Warp Speed Ahead: COVID-19 Vaccines Pave the Way for a New Frontier in Surveillance
By John W. Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | December 1, 2020
Like it or not, the COVID-19 pandemic with its veiled threat of forced vaccinations, contact tracing, and genetically encoded vaccines is propelling humanity at warp speed into a whole new frontier—a surveillance matrix—the likes of which we’ve only previously encountered in science fiction.
Those who eye these developments with lingering mistrust have good reason to be leery: the government has long had a tendency to unleash untold horrors upon the world in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.
Indeed, “we the people” have been treated like lab rats by government agencies for decades now: caged, branded, experimented upon without our knowledge or consent, and then conveniently discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects.
You don’t have to dig very deep or go very far back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace, making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins.
Now this same government—which has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests (GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.) and used it against us, to track, control and trap us—wants us to fall in line as it prepares to roll out COVID-19 vaccines that owe a great debt to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for its past work on how to weaponize and defend against infectious diseases.
The Trump Administration by way of the National Institute of Health awarded $22.8 million to seven corporations to develop artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, etc., with smart phone apps, wearable devices and software “that can identify and trace contacts of infected individuals, keep track of verified COVID-19 test results, and monitor the health status of infected and potentially infected individuals.”
This is all part of Operation Warp Speed, which President Trump has likened to the Manhattan Project, a covert government effort spearheaded by the military to engineer and build the world’s first atomic bomb.
There is every reason to tread cautiously.
There is a sinister world beyond that which we perceive, one in which power players jockey for control over the one commodity that is a necessary ingredient for total domination: you.
By you, I mean you the individual in all your singular humanness.
Remaining singularly human and retaining your individuality and dominion over yourself—mind, body and soul—in the face of corporate and government technologies that aim to invade, intrude, monitor, manipulate and control us may be one of the greatest challenges before us.
These COVID-19 vaccines, which rely on messenger RNA technology that influences everything from viruses to memory, are merely the tipping point.
The groundwork being laid with these vaccines is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.
If you were unnerved by the rapid deterioration of privacy under the Surveillance State, prepare to be terrified by the surveillance matrix that will be ushered in on the heels of the government’s rollout of this COVID-19 vaccine.
Everything we do is increasingly dependent on and, ultimately, controlled by our internet-connected, electronic devices. For example, in 2007, there were an estimated 10 million sensor devices connecting human utilized electronic devices (cell phones, laptops, etc.) to the Internet. By 2013, it had increased to 3.5 billion. By 2030, it is estimated to reach 100 trillion.
Much, if not all, of our electronic devices will be connected to Google, a neural network that approximates a massive global brain.
The end goal? The creation of a new “human” species, so to speak, and the NSA, the Pentagon and the “Matrix” of surveillance agencies are part of the plan.
Neuralink, a brain-computer chip interface (BCI), paves the way for AI control of the human brain. “In the most severe scenario, hacking a Neuralink-like device could turn ‘hosts’ into programmable drone armies capable of doing anything their ‘master’ wanted,” writes Jason Lau for Forbes.
There’s no limit to what can be accomplished—for good or ill—using brain-computer interfaces.
Clearly, we are rapidly moving into the “posthuman era.”
Transhumanism—the fusing of machines and people—is here to stay and will continue to grow.
In fact, as science and technology continue to advance, the ability to control humans will only increase. In 2014, for example, it was revealed that scientists have discovered how to deactivate that part of our brains that controls whether we are conscious or not.
Add to this the fact that increasingly humans will be implanted with microchips for such benign purposes as tracking children or as medical devices to assist with our health. Such devices “point to an uber-surveillance society that is Big Brother on the inside looking out,” warns Dr. Katina Michael. “Governments or large corporations would have the ability to track people’s actions and movements, categorize them into different socio-economic, political, racial, or consumer groups and ultimately even control them.”
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, control is the issue.
All of this indicates a new path forward for large corporations and government entities that want to achieve absolute social control. Instead of relying solely on marauding SWAT teams and full-fledged surveillance apparatuses, they will work to manipulate our emotions to keep us in lock step with the American police state.
Now add this warp speed-deployed vaccine to that mix, with all of the associated unknown and fearsome possibilities for altering or controlling human epigenetics, and you start to see the perils inherent in blindly adopting emerging technologies without any restrictions in place to guard against technological tyranny and abuse.
It’s one thing for the starship Enterprise to boldly go where no man has gone before, but even Mr. Spock recognized the dangers of a world dominated by AI. “Computers make excellent and efficient servants,” he observed in “The Ultimate Computer” episode of Star Trek, “but I have no wish to serve under them.”
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
The Mainstream Press Has Failed America
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | December 1, 2020
While President Trump continues to maintain that the presidential election was marred by massive fraud, the mainstream press continues to maintain that Trump’s charges are “false” and “baseless” and that his allegations are damaging trust in America’s democratic electoral system.
Actually, however, it’s the other way around: It’s the mainstream press, owing to its extreme deferential attitude toward the Washington, D.C., establishment, that has severely damaged trust in America’s democratic system.
Of course, this isn’t the first election in which the losing side has charged that he has been cheated out of his victory. In virtually every election cycle, there is at least one political candidate that charges that he lost because of fraud committed by the other side.
But let’s face it: Sometimes there is fraud. As I have pointed out before (see here and here and here), there is now no doubt that Lyndon Johnson employed fraud to win the 1948 U.S. Senate race in Texas against popular Governor Coke Stevenson. Johnson told a South Texas crony who controlled some South Texas counties to keep his poll results open in case Johnson needed extra votes to win. When the vote-counting was over, Johnson did need a few more votes to win. He called his crony, a man named George Parr, and Parr ordered a local election judge to produce 200 additional votes for LBJ, which then gave Johnson the win. Many years later, the election judge confirmed that he had done this. The 200 signatures on the voter list were all in the same ink, and the names of the 200 voters were in alphabetical order. If Johnson had lost the election, he never would have become vice-president or president, which truly made him a truly illegitimate president in U.S, history, one who ended up sending tens of thousands of American men to their deaths in a senseless war thousands of miles away in Southeast Asia.
The problem with the mainstream press in the Trump-Biden race is the speed by which it concluded that the 2020 presidential election was not marred by fraud. It reached its conclusion before the election was even over.
Now, it’s very possible that Trump’s assertions are, in fact, false and baseless, but how could the mainstream press know that before or immediately after the election without even the semblance of any press investigation into the allegations?
Perhaps the mainstream press believed that the stealing of an election through fraud is simply inconceivable. But how can it be inconceivable when it is undisputed that LBJ won his Senate race through fraud? If it happened once, doesn’t that negate the idea of inconceivability?
It certainly can’t be that the press immediately conducted an investigation and found no evidence of fraud in the Trump-Biden race because the mainstream press reached its conclusions immediately and never conducted any independent investigation.
And that’s the core of the problem — the mainstream press’s deference to the Washington, D.C., establishment by automatically embracing its official position that the election was honest and above board.
In a free society, the citizenry necessarily depend on an independent press to keep government honest. The citizenry simply lack the resources and time to investigate official misconduct. Thus, they necessarily depend on a vibrant, dynamic independent press to do this job for them.
That’s where the mainstream press has failed America and has severely damaged America’s democratic system. It has essentially become a loyal lapdog of the Washington, D.C., establishment, never daring to challenge it, question, or investigate it at a fundamental level.
That’s why people don’t trust the mainstream press. That’s one big reason why mainstream papers have lost massive numbers of subscribers ever since the Internet came into existence. People know that when it comes to confronting political power with truth, they are going to find it on the Internet rather than in the mainstream press.
In the meantime, the mainstream press cannot figure out why people don’t blindly accept its pronouncements. They cannot figure out why people have been leaving them in droves and going to the Internet for answers. They cannot figure out why people don’t trust them or believe what they say.
Now, I’m not saying that the mainstream press should go out and investigate every charge of fraud that every loser of a political race makes. What I am saying is that when there are extreme anomalies in votes, as there have been in the Trump-Biden race, it is incumbent on an independent press to severely scrutinize them. Extreme anomalies, of course, don’t equate to fraud but they do equate — or should equate — to the need for extremely careful scrutiny to ensure that there is no fraud.
An independent press is in the best position to perform such an investigation. If America were characterized by such a press, it would actually strengthen, not weaken, America’s democratic system because then people would be more assured that elections were not marred by fraud. When you instead have a passive and deferential press that automatically defers to the D.C. establishment, immediately concludes that the election is on the up and up despite extreme anomalies, and just pokes fun of the losing candidate for asserting fraud, that tends to make people suspicious, distrustful, and cynical.
Of course, the passive and deferential nature of the mainstream press has been going on for much longer than the 2020 presidential race. One of the best examples is the Kennedy assassination. From the time Kennedy was declared dead, the mainstream press has always automatically accepted the official version of events of the national-security establishment, never daring to conduct independent investigations into whether that version was false and baseless.
In the 1970s, after the House Select Committee on Assassinations met to reinvestigate the assassination, several enlisted men came forward with a remarkable story. They said that they had secretly carried the president’s body into the morgue almost 1 1/2 hours before the body was officially reintroduced into the morgue. They said that they had been sworn to secrecy on the weekend of the assassination and had been forced to sign secrecy oaths. Their superiors threatened them with extreme punitive action if they ever disclosed what they had seen or done.
Now, wouldn’t you think that that was something that the mainstream press would find worth investigating? Were these enlisted men lying? Were they just making up a story? Why would they do that? Why would the national-security establishment be sneaking the president’s body into the morgue? Why was the military in charge of the autopsy?
Wouldn’t just one mainstream investigative reporter want to investigate such things? Well, if he did, he would be fired by every mainstream paper in the land, owing to the passivity and deferential attitude that the mainstream press have had about the Kennedy assassination since the beginning.
In the 1990s, the Assassination Records Review Board discovered the existence of a Marine Sergeant named Roger Boyajian, who told the ARRB that it was his team that secretly carried the president’s body into the morgue at 6:35 p.m., almost 1 1/2 hours before the official entry time of 8 p.m. Boyajian even produced a copy of his official report that he had submitted to the military immediately after the assassination weekend in November 1963, a report that the military had kept secret. His statement and his report confirmed what those enlisted men has said back in the 1970s.
Did the mainstream press then conduct an investigation? Not on your life. It was still considered verboten for any mainstream news media outlet to investigate any aspect of the Kennedy assassination.
When Congress enacted the law that established the ARRB, someone slipped a provision into the law that prohibited the ARRB from investigating any aspect of the Kennedy assassination. It was a prohibition that was strictly enforced by the ARRB board of trustees. Now, wouldn’t you think that some enterprising, independent-minded mainstream investigative reporter would want to find out why anyone would want to keep the ARRB from investigating things it discovered while securing the release of long secret records of the national-security establishment? Nope. It just didn’t happen.
The ARRB also discovered the existence of a woman named Saundra Spencer. She was a chief petty officer in charge of the Navy’’s lab at its photography center in Washington, D.C. She had a top secret security clearance and worked closely with the White House on both classified and unclassified photographs.
Spencer told the ARRB a remarkable story. She said that on the weekend of the assassination, she had been asked to develop, on a top-secret basis, the photographs of President Kennedy’s autopsy, which had been conducted by the U.S. national-security establishment on the night of the assassination. Spencer had kept her secret for more than 30 years.
Spencer was shown the official autopsy photographs in the record. After closely examining them, she said: No, those are not the autopsy photographs I developed. The ones I developed showed a massive exit-sized wound in the back of the president’s head. The photographs in the official record show the back of the president’s head to be fully intact.
Now, wouldn’t you think that that would be enough to get the mainstream press to send an investigative reporter out to get to the bottom of this, especially given that Spencer’s testimony about the massive exit-sized wound in the back of Kennedy’s head matched the statements of the treating physicians at Parkland Hospital, along with the treating nurses, two FBI agents, a Secret Service agent, and others? Wouldn’t you think that fraudulent autopsy photographs would be enough to generate such an investigation?
Nope. The position of every mainstream paper in the country has always been: “Stay away from the Kennedy assassination. That’s what the national-security establishment wants and that’s the way it’s going to be.”
The ARRB made another remarkable discovery. It discovered that there were two separate brain examinations in the Kennedy autopsy. At the first one, the president’s brain was “sectioned,” which meant cutting it like a loaf of bread to study the trajectory of the bullet that hit the president in the head. At the second brain exam, the brain was fully intact.
There is one big problem: Once a brain is sectioned, it cannot reconstitute itself. That means that the second brain exam had to have involved a brain that wasn’t the same brain at the first exam.
Wouldn’t you think that the mainstream press would find this worth investigating? Nope. And it’s not like they weren’t aware of the two brain exams. The Washington Post and the Associated Press both carried stories on the ARRB’s discovery (see here and here). Unfortunately, as astounding as it is, the discovery of a fraudulent brain exam was not enough to induce the mainstream press to follow up with aggressive investigations to get to the bottom of this.
Many years ago, the American people discovered the existence of Operation Mockingbird, a secret illegal operation of the CIA to convert journalists in the mainstream press into CIA assets and operatives. Mainstream journalists who were asked to serve loved it and considered it a great honor to secretly serve the national-security establishment.
Today, the CIA need not bother because the entire mainstream press has willingly made itself a de facto asset of the national-security state. The American people have been left without an independent mainstream press whose mission is to keep the government honest and instead rely on people on the Internet to perform that service. In the process, the mainstream press has done a tremendous disservice to the American people and to America’s democratic processes by abdicating its responsibility to be a watchdog, not a lapdog, to the Washington, D.C., establishment.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education.
Killing The Future: COVID Madness Will Lead To HALF A MILLION Fewer U.S. Births In 2021
By Steve Watson | Summit News | November 30, 2020
Research has concluded that the US will experience 500,000 fewer births in 2021, as couples choose not to have children because of the coronavirus fallout.
The findings by the Brookings Institute were published last week in the Wall Street Journal, which noted that there will be “between 300,000 to 500,000 fewer births in the U.S. next year, compared with a drop of 44,172 last year.”
The numbers equate to a 13% drop from the 3.8 million babies born in 2019.
The “analysis, partly based on what happened following the 2007-2009 recession, is that weaker job prospects equate to fewer births,” the report further notes.
“Women will have many fewer babies in the short term, and for some of them, a lower total number of children over their lifetimes,” the research, previously previewed in the Summer, noted.
The US birthrate is already at its lowest level on record, and according to clinics, there has been a 50% jump in requests for birth control since the beginning of the pandemic, and a 40% increase in requests for Plan B.
CDC research notes that the birth rate in the US has been below replacement level since 1971. It is now a problem across all major racial groups including Hispanics, non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, and non-Hispanic Asians. All have below replacement birth levels.
A recent survey from the Guttmacher Institute discovered that 34% of women able to have babies in the US have made a decision to either delay having a child, or to just have fewer children because of COIVD.
Analysts say this will have a long and profound impact on the economy for many years to come, as the US could be falling into a so called ‘Fertility trap’ where there are fewer women around to have babies, resulting in smaller families, and low population growth reducing economic growth.
All of this results in increased pessimism and a downward spiral that is difficult to break.
It will also mean that in the near future there will be a huge mismatch between the amounts of younger and older people in the country.
Indeed, by 2034 Americans over age 65 are expected to outnumber those under 18 for the first time in the history of the nation.
Unless it is stopped now, the COVID madness, the lockdowns, the panic, the social engineering will not only be causing irrevocable damage to our collective psyche, societal morale, and cultural richness, it will also destroy future prosperity and literally deny life to millions along the way.
But perhaps that was the endgame all along?
The Russian Brexit Plot That Wasn’t
By Paul Robinson | Irrussianality | November 26, 2020
Russian Disinformation. Russian Disinformation. Russian Disinformation. How many time have you heard that over the past four years?
But what about British disinformation?
Much of the current Russia paranoia began with the claims that Donald Trump was recruited by Russian intelligence years ago as a sleeper agent, and then given a leg-up into the presidency of the United States with the help of the GRU. The claims of ‘collusion’ were repeated over and over, and yet at the end of the day none of them could be substantiated. And where did it all start? In the now notorious dossier assembled by former British spook Christopher Steele.
Steele, it has now been revealed, got his information from a guy called Igor Danchenko. He in his turn got a lot of it from a former classmate, Olga Galkina, described as an alcoholic ‘disgruntled PR executive living in Cyprus’, and as such obviously a well-informed source with intimate knowledge of the Kremlin’s innermost secrets.
In short, the Steele dossier was a load of hokum, commissioned by a British Black PR operative and then fabricated by some random Russian émigrés with no access to anything of value. And yet, millions believed it.
And then, we have the story of Brexit. Ever since the 2016 referendum which resulted in Britain leaving the European Union, we have been repeatedly told that the victory of the Leave campaign was made possible by ‘Russian interference’. Most significantly, it was claimed that the Russian government illicitly funded the Leave campaign by funneling money through the campaign’s most significant financial backer, businessman Arron Banks.
Leading the charge against Russia and Banks was journalist Carole Cadwalladr of The Observer (as the Sunday version of The Guardian is known). ‘We know that the Russian government offered money to Arron Banks’, she said. ‘I am not even going to go into the lies that Arron Banks has told about his covert relationship with the Russian government’, she added, ‘I say he lied about his contact with the Russian government. Because he did.’
But it turns out that it was Cadwalladr who had a tricky relationship with the truth. Angered by her assertions, Arron Banks sued her for libel. Three weeks ago, she publicly backed down from one of her accusations. ‘On 22 Oct 2020,’ she said, ‘I tweeted that Arron had been found to have broken the law. I accept he has not. I regret making this false statement, which I have deleted. I undertake not to repeat it. I apologise to Arron for the upset and distress caused.’
This week Cadwalladr went further. The judge in the libel trial ruled that the meaning of her statement that Banks had lied about his relationship with the Russians was that he had lied about taking money from Russia, and that she had intended this as a statement of fact, not a call for further investigation. In the face of this judgement, Cadwalladr withdrew her ‘truth’ defence and has been ordered to pay Banks’ costs relating to this aspect of the case. In this way she in effect conceded that she was not willing to defend as fact the proposition that Russia financed Leave via Banks. While Cadwalladr continues to fight the case using a ‘public interest’ defence, the withdrawal of the truth argument is a dramatic concession.
The Banks story is not the only problematic aspect of Cadwalladr’s reporting. The journalist earned international plaudits and a prestigious Orwell prize for her report on how the British firm Cambridge Analytica supposedly used big data dredged up out of Facebook to help both the Leave campaign and Donald Trump win victories in 2016. This too had a Russian connection. In a 2018 article for The Observer Cadwalladr described how, ‘Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic who orchestrated the harvesting of Facebook data, had previously unreported ties a Russian university. … Cambridge Analytica, the data firm he worked with … also attracted interest from a key Russian firm with links to the Kremlin.’
Others jumped on the Russia-Cambridge connection. ‘The Facebook data farmed by Cambridge Analytica was accessed from Russia’, claimed British MP Damien Collins, head of the House of Commons Select Committee for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport. In this capacity, he then published a report outlining allegations of Russian propaganda and meddling in British affairs, including unsubstantiated insinuations that Russian money had influenced the Brexit campaign via Mr Banks.
And yet, all this was false too. The United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) spent over two years investigating Cambridge Analytica, including its alleged role in the Brexit referendum, the 2016 US presidential election, and its supposed ties to Russian government influence operations. Having completed its investigation, the ICO reported that apart from a single Russian IP address in data connected to Cambridge Analytica, it had found no evidence of Russian involvement with the company. Moreover, it concluded that claims of the company’s enormous influence were ‘hype’, unjustified by the facts.
In other words, just like the Steele dossier, the whole story about Russia influencing the outcome of the Brexit referendum was made-up nonsense.
And yet, it has had an enormous influence. The allegations that Russia ‘interfered’ in Brexit have been repeated again and again – in parliamentary reports, newspaper articles, scholarly journals, books, social media, and so on. Despite their falsehood, they have enjoyed a spread and influence that Russian ‘meddlers’ could only dream of.
Will the peddlers of British disinformation repent? Will they now pen scores of articles admitting that they were wrong? Will they give evidence to parliament denouncing the scourge of false stories about Russia emanating from the British media and MPs?
Of course not. Ms Cadwalladr’s humiliation will get a few lines buried somewhere deep in some newspapers’ inner pages, and will then be forgotten. Meanwhile, the original claims will remain uncorrected in the many documents that repeat them, and the myth of Russian interference in Brexit will trundle on as a basis for denouncing the threat emanating from the East. The damage has been done. Ms Cadwalladr has been discredited, but someone else will soon be found to pick up the torch.
Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history, and military ethics.
Johns Hopkins study explodes COVID death hoax; it’s re-labeling on a grand scale
By Jon Rappoport | November 30, 2020
“This patient who died had an ordinary heart attack.”
“Not anymore. We’re repackaging it as COVID.”
Don’t blink. Johns Hopkins may delete or retract their analysis at any moment. Their author’s study is devastating. Too hot to handle.
UPDATE: Yes, I wrote that opener a few hours before Johns Hopkins stepped in and DID retract the article. Boom. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Hopkins claims the article has been used to spread misinformation about the pandemic, and contains factual errors. CDC is cited as one correct source of facts. Hmm.
Regardless, here is my article, finished before the Johns Hopkins retraction. Since then, I’ve only polished it a bit in several places, for clarity:
Months ago, I told you this, in a number of articles: The overwhelming percentage of people who are “dying from the virus” are actually dying from traditional diseases.
These people have been relabeled and repackaged as “COVID-19.”
It has nothing to do with “the virus.”
A new analysis from Johns Hopkins confirms this in spades.
The Johns Hopkins News-Letter article, in a student publication, is headlined, “A closer look at US deaths due to COVID-19.” It lays out the case made by “Genevieve Briand, assistant program director of the Applied Economics master’s degree program at Hopkins.”
As you keep reading, keep this in mind: If the so-called increase in mortality from COVID is offset, almost exactly, by a decrease in deaths from all other major diseases…
Indicating that the so-called COVID deaths are nothing more than an exercise in re-labeling, then…
You can say there is a new coronavirus, but it’s even less harmful than flu, because virtually everybody recovers…
Or you can say the whole story of a new coronavirus is a fake narrative. There is no new virus.
My readers know I’ve been offering much evidence for the latter conclusion.
Here are key quotes from the Johns Hopkins News-Letter article:
“These data analyses suggest that in contrast to most people’s assumptions, the number of deaths by COVID-19 is not alarming. In fact, it has relatively no effect on deaths in the United States.”
“This comes as a shock to many people. How is it that the data lie so far from our perception?”
“When Briand looked at the 2020 data during that seasonal period, COVID-19-related deaths exceeded deaths from heart diseases. This was highly unusual since heart disease has always prevailed as the leading cause of deaths. However, when taking a closer look at the death numbers, she noted something strange. As Briand compared the number of deaths per cause during that period in 2020 to [deaths per cause in] 2018, she noticed that instead of the expected drastic increase across all causes, there was a significant decrease in deaths due to heart disease. Even more surprising, as seen in the graph below, this sudden decline in deaths is observed for all other causes.”
“This trend is completely contrary to the pattern observed in all previous years. Interestingly, as depicted in the table below, the total decrease in deaths by other causes almost exactly equals the increase in deaths by COVID-19. This suggests, according to Briand, that the COVID-19 death toll is misleading. Briand believes that deaths due to heart diseases, respiratory diseases, influenza and pneumonia may instead be [may have been] recategorized as being due to COVID-19.”
“The CDC classified all deaths that are related to COVID-19 simply as COVID-19 deaths. Even patients dying from other underlying diseases but are infected with COVID-19 count as COVID-19 deaths. This is likely the main explanation as to why COVID-19 deaths drastically increased while deaths by all other diseases experienced a significant decrease.”
“’All of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers. We found no evidence to the contrary,’ Briand concluded.”
“’If [the COVID-19 death toll] was not misleading at all, what we should have observed is an increased number of heart attacks and increased COVID-19 numbers. But a decreased number of heart attacks and all the other death causes doesn’t give us a choice but to point to some misclassification [re-labeling],’ Briand replied.”
“In other words, the effect of COVID-19 on deaths in the U.S. is considered problematic only when it increases the total number of deaths or the true death burden by a significant amount in addition to the expected deaths by other causes. Since the crude number of total deaths by all causes before and after COVID-19 [was first announced] has stayed the same, one can hardly say, in Briand’s view, that COVID-19 deaths are concerning.”
Of course, there is some mealy-mouthed backtracking in the article. The virus is deadly and the pandemic is real, etc. But the data are the data.
The whole COVID operation is a hoax.
If I thought other honest researchers would investigate and re-calculate the Hopkins analysis, I would say, let’s see what they come up with. But based on my experience, there will be, at best, a brief flurry of articles in the press about this extraordinary finding, and then the scientific and press denizens will move on, as if nothing happened. That is their way. They briefly expose a scandal and then they slither off to cover up the scandal.
The other possibility is: Hopkins will retract the analysis, claiming it was flawed. That is the other strategy the low-crawling creatures sometimes deploy.
So there you have it.
Hoax. Con. Fake.
As I keep reporting, the virus (never proven to exist) is the cover story for the true phase-one goal: destruction of the economy.
If the virus were real, if it were attacking people left and right, the all-cause mortality numbers would be through the roof.
But they aren’t.
“I have a great idea, Bill. Let’s declare a fake pandemic. We’ll report all sorts of high death numbers. But really, we’ll just be subtracting numbers from other traditional diseases that cause deaths, and we’ll add those numbers to our fake pandemic.”
“Sounds great, Tony. Can you pull it off? I mean, it’s pretty obvious.”
“Sure, we can pull it off. And if some journalist with a mainstream reputation or an institution suddenly develops a brief infection of ETHICS, we’ll call their work a mistake or a lapse in judgment.”
“You mean an institution like the World Health Organization or Johns Hopkins?”
“Right. We’ll say the institution didn’t issue the study, it was just one of their people, a lone researcher. And if necessary, the institution, under pressure, will back off. But that’s assuming anyone noticed the study in the first place. Normally, these ‘revelations’ surface for a moment and then sink like a stone. No one cares. A pandemic is a money waterfall. The beneficiaries won’t sacrifice their bottom lines, or their reputations…”
Of course, people can rise up and raise holy hell.
SOURCES:
[1] https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2020/11/a-closer-look-at-u-s-deaths-due-to-covid-19
[3] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iO0K75EZAF8dkNDkDmM3L4zNNY0X-Xw5/view
Trump Pardons Flynn… It’s a Good Start!
By Ron Paul | November 30, 2020
Last week President Trump granted a “full pardon” to Gen. Michael Flynn, his first National Security Advisor. In a White House statement announcing the pardon, the Administration pointed out that the relentless pursuit of Flynn was a partisan effort to overturn the results of the 2016 election.
The pursuit of Flynn was spearheaded by people who refused to accept the results of the 2016 election and worked to undermine the peaceful transfer of power, said the White House. These same people are the ones accusing Trump of undermining the election by challenging what appears to be serious voting irregularities in the 2020 presidential election.
That is called “projection.”
The White House statement also cites partisans in politics, the media, and the Deep State which sought to prevent Trump from being elected, to prevent him from taking office once elected, and to remove him on false pretenses once in office.
In order to push the false narrative that Trump was somehow elected due to the intervention of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the coup-masters had to make it appear that a high-ranking official was involved in monkey business with the Russians. Flynn was the unlucky victim of their smear machine, accused of “Russia collusion” over an innocent telephone call with the then-Russian Ambassador in Washington during the transition to a Trump Administration.
Yet when Joe Biden’s transition people bragged recently that Biden was connecting with foreign officials before inaugurated, the media praised it as a welcome return of the “experts” to foreign policy.
While it is very good news that President Trump is in the mood to pardon those victims of the warmongering Deep State, I very much hope that he is only warming up. It would be a great tragedy if other Deep State victims are left to suffer for their non-crimes.
Tweeting about her legislation that calls for charges against Edward Snowden and Julian Assange to be dropped and the Espionage Act reformed, US Rep. Tulsi Gabbard told President Trump, “since you’re giving pardons to people, please consider pardoning those who, at great personal sacrifice, exposed the deception and criminality of those in the deep state.”
My good friend Rep. Thomas Massie, a Ron Paul Institute Board Member, is a co-sponsor of Rep. Gabbard’s legislation, making it a real bipartisan effort to restore the rule of law in the United States and to rein in the Beltway warmongers.
Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are not criminals. They are heroes for telling us the truth about what criminals in government were doing in our name and with our money.
The fact is we were lied into war over and over again. While those wars were profitable for the military-industrial-Congressional-media complex, they snuffed out the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people overseas and robbed our own children and grandchildren of trillions of dollars wasted on neocon lies. And meanwhile, as Ed Snowden showed us, the intelligence community declared us the enemy and set up an elaborate internal spy network that would make the East German Stasi green with envy.
President Trump: you have the incredible opportunity to right the terrible wrongs perpetrated by the Obama/Biden Administration. History will smile kindly upon you if you also grant full pardon to Julian Assange and Edward Snowden – and any other truth-teller who faces persecution for exposing the Deep State warmongers.
Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute.
Trump Says DoJ, FBI May Have Been In On Large-scale Voter Fraud
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 29.11.2020
The Trump campaign has accused Democrat Party officials in half a dozen battleground states of widespread election fraud, mostly involving mail-in ballots. Democrats, most legacy media, and even some Republicans have dismissed the allegations and urged the President to concede defeat.
President Donald Trump has accused the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation of possibly being ‘in on’ the alleged plot to steal the election from him.
“This is total fraud and how the FBI and the Department of Justice, I don’t know, maybe they’re involved, but how people are allowed to get away with this stuff is unbelievable. This election was rigged. This election was a total fraud,” Trump alleged, speaking to Fox News in a telephone interview Sunday morning.
“They’ve been there a long time. Some of them have served a lot of different presidents, and they have their own views. All I can say is… with all the fraud that’s taken place, nobody has come to me and said ‘the FBI has nabbed the people that are doing this scheme,'” he added. The President went on to complain that the FBI and the DoJ have yet to investigate Obama-era officials’ potential illegal activities, including spying on the Trump campaign in 2016.
“Where are they with Comey, with McCabe, with Brennan, with all these people? They lied to Congress, they lied, they leaked… Where are they with all this stuff?” Trump asked, referring to former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and former CIA director John Brennan and their roles in instigating Russiagate.
Suggesting that the world was watching what’s going on in the United States regarding the election fraud allegations, Trump said that he’s had leaders of other countries calling him up and saying the 3 November vote was “the most messed-up election we’ve ever seen.”
‘Hundreds and Hundreds of Affidavits’
Going through his campaign’s claims, Trump pointed to alleged widespread fraud involving mail-in ballots, including cases of people receiving multiple ballots, dead people ‘voting’ and requesting applications to vote, so-called ‘glitches’ of Dominion voting machines which shifted thousands of votes from Trump to Biden, and problems of poll watchers being “thrown out” of counting rooms in major Democrat strongholds. Trump insisted his campaign had “hundreds and hundreds” of sworn affidavits to back up these allegations.
The President also recalled the discrepancy between results coming in on election night and those coming in later, thanks to large “vote dumps” in Biden’s favour in Michigan, Pennsylvania and elsewhere. “And all of a sudden I went from winning by a lot to losing by a little, and in some cases it took a period of time to do it,” he said.
Trump accused state judges and the media of shirking their responsibilities to hear his campaign’s lawsuits and cover the fraud allegations, and attacked big tech for its alleged censorship. “The media doesn’t want to talk about it. They know how fraudulent this is. It’s no different than Hunter,” he said, referring to Joe Biden’s son and his alleged pay-to-play corruption in Ukraine during the Obama presidency.
“We don’t have freedom of the press in this country. We have suppression by the press. You can’t have a scandal if nobody reports about it,” Trump complained, referring to efforts by Twitter and Facebook to cover up a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop allegedly proving illegal activities, and other mainstream media’s lack of coverage.
‘One Nice, Big, Beautiful Lawsuit’
As for the courts, Trump claimed that judges in the swing states weren’t allowing his campaign to put the evidence in.
“We’re not allowed to put in our proof. They say ‘you don’t have standing’. I said to the lawyers that I would like to file one nice, big, beautiful lawsuit with tremendous proof. We have affidavits. We have hundreds and hundreds of affidavits… [people] willing to sign under penalty of perjury (you go to jail)… These are respected people. These are people that are putting their life at risk. And they don’t want to take the affidavits. Then they say we don’t have proof.”
Trump also expressed doubts about whether his campaign’s fraud claims could reach the Supreme Court. “The problem is it’s hard to get into the Supreme Court. I’ve got the best Supreme Court advocates that want to argue the case if it gets there. But they said it’s very hard to get a case up there.”
Echoing claims made by other members of his staff – as well as members of his family – about the supposed unlikelihood of Biden receiving 15 million more votes than Barack Obama, Trump suggested repeatedly in the interview that he believed there was no way that Biden got 80 million votes, or could win more votes in African-American communities than Obama.
“I got 63 million votes four years ago and won quite handily in the electoral college… We were hoping to get 68 or so and we felt that was a path to an easy victory. I got 74 million votes – the largest in the history of a sitting president. So many millions more than we were even trying to get. And everyone said this is over. I’m telling you, 10 o’clock [election night] everybody thought it was over. And then the phoney mail-ins started coming in,” Trump said.
Major US media called the election in Biden’s favour on 7 November, with the Democrat projected to win 51.1 percent of the popular vote and 306 votes in the Electoral College, well above the requisite 270. President Trump has refused to concede. The Electoral College is expected to cast its votes formally for president and vice-president on 14 December, with votes to be counted by Congress on 6 January, and the inauguration slated for 20 January 2021.
Cause of Death: A Primer
By Kip Hansen | Watts Up With That? | November 28, 2020
There has been massive media attention on Covid-19 deaths – and there have been a lot of them. The CDC as of noon on 26 November 2020 was reporting that there have been 259,005 total Covid-19 deaths in the United States.
Yet anyone who reads widely is aware that there have been reports of a motorcycle accident victim being reported as a Covid death. There are many who correctly report that all people dying from or with Covid and even suspected of dying from-or-with Covid-19 are all being counted as certified reportable must-make-the-headlines Covid-19 Deaths.
[Note: This is a long and rather detailed explanation of what leads to the situation in which we find ourselves regarding Covid-19 Deaths reporting. Those who want a better understanding of the issue should continue reading. Readers with no or little interest can just accept this brief synopsis: “It’s Complicated” and move on to other posts. ]
Various experts, journalists, bloggers, and pundits tells us that “Covid Deaths” are being over-counted, mis-counted and even under-counted. Other pundits and media-reported experts desperately try to reassure us that Covid Death counts are correct and real – and that we should all stay concerned and follow all government mandates – which vary from “reasonable” to “obviously based on magical thinking” (closing bars and restaurants at 10 PM because that’s when the Corona Virus Zombies attack) — all this despite various governments having different and contradictory mandates (or even an absence of mandates) and the various States in the United States following differing rules and policies on Covid Deaths reporting. Those reporting “facts” like “US Covid-19 Deaths overestimated by 17 times” (based on this CDC comorbitity data) are sadly mistaken and misinform the general public, just adding to the general confusion on the subject.
Doctors, Coroners and Medical Examiners will calmly explain that “Cause of Death” is complicated and not simple. And they are right. Most of us think that when a person dies, it is obvious what killed him/her. But that is just not the case. In fact, everyone dies of a combination of ”heart stoppage” [cardiac arrest] and “cessation of breathing” which eventually leads to “brain death”. But these are not usually listed as the Cause of Death on a death certificate.
Covid Deaths are being counted and reported based on advice from the CDC, who has based its advice on advice from the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (.pdf). More on what that means later.
The Primer: What is meant by Cause of Death?
When a person dies in a hospital or other setting, there is some doctor, coroner or medical examiner that fills out a death certificate – officially certifying that John/Jane Doe has died and reports the date, time, place, Social Security number and other personal details along with the circumstances and sequence of events that led to that death.
Here’s a CDC-annotated image of the Cause of Death portion of a typical death certificate:
We are interested here only in Parts I and II.
“Part I
This section on the death certificate is for reporting the sequence of conditions that led directly to death. The immediate cause of death, which is the disease or condition that directly preceded death and is not necessarily the underlying cause of death (UCOD), should be reported on line a. The conditions that led to the immediate cause of death should be reported in a logical sequence in terms of time and etiology below it.
The UCOD, which is “(a) the disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death or (b) the circumstances of the accident or violence which produced the fatal injury” (7), should be reported on the lowest line used in Part I.”
[ source: CDC here – .pdf ]
Let’s look at a CDC example:
This patient had Coronary Artery Disease for seven years — which led to Coronary artery thrombosis from which the patient suffered for 5 years — which led to Acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) after which he survived for 6 days until — his heart ruptured resulting in death within minutes. Conditions contributing to his/her death were diabetes, COPD, and smoking. Each of these “significant conditions contributing to death, but not resulting in the underlying cause” are themselves known to cause a wide range of other serious conditions. For instance, smoking is believed to cause COPD and heart disease. Diabetes can cause cardiovascular diseases “including coronary artery disease with chest pain (angina), heart attack, stroke and narrowing of arteries (atherosclerosis).” Notice that there is a dedicated section “35” asking “Did tobacco use contribute to death?” For this patient, the doctor chose “Yes” – thus the CDC will count this death as one of the 480,000 annual tobacco deaths.
Let’s look at another example (from the same document):
This person suffered from noninsulin dependent Diabetes mellitus, often called Type 2 Diabetes, for 15 years. As sometimes happens, this diabetes sufferer eventually went into a Hyperosmolar nonketotic coma in which she/he remained for 8 weeks before finally succumbing to Acute renal failure (kidney failure). The family of the patient would have told friends and neighbors that their loved one died of kidney failure. They may have mentioned this was probably the end-of-line result of his/her long-term diabetes. Type 2 Diabetes is known to cause the following conditions: Heart and blood vessel diseases, Nerve damage (neuropathy), Kidney damage (as in this patient), Eye damage, Slow healing, Hearing impairment, and even Alzheimer’s disease.
It is clear that this second patient died of acute kidney failure – “Acute kidney failure is most common in people who are already hospitalized, particularly in critically ill people who need intensive care” — and is not necessarily a direct result of diabetes – but assumed in this case as kidney damage can be caused by diabetes. The death certificate Part I sequence is reasonable and represents the doctor’s professional opinion.
“In certifying the cause of death, any disease, abnormality, injury, or poisoning, if believed to have adversely affected the decedent, should be reported. If the use of alcohol and/or other substance, a smoking history, or a recent pregnancy, injury, or surgery was believed to have contributed to death, then this condition should be reported. The conditions present at the time of death may be completely unrelated, arising independently of each other; or they may be causally related to each other, that is, one condition may lead to another which in turn leads to a third condition, and so forth. Death may also result from the combined effect of two or more conditions.”
Source CDC Medical Examiners’ and Coroners’ Handbook on Death Registration (.pdf)
So, you call the Cause of Death of these two patients. What was the Cause of Death of each? Did diabetes kill them both? The first patient via atherosclerosis which kicked off the sequence in Part I? The second from the diabetes induced coma or was the coma from simply caused by being in intensive care? Or was it the first patient’s life-long cigarette smoking causing the coronary artery disease? Or would you, as this doctor did, start the death sequence with his/her seven years of Atherosclerotic coronary artery disease? In each case, there are several sequences that would be reasonable and could have been correctly entered by the attending physician, a coroner, or later by a medical examiner.
The above are pretty common examples – long-term conditions which lead to the next condition that finally leads to death. We don’t see the personal information part of the Death Certificate so we don’t know the age of these patients. The age of the patient is often key to Cause of Death – but is not to be used as a cause itself.
“Common problems in death certification
The elderly decedent should have a clear and distinct etiological sequence for cause of death, if possible. Terms such as senescence, infirmity, old age, and advanced age have little value for public health or medical research. Age is recorded elsewhere on the certificate. When a number of conditions resulted in death, the physician should choose the single sequence that, in his or her opinion, best describes the process leading to death, and place any other pertinent conditions in Part II.” [ source: CDC my bolds – kh ]
And then this:
“For statistical and research purposes, it is important that the causes of death and, in particular, the underlying cause of death, be reported as specifically and as precisely as possible. Careful reporting results in statistics for both underlying and multiple causes of death (i.e., all conditions mentioned on a death certificate) reflecting the best medical opinion.
Every cause-of-death statement is coded and tabulated in the statistical offices according to the latest revision of the International Classification of Diseases. “
Source CDC Medical Examiners’ and Coroners’ Handbook on Death Registration (.pdf) – my bold — kh
There are over 69,000 ICD-10 diagnostic codes. Someone goes through every death certificate filed and translates the diseases and conditions the doctors, coroners and medical examiners enter in Parts I and II into ICD-10 codes (soon to be ICD-11 codes). There are so many codes that there are many online look-up tools and apps to help medical staff code up office visits and others to code up Cause of Death certificates. The first Death Certificate above might be coded: “ E08.01 Diabetes mellitus due to underlying condition with hyperosmolarity with coma” – which would cover Part I lines “c” and “b”. This diagnosis is billable. This app helpfully informs the staff if the ICD-10 code they select is “billable” – if not billable, we can safely suspect that office assistants coding office visits can search for a true but alternate diagnostic code that is billable. “All conditions mentioned on a death certificate” are translated to ICD-10 codes and eventually tabulated “for statistical and research purposes.” In our two sample Death Certificates, there are ten different diseases and conditions mentioned. Thus each of the ten condition codes eventually, at the CDC and WHO level, gets a little “tick-mark” – a plus one – added to the number of deaths involving that ICD-10 code.
Thus the huge number of deaths reported for which smoking is claimed to be the cause, as we see in this next quote from the CDC:
“Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death.Worldwide, tobacco use causes more than 7 million deaths per year. If the pattern of smoking all over the globe doesn’t change, more than 8 million people a year will die from diseases related to tobacco use by 2030.
Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure. This is about one in five deaths annually, or 1,300 deaths every day.”
[ source: CDC here ]
Most people simply accept those statements as fact, though they know of no one who put a cigarette in their mouth, lit up, and died as a direct result. Through many years of public health anti-smoking/anti-tobacco education we have been taught that smoking or otherwise using tobacco can lead to a long list of health problems, many of which cause or contribute to the eventual death of the smoker. In this case, a life-time of tobacco use is referred to, by public health officials, as a “cause” of death – though it probably would not be listed as a cause on a death certificate. Despite not being listed as a cause on the Death Certificate, the CDC and WHO unequivocally tells us that smoking is “the leading cause of preventable death”.
As in many complicated subjects, there are varying definitions in use for the same terms – in this case “cause of death”. There is the general everyday use – like “something that directly causes the death of a person, if it hadn’t happened, they wouldn’t have died”. So, a person gets lung cancer, probably or presumably because they had been a life-long smoker, and dies from the lung cancer. We know they died of lung cancer but accept that smoking led to that death. It is this definition that the WHO uses above. But it is not the official definition that is to be used on a Death Certificate as Cause of Death, which is in the quote far above, labelled Part I.
Those readers who watch any of the popular crime and police television series know that Cause of Death in trauma deaths is even more complicated — “homicide, accident or suicide?” — though those TV Medical Examiners are always portrayed as having almost paranormal insight – “blunt trauma to the head…but that’s not what killed him.”
One last quote from the handbook for medical examiners:
“Precision of knowledge required to complete death certificate items
The cause-of-death section in the medical examiner’s or coroner’s certification is always a medical opinion. This opinion is, of course, a synthesis of all information derived from both the investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death …. It represents the best effort of the medical examiner or coroner to reduce to a few words his or her entire synthesis of the cause of death.”
[ emphasis in the original – kh ]
Bottom Line: Cause of Death determination and reporting is complicated and highly dependent on the training and opinion of the person making the report.
# # # # #
Reporting of Covid-19 Deaths
Here’s the pivot point on Covid-19 Deaths:
This is from the CDC’s weekly Covid report. See the Column 2 heading? It says “All Deaths Involving Covid-19 (U07.1)1”. The keyword is INVOLVING. To be perfectly clear, what is being reported by the CDC, as collected by the National Center for Health Statistics, are All (every one) Deaths (people dying) that Involved Covid-19. See the little footnote indicator “1”?
Footnote 1 says: “COVID-19 deaths are identified using a new ICD–10 code. When COVID-19 is reported as a cause of death – or when it is listed as a “probable” or “presumed” cause — the death is coded as U07.1. This can include cases with or without laboratory confirmation.”
Not just verified cases in which Covid-19 was the immediate cause of death. At least, to be even clearer, not necessarily what you, the average reader, would consider THE cause of death.
So, what exactly are they counting when the CDC and WHO report Covid-10 Deaths? The World Health Organization’s official guidelines are:
2. DEFINITION FOR DEATHS DUE TO COVID-19
A death due to COVID-19 is defined for surveillance purposes as a death resulting from a clinically compatible illness, in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID disease (e.g. trauma). ….
A- RECORDING COVID-19 ON THE MEDICAL CERTIFICATE OF CAUSE OF DEATH
COVID-19 should be recorded on the medical certificate of cause of death for ALL decedents where the disease caused, or is assumed to have caused, or contributed to death.
[ my emphasis – kh source: WHO here .pdf ]
Note that the Death Certificate — Cause of Death Part II is “Other significant conditions contributing to…”. So, there is where Covid-19 (ICD code U07.1) would be written for any death in which Covid wasn’t “caused, or is assumed to have caused” but only contributed to the death. If the decedent was a “Covid case” then he/she becomes a “Covid Death” if they die. Read on . . .
For the general public, who want to know “How many people are being killed by the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic?”, this definition does not supply the answer to their question. The vagueness and breadth of these definitions is exacerbated, in this “possibly-too-broad” sense, by the definitions being used to define “What is a Covid-19 case?” We see that the WHO definition of a Covid death includes “a probable or confirmedCOVID-19 case”.
So, how do WHO and the CDC define or advise doctors how to define/determine a Covid-19 case?
Clinical Criteria
At least two of the following symptoms: fever (measured or subjective), chills, rigors, myalgia, headache, sore throat, new olfactory and taste disorder(s)
OR
At least one of the following symptoms: cough, shortness of breath, or difficulty breathing
OR
Severe respiratory illness with at least one of the following:
Clinical or radiographic evidence of pneumonia, OR
Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS).
AND
No alternative more likely diagnosis
[ source: CDC here ]
So, by this definition, I could at this very moment be declared to be a Covid-19 case. I have muscle pain (myalgia) and a headache — two symptoms – — and yesterday, I had a cough — and, if I have reported to the ER and doctors are both rushed and spooked by the pandemic, there might be “no alternative more likely diagnosis”, in their minds at least. (Of course, I have these symptoms for reasons well known to me and my personal physician but this might not save me in the ER.) Especially if they also ask me a bunch of epidemiological questions:
“Epidemiologic Linkage
One or more of the following exposures in the 14 days before onset of symptoms:
Close contact** with a confirmed or probable case of COVID-19 disease;
OR
Close contact** with a person with:
clinically compatible illness
AND
linkage to a confirmed case of COVID-19 disease.
Travel to or residence in an area with sustained, ongoing community transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
Member of a risk cohort as defined by public health authorities during an outbreak.
**Close contact is defined as being within 6 feet for at least a period of 10 minutes to 30 minutes or more depending upon the exposure. In healthcare settings, this may be defined as exposures of greater than a few minutes or more. Data are insufficient to precisely define the duration of exposure that constitutes prolonged exposure and thus a close contact.”
[ source: see previous quote ]
So, if I were in the Emergency Room, the ER doctor might ask me these questions: Do you know anyone who isn’t feeling well? Have you been in close contact with them for more than 10 minutes? Have you attended any meeting with more than 10 people in the last 14 days? Have you been to church or a party? Have you visited a restaurant or a bar? Any YES epidemiologically qualifies me as a Covid case. More questions: Do you wear a face mask whenever you are out of your own home? in your car? in WalMart? at the park? while mountain biking? Any NO qualifies me as a Covid case epidemiologically.
You can see how easy it is to be classified as a Covid-19 case. And they haven’t even tested me yet. (Read the link to see why even testing wouldn’t save me.) They would report me as a Covid case even if I tested negative – I might not be positive “yet”.
And while I describe my pending Covid-19 Case classification jokingly, it is a very real scenario. And, heaven forbid, were I to die of almost anything (except obvious trauma) in the next 14 days, I would become another Covid-19 Death statistic.
As most of us know by now, advanced age is a key factor in the vast majority of Covid-19 deaths:
Eighty percent (80%) of Covid-19 deaths are of those 65 years of age of or older – and a full one-third of the deaths occur in those over 85 years. If you are an adult today, then you were born between 1925 and 2000. At your birth, you could expect to live (life expectancy at birth) between 58 to 72 years, depending on your birth year. Those who are dying at 85 or older had a life expectancy at birth of less than 61 years. [My life expectancy at birth was about 66 years – so I have beaten the odds and hope to continue to do so for many years more.]
If this does not seem significant to you, I’ll repeat the CDC quote on reporting cause of death for the elderly – those 65 year of age or older.
“Common problems in death certification: The elderly decedent should have a clear and distinct etiological sequence for cause of death, if possible. Terms such as senescence, infirmity, old age, and advanced age have little value for public health or medical research. Age is recorded elsewhere on the certificate. When a number of conditions resulted in death, the physician should choose the single sequence that, in his or her opinion, best describes the process leading to death, and place any other pertinent conditions in Part II.” [ source: CDC my bolds – kh ]
For the elderly, the aged, the older citizen, which comprise the majority (80%) of Covid-19 deaths, any illness or condition that leads to breathing problems is prone to being classified as a Covid case, and thus a Covid-19 death in “a clinically compatible illness, in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case”.
Bottom Lines:
- It is complicated.
- Make no mistake, there are lots of people dying deaths that involve confirmed, assumed, or suspected Covid-19.
- Somewhere between “Most” and “Almost All” of those deaths involved other conditions that were already killing the patients – sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly.
- The official health organizations have their own reasons for what they are counting and they are counting exactly what they say they are counting – but it is not what you or I would expect them to count. They are counting, as the CDC does, “All Deaths Involving Covid-19”.
- The Covid-19 Death statistics represent the counts of the WHO, the CDC and other National and State public health agencies. The general public often mistakenly thinks those counts mean deaths in which Covid-19 was the immediate cause of death – deaths in which the person was killed by Covid-19. That is not the case – it is far more complicated than that.
- The common citizen would have grave doubts about including each and every one of those dead people in the count of “Deaths Caused by Covid-19” if they were tasked with the job of reviewing all of the details of each death. Our citizen might make up our own sensible classifications: such as: ”Old Age complicated by Pneumonia initiated by a viral respiratory infection: maybe Covid-19 or influenza or the common cold”.
- Doctors (and here), Coroners and Medical Examiners are not immune to taking easy shortcuts. The official definitions for Covid-19 cases (in the essay) make it an easy choice for hurried doctors, and official guidance requires at least Covid-19’s mention on Death Certificates, under a vast array of normal circumstances during this pandemic. This is exacerbated by RT-PCR tests returning “positive” test results for very small amounts of viral RNA fragments in asymptomatic people.
# # # # #
Addendum:
There has erupted a flap concerning Genevieve Briand’s research at John Hopkins on U.S. Covid-19 Deaths: I supply these links on the controversy:
Covid-19 Deaths: A Look at U.S. Data
pdf file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iO0K75EZAF8dkNDkDmM3L4zNNY0X-Xw5/view
William Briggs: https://wmbriggs.com/post/33680/
Twitter Thread on the Paper: https://mobile.twitter.com/jhunewsletter/status/1332100136152035330
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TKJN61aflI
John Hopkins News-Letter retraction notice: https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2020/11/a-closer-look-at-u-s-deaths-due-to-covid-19
Author’s Comment:
I have mentioned previously that I come from a medical family and studied the prerequisites for medical school in university, before changing majors for personal reasons. Our home was filled with the joys of new life and the sorrow of babies’ and children’s deaths. My generation fought and died by the thousands in the misguided military intervention in Viet Nam – some of these were my cousins and high school and college friends.
We are all sad when lives are cut short.
Covid-19, the illness caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is shortening the lives of thousands in the United States and around the world. One blessing is that it is mostly shortening the lives of those who have already had a life – as opposed to stealing the entire lives of our children and young people.
Public health organizations have valid reasons for counting “All Deaths Involving Covid-19” using their own internal definitions, which are suitable for epidemiological studies and research when combined with all the other information being collected to produce that statistic. That statistic, created with their surveillance and epidemiological definitions, is not suitable for release to the general public without a long and complicated explanation – releasing just the number, and labeling it as Covid-19 Deaths is a form of misinformation.
The media, politicians, health agencies and governments have utterly failed to effectively communicate the reality of Covid deaths, failed to illuminate the caveats and complexities of Cause of Death reporting and instead of have repeatedly just reported this “Big Number” in a usage that is seems to be intentionally misleading.
Featured Video
Iran War Confusion & Mixed Messaging /Lt Col Daniel Davis
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Anti-science
The infinite list
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | October 12, 2022
Almost three years ago science entered a new dark age.
Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, seems to agree. He has been compiling a list of the examples of anti-science we have unfortunately become used to.
I have listed his thoughts so far but the list is continually expanding... continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Iran War Confusion & Mixed Messaging /Lt Col Daniel Davis
- Israel threatens Gaza flotilla activists with death after abduction
- Met refuses to probe British nationals accused of war crimes in Gaza
- Hezbollah denies activity in Syria amid persistent and false claims
- Melkite bishops concerned over Israeli demolitions in South Lebanon
- Israel’s Obliteration Ecocide from Gaza to Lebanon and Beyond
- UAE deports tens of thousands of Pakistanis, seizes their savings amid war on Iran: Report
- Wheels Down in Tbilisi: Was a Routine U.S. Military Stopover a Deliberate Signal to Iran?
- Trump’s second strike on Iran would be suicidal. But that’s not the reason why he won’t go ahead with it
- Palantir touts record expansion and ‘battlefield’ AI value
- If Americans Knew
- An All-American Retort to Israel’s Invasion of Lebanon
- How Dr. Adam Hamawy’s experience as a surgeon in Gaza inspired him to run for Congress
- Under Trump, Green Card Seekers Face New Scrutiny for Views on Israel
- With World Distracted by War, Extremist Settlers Intensify Attacks in West Bank
- Israel’s brutality toward Gaza flotilla activists – 3 articles
- “Spitting and humiliation are daily. People are afraid to walk in Jerusalem with Christian symbols.”
- How the US-Israel Relationship Weakens America and Harms the World
- 1 in 5 amputees in Gaza is a child, UN warns amid prosthetic care crisis
- 6,000 Gazans lack prosthetic and/or rehabilitation care – Daily Update
- As in Gaza, Israel is targeting rescue workers in South Lebanon, killing more than 100 since March
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Declining Trends In 1980-2023 Tropical Cyclone Frequency, Accumulated Energy
- 46 IPCC Scientists Break Rank, Publicly Challenge Long-Standing Dogmatic Climate Claims
- Another Study Links Warming To Cloud Forcing, Shortwave Radiation, Natural Atmospheric Circulation
- Wind Energy Is Toxic, Hazardous To Human Health, Scientific Review Shows
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
Aletho News 