The COVID Response. What We Got Wrong.

Part XIV: Do Booster Shots Cause Strokes?! 

I wonder…

Was the stroke I had in September caused by the Pfizer vaccines I took?

In January, the CDC released a warning, saying that they have evidence that getting a Pfizer booster shot puts people 65 and older (Me!) at an increased risk for stroke.

From Reuters:

“A safety monitoring system flagged that US drugmaker Pfizer Inc. and German partner BioNTech’s updated COVID-19 shot could be linked to a type of brain stroke in older adults, according to preliminary data analyzed by US health authorities.

“The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said on Friday that a CDC vaccine database had uncovered a possible safety issue in which people 65 and older were more likely to have an ischemic stroke… after receiving the vaccine booster.”

And from Bloomberg, the same story.

Now, “increased risk” doesn’t mean “definitely risky.” But still. Sometime after I got my shots, including two boosters, I had a stroke. The same sort of stroke, with the same symptoms reported by the CDC in that announcement.

What’s more interesting (to me, at least) is how the different media reported this. Reuters and Bloomberg reported the CDC statement literally, as in there is some additional risk of stroke. Whereas, The New York Times took the opposite approach. (Note the italics below.)

“Fears that the COVID booster shots made by Pfizer-BioNTech may increase the risk of strokes in people aged 65 and older were not borne out by an intensive scientific investigation…”

Read the whole NYT article here.

What to make of this?

It’s too early to draw definitive conclusions. The study was relatively small, and the differences recorded were small, too. But the reportage by the NYT reminds me that we cannot rely on the mainstream media to tell us the truth about anything that has political overtones.

If you are really concerned about COVID or our role in the Ukraine, you should go to primary sources to gather your information. Then draw your own conclusions.

The COVID Response. What We Got Wrong.

 Part XIII: The Backtracking Speeds Up 

Almost every week since I began writing this series, there has been some revelation in the mainstream media about what the CDC got wrong about COVID. None of them admits to being a part of the three-year-long campaign of misinformation and downright lies. Instead, they report on the new revelations as if they are news.

For anyone like me that’s been following the story since the beginning, the naïveté of their posture is evident. The “facts” that were so widely reported and defended throughout the lockdown were either suspicious or evidently illogical and/or impossible back then. The media didn’t inquire about them because they didn’t want to. They were supporting a political narrative that needed false facts. And so began a partnership between the CDC, the left-leaning pols, and the reporters that promoted them.

What’s New 

What’s new this week is that Fauci is admitting what he, his health tsars, the CDC, Pfizer, and Moderna knew all along: The vaccines didn’t work. They didn’t stop the spread of the virus.

He is among a growing number of officials acknowledging that the vaccines were never even tested for efficacy. There wasn’t time. The CDC went ahead and approved them for use in the market. And the US government took this one step further by mandating their use, without any idea of the complications they would cause.

“Vaccines against both COVID-19 and influenza have deficiencies,” Dr. Fauci and top officials of the NIH said in a paper published last week. Even worse, they said, the vaccines are “suboptimal” and are no better at stopping COVID than the ordinary flu vaccines that we’ve been getting for decades.

“With the imperfections of these vaccines, it seems a public health imperative to aggressively pursue better vaccines and vaccination strategies,” they added later, before acknowledging that “none of the predominantly mucosal respiratory viruses,” such as COVID-19, “have ever been effectively controlled by vaccines.”

“That is just an amazing admission,” said David Wiseman, a former Johnson & Johnson scientist, last week.

“Numerous federal officials are quietly trying to walk back their lies and obfuscations from earlier in the pandemic,” Dr. Meryl Nass, an expert on vaccines, recently told The Epoch Times.

The COVID Response. What We Got Wrong.

Part XII: More About the Masks

On Dec. 20, 2022, I wrote about how inconsistent the reporting was on the effectiveness of wearing masks against COVID-19. I explained how the WHO, the CDC, and the US government gave us all sorts of bad information in 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Their first recommendation was that the public should not wear masks because they don’t work. Their next was that the public should wear masks because they do work. (The prior misinformation was explained as a little white lie to prevent a shortage of masks among frontline workers.) Then the mask mandates became not just recommended, but mandatory. Meanwhile, studies on masks were being compiled, and they were not supporting their utility.

In my Dec. 20 report, I argued that cloth masks were virtually useless, but N-95s were somewhat useful.

“It would have been better for everyone,” I wrote, “if they had reported the ‘science’ as it arrived and made transparent recommendations based on the latest data. Had they done it that way, they would have admitted that N-95 and surgical masks were much safer than cloth masks. They would have said that if you could not get hold of or afford N-95 masks to wear a combination of surgical and cloth masks. And they would have told us that social distancing was the best way to avoid contracting COVID and spreading it to others.”

Now, after nearly three years, we have all sorts of studies done and compiled, some of them more reliable than others. And JM, one of my trainers, mentioned to me that Fauci has publicly admitted that masks don’t work and never did. I found it hard to believe that Fauci would say that. But before I could do any research, I got this note from “Greg,” a reader:

“Do You Believe In Science? 

“You do, right?

“If so, you recognize the hierarchy of evidence when it comes to poorly understood subjects.

“And let’s be clear on this: If a subject is well-understood, the outcomes are deterministic. You don’’ have a ‘percentage’ change. A thing either is or is not, and it is repeated every time. Almost nothing in medicine meets this standard. Ergo, virtually everything is poorly understood.”

Click here for an introduction to a very persuasive piece suggesting that even the N-95s do not and never did work. Chew on that for a minute!

The COVID Response. What We Got Wrong.

Part XI: The Biggest Mistake 

I have talked here about many mistakes made in the government’s response to COVID-19. But the biggest was the fundamental assumption that “locking down” cities, states, and countries was an effective way to reduce infections and death.

When I first began reporting on the pandemic, I explained why I didn’t believe that would work. Back then, my predictions were treated as conspiracy theories. Now they are, for the most part, proven fact.

Here’s a scientist making the point. (This is not meant to be persuasive. I will be following up, in detail, in future issues.)

The COVID Response. What We Got Wrong.

Part X: Black Africa’s Great Numbers

On Friday,  I said I’d write about something that has puzzled me since I began tracking the COVID case and mortality data in the middle of 2020. If you believed what the WHO and the CDC were recommending back then, you would have expected to see that the widespread lockdowns, mask mandates, and other draconian measures resulted in lower case fatality rates. But within six months of the WHO alerting the world to the threat of COVID-19 in January of 2020, there were already so many nonsensical announcements coming from both the WHO and the CDC that I began to doubt everything that was said.

I was looking at the differences between places where the restrictions were extensive and those where they were minimal – both here in the US and in other countries. And what I saw for most of 2020 seemed to validate the positions of the WHO and the CDC. The states and countries that had put stricter preventative measures in place had better case fatality rates.

As time passed, the differences became negligible. Thus, for example, the mortality rates for Florida, which was famously relaxed on the shutdown, ended up statistically even with (in some cases lower than) states like California, New Jersey, and New York. Likewise with countries. (China, which I wrote about on Friday, was used by some advocates as a shining example of the effectiveness of stringent lockdowns.)

Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but notice that many of the countries with the lowest COVID mortality rates were countries that, in my mind, should have had the highest.

I’m talking about poor, undeveloped, third-world countries that typically get the worst of any sort of natural disaster. Countries with widespread poverty, terrible sanitation, and 18th century health infrastructure. I’m talking, specifically, about the countries of “Black” Africa.

Why were their mortality rates so low?

Until recently, I couldn’t find a cogent explanation for it. I couldn’t even find the question being asked. (Which was likely because, despite pretenses to the contrary, the American media is not the least bit interested in what happens in Black Africa.)

But about a week ago – to settle some argument I was having with a friend – I did a Google search to determine the average age of people in the US as compared to Japan. The median age of Americans is 38. And the median age of the Japanese is 47. Nearly 10 years older!

Then I noticed something remarkable. With an average age of 47, Japan is near the top of the 10 oldest populations in the world. And all of the ten “youngest countries” in the world, with an average age of 18 or less, are in Black Africa!

And then I thought…

Age – i.e., old age – is probably the single most important factor in determining the case fatality rate for COVID. We know that children have virtually no chance of dying from COVID. That’s pretty much true of people in their teens and 20s, too. People in their 30s and 40s have a small but possible chance, especially if they have “comorbidity issues.” But the vast majority of COVID-caused deaths occur in people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s. So surely, the fact that the average age of Black Africans is about half that of Americans must be one reason they have had such low mortality rates.

So then I thought about the other leading factors in COVID mortality. What about obesity?

Obesity is generally listed as the second greatest risk factor in COVID mortality. I checked – and, yes, obesity is almost nonexistent in Black African countries.

Two for two.

And what’s the next most common factor in COVID mortality?

It’s diabetes. And guess what? The percentage of Black Africans that suffer from diabetes is less than half that of the US!

So, there I had it. Mystery solved!

The reason the poorest, least developed countries in the world have the best records in terms of defeating COVID-19 is because their people are the youngest, slimmest, and least likely to have diabetes.

By the way… none of this is brand-new information. The CDC had access to it at the beginning of the pandemic. Had they used it to institute a sensible policy for protecting Americans from COVID-19, it would have looked like what I suggested two years ago:

Protect the old, the obese, and those with comorbidities (especially diabetes) with masks and social distancing. And reduce the threat to the rest of the population by keeping schools and businesses open to achieve herd immunity as soon as possible.

The COVID Response. What We Got Wrong.

Part IX: China’s Bogus Claims

In my last two blog posts, I wrote about how the WHO and the CDC rigged the records to exaggerate the number of COVID hospitalizations and deaths by 70% to 90% – and how the undercounting of cases, especially in the first 12 to 18 months, meant that the case fatality rate was probably less than 1%. Perhaps even in the same range as the common flu.

It was obvious to me back then that the case fatality rates were bogus. But an even more ridiculous falsehood that was promoted by the mainstream media (and touted by many politicians) was China’s COVID death count. Until very recently, when the total in the USA was 1.2 million, China’s reported death count was 5,000!

Imagine that. A country of 1.4 billion people – four times more than the US – having only 5,000 COVID deaths. It was absurd. Even if you believed the preposterous notion that lockdowns reduced COVID death counts, how you possibly believe that they could reduce them by 99.9999%?!

And yet, millions of people, including most of my educated friends, believed it. (Some still do.)

In the past month or so, China has been reporting a surge in COVID that has brought their case count to more than 2 million. But they are still telling the US media (and they are still buying it) that their total deaths so far have only been 5,273!

Click here for a report on the scope of this surge in cases, as well as the attempt to cover up the associated deaths.

And just so none of my readers will waste their time “informing” me that there are a few estimates that the actual count of COVID-caused deaths in China is about 60,000, that number is statistically equal to 5,273 when you measure it against the Chinese population.

There will be people that read this that believed the old reports from China and still believe China’s official explanation of their recent surge in cases. The CCP is saying that the surge was the result of relaxing their zero-tolerance lockdown strategy in response to widespread protests. And that almost all of those that got sick were unvaccinated.

Both statements are obviously false. If I didn’t have to go to dinner now, I’d take the time to explain why. Instead, I’m going to ask anyone who disagrees to go back and re-read the bits I wrote on Dec. 6 (the “pandemic of the unvaccinated”) and Dec. 9 (the lockdown idiocy).

In the next installment of this series, I’m going to explain an anomaly that puzzled me for a long time: Why it is that some poor, poorly regulated, and generally unhealthy countries, including most African countries, have a much lower COVID death count than the US, Europe, and other advanced countries.

Is Biden Being Betrayed by His Own Party?

Are you ready for a new conspiracy theory? Something topical and wild? Something completely unbelievable? Something I’m sticking my neck way out to predict? Yes? Okay. Here goes…

When Biden announced that he was going to run again in 2024, he did so because the Democratic leadership felt that his saying so would give the party the sense of stability it needed to do well in the midterm elections. And they did do well.

But that doesn’t mean they wanted him to run in 2024. I don’t believe that the party leaders had any intention of getting him reelected. I don’t believe they thought he had a chance in hell of beating Trump or, worse for the Dems, someone like DeSantis.

But there was another, perhaps more important, reason they didn’t want him to run. They knew very well (as even the mainstream media knows now) that Biden is highly likely to be seriously tainted by the investigation of his son’s laptop. It’s not all the bad behavior. It’s the millions of dollars Russia, China, and the Ukraine paid this helpless halfwit to advise them on matters about which he had no understanding. (“Ten percent goes to the big guy,” Hunter is recorded as saying to one of his sponsors.)

So here’s a question: 

Can anyone seriously believe what’s going on with the classified papers in Biden’s office and garage? Everything about it smells fishy. Can anyone really believe that these papers were discovered by his own staff… that they held on to them for months until the midterms were over… and then suddenly turned them over to the Justice Department and made the announcement to the press?

I mean, really?

We know why they held on to them until after the midterms. (See above) But why make a public show of turning them in?

I believe it is because it was the perfect solution to the mounting problem of the laptop scandal. I believe it was done to allow or force Biden to resign from office before he and his son could face criminal charges. By resigning, the classified-documents charge disappears and Biden gets to step down from a job even he knows he can’t handle. Having been sated, the Republicans may then loosen up on their laptop investigation and allow him to go down in history with just a smudge on his record rather than as the president who went to jail. Best of all, it gives the Democratic party the opportunity to install Gavin Newsome (or someone close) as their 2024 candidate instead of facing the impossible task of trying to get Kamala elected.

And there’s a cherry in it for Trump. As the quid pro quo for dropping Biden’s classified documents investigation, Trump’s would be dropped, too.

I know. This sounds completely crazy, right? Nobody in Washington is capable of such skullduggery. And Biden wouldn’t stand for it.

But it explains why, for the first time in two years, while the dumbos on The View explain to their dumbo audience that Biden’s documents problem is nowhere as serious as Trump’s, the mainstream press is going hard at Biden.

What Will Happen Next? 

Here’s what I think. In the next few weeks, the mainstream media’s assault on Biden will accelerate. And the battle will expand to critical editorials and interviews with liberal analysts and other left-leaning notables.

The interviews will go like this: Early salvos about the bad judgment of Biden re the classified documents. Then a pivot to other questionable judgements he’s made, including his handling of COVID, the evacuation of Afghanistan, the state of the economy, and his position on energy.

That should be enough to get pretty much the entire Democratic constituency to accept the new narrative about Biden – that he has a good heart but a quickly disintegrating brain.

And then he will resign.

Click here to watch an early example of what I’m predicting. It’s an interview with a former Clinton appointee and a staunch Democrat. Tell me if this isn’t a set of questions orchestrated to feather the bed for Biden to retire.

He begins by acknowledging that Biden is culpable for the classified document scandal, and then praises Biden’s flunkies for turning him in. He goes on to list a half-dozen “problems” that Biden and team will face if he runs in 2024. He points out that Biden has only 40% support in his own party. And then – the coup de grâce – he admits to the terrible truth: Joe is really, really old!

The COVID Response. What We Got Wrong.

Part VIII: More on the Accuracy of the Count 

In this series, I’m trying to cover the many ways the WHO, the CDC, our government, and the mainstream media responded badly – in some cases, almost hysterically – to the COVID pandemic. It’s going to take a while to go through everything. There is just so much.

On Friday, I looked at one of the craziest things that happened – the purposeful overcounting of the number of people that died from COVID. It was done by hospitals and other medical facilities all over the US, because the CDC decided that anyone that died with COVID would be counted as someone that died of COVID. We now know that this resulted in overcounting COVID-caused deaths by a factor of 7 to 10. And as I said on Friday, this was not a mistake. It was intentional. It was done to scare the hell out of people in order to achieve certain political aims.

 Overcounting COVID deaths was a huge problem. But we had another problem that was just as big. I’m talking about undercounting COVID cases in the early days of the pandemic, which made the official fatality rate much, much higher than it really was. Again, I contend that this was done intentionally. No sane person could believe that it could have been an accident or a mistake.

In the early days of the pandemic, there were very few COVID testing facilities. And very few test kits. And considering the fact that COVID symptoms for the young and healthy were so mild (sometimes non-existent), the number of cases not counted back then was probably in the millions. Maybe even the tens of millions. We will never find out.

Like overcounting deaths, undercounting cases greatly exaggerated the mortality rate, and thus created widespread fear that, in my view, bordered on a pandemic of hysteria fueled by the WHO, the CDC, the government, and the media.

Back then, I predicted that the lethality rate – which was first estimated at 10% and then gradually moved down to 5% – would continue to decline as the availability to test for COVID grew. My guess was that it would come down to 2%, and quite possibly below1%.

Once again, I was right. The latest estimates put the lethality rate at 1% for wealthy countries like the US and Europe (that have high percentages of older people) and only 0.25% for poorer countries that have larger younger populations.

And remember… for the most part, those numbers come from the likes of the WHO and the CDC, which are still grossly exaggerating the death count.

My new prediction is that, before too long, the fake-death-count charade will end because its political usefulness is over. And that – except for older people (65+) dealing with obesity and diabetes – the overall lethality rate will drop from 1% to 0.2% to 0.4%, which would mean that it is, and always was, no more deadly than the common flu.

The COVID Response. What We Got Wrong.

Part VII: The Accuracy of the Count

The topic for today is about accuracy. The accuracy of the count for the number of people that have been hospitalized and died from COVID since the pandemic began.

This is something I wrote about in the early days of the outbreak and have mentioned several times since then. I’ve been saying that the official count is misleading. And as such, it is meaningless. It greatly exaggerates the numbers that are relevant by the sort of verbal prestidigitation that would put an internet health product seller in jail.

The claim that I’ve been making is this: The counts we’ve been hearing about in the media – which are coming directly from the WHO and the CDC – are higher than they should be. And that is because, from the beginning, the CDC’s guidelines to hospitals were to report anyone that died with COVID as having died of COVID.

So… someone gets admitted to the hospital with a gunshot wound to the chest. He dies from loss of blood. Following CDC guidelines, he is tested for COVID. If he tests positive, the hospital is required to list him as having died from COVID. And this “COVID” death is then relayed to the CDC, which publishes it.

I know. This sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory. And that is what everyone said to me whenever I wrote or even talked about it. “That can’t possibly be true,” they said. “The CDC is a government agency. Led by scientists. They would never do something so obviously misleading!”

Truth be told, I stopped mentioning it because I came to believe what they were telling me. It can’t have been true. I must have been passing along fake information.

But then, just last week, I came across something in The Washington Post, the Jeff Bezos-run newspaper that has been staunchly defending Fauci and the CDC. (And not just defending Fauci and the CDC, but also attacking anyone that questioned anything they said.) It was an essay by WP columnist Leana Wen that validated what I’d been saying. According to the experts she interviewed, the hospitalization and death rates due to COVID have indeed been grossly exaggerated, precisely because of this trickery in reporting the numbers.

And the exaggeration is not small. The experts said the over-counting has been somewhere between 70% and 90%. This means that the CDC’s current estimate of an average COVID death rate of 400 per day is actually between 40 and 120!

At 40, that would average out to be +/- 14,000. At 120, that would average out to be +/- 44,000. In other words, a typical mortality rate for the flu!

There’s loads more to this story. And I’ll get deeper into it in the weeks ahead, as other stories from the mainstream media begin to parrot the WP so they can claim that they had not been covering up the facts.

In the meantime, you can read Wen’s article here.

And/or get more on her reporting here.

Is the US a Democracy or a Republic?

Why It Matters

Last week, I was having a discussion with an acquaintance about how our country has changed over the years. Mostly for the worse, in my opinion. (He was more optimistic.) One bone of contention was the integrity of the last two federal elections and the midterms.

We agreed that the current system needs to be overhauled. But I felt that his solution – to replace the electoral college with direct elections by the people – was preposterous. I sided with the founding fathers that were very cautious about the dangers inherent in unbridled democracy.

My position was that there was a good reason our founders put so many checks and balances into the Constitution – including the three branches of government, the bicameral legislature, the Bill of Rights, and the electoral college. It was because they believed that democracies are fundamentally flawed and, unless restrained, would inevitably move toward tyranny.

That’s what I said to him. But I must admit, it was just a notion. Since then, I’ve done a little digging to figure out if there was merit to my position. And I’ve found a fair number of books and essays that seem to validate it.

One idea that I ran into surprised me at first, and I’ve come across it several times since then. It is the idea that what the founding fathers created was a constitutional republic. With “republic” – not “democracy” – being the key word.

It’s an interesting argument that supports my position. And the logic is simple. If you’d like to learn more about it, here are some links you can start with:

Click here and here for two arguments that make the republic case.

And click here for a video made 50 years ago.

Click here and here for two arguments against the republic thesis.

And finally, click here for an argument that takes a unifying approach.