Sometimes it pays to step back in history to understand exactly how something monumental was created. This is the story of how one Big Lie turned our world upside down and ruined the lives of millions of people.
Hard to believe that one Big Lie could have created all the pandemic controls, especially lockdowns, school closings and quarantines, that devastated our lives, our economy and our society. But it happened.
A very powerful, influential person told the world in early 2020 that the new China virus that leads to COVID-19 infection was especially lethal. It quickly pushed a fast, enormous response to protect public health. Was the truth was being told? It was not. There was an exaggeration of the new virus lethality for the entire population. In truth, it was only severe for the oldest age category. Helped by corrupt data from CDC, overstatement of COVID lethality continues today. To maintain public fear.
But first it is important to discuss the meaning of critically important terms. What the Big Lie was all about had to do with the fatality or death rate of what early in 2020 was seen as an invading new virus coming from China. How should we think about the fatality rate of a virus?
Terminology
One simple and correct way is how many people die from the infection caused by the virus: the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR). But another possible way would be to invoke the Case Fatality Rate (CFR); the fraction of documented cases of people with the virus that resulted in death.
How can you know how many people are infected? A lot of testing would be necessary. For our COVID pandemic there has been, surprisingly, very little wide blood testing across the whole population. Many people with infections have no symptoms or just mild ones and do not seek testing or medical attention. The CDC has done a terrible job of getting good data on infection numbers.
As to cases ascribed to COVID, there are reasons why that number surely underestimates how many people are really infected. Why? Because only some people, usually with symptoms, get tested and if found positive become a case. On the other side, the PCR test method most widely used has often been implemented in a way to get false positive results. Mainly because the number of cycles the test is run is far too high (above 25) and picks up fragments of the virus (or any coronavirus) that does not document real COVID infection. Thus, the CFR is not a reliable or accurate measure of the real death rate despite widely published case numbers.
Key moment in history
During a March 11, 2020 hearing of the House Oversight and Reform Committee on coronavirus preparedness, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, put it plainly: "The seasonal flu that we deal with every year has a mortality of 0.1%," he told the congressional panel, whereas coronavirus is "10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu," per STAT news. [0.1% also expressed as .001]
He also said: "The bottom line: It is going to get worse." And this: "The stated mortality, overall, of [the coronavirus], when you look at all the data including China, is about 3%."
That figure of 3%, far from reliable, is 30 times greater than the figure given for the seasonal flu. Fauci exaggerated to create a crisis. Simply by implying great lethality for everyone infected by the new COVID virus.
And it should be noted that CDC has found the flu IFR ranged from 0.1% (the figure cited by Fauci) to 0.17% [.0017] from 2014 to 2019, because seasonal deaths vary significantly.
What Fauci said put the country, with the help of big media, into convulsions. It created the foundation for authoritarian contagion controls driving a spike into the lives of Americans. Fauci intentionally created the pandemic by creating fear.
New York City analysis
An interesting analysis was made for IFR for New York City at the height of the pandemic in May 2020. It illustrates how both death and infection data can be fine-tuned to get an IFR. As to deaths, blood testing found that 19.9% of people had antibodies indicating infection, yielding a number of 1,671,351 infected. As to deaths from COVID, there were three components: 13,156 confirmed, 5,126 probable, and 5,148 excess for a total of 23,430, that may have overstated deaths. Probable meant likely COVID death but not confirmed through testing. Excess meant the number above expected seasonal baseline level. Using the total deaths divided by total infected produces an IFR of .014. Higher than the usual quoted flu value [.001] for the height of the pandemic in high density New York City. And without consideration of variations among most vulnerable groups. A high rate of fatality for elderly people would cause a deceptive high value for IFR for the entire population.
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