Another update on the lie that was COVID
How our governments continue to determine policy against COVID
One week ago I published a short essay listing a number of news stories that, as I wrote then, “illustrate starkly the foolishness and the over-reaction to COVID.”
It appears I might have to make this a weekly feature. In the last seven days I’ve collected a whole bunch of new articles, all of which provide further evidence of the lie that was COVID. Not only did our political and health leadership in government routinely lie to us, they often exhibited a remarkable ignorance about some basic science. Until there is reckoning that cleans house in these government agencies, Americans should never believe anything they say.
Most of the stories this past week document the overall failure of the COVID shots to do what these government officials promised: to prevent infection. To understand the significance of this fact, one must go back and review the claims made by government health officials when these shots were first developed. From the beginning these officials repeatedly claimed that the shots would prevent transmission of the virus, and protect people from any Wuhan flu infection if they got the jab. Just watch some of the videos here. Over and over again so-called experts claimed back in the spring of 2021 that the shots would “prevent transmission.”
NOT.
- Latest CDC Data Shows That Vaccinated Children Aged 5-11 Are Now MORE Likely to Catch Covid Than Their Unvaccinated Peers
- Vaccinated more likely to die during omicron wave if they got J&J shot: CDC
- With 92% of population vaccinated S.Korea’s total COVID cases top 10 million
- Protection From Second Booster Quickly Wanes: Israeli Study
These stories do not prove that the shots accomplish nothing, or are very dangerous. The dangerous risks posed by the shots are estimated to be about the same or less than getting COVID itself, which means if you get the jab you will almost certainly not experience any adverse effects. There is also evidence, though very uncertain, that the shots reduce the severity of the Wuhan flu.
Nonetheless, these stories and the data once again show that the promises made about the shots by government officials and their toadies in the health profession were either overstatements, or outright lies. The shots generally accomplish very little, and were oversold.
Then there were these stories this week about the failure of the lockdowns.
- Quarantine Slaughterhouse: Numbers Are Coming in on Non-COVID Deaths During Lockdowns
- Sweden right not to lockdown for COVID: report
It was patently obvious back in the spring of 2020 that the lockdowns were a bad idea. They didn’t prevent the spread of the disease, at all, while causing terrible economic disaster for millions. The stories above merely document the failure of the lockdowns more thoroughly, in hindsight.
Yet, politicians, mostly Democrats, not only pushed for massive lockdowns and quarantines right from the beginning, these same politicians have continued to push them, with Democrats in California, Oregon, Washington, and New York still doing so even today.
New York City is a great example of the idiocy of Democratic Party politicians. There, mask and vaccine mandates have been maintained to the bitter end. Yet the city’s Democrat mayor, Eric Adams, suddenly decided on March 24, 2022 that athletes and theater performers somehow didn’t need masks or vaccines to work in New York and be safe from the Wuhan flu, based on zero scientific evidence .
The immediate response from city employees was interesting:
Adams said he was righting a wrong, leveling the playing field that allowed unvaccinated athletes from out of town to play in New York arenas while those on New York teams couldn’t. But there is intense pushback. Municipal unions, even the City Council speaker, are crying foul, saying rich athletes shouldn’t get a pass when more than 1,400 city workers were fired for not getting the shot and thousands more could soon join them. [emphasis mine]
Somehow, the Wuhan flu could kill cops working at the ball parks or in the theaters if they didn’t wear masks or get the jabs, but the athletes or performers were entirely immune, and didn’t need either masks or shots. SCIENCE!
What is probably most infuriating about these lies has been the attempt by these liars to make believe they never said them. For example, in early February CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen told us:
In the coming days, we will see many Governors and local leaders lift mask mandates. This is the right step, and marks a needed shift from government-imposed requirement to individual decision. It helps to preserve public health authority for when it’s needed again. [emphasis mine]
In saying this, Wen also claimed that “the science had changed,” when in truth nothing related to the effectiveness of masks had changed at all. Research spanning many decades before COVID had shown that masks did nothing to protect anyone from a virus respiratory illness like the Wuhan flu. No research since has changed that conclusion.
However, in early February Democrats suddenly realized that the public had finally figured this out, and were now becoming very hostile to mask mandates. Thus, in February the mantra suddenly became “Masks no longer work! We are abandoning them in order to follow ‘the science!'”
Many of these petty tyrants now claim that they always followed “the science”, when in fact none of their decisions ever had anything to do with facts. They imposed these mandates out of fear and an eager desire to gather power to themselves — as the highlighted sentence in Wen’s quote above proves: “It helps to preserve public health authority when it is needed again.” These brainless thugs fear losing that power, and are trying to rewrite history to avoid being slammed at the polls. Or as one person said so pithily on Twitter in translating Wen’s comments:
“The science has changed” is code for “we were wrong and people have caught on to our lies and we’re afraid of the backlash.”
Free Americans must not let these incompetent liars get away with this last lie. They must be fired from their jobs, and must never be allowed to have power over others ever again. We will have our next chance to remove some of them in November. Woe to us if we do not.
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Seams(between) to be the Season for finally catching up the on the Truth …just so later they can say…seeeeee we told you ALL SO!
See also NY Times and WaPo on a laptop formerly owned by a Board Member of a Ukrainian Gas Company………Hunter ! OOps!
Man, Robert just never gets tired of doubling down on being wrong! It’s quite remarkable.
Bob,
Here’s one that caught my eye – https://www.westernjournal.com/military-doctor-testifies-court-high-level-command-ordered-silence-frightening-vaccine-data/?fbclid=IwAR0VAyXKSYMGxkLpMURqqRLUmNtZvLsLRiWM5BsXvFqfnn9SGGH1G0_FehE
Icepilot: Yeah, I saw that but forgot to bookmark it. It goes in the hopper for reference in the future.
Bobby Hill, So, post a refutation to his comments. Or your post was nothing but hot air
I am not so hard on the authorities. First, being safe and forcing people to get vaccinated is excellent politics. You have to win election to control policy in the country. Many voters are afraid of being infected when in a social setting. In the case of Covid, a majority of voters wanted mask and vaccination mandates
Not to be dense and missing something, but isn’t it clear that many more of the covid hospitalized were those who were not vaccinated? Yeah, the vaccine harmed more than a few people. But from the perspective of a Fauci, there will be a lot less serious sickness and death if everyone is forced to be vaccinated.
Steve Richter – I was vaccinated and got COVID. Vaccination isn;t a silver bullet – which is what was being claimed by Brandon and Fauxi. Yes, getting elected is important, so is telling volters the truth. As Bob states, masks were known to be a waste of time years before the pandemic started. But, image demanded they “do something” and heaven forbid that our betters admit they are not omniscent and omnipotent. Anyway, Putin has discovered the way to conquer COVID. Invade Ukraine. Have you heard anything about the pandemic from the media since….so it must have been eradicated, right
“… I was vaccinated and got COVID. Vaccination isn;t a silver bullet …”
very few vaccinated individuals were hospitalized. Fewer died from covid. That is a big deal. And very politically appealing.
on masks, there has been no seasonal flu the last two years. I guess you can argue that is because of limited travel from China. But also logical to say that masking in public has greatly reduced the spread of the flu.
Steve Richter – re: Masks, an alternative view of the suppression of the flu is that people stopped interacting if they had symptoms of the flu. Fever or cough made you a pariah so you didn’t go out in public. In addition, kids are a vector for colds and flu and with classrooms shutdown, there was less transmission. Attributing lower flu to masks or the plexiglass guards is a stretch given what we know about airborne viral transmission.
I hope the “stay at home if you are sick” rule stays in place. Other than that, something maybe 5-10X more transmissible than the flu is not going to be contained, period. You can lower the curve, but unless you have a sterilizing vaccine (and these aren’t, in fact they are the opposite) you are just creating later infection cycles. You can’t stop covid-19 anymore than you can hurricanes and earthquakes. You can create better therapeutics, like you build levees and earthquake building codes, but you can’t stop it.
Steve Richter wrote: “I am not so hard on the authorities. First, being safe and forcing people to get vaccinated is excellent politics.”
Except that as the faux vaccines were first being released to the public, a year and a half ago, many of the same people mandating them recently had at that time warned that they were ineffective and unsafe. They turned out to be right on that count, but they continue to advocate mandates anyway.
“very few vaccinated individuals were hospitalized.”
It is so much better to be long-term hospitalized from a vaxxine-related stroke than short-term hospitalized from Wuhan flu. Or is it better to undergo a few days of inconvenience rather than a lifetime of paralysis?
The jabs are not and never were “vaccines” in the old definition of vaccine.
At best they are “seasonal flu shots”.
Like seasonal flu shots, if the government guessed correctly on what strain, it may prevent, but is more likely to reduce the severity of the symptoms. That reduction, for some groups, helps avoid hospitalizations.
Gov guesses wrong on the strain, and either you have no difference or it may help you.
Swine flu, anyone else remember that? Remember the push to get vaccinated against it? Remember what the vaccines were (mRNA based)? Remember the side effects and the 60 Minutes story on them?
Lots of similarities.
“Forcing people to get vaccinated” is a bad idea and is an overreach of authority. Especially when the jabs are not actually approved or fully vetted from a medical point of view.
“Stay at home if you are sick” Gee, that was standard practice pretty much everywhere for anyone born before about 1980. Stay in bed, plenty of rest, fluids, limit interaction with the rest of the family. Toss in chicken soup and outside in fresh air and sunshine and you got over it.
RZ makes many good points and then says “…the shots GENERALLY accomplish very little…”.
I do NOT find fault with THIS statement because GENERALLY very few people were at high risk of severe reaction or death in the first place. However, remember from RZ’s own recent post [ https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/update-on-the-lie-that-was-covid/ ] the included reported conclusion of 44 papers
“…vaccines are important to reduce severe disease and death…the vaccines provide individual benefits to the vaccinee, and especially to older high-risk people…”
I do not agree with RZ that these results are “very uncertain”…they are fairly robust for the high risk groups, IMO.
Also see here:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/09/covid-19-vaccines-protect-against-severe-illness-during-delta
https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2582
A covid vaccine (or whatever you may want to call it) that reduces death and hospitalization by 80 or 90% in high risk groups is still a very effective vaccine for that group. If you were a high risk person and would rather have gotten very sick(even deathly sick) and gone to the hospital and relied on therapeutics to save your life from the original or delta covid variant, so be it.
The Covid virus was roughly 15 times as lethal as “normal” flu and the vaccines were a very effective protection for some high risk people. No more and no less. It had also been deadly for some…especially among healthy people with overactive(?) immune responces.
AND the mandates were outrageous and unnecessary.
AND the number of people in the U.S. mortally threatened (ie needing hospitalization) of covid was only about 4 in 1000 per year. And the number of covid-19 induced deaths about half of that (0.2% of the population)…hardly an existential crisis warranting the egregious devastation of an economy, personal finances, private businesses, education, and the social health and happiness of entire societies
As to lethality…Covid-19 killed roughly 15 times the number (of the usual susceptible groups) than that of a recent normal or average flu season (of the same susceptible groups). Over the last decade flu deaths/season in the US average 35,900 .
[see: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html ]. The number of TOTAL US deaths above the decadal average/year is ROUGHLY 550,000 .[Actually from week 12 2020 to week 11 2021 the total deaths is 3,519,000…for 2019 the total=2,855,000.
Thus, the extra increase/year during the worst of the pandemic was about 664,000]
This is not a “CORRUPT” number as DEATHS FROM ALL CAUSES ARE NOT EASILY FAKED OR CORRUPTED AND ARE VERY ACCURATE.
550,000/36,000=15 …ROUGHLY.
As to attribution, the increasing difference of total deaths/month from the recent decadal norm started sharply in about March 2020 at the time of the great china-covid infection increase and increased to about 550,000/year above the norm roughly. What else was the cause? Were the elderly and weak dying at an increased 550,000 per year rate since march 2020 by coincidence?
One possible correction is related in this plot of the CDC’s “estimate” of Covid caused deaths [see: https://wmbriggs.com/post/38241/ ] which purports to reduce the number of covid related deaths from this excess…But are these estimates reliable? It is better to use total deaths versus total deaths because it is difficult to ascertain cause when multiple diseases are acting together, especially in the elderly and infirmed.
However, EVEN if you accept this plot above (which reduces “Covid” deaths by about 140,000/year) and use the more accurate 664,000 death/year year over year total death increase (see above), you can calculate (664,000-140,000)/36,000= 14.55 increased lethality, which is still ROUGHLY 15 times as lethal than “normal” flu season!!
It does not matter that many of these people had other diseases or were elderly and weak BECAUSE this is the same group that dies of “normal” flu. The approximate 2 week lagging correlation of death rate spikes with known infection rate spikes is again hardly coincidental and FURTHER INDICATION OF THE CAUSE/EFFECT RELATION OF COVID-19 TO THESE DEATHS. Whether this is a flu virus or not, it was roughly 15 times as lethal as the “normal” flu.
I originally held a view (or hope) of “normal” flu like death rates, but the facts would not support it. Covid clearly caused more death (~15 times) than the average flu season, and warranted special consideration. The continuing claim that it was comparable to the normal flu season is ridiculous.
In the reference link sited by RZ:
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/covid-19-the-unwarranted-panic/
is the quote “This is a death rate[in S. Korea] of 0.9%, higher than the flu’s 0.1% but not horribly so.”
Thus, an early confirmation from RZ himself that Covid-19 was roughly a factor of 9 worse than “common” flu viruses, and not “quite comparable to the ORDINARY flu”.
THUS THE EXTRAORDINARY NATURE OF THE COVID VIRUS WAS NOT UNEXPECTED EARLY ON.
And even though the lethality of the covid virus has dropped considerably in the past years, it is still apparently about 10 times as lethal as “normal” flu. see:
“The COVID-19 situation continues to change, sometimes rapidly. Doctors and scientists are working to estimate the mortality rate of COVID-19. At present, it is thought to be substantially higher (possibly 10 times or more) than that of most strains of the flu.”
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/coronavirus-disease-2019-vs-the-flu
And
“U.S. far from normal with Covid deaths 10 times higher than seasonal respiratory viruses, report says”
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/07/us-far-from-normal-with-covid-deaths-10-times-higher-than-flu-rsv-report.html
As to the nature of vaccines:
The definition of a vaccine:
“A substance used to stimulate the production of antibodies and provide immunity against one or several diseases, prepared from the causative agent of a disease, its products, or a synthetic substitute, treated to act as an antigen without inducing the disease.”
Vaccines do not have to be 100% preventative of all symptoms or infection on all people to be a “vaccine”.
Vaccines that don’t work well on some older people (far below 100% because they have very poor immune systems) are still “vaccines”.
Any substance that enhances immune response by the method described in the definition is a vaccine….it may or may not be safe and effective.
Flu shots are vaccines by all modern medical terminology, but they are far from 100% effective.
The Wuhan flu vaccines work by enhancing immunity…that is the only thing they CAN do, they can do nothing else!
They do not kill the virus directly. If given after infection they have no or little effect because they only work by enhancing the hosts own immune system before infection, per the definition. This is the most critical point. Let me repeat it:
The Wuhan flu vaccines work by enhancing immunity…that is the only thing they CAN do, they can do nothing else!
They do not kill the virus directly. If given after infection they have no or little effect because they only work by enhancing the hosts own immune system before infection, per the definition.
They are vaccines, and they are not 100% preventative, and they might not even be safe for many people.
I consider therapeutics to be remedial, not preventative…but that may not be the broadest definition.
A covid vaccine (see definition above) that reduces death and hospitalization by 80 or 90% is still an effective vaccine. If you were a high risk person and would rather have gotten very sick(even deathly sick) and gone to the hospital and relied on therapeutics to save your life from the original or delta covid variant, so be it.
It is true that therapeutics are getting better and the new variants are getting much less dangerous so vaccines are becoming pointless for all but a few.
However, all the silly semantical games about the “true” definition of a “vaccine” simply avoid the point of RZ’s recent post[ https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/update-on-the-lie-that-was-covid/ ]
that the vaccines DO work, is the reported conclusion of 44 papers
“…vaccines are important to reduce severe disease and death…the vaccines provide individual benefits to the vaccinee, and especially to older high-risk people…”
see also
and here:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/09/covid-19-vaccines-protect-against-severe-illness-during-delta
https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2582
AND the mandates were outrageous and unnecessary.
AND the number of people in the U.S. mortally threatened (ie needing hospitalization) of covid was only about 4 in 1000 per year. And the number of covid-19 induced deaths about half of that (0.2% of the population)…hardly an existential crisis warranting the egregious devastation of an economy, personal finances, private businesses, education, and the social health and happiness of entire societies.
People are analyzing the Pfizer document drop that was forced by the court. Pfizer wanted these documents withheld from the public for ……..75 years.
Welcome to Daily Clout! What’s our story?
Pfizer hired over 2400 new employees during their testing period just to handle the expected adverse events reporting requirements.
That is how many adverse events they were documenting during their testing of the mRNA Spike protein “Vaccine”.
DailyClout
Go to Daily Clout to read the Pfizer mRNA testing analysis: https://campaigns.dailyclout.io/campaign/home
the current attempt to slime folks who instinctively knew something was up:
https://phys.org/news/2024-03-conspiracy-theorists-favor-intuitive-style.html