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Thursday, April 9, 2020

CORONAGATE UPDATE: Globalist Politics Garbed in Fake Science

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CORONAGATE UPDATE: Globalist Politics Garbed in Fake Science

What is in dispute here is not the potential lethality of this particular virus, but the ongoing COVID-19 agitprop campaign by the media, their Democrat allies, and clearly left-leaning elements of the globalist medical establishment.
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Introduction

As I write this piece, I have just been informed by my sister that my 96-year-old father, Joseph, who has been locked into a veteran’s nursing facility since March 12 because the Wuhan virus is present, now has fever of more than 102°. While his COVID-19 test results will not be available for days, as a precaution he will be taken by ambulance to the local hospital where we hope he will receive the drug hydroxychloroquine—the same drug the evil, lying media have been on a “jihad” to discredit, as Attorney General Barr put it, merely because President Trump endorsed it.   My father has an iron constitution, so we are hoping and praying that if he has the Wuhan virus he will overcome it, as did this 103-year-old woman in Italy

While my father may soon be benefitting from its use, moronic Democrat governors, cheered on by the same lying, evil media, have prohibited pharmacies and private doctors from dispensing hydroxychloroquine. The media have assisted these fools with the cover story that there is only a “partial ban” by Democrat governors because, to quote the Michigan directive, the aim is to prevent “a shortage for patients with lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, or other ailments for which chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are proven treatments…” Yes, we can be sure that Governor Gretchen Witless Whitmer of Michigan is deeply concerned that lupus and arthritis sufferers and those with “other ailments” have an ample supply of the drug as opposed to COVID-19 patients whose lives it might save.  It couldn’t possibly be the case that under no circumstances can she allow Trump to be proven right or the “pandemic” to be diminished by a simple and effective treatment.

I am again asking that Remnant readers pray for my father (our venerable “Patriarch”, as we like to call him) and for all the vulnerable elderly in his facility, which suffered a similar crisis during a two-month onslaught of the flu earlier this year.

The Wuhan Virus in Perspective

In this piece, I continue the Remnant’s series on the Coronavirus Panic of 2020, writing from the perspective of someone who has an immediate relative in danger from the Wuhan virus.   I will present further evidence of the exploitation of this virus for demagogic manipulation of the American people to serve political ends that become more obvious with each passing day.  In short, “Coronagate.”

But first, for any reader who may be new to this series, a brief reprise of a saner perspective on the Wuhan virus. As we have seen, the daily briefings on the “global pandemic” have degenerated into a series of episodes resembling a kind of daytime soap opera: “As the Virus Turns.”  In the midst of this endless farce, we need to situate this particular virus in the context of our lived experience with viruses.

That the Wuhan virus, like influenza, can kill is obvious. My own father, having been confined to a veritable incubator of the virus, is at risk of death.  If you are very elderly like my father, or a younger person with a compromised immune system, any form of community-acquired pneumonia (i.e., pneumonia acquired outside of a hospital) can be fatal, whether cause of the pneumonia is bacterial or viral.  The Wuhan virus kills the way other viruses kill: by descending into the lungs and causing pneumonia, often in combination with bacteria that invade inflamed lung tissue, leading to respiratory failure and death in the susceptible.

media hysteria

The mantra that “COVID19 is not the flu,” which is part of the panic narrative over this particular virus, means nothing.  Conversely, the flu is not COIVD-19. So what?  The Wuhan virus is a novel coronavirus that can kill certain people, just like previously established viruses. Likewise, H1N1 was a novel flu virus that first appeared in 2009 as “the swine flu” but has since become part of the seasonal viral burden and is now designated Influenza A.  Indeed, even the World Health Organization (WHO), the leading fear-monger in this case, observes of the “swine flu” that “Influenza A (H1N1) is similar to seasonal influenza but has been characterized by higher activity during the northern summer season, higher fatality rates among healthy young adults and higher incidence of viral pneumonia.”

There is no hard evidence, only breathless media hysteria, that the Wuhan virus is any more of a threat to public health than Influenza A, which infected tens of millions of Americans and killed 18,000 in the season of its first appearance, 2009-10, with most of the victims being younger than 65. The Wuhan virus, along with H1N1 or Influenza A, has joined the large family of influenza and influenza-like illnesses (ILIs), as the epidemiologists call them, all of them more or less potentially fatal for certain people.

What is in dispute here, and rightly comes in for mockery, is not the potential lethality of this particular virus, but the ongoing COVID-19 agitprop campaign by the media, their Democrat allies, and clearly left-leaning elements of the globalist medical establishment—above all WHO, funded by the Gates Foundation, and the Gates Foundation-funded Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). This agitprop aims to frighten the masses into believing that the Wuhan virus is a uniquely genocidal plague capable of killing millions of people in this country alone unless we “mitigate the pandemic” by observing “social distancing.” 

The “Social Distancing” Canard

The term “social distancing” was originally limited to the same reasonable precautions one would observe during the flu season, but has rapidly expanded to include a completely insane and pointless national lockdown regime so full of exceptions that its only effect is to create mass unemployment in the midst of the mass population movements still permitted for dictatorially delimited “essential businesses”  and “essential activities.”

The people are being asked to believe the preposterous claim that millions will die unless people “stay at home”—except as follows:

  • when traveling to and from, or working in, the locations of “essential businesses”;
  • when visiting “essential” supermarkets, liquor stores, convenience stores, gas stations, home improvement stores, banks, cell phone stores, automobile repair shops, pet stores, laundromats, dry cleaners and marijuana dispensaries (by prescription only);
  • when venturing out for drive-thru fast food or take-out orders at the restaurants that have not yet gone out of business;
  • when traveling to care for relatives or other persons, as well as “essential” pets;
  • when exercising outdoors;
  • when using mass transit to engage in all of these permitted “essential” activities. 

On the other hand, the people are asked to believe that millions will die if they dare to attend Mass, go to Confession or even set foot in a totally locked church (depending on which state lockdown one is suffering under); congregate in groups of more than ten people in the open air or in their own homes; fail to remain six feet apart from everyone they encounter on the street (but not in jam-packed supermarkets or other “essential businesses” with high foot traffic) or leave their homes for such frivolous and deadly activities as a family game of tee-ball in the parkCitizen, what were you thinking!

This just in: The idiot Democrat Governor of Nevada, following the idiot Democrat Governor of  New York, has not only banned social gatherings of more than ten people, but now explicitly threatens families who dare to have Easter dinner with more than the permitted ten family members: “If we get to that later in the week, you’re going to see what strict enforcement looks like.”

And don’t forget the face masks.  Citizen, where is your face mask?  Are you trying to spew death into the air? That face masks were at first dismissed as completely ineffective and even counterproductive is irrelevant. Some 45 days into this fiasco, with the number of reported cases and daily deaths beginning to decline as the weather warms, face masks are suddenly a matter of life and death. The better to keep us mindful of the deadly pandemic for months to come.

The IHME Deception

A key element of “Coronagate” is the ever-changing, fake science “model” created by the Bill Gates-funded IHME.  The IHME model has recently been the principal prop trotted out at the daily press briefings by Dr. Deborah Birx (aka “Scarf Lady”) and her mentor Dr. Anthony Fauci (aka “Tony”). Tony is a member of the Leadership Council of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s propaganda apparatus for global vaccine promotion, including the COVID-19 vaccine they may soon be attempting to make mandatory for all Americans.  Scarf Lady, appointed by Obama as U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, “oversees the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR),” which is funded by—is anyone surprised?—the Gates Foundation

The IHME model is now the primary “scientific” driver of the immensely destructive nonsense that has shut down our entire country; it has become the model most cited by Tony and Scarf Lady, and thus by the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Long gone are Tony’s and Scarf Lady’s laughable claims, based on the loopy Imperial College of London study, that 2.2 million Americans—more than twenty times the total world death toll to date—could die without “social distancing” and that up to 240,000 will die even with “social distancing.”

Forget all that. Now, the IHME model is the thing.  Yes, this one is very reliable.  We must not be dissuaded of this by the model’s wildly excessive predictions, all of them wrong, about how many hospitalizations, hospital beds, ICU beds and ventilators would be needed in New York and other states. According to this latest and greatest model, the national death toll from the Wuhan virus—with “social distancing” of course—will be 93,531. No, wait! - 81,766. No, wait! - 60,415.  As the data on deaths come in, the total death predictions go down in a matter of days.  The predictions merely follow the daily data, which means they aren’t predictions at all, but a series of guesstimates adjusted post hoc to fit the real world.

Tony and Scarf Lady have been maintaining that “mitigation” is the reason the IHME mortality prediction is constantly dropping. But “mitigation” has always been built into the prediction. The same is true of their own previous predictions of up to 240,000 deaths with mitigation—a fatal blow to their predictive credibility they hope no one will notice.  As the assumption of mitigation underlies both their own earlier predictions and those of the IHME model they are now touting, it is clear that the predictions have been dropping like lead balloons, not because of “mitigation,” but because they were monumentally wrong from the start

MEDIA HYSTERIA graphic

And IHME’s prediction still seems monumentally wrong, seeing that the U.S. death toll attributed to the Wuhan virus stands at 16,231 as of today (April 9 at 3:30 p.m.). Another 44,000 Americans will have to die from this virus in order to prove the IHME model right. But even if that number were to die, we would still be in the neighborhood of a bad flu season.  Yet, only two weeks ago, Scarf Lady and Tony were confidently predicting up to 240,000 deaths even if everybody “mitigated.”

Finally, if anyone still has any doubt that the Wuhan virus is being utilized as a political vehicle for social engineering by fear, consider these telling indications of deception in the IHME model:

First, the banner above the model’s latest prediction of 60,415 deaths reads: “COVID-19 projections assuming full social distancing through May 2020.”

Second, as the AP reports, the Director of the IHME, Dr. Christopher Murray, had this to say about “social distancing”:

Our estimates assume statewide social distancing measures are continuing in states where they have already been enacted, and for those states without such measures in place, it is assumed that they will be in place within seven days.

If social distancing measures are relaxed or not implemented, the US will see greater death tolls, the death peak will be later, the burden on hospitals will be much greater, and the economic costs will continue to grow.

The Leftist politics in the guise of fake science could not be more blatant. Anyone with half a brain can see that the term “full social distancing” is not a quantity that can be plugged into an algorithm for modeling mortality predictions. Rather, it is a politically fraught term with no fixed  meaning, differs widely in application from place to place, is quantitatively incalculable, cannot be separated into distinct operators (e.g., handwashing versus face masks versus avoidance of “non-essential” movement), and is impossible to verify empirically as to compliance by innumerable different populations under differing regimes of restriction.

And note the requirement of “statewide social distancing,” clearly tailored to the demands of the proponents of the economy-killing national lockdown. “Statewide social distancing” is a phony variable, invented in March, which has no basis in prior experiential data from other epidemics that could be quantified.  Recall that in my previous article I noted that “Tony” admits he has never seen this kind of “mitigation” before.

Even more outrageous is IHME’s phony “prediction” that many more people will die unless the remaining eight holdout states (South Carolina caved two days ago) adopt “statewide social distancing” measures “within seven days.” Not eight days or nine days, mind you, but exactly seven days. Not city or county “social distancing measures”—whatever “social distancing” might mean—but only statewide social distancing measures will do. Otherwise, “predicts” the phony “model,” the bodies will start piling up from a lack of social distancing.

Evidently, they think we are fools. As the already-proven-worthless IHME model explicitly bases its ever-declining fake “predictions” on a vague, politically motivated and quantitatively empty variable—“social distancing”—it is nothing less than a pseudo-scientific fraud upon the people.  Yet it provides the current plot line for “As the Virus Turns.”

CDC to Doctors: Inflate the Death Toll!

We cannot even rely on the seemingly hard death toll data that have prompted drastic downward revisions of IHME’s pseudo-scientific predictions. We now know for certain what has already been revealed in Italy: that even the lowering number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 is inflated. During Tuesday’s episode of “As the Virus Turns,” Scarf Lady freely admitted this in answer to a question that seemed designed to extract an admission that COVID-19 deaths were being underreported:

I think that in this country we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality…. There are other countries that [sic] if you had a preexisting condition, and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem, some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death….

Right now we’re still recording it—I mean the great thing about having forms come in, and a form that has the ability to mark it as COVID-19 infection—the intent is right now is that if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that [her emphasis] as a COVID-19 death.

Oh no, dear reporter, we have not underreported COVID-19 deaths!  We have deliberately overreported them.  The protocol Scarf Lady described is equivalent to stating on a death certificate that someone who died from a heart attack died from prostate cancer merely because cancer cells were found in his prostate.  

Bristling at the suggestion that something is amiss with the death toll numbers, during Wednesday’s episode of “As the Virus Turns” Tony took to the podium and offered the liberals’ favorite response to well-founded doubts about their demonstrably false claims: “You always have conspiracy theories when you have very challenging public health crises.”  This was in response to a softball question from the dimwit Jim Acosta of Fake News CNN, who suggested that the accusation had been made “without really [sic] any evidence.”

Without evidence?  How about the explicit admission by Scarf Lady at the same podium the day before? There is no question that COVID-19 death data, like those in Italy, have been corrupted to a degree we will probably never be able to determine fully.  At least Italy’s Ministry of Health later provided the estimate that only 12% of the deaths attributed to COVID-19 were actually directly caused by the virus.

But the data corruption in this country is not merely out of sloppiness or even invidious bias on the part of individual physicians.  Quite the contrary, the Deep State has recommended fudging the data. A Minnesota state senator who is also a doctor revealed during an interview with a local TV anchor, and later on the Laura Ingraham Show, that he received a 7-page set of instructions from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), via the CDC, that basically coaches him to find that the virus was the cause of death even without testing for its presence!  As the instruction states:

In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID–19 cannot be made, but it is suspected or likely… it is acceptable to report COVID–19 on a death certificate as “probable” or “presumed.” In these instances, certifiers should use their best clinical judgement in determining if a COVID–19 infection was likely. However, please note that testing for COVID–19 should be conducted whenever possible.

Whenever possible?  So, deaths from COVID-19 are apparently being reported—who knows how often?—without a COVID-19 test to confirm the diagnosis.  And even where there is a positive test, the direct cause of death is being demoted—who knows how often?­—in favor of a presumed contribution by COVID-19. This is exactly the kind of data corruption that occurred in Italy.

But why? One need only watch a few episodes of “As the Virus Turns” to understand what the doctor from Minnesota said in answer to that same question from the clearly appalled local news anchor: “Fear is a great way to control people.”

Conclusion

There is no sign of an end to “Coronagate” any time soon.  As even the inflated data let them down, the fear-mongers are only increasing the intensity of their propaganda. “White House health advisor Fauci says we may never get back to ‘normal’ after coronavirus pandemic,” screams a headline on CNBC.  The headline spins Tony’s suggestion from his White House podium that “if you want to get to pre-coronavirus, that might not ever happen in the sense that the threat is there.”  Tony knows full well that numerous viruses and their variants return every year and that their “threat” is likewise “always there.”  He knows this yet he portrays the Wuhan virus as unique in this regard.  He does so for the transparent purpose of misleading the public in order to keep their fear alive.

In Minnesota, the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health has just rolled out yet another “model”.  This one “predicts” up to 74,000 deaths from the Wuhan virus in Minnesota alone without “mitigation” and up to 50,000 deaths even with “mitigation” in the form of a “stay-at-home order for two weeks; followed by a continuation of closures and restrictions on entertainment venues and restaurants until May 1 and keeping schools closed until May 4…”. This “mitigation,” the study claims, will save 20,000 lives.

Thus far in Minnesota only 50 deaths have been attributed to the virus—very loosely attributed, as the Minnesota physician quoted above has revealed.  Nevertheless, Democrat Governor Tim Walz has just cited these patently absurd predictions to justify his version of a statewide lockdown, even though the study’s own authors admit that their model provides only “a rough estimate with high uncertainty” and “those involved with the model wince at giving that figure [of 20,000 lives saved] too much stock, calling it an ‘incredible mismatch’ for the reality on the ground.”  Yet Walz “pledged to Minnesotans that his decisions would be made not on fear but on the best data available.” For Walz, the “best data available” is a “rough estimate with high uncertainty” involving an admittedly “incredible mismatch” with observed conditions. That is, the best data available are those that can be exploited to keep fear alive.

So, it appears there will be no end to the search by predominantly Democrat partisans for any pretext to keep fear alive and the states under lockdown even if Trump takes measures to “open up the country” come April 30.  Pray to God that Trump manages to liberate himself from this astonishing, infuriating and devastating exercise in mass imprisonment by mind-forged manacles of fear, cheered on by an array of people who want nothing more than his political destruction and the fulfilment of their dream of a new America in a “post-COVID world” that the globalists, including Bergoglio, triumphantly declare “will never be the same.”

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Last modified on Friday, April 10, 2020
Christopher A. Ferrara

Christopher A. Ferrara: President and lead counsel for the American Catholic Lawyers Inc., Mr. Ferrara has been at the forefront of the legal defense of pro-lifers for the better part of a quarter century. Having served with the legal team for high profile victims of the culture of death such as Terri Schiavo, he has long since distinguished him a premier civil rights Catholic lawyer.  Mr. Ferrara has been a lead columnist for The Remnant since 2000 and has authored several books published by The Remnant Press, including the bestseller The Great Façade. Together with his children and wife, Wendy, he lives in Richmond, Virginia.