Forget the Democrats and Republicans! It looks like the Labcoat Party is the new sheriff in town.
~10-12 min read
An expert knows all the answers, if you ask the right questions.
~ Levi Strauss
On March 31st, Dr. Deborah Birx, the Coronavirus Response Coordinator for the White House Task Force, introduced a coronavirus model that was developed by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. The graph that she presented to the American public showed two vastly different curves with respect to potential coronavirus deaths over time. One curve predicted that 1.5 to 2.2 million deaths would occur if no public health interventions (travel bans, social distancing, avoiding groups, business closure) were used. The other curve forecasted that 100,000 to 240,000 people would die even with interventions like social distancing. On March 29th, the President announced that the pandemic guidelines would be extended until the end of April. According to Dr. Birx, the IHME model directly informed the White House’s decision to double the time frame for lifting social distancing recommendations from 15 days to 30 days. That came as a change from the planned reopening of parts of the country by Easter. Dr. Birx conceded that “it’s not a simple situation when you ask people to stay home for another 30 days, and so they have to know that we really built this on scientific evidence.” Thank you Dr. Birx for caring about the American people and for basing the very tough decision on scientific evidence.
White House Coronavirus Task Force Response Coordinator Deborah Birx answers a reporter’s question during the coronavirus update briefing Saturday, April 4, 2020, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)
The Models Are Flawed and Lies Are Being Told
Well, less than two weeks after she made that assertion, Dr. Birx’s scientific evidence looked pretty shaky. On April 9th, a new projection by the same IHME research center estimated that the amount of U.S. coronavirus fatalities might end up being around 60,000, which is far fewer deaths than what was previously predicted. On top of that, Dr. Birx made the following statement on April 7th, “I think in this country, we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality.” Very interesting. What does that mean exactly? Birx elaborated that “there are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition, and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU [intensive care unit] and then have a heart or kidney problem. [They] are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death.” Makes sense so far. But then, Birx offers her most pertinent and damning words: “The intent is if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.” In a very long-winded way, Dr. Birx divulged the crucial point that the United States is conflating deaths due to the coronavirus with the deaths of those who test positive for the coronavirus but die from other illnesses. That is a very big deal.
Maybe Dr. Birx did not think that anyone would pay attention to such a disturbing revelation, or perhaps she thought that what she said was not all that important. But people should be extremely concerned. America currently leads the world in coronavirus deaths but according to Dr. Birx, the coronavirus was only incidentally present in some of those recorded deaths. For instance, in the case of cardiac patients, it is plausible that some of those who died of a heart attack caused by a blocked artery were recorded as coronavirus fatalities if they just so happened to test positive for the coronavirus. This sort of unscrupulous data collection is exceedingly troublesome because it makes the disease appear more lethal than it really is, which is totally unacceptable. After an infectious disease runs its course, its virulence is assessed by the ratio of the number of people who died from the disease relative to the number of people who were infected by it. Fraudulent reporting will certainly impede an honest evaluation of the coronavirus pandemic when it is all said and done. That will have dangerous implications for future disease control plans and strategies. How can lawmakers and health professionals develop effective procedures for future outbreaks based on shambolic and dishonest data?
Equally importantly, the artificial enhancement of coronavirus fatalities actually helps to justify the controversial lockdown that is taking place while making the United States appear incompetent in its handling of the disease. Most people will not take into consideration that the United States has a lower per capita mortality rate than a number of other countries that are facing the coronavirus scourge. They will see the sky-high mortality numbers and assume that the disease is exponentially worse than they imagined, that the political establishment is totally inept, and that the disease experts are their only hope for reprieve.
Fauci (Inadvertently?) Exposes Cracks In The Armor
The funny thing is that even with all of the fraudulent numbers that are being tossed around, the IHME nevertheless had to lower its prediction to 60,000 fatalities. The current IHME prediction took the low end of the former model which was 100,000, and cut it nearly in half in spite of the exaggerated reports of coronavirus deaths. Keep in mind that the American people were initially presented with the specter of 2.1 million deaths about a month ago. That number was then reduced by a massive amount to a maximum of 240,000 deaths. Within the space of a week and half, the potential mortality estimates dropped again to 60,000. What exactly is going on here? Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the lead members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, defended the wildly fluctuating coronavirus fatality prognostications by saying that the “models are as good as the assumptions you put into them.” Well, Dr. Fauci is absolutely correct! The computer models are only as good as the fallible human being who is inputting the data that is being evaluated. That means that if a scientist is well-informed and unusually perspicacious, then the predictions that he or she makes will in all likelihood be very close to the truth. Conversely, a mediocre researcher who uses flawed data or comes to erroneous conclusions about that data will produce chaotically inaccurate models. In a similar vein, a researcher’s calculations will be distorted if he or she: happens to be biased in some way, is compromised by a conflict of interest (i.e. monetary considerations), or is driven by ulterior motives that have little to do with public health.
Dr. Birx Has Some Serious Conflicts of Interest
It seems as though Dr. Deborah Birx might fall into the category of having some financial stakes in this coronavirus situation, i.e. monetary considerations that result in a conflict of interest. When it comes to the coronavirus, there are a number of disease models to choose from. Some of them are pessimistic, while others are more sanguine. The truth is that the choice of the model is not always based on which one of them is the most accurate or which one would be best for public policy. The ultimate decision might be made on the basis of business connections and finances, which is certainly the case as pertains to the coronavirus. Out of all the models that Dr. Birx could have chosen to present to the American people, she used the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) model for her Task Force presentation on March 31st. The research behind the IHME model is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Dr. Birx sits on the board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria which happens to be largely funded by Bill Gates. Long story short, Dr. Birx had every financial incentive to promulgate the IHME model whether it was accurate or not. Especially if it predicted relatively fearsome amounts of disease fatalities. She did not have the incentive to do otherwise.
And apparently, the IHME model that Dr. Birx presented was developed by a fellow named Chris Murray, who just so happens to be the institute director of the IHME. Dr. Birx stated that Murray based his predictions on data from New York and New Jersey. Coincidentally, NY and NJ are coronavirus hotspots, with over 150,000 and 50,000 coronavirus cases respectively. So basically, Murray extrapolated information from the worst-hit regions of the United States and applied it to the entire nation to create his graphs. In other words, both of the curves reflected worst case scenarios for the country. Nonetheless, the graphic was described by Birx as being constructed by the “best computer models” even though she admitted that they were geographically biased, and seven days later, that they were somewhat artificially augmented. Dr. Birx played the American people like a fiddle! But the average American listener does not pay attention to technical minutiae and other prosaic scientific jargon. The average American viewer saw that 100,000 to 240,000 deaths were likely to occur even if they made their best efforts to avoid spreading the disease. Most viewers immediately got scared and desperately agreed to follow each and every unconstitutional policy that their local or state government decided to implement to “stop the spread.”
Lord Fauci Claims Social Distancing Is All There Is To It! But He’s Not Really Being Honest
Dr. Fauci tried to buttress the latest IHME prediction by arguing that the new projection of 60,000 deaths was the result of “mitigation things that we’re doing, this physical separation.” So Fauci wants to say that social distancing is the reason why the projections are so low compared to what they once were? What about the fact that Dr. Birx made it clear that the first IHME model that she presented had already built social distancing into its algorithm? She declared that “social distancing and other protocols” would cause the drastic flattening of the disease curve from 1.5-2.2 million deaths to 100,000-240,000 deaths. If social distancing and other relevant pandemic interventions like voluntary quarantine of infected households, closure of schools, bans on public gatherings, etc. were perfectly followed then the coronavirus pandemic was nevertheless supposed to yield a minimum of 100,000 casualties!
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force delivers remarks at a coronavirus (COVID-19) update briefing Monday, April 6, 2020, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)
So what gives? First of all, as mentioned earlier, the previous model was based on coronavirus hotspots so it was already skewed. Moreover, the United States has not been able to enforce social distancing and other means of physical separation to the degree that some other countries have because our laws forbid the abuse of government authority. This is not China where residents are forbidden to even step foot outside of their homes during a lockdown. There are only pockets of areas in the United States where the pandemic regulations approach or exceed constitutional constraints. For the most part, the cities and states have advised people to do as they are told but they have permitted considerable bending of the rules. Consequently, adherence to social distancing has varied widely between the states. A company called Unacast has used cell phone GPS location data to create a “Social Distancing Scoreboard” that shows the extent to which people are staying at home and reducing contact with other people. The results are broken down by state and county and are regularly updated online. The most recent report card from Unacast gives the United States as a whole a C+ grade for social distancing. That’s not exactly a great score. To illustrate the rather conspicuous variations in the grades, Nevada received an A-, New York received a C+, Oklahoma received a D, and South Carolina received a D-.
The inconsistency of adherence to the pandemic guidelines across the country negates the argument that social distancing is the major reason why the IHME model is now predicting 60,000 fatalities as Dr. Fauci maintained. There is a strong likelihood that the experts have been overestimating the lethality of the coronavirus. Uniform adherence to social distancing was factored into the IHME report that forecasted up to 240,000 deaths from the coronavirus. With mediocre compliance and artificially high coronavirus fatality reports, the IHME still had to readjust its model to reflect a lower than expected national mortality rate. These details strongly suggest that some factor(s) other than social distancing is/are at play. It is within the realm of possibility that the coronavirus itself is just not as deadly as some of the experts have been saying. The primary problem is that each major report or model that the disease experts have produced in the course of this pandemic seems to rattle the country to the core, even when the analyses are later debunked. The “experts” from the Labcoat Party keep nonchalantly changing the projections, which may have no conspicuous effect on their lives, but massively alters millions of other lives. Each postulation and theory emanating from bespectacled scientists in pristine and prestigious laboratories has added an additional dagger to the nation’s severely wounded frame, throwing the livelihoods of millions of people into dire straits.
We really thought that we were going to have to head to the polls to choose a candidate this November. But luckily, we won’t have to go through all that trouble. Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx have spared us the hassle of holding elections. Thanks to them, we won’t have to worry about spreading or catching the coronavirus by going out to vote!
Section II will dive even deeper into these issues, with a special focus on the star of the show, Dr. Fauci.
#Technocracy #IHME #Fatality #USnews #government #TaskForce #research #Theories #science #politics #Death #SocialDistancing #President #BillampMelindaGatesFoundation #Fauci #conflictofinterest #BillGates #Virus #Mortality #Pandemic #Birx #Evidence #doctors #Models #Unacast #SocialDistancingScoreBoard #ChrisMurray #Data #MelindaGates #WhiteHouse #UniversityofWashington
Comentários