher than official counts indicated, and that the infection fatality rate was therefore much lower than previously feared, only around 0.17 percent. (The original version of the manuscript gave the fatality rate as ranging between 0.12 and 0.2 percent.) It followed that extended lockdowns might not be the best approach to controlling harm from the virus.
Although the Stanford group’s estimation of the infection fatality rate falls at the low end of the range obtained in other antibody studies, it is not an outlier. A meta-analysis by Ioannidis found that other groups have independently estimated similar fatality rates. Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has placed the case fatality rate at 0.4 percent, meaning the infection fatality rate is substantially lower. Yet the Santa Clara study was singled out for particularly pointed attacks.
Some critics suggested the Stanford researchers had biased the study toward finding a high prevalence, to justify Ioannidis’ argument that the initial estimates of fatality rates were inflated. Other critics said the antibody test used in the Santa Clara study was so unreliable that it was possible none of the 50 participants who tested positive had actually been infected. This, despite the fact that almost all surveys to date suffer similar test-reliability problems in low-prevalence areas.
Still others argued that the Stanford team’s decision to recruit subjects through Facebook possibly skewed the sample group toward healthier and wealthier individuals, though there was hardly a peep of criticism for a New York State survey that recruited test subjects at grocery stores and shops or a Los Angeles County study that skewed toward the rich.
The Santa Clara study caught on in the popular press, where opinion-makers and reporters quickly took sides. The right-leaning press was quick to embrace the idea that the threat of the pandemic had been exaggerated. Ioannidis earned praise in the National Review. The DailyWire.com, a right-wing news and opinion website, pronounced that liberals had been “continuing to gaslight” the public with inflated pandemic numbers and called for an end to “dystopian” lockdowns. Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, a conservative firebrand, had Ioannidis on her show.
On the left, The Nation published an article calling Ioannidis’ work a “black mark” on Stanford University. The source of the Nation’s ire was an article in left-leaning media outlet BuzzFeed News, by Stephanie Lee, suggesting that Ioannidis had failed to disclose a potential conflict of interest in the Stanford study. Wrote Lee, “Ioannidis and his coauthors did not disclose that the study was funded in part by [David] Neeleman,” whose company JetBlue potentially stood to benefit from research indicating that the threat of Covid-19 had been overestimated. Quoting from the anonymous whistleblower complaint, Lee wrote, “Concern that the authors were affected by a severe conflict of interest is unavoidable.” With that accusation, even some longtime medical allies of Ioannidis began to scatter.
But it turned out that the backlash was missing crucial context. Neeleman did indeed make a $5,000 donation to the study, but it was placed by Stanford in an anonymous fund that the university says was created to ensure the independence of researchers. Ioannidis told us that he only learned of the $5,000 donation when the article in BuzzFeed appeared. He said, “I and many others invested our time and effort to the project entirely for free.” Although Eran Bendavid, the study’s lead investigator, says he did correspond with Neeleman while the work was ongoing, he told us he only learned of Neeleman’s donation from an email from the Stanford development office. That email, which he shared with us, was dated April 15, one day after the study had been completed and submitted for publication on the MedRxiv preprint server.
Attacks on Ioannidis came early and often. Just days after the study published, Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman wrote that Ioannidis and his co-authors “owe an apology not just to us, but to Stanford.” And in May, YouTube pulled one of Ioannidis’ interviews, saying that it contained “medical misinformation.” Despite numerous queries, neither YouTube nor its parent company, Google, has revealed which part of the interview could be construed as misinformation.
The politicization of medicine and science is nothing new. But some people seem to think this tribalism is owned by the political right — that the rightwing leverages science as propaganda, while the left engages in “discussion and debate.” But in the case of Ioannidis, the nuance has been lost on both sides.
Ioannidis’ views on lockdowns, far from aligning with a Trumpian desire to benefit Wall Street, are consistent with his longstanding body of work, which has regularly pointed out how researchers often downplay or ignore the harms of medical interventions. As he wrote to a private list of doctors and researchers, “Locking ourselves in our beautiful mansions and continuing with our videoconferences practically does nothing for nursing homes and chronically badly prepared hospitals . . . It also kills the poor, the disadvantaged . . .” He has cautioned that protracted lockdown will cause starvation, violence, poverty, and deaths that could exceed the number of lives saved by avoiding Covid-19 infections.
He’s not alone in these concerns. The World Food Program estimates that 265 million people worldwide could face hunger and starvation due to lockdown-related disruptions in the food supply. Business writer Tom Keane suggests, based on a study linking death rates to unemployment, that pandemic-related job losses in the U.S. alone could translate to an extra 815,000 deaths over the next 10 to 17 years.
Ioannidis will almost certainly emerge from this imbroglio with his reputation as a rigorous researcher restored, but the level of vitriol being aimed at his work is causing others in the medical community to self-censor, as a number of doctors and researchers have acknowledged to us. This is the worst possible outcome during a pandemic when there is so much yet to be learned.
Ioannidis, right or wrong, has raised difficult questions, in the best tradition of science. Silencing him is an enormous risk to take.
June 17, 2020 - A bitter pill for doctors to swallow: The public doesn’t trust us anymore
At the turn of the 20th century, the medical profession was becoming one of the most trusted societal institutions in the United States. Leaders within medicine held significant influence over federal policy decisions. This influence grew until the mid-20th century; by 1966, 73% of all Americans said they had great confidence in the leaders of the medical profession.
From that peak, public trust in the U.S. medical profession has steadily eroded; by 2012, only 34% of Americans expressed confidence in our medical leadership.
(They Satanically inverted it. Two thirds of Americans do not have confidence in our medical leadership. - ed)
June 12, 2020 - NPR: “ Mounting Evidence” Suggests COVID Not As Deadly as Thought. Did the Experts Fail Again ?
The ‘experts’ may have subjected us to a blunder greater than any since the Iraq War.
In April 2005, Charles Duelfer, the CIA’s top weapons inspector in Iraq, admitted in the CIA’s final report that after an extensive search, no weapons of mass destruction could be found.
“After more than 18 months, the WMD investigation and debriefing of the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted,” wrote Duelfer, the leader of the Iraq Survey Group. “As matters now stand, the WMD investigation has gone as far as feasible.”
Today it’s generally accepted that the presence of WMD was the primary basis for the Iraq War. Naturally, the absence of such weapons shook the world. The media blamed the politicians, the politicians blamed US intel, and the intelligence actors involved mostly defended their work.
The official word, chronicled in the Robb-Silberman report, concluded that “the Intelligence Community didn’t adequately explain just how little good intelligence it had—or how much its assessments were driven by assumptions and inferences rather than concrete evidence.”
The Iraq War WMD debacle is arguably the greatest expert “fail” in generations. The holy triumvirate—lawmakers, bureaucrats, and media—all failed to sniff out the truth. If any of them had, a war that cost trillions of dollars and claimed the lives of 100,000-200,000 people likely could have been avoided.
It would be difficult to surpass the Iraq blunder, but emerging evidence on COVID-19 suggests the experts—again: lawmakers, bureaucrats, and media—may have subjected us to a blunder of equally disastrous proportions.
A new NPR report suggests the global response to COVID-19 may have been reached on a flawed premise.
Mounting evidence suggests the coronavirus is more common and less deadly than it first appeared.
The evidence comes from tests that detect antibodies to the coronavirus in a person’s blood rather than the virus itself.
The tests are finding large numbers of people in the US who were infected but never became seriously ill. And when these mild infections are included in coronavirus statistics, the virus appears less dangerous.
“The current best estimates for the infection fatality risk are between 0.5% and 1%,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
That’s in contrast with death rates of 5% or more based on calculations that included only people who got sick enough to be diagnosed with tests that detect the presence of virus in a person’s body.
Many people will recall the fatality risk debate that took place prior to and in the early stages of the lockdowns. There was much discussion over how deadly the virus was and what the collective response to the virus should be.
Some voices exercised caution.
“The public is behaving as if this epidemic is the next Spanish flu, which is frankly understandable given that initial reports have staked COVID-19 mortality at about 2–3 percent, quite similar to the 1918 pandemic that killed tens of millions of people,” Jeremy Samuel Faust an emergency medicine physician and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, wrote in Slate. “Allow me to be the bearer of good news. These frightening numbers are unlikely to hold.”
Similarly, on March 5 vaccine expert Paul A. Offit, who holds the Maurice R. Hilleman Chair of Vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania, told Factcheck.org that he believed that the World Health Organization’s 3.4 percent fatality rate figure was too high, suggesting it was well below 1 percent.
“We’re more the victim of fear than the virus,” Offit said, adding that the world was witnessing a “wild overreaction” to the disease.
Voices like those of Faust and Offit (and Miller - ed) were quickly drowned out, however. The 24-hour news cycle fanned collective fear and outrage that more was not being done. Runs on toilet paper and masks ensued. Neil Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, predicted millions would die in the “best-case scenario.”
Following the example of China, one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world, most of the developed world was placed in indefinite lockdown by their own governments.
The social and economic costs of the lockdowns soon became apparent. The US alone has seen 40 million jobs lost, many of which aren’t coming back. Recession looms. Hundreds of thousands of businesses have already been wiped away. The federal debt has surged to $26 trillion.
Unfortunately, the COVID disaster and the aforementioned Iraq War fit a familiar pattern. As the historian Paul Johnson has observed, most of the worst events of the 20th century were perpetrated by experts who used collective power to shape world events in a direction they believed was beneficial.
“One of the principal lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is—beware intellectuals,” Johnson wrote in The Intellectuals. “Not merely should they be kept away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.”
Nobody denies the immense cost of the lockdowns, but what was gained by them remains a subject of contention.
A May report from JP Morgan, as well as other evidence, suggests the lockdowns had little to no impact on the spread of COVID-19.
Marko Kolanovic, a physicist and strategist for JP Morgan, pointed out that a majority of nations saw declines in infection rates after the lockdowns were lifted.
“Unlike rigorous testing of new drugs, lockdowns were administered with little consideration that they might not only cause economic devastation but potentially more deaths than Covid-19 itself,” Kolanoviche said.
Most nations saw Covid infection rates go down after lockdowns were lifted, a recent @jpmorgan analysis found.
Similarly, a Bloomberg analysis in May found “little correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities.” Meanwhile, Norway’s top health official recently stated that lockdowns were not a necessary step to tame the virus.
On the other hand, the Washington Post this week cited studies claiming the lockdown orders prevented hundreds of millions of COVID-19 infections and saved millions of lives.
These findings come with caveats, however. First, one of the studies was submitted on March 22—well before the vast majority of COVID cases had even occurred. The other study was conducted by researchers at the Imperial College of London, the same school from which Ferguson hailed. (He has since resigned after it was discovered that he broke the lockdown protocol he helped design by allowing his married lover to come to his home.)
Ferguson, who in 2005 said up to 200 million might die from bird flu (about 100 did), was asked by The New York Times in March what the best-case scenario was for the US during the COVID pandemic.
“About 1.1 million deaths,” he responded.
As of June 10, Ferguson is off by about a factor of ten. Why we should continue to listen to schools that have already proven to be so disastrously wrong is anyone’s guess. The “chicken little” story comes to mind.
In 2003, state actors led the world into a bloody, years-long struggle in Iraq to protect the world from nuclear weapons that didn’t exist—only to eventually learn how little US intel experts actually knew about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities.
In 2020, central planners from around the world decided to shut down the global economy to protect people from an invisible, highly contagious virus that will result in no or mild symptoms for up to 90 percent of its carriers.
Some lessons, it seems, are hard to learn.
