Current Covid Hysteria

“Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.” That’s a truth that Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784) — the great English poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer — appears to have articulated long ago.

The vested interests of the few and the credulity of the masses conspire to kill whatever is the relevant truth. The war against the Chinese Covid-19 virus is no exception. The fake and the false have reigned with little opposition. Unsurprisingly, it’s the masses’ inability to reason and ignorance that is to blame for this misfortune. That sounds elitist but it is an unavoidable conclusion.

Various vaccines have been quite effective in combating the original virus and the variants that emerged in the last few months. The data indicate that the virus is effectively under control, and that if present trends of vaccinations continue, Covid-19 will be just a minor medical problem, about as lethal as the seasonal cold viruses that are globally endemic. Only the insanely stupid and criminally incompetent would mandate the shutting down of the global economy because of cold viruses.

But regardless of that fact, bureaucrats and politicians will continue to milk this Covid-19 cow for all it’s worth to grab more power and step up their tyrannical control. Sure, viruses kill. But the lockdowns from an overactive bureaucracy needlessly kill more than the viruses do.

(Just by the way, I think Dr Fauci should be tried as a war criminal and punished appropriately. He’s the biggest fraud in modern medical history. He’s got blood on his hands, and there’s a good deal of evidence that he partly funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain of function research into corona viruses.)

With that preamble, I present to you two articles of interest. The first is from FEE titled, “Despite ‘Delta’ Alarmism, US COVID Deaths Are at Lowest Level Since March 2020, Harvard and Stanford Professors Explain.”

That article notes that “the Delta variant has been spreading in the US for months now, and deaths have remained relatively flat, in part due to widespread vaccination.” Here’s more:

“It is striking that COVID mortality is at such low levels despite the fact that we are seeing an increase in cases of late,” Stanford Professor of Medicine Dr. Jay Bhattacharya tells FEE. “By immunizing the elderly and many other vulnerable people, we have provided them with excellent protection against severe disease in case they get infected. Also contributing is widespread natural immunity from recovered COVID patients. Though cases may rise, deaths will no longer follow in proportion. We have effectively defanged the disease with our successful vaccination rollout.”

Furthermore:

“We should be declaring a great and resounding success,” Bhattacharya told FEE in conclusion. “The COVID emergency is over. We still need to take COVID seriously, and there are still vulnerable people here and abroad left to vaccinate. But we can start to treat it as one disease among many that afflict people rather than an all-consuming threat.”

In that article, there’s a graph from OurWorldinData.org.

Click on the graph above to get to an interactive version (opens in a new tab.) If you place your cursor over the graph, you will get data related to specific dates. For example, at its peak, the number of reported daily deaths in the US due to Covid-19 per million population was 10.35 on Jan 13th 2021. On July 27th (two days ago), that was down to 0.90 deaths daily. That reduction is attributed to the fact that nearly all of the vulnerable population has been vaccinated.

Here’s another bit of information that is relevant to India’s Covid-19 deaths. On the same page as that graph, on the left hand side you will find “Add another country” column. Add India and you will get this graph:

The graph unambiguously shows that India has had lower death rates than the US, except for the period from April 28th to June 30th. Use your cursor to compare the data for India and US. India’s peak occurred on May 21, 2021 when the daily deaths per million was 3.04.

On July 27, India’s number was only 0.37 (compared to the US’s 0.90). On Jan 13th, 2021, the US number was 10.35, compared to India’s 0.14. India’s number was 2 orders of magnitude lower than the US.

The bottom line is that in India, the virus directly killed a lot in absolute terms but nothing spectacular compared to other countries in relative numbers. My claim is that India will have tens of millions of deaths not due to Covid-19 but because of the insanely bad policies of the corrupt bureaucrats. The economic disaster caused by the Indian government will kill more than the Chinese virus ever could.

Moving on, here’s a very important article that must be read. I am surprised that the Washington Post published the article. Why? Because it is numerate and informed and not given to Covid hysteria. Perhaps a momentary lapse of un-reason but let’s be thankful for small mercies. I guess it will be taken down soon enough after Dr Fauci gets to hear about it.

It’s an opinion piece by Marc Thiessen titled “Vaccinated Americans are more likely to die from a lightning strike than covid. Don’t bring back restrictions.” A few quotes:

According to the CDC, as of July 19, a grand total of 4,072 vaccinated Americans had been hospitalized with symptomatic breakthrough infections, out of more than 161 million who have been fully vaccinated. That is a breakthrough hospitalization rate of less than 0.003 percent. Better still, of those hospitalized, only 849 have died of covid-19. That means the death rate from those breakthrough infections is 0.0005 percent.

To put that in perspective, your chance of dying from a lightning strike is .0007 percent, and your chance of dying from a seasonal flu is 0.1 percent. If you’re vaccinated, you have a much greater chance of dying from a hornet, wasp or bee string, a dog attack, a car crash, drowning, sunstroke, or choking on food than you do of dying from covid-19.

It goes on to stress that what “this means is that for otherwise healthy vaccinated people — and those who have natural immunity from previous infection — the chance of dying of covid-19 is close to zero.” And concludes simply:

That battle has been won. We may need boosters down the line. And if new variants emerge, mRNA technology can quickly be adapted to target and defeat them. The period when we were defenseless against the virus is over. It’s time to live our lives again.

We should get back to living our lives. But will the evil incarnate Dr Fauci and the power hungry control freaks ever let us? No, unless we fight for our most precious possession — more precious than life itself — Freedom.