Over the last 18 months, I have spoken to many of you about the tyrannical controls that school boards have placed upon your grandchildren, and the impact those mandates have had on their parents, your adult children. “Our daughter hasn’t been able to return to work, because she’s at home supervising remote learning—even as private schools and the public schools in Florida have been fully open all year…”, one client pleaded, echoing the frustrations that I’ve heard from dozens of you.
Two weeks ago, frustrated parents and skeptical local public health officials demanded that the CDC “show us the data” to justify their recommendation that 56 million public school children of all ages be masked for the entirety of the upcoming school year, regardless of transmission levels from one state to the other. When the CDC finally released that data, many observers were even more perplexed.
The centerpiece of the CDC’s case involved an outbreak of the Delta variant in the resort town of Provincetown, Massachusetts, the tip of Cape Cod where I grew up, over the July 4th holiday weekend. Over the course of that 3-day period (and the four weeks that followed), “Of 469 cases, 346 (74%) occurred in fully vaccinated people, and almost 80% of those cases were symptomatic. There were five hospitalizations, four among fully vaccinated people, and no deaths. Of the cases with sequence information available, 89% were from the Delta variant…moreover, vaccination coverage in Massachusetts was reported to be 69% as of July 3rd…”
So let’s analyze: If 346 of the 469 cases were among fully vaccinated individuals, that leaves 122 who were not vaccinated. The unvaccinated group had one hospitalization, while the vaccinated group had four, ratios that are almost perfectly proportional to the size of each group. The symptoms were also equally mild for both groups, and no one in either group died. Let’s conclude with what my High School Trigonometry teacher referred to as deducible truths that are “intuitively obvious even to the most casual observer”.
So P-town is safe, transmissibility peaks in about 2 weeks and drops rapidly thereafter, but the CDC is saying we need to re-mask across most of the country, mask school children for the entire school year, even as the Pentagon is mandating still-experimental, not-yet-FDA-approved vaccinations for every soldier/officer in the U.S. military. This may be political science, but it certainly isn’t biomedical science.
When 637,439 Is Really 31,872
As I’ve shared on prior occasions (and monthly in our client-only Economic/Market videos), the following quote can still be found here on the CDC’s website. It refers to all 637,439 U.S. “Covid-related” deaths to date:
“…For over 5% of these deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned on the death certificate. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death…”
This remains a stunning admission. It means that, in truth, fewer than 32,000 Americans have died solely from the virus, while the other 95% died with an average of four other causes. Per the CDC data, deaths occurring among those over age 75 represented 57% of all “Covid-related” deaths, and over 94% of all decedents also suffered from some combination of heart disease, respiratory ailment, diabetes, or obesity. Simply put, the typical 82-year-old died of a heart attack, with COPD, as an overweight diabetic, and when the autopsy was performed, they found antibodies for Covid in the decedent’s bloodwork. Is it possible that he might have lived another few months or years had he not contracted the virus? Of course, but it is also possible if not probable that he would have succumbed to his other comorbidities within a few months anyway. And, sure, most of us can probably cite several anecdotal instances of exceptions to this example, but according to the CDC’s own data, this decedent is representative of 94% of the 95% of “Covid-related” U.S. deaths of the last 20 months.
Our indecisive authoritarian public health officials in government are devaluing their own currency, first by telling us that once we’re vaccinated, we won’t need to wear a mask, and then by telling us that we need to wear a mask outdoors, even if vaccinated, to protect us from the unvaccinated. Dr. Peter Weiss just echoed the sentiments of tens of thousands of Covid-fatigued doctors (including my own) here:
“…We’re beset by misinformation and confusing recommendations from our government. Don’t wear masks, now wear masks. Wear two masks, since two is better than one. Vaccines will set you free, until they don’t. Therapeutics that can treat COVID-19 are frowned upon, and you must be evil if you even suggest the possibility. This isn’t a reliable information environment…”
Welcome to The Permanent Pandemic—504 days after Dr. Fauci first asked us for “15 days to slow the spread”—endless theatrical posturing that says if you’re not wearing a mask, I might forget to be scared, and that the superior natural immunity of over 35% of the population is insufficient protection for the rest of us—even though another 51% has been vaccinated. And if your doctor recommends against your getting the vaccine, you may not be able to dine out, go to the theater, travel by air, or return to the job you’ve worked at for 20 years, were you to adhere to that advice.
Time will tell whether we tolerate the societal transformation of our free republic into a biomedical oligarchy, wherein we allow unelected, oft-wrong “experts” to control every aspect of our lives “for our own good and the good of our communities.” There is far more at stake in the loss of our freedoms (free speech, assembly, rights of private property, protest, and medical autonomy) given the way our leaders are mismanaging this crisis—than the adverse consequences of a virus that is 99.91% survivable. We don’t suspend the Constitution because some of us are scared; we stand up to the fear-mongers, correct the misinformed, encourage the fearful, protect the vulnerable, and go on living free and fruitful lives.
Now would be good.
10 Comments
Thom,
Love your post.
Just ordered the book American Marxism by Mark Levin.
Can’t wait to read it.
Jim
Thanks Jim! I read Liberty and Tyranny when that came out several years ago and it was the best book I read that year. Mark is quite a scholar.
Thanks again for posting,
Thom
Thom,
You are correct in your analysis. The first time around we should have gone all out to protect the elder population with health problems. We should have used antivirals such as hydroxychloroquine, etc., it would have reduced the number who died. By trying to shield people with masks and by staying home away from people, we have prolonged the epidemic. We have allowed time for the virus to mutate into “variants.” It would have been best to let it run its course.
One question I do have is how many people, who had the original virus, have caught the variant?
Roland
Thanks for commenting, Roland.
From what I’ve read, treatments to mitigate symptom severity are being overlooked especially in blue states like CA and NY. While cases are way up in FL, deaths are continuing to trend lower, something the media isn’t reporting. I don’t know the answer to your question, and it’s not clear that anybody benefits from the wrong answer. As to your specific mention of hydroxychloroquine, I find it interesting that the continents of Africa and Indonesia have by far the lowest hospitalizations and deaths. What those two regions have in common is that the governments of the countries therein supply their populations with the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine. Why Dr. Fauci has minimized its efficacy, one can only guess.
I appreciate your thoughts.
Best to you and Carmen,
Thom
Thom,
Thank you for stating this so clearly. You state what I believe to be the true assessment. May others have the courage to also state the truth.
I hear so many stories about serious or deadly affects of the vaccines. Do you have an insight on those?
Louise
Thanks for your kind compliments, Louise. You may want to watch the video in this link, as it’s concise and easy to understand without talking over our heads with medical complexity.
Best,
Thom
Thom,
Provincetown is not showing us much, too little of a sample to draw any conclusions.
However, if you look at the CDC Data from Census you will see that our death rate increased 545,600 from all causes in 2020 compared to 2019 or 2018 when we had no COVID but had all other causes were in effect. 2020 was not representative of a full year of COVID deaths either as there were very few in the first three months. When you see the data from April 2020 to April 2021 this number is much higher, indicating that the difference from COVID is closer to double this number in that period. It only dropped when vaccines became available.
Gary
Hello Gary,
Thanks for commenting—thoughtfully as always! You are correct that the initial Provincetown sample of 469 cases was small, but by the end of the month the cases had risen to over 900. When a polling organization polls registered voters on an issue, they typically sample around 900-1000 respondents with a margin of error of <3%. My point was simply that the data-centerpiece of the CDC’s recommendation (that we fully mask 56 million school children for the next nine months) was entirely based on the Provincetown experience. I agree that to adversely impact that many children (with “depression, anxiety, and suicide, along with decreased academic performance and socialization”) over so small a sampling would indeed have been a disproportional solution and the very definition of heavy-handed! As such, parents are right to object since the science is on their side.
Did you happen to click on the hyperlink to Israel and the UK? In Israel they had over 90% of their entire population vaccinated and yet nearly 80% of those hospitalized had received one or both vaccine shots. Provincetown may be a small sample, in which case it’s ridiculous that the CDC is basing their recommendations on it, but Israel and the UK are countries, not towns, and they’ve had the same experience: Mostly symptomatic cases among both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, minimally short hospital stays for both groups, and far fewer deaths than with the original Alpha variant.
You’re also correct in that if you measure deaths from April 2020 to April 2021 the number is much higher, yet you say that deaths “only dropped when the vaccines became available.” Well, the vaccines became available in October of 2020 (a month before the election) so they were available during the last 6-7 months of that 12-month span. Daily deaths peaked at 4489 on January 12th. You can’t have it both ways, saying on the one hand that a more accurate one-year term runs from April to April, conceding that the cases dropped significantly after the vaccines became available, and then also ignore that the vaccines became available at the midpoint of that 12-month span.
In any case, my central point was that of the 639,640 deaths that occurred from the beginning of the pandemic to now, only 5% were Covid-only according to their death certificates. The other 95% had an average of four other comorbidities. Remember when, before Covid, when we‘d go to the doctor not feeling well, and after examining us he’d tell us, “It’s a virus, so it’ll just have to run its course”—and then gave us a prescription for therapeutics just to ease our symptoms? Whatever happened to that realistic honesty? ‘Virus gonna virus’, my friend.
I appreciate your comments!
Thom
P.S.: Check out the world-renowned doctors who are now saying that the pandemic is largely over. This is consistent with both deaths and cases in Florida dropping dramatically in the last 10 days—even as the hysteria aimed at the governor there continues.
Thom,
I look at this Covid “porn” as a means for the left wingers to further keep our personal lives under control.
Dr. Fauci is a perfect example of an overeducated bureaucrat who probably has never treated a patient, and definitely lacks sound judgement capabilities.
Between him and the fools at CDC they have destroyed any credibility the government health agencies had.
It’s easy to see why people are hesitant to be vaccinated with these clowns in charge.
Jim
Hello Jim,
As always, thanks for chiming in. As I said in my post, our health care bureaucrats are undermining their own credibility via the many contradictory advisories they’ve issued in the last 20 months, confusion/contradictions that definitely contribute to vaccine hesitancy. Still, with Israel and the UK at 90% and 86% vaccinated (compared to the U.S. at 51%), they still had over 80% of their recent Delta variant cases occurring among their fully-vaccinated citizens. To me, THAT is an even bigger justification for such hesitancy. And, no, they can’t claim that “at least” the vaccine contributed to reduced symptom severity because the unvaccinated (in Provincetown, Israel, and the UK) had similarly mild symptoms, just as few/brief hospital stays, and just as few deaths. The final point is that all of these “clowns”, as you so delicately put it, continue to ignore the natural immunity enjoyed by over 35% of the U.S. population whom we either know have had Covid (and fully recovered), or project as having had it without knowing so and who are also immune.
Best to you and Cathy,
Thom