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Did the New York Times just admit Covid deaths were overcounted?
Writer David Leonhardt made the startling admission in a recent column
A recent New York Times article contains a rather surprising piece of information. Discussing the significant decline in official Covid deaths in the US, writer David Leonhardt claims that the actual number is almost certainly even lower. “The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had the virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death,” Leonhardt writes, noting that even the CDC’s own data shows that almost one-third of recent official Covid deaths have fallen into this category.
Leonhardt adds this very nonchalantly, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. In fact, the issue was verboten until not too long ago: throughout the pandemic, claims that the official number of Covid-19 hospitalisations and deaths was likely to be inflated — due to the use of very questionable statistical methods — were dismissed as groundless conspiracy theories. It’s good to see another taboo fall, but the real question is why it took so long, considering that it became apparent almost from day one that governments were adopting a very “liberal” approach to attributing deaths.
As Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under Donald Trump from 2020 to 2021, declared: “if someone dies with Covid-19, we are counting that as a Covid-19 death.” The same approach was adopted in most Western countries. This was rather surprising, especially in light of the fact that the overwhelming majority of “Covid-19 deaths” were patients with pre-existing illnesses (hypertension, diabetes, heart conditions, and so on) for which a direct causality from Covid was impossible to ascertain.
This was a completely novel approach. Until then, the standard method had been to consider the true cause of death the underlying disease — if someone suffering from end-stage cancer contracts pneumonia and dies, the cause of death is still cancer. Indeed, in March 2020 Walter Ricciardi, Scientific Advisor to the Italian Minister of Health for the Coronavirus Pandemic, reported that “on re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12% of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus.” Yet they were all counted as Covid-19 deaths. And the same thing was happening everywhere.
This is what came to be known as the death “by/with Covid” debate. Even worse, though, it soon became standard practice in virtually all the Western countries to classify every deceased person who had recently (or even not so recently) tested positive for Covid as a “Covid death”, even if the death was manifestly unrelated to the virus. Indeed, in several countries it wasn’t just fatalities with a positive Covid-19 test that entered the ranks, but also those where Covid-19 was simply suspected — as per World Health Organization guidelines.
As Ngozi Ezike, the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) Director, put it in April 2020: “technically, even if you died of a clear alternate cause, but you had Covid at the same time, it’s still listed as a Covid death. So, everyone who’s listed as a Covid death doesn’t mean that was the cause of death, but they had Covid at the time of death”. It would later emerge, in one American county, that “clear alternate causes” of death could include anything from injury and poisoning to motorcycle accidents and gunshot wounds.
So, overall, it’s safe to say that Covid-19 hospitalisations and deaths were massively overcounted — as even the New York Times now admits. This raises a number of very disturbing issues: was this simply the result of authorities erring on the side of caution by rounding up numbers, or was there a deliberate attempt to inflate the figures in order to stoke panic and fear in the population? And even more importantly, if many of the excess deaths weren’t caused by Covid itself, there’s only one logical conclusion: that they were caused by the political response to it.
The answer is simple really – fear. Govts used fear to make people compliant.
And what about excess deaths? Why is no one interested in seriously investigating this?
How naive of Mr. Fazi to fail to mention the real reason.
The real answer in the U.S. at least, has to do with the additional money hospitals received for caring for a patient with Covid, Always follow the money!
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fact-check-medicare-hospitals-paid-more-covid-19-patients-coronavirus/3000638001/
As a side note, it is revealing that this USA Today article was certain to state that there is no evidence of hospitals inflating the COVID19 numbers in order to increase their payments. Had to laugh at that one.
I think the whole covid issue showed us a few things. One, it showed us just how corrupt, dishonest, and authoritarian the governments were, and also it showed us how fearful people have a sort of consensus filter where rather than asking “is this true?” they ask “is this safe to think and say?”. So, we found out that consensus could be manufactured, from above. If on every screen people saw the same thing was repeated over and over again, they simply believe it to be so. Because it’s safest to belong to the majority tribe, and the impression is that the argument is over, this is the right position, and anyone who says otherwise is dangerous, misinforming people, evil, needing to be stopped, censored, etc.
By extension, and I agree with you, we can have some sympathy for the ordinary Russian who is subject to the same narrative control on a daily basis.
you don’t have to look to Russia – just turn on your own TV and witness the hysteria around hot weather and wild fires in Europe over the past few weeks. We are being subjected to all the same unethical psychological manipulation techniques once again, blantently and shamelessly.
Amen. It’s as if we never experienced a hot summer before. It’s summer!!!
It’s not just the hysteria around hot weather and wild fires over the past few weeks. For many years we in the UK have been subjected to a relentless daily menu of propaganda by the BBC in relation to climate change (whatever that means), racism, misogyny, feminism, disability, decolonisation, white supremacy, toxic masculinity, blah, blah, blah – the Diversity, Inclusion & Equality agenda divided into the oppressed vs the oppressors. This brainwashing is not confined to regular news bulletins, but hourly infests every aspect of programming from classical music to fiction to science. And we, the public, meekly continue to pay the annual licence ‘fee’ (a tax in any other name) that pays billions into the budget of this so-called public service broadcaster. The independent broadcasting sector is no better.
I suspect the Russian media is more reliable than what we get fed
Or Ukraine. Or any in the west who supports the war. No one is getting accurate information.
And yet people continue to believe the climate catastrophe narrative – the all purpose excuse to get people to do what the progressive elite tell them to do.
And this is why I condemned government overreach during the COVID-scare. Functional governments quell panic by presenting factual evidence to their populations. Instead politicians colluded with experts and journalists to spread fear and hatred toward those who objected to enforced vaccination and lockdown mandates.
I think the difference this time was that they – globally- discussed the matter and the useful idiots that lead us were convinced by those they sought counsel from that this was the ideal opportunity to build back better and to usher in the biometric information passport for all scheme via mass vaccinations etc etc.hence the reason to keep the fear going long after it was clear that the main threat had passed.
Omicron made it clear that they were desperate to get compliance. The variant was identified by a South African doctor after it had first made its appearance in Botswana. She strove to make it clear that this variant though virulent was relatively mild and she was bewildered by the hysteria Western governments and media confected. Truly despicable behaviour and surely criminal to create mass fear and panic for no reason. But then they – along with the WHO – had been busy for some time creating the opinion that to believe in immunity via infection was some kind of right wing conspiracy theory and of course they wanted to get those boosters ‘into arms’. After all they had stockpiled millions upon millions of doses.
Pharmaceutical companies pay mad stacks to buy politicians, and they are the media’s biggest advertisers. Money is always the motivator.
…….and it worked !!! One could wonder wether people had a brain for a critical examination of simple facts. Even today, some conversations can turn ugly.
Thank God I was able to seek refuge in Sweden right at the outbreak of this…….flue like illness after the Norwegians had kicked everyone of us foreigners out of their country. The only men on the planet who cared about facts and no hysterical train of thoughts, were Anders Tegnell and Johann Gieseke. I was there 3 months and then went back to France were I could witness how a country could be turned into a padded cell.
The most dystopian countries were by far, Norway, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand and Australia were in Victoria, they even send the police to arrest a pregnant woman who had dare questioning the logic of lockdown. It can be seen on YouTube.
My mistake……I forgot China…..one for the books.
Then of course, the media lapdogs hammered the scare mongering message day in and day out.
Good job Thomas. But why pose that final rhetorical question? All sceptics (you too no doubt) raged at this naked subversion of medical ethics and statistics at the time; who can forget the shock when we realised they were counting covid positives who were hit or killed by cars 2 weeks later?? Literally beyond belief. And sinister. You, we, all know this was just one part of a conscious State directed Project Fear to exaggerate the scale of the epidemic and to enforce the tyrannical shutdown of a society. THE question is why so many arms of the British State – the BBC, our legal system, doctors and Scientists all became de facto Vichy collaborators in an NHS First Dystopia for two long years (i.e beyond the First Media induced hysteria?), by supporting and failing to expose THIS base and basic manipulation of the Truth – and all the others too?? Sure, they all got rich wfh on the coercion. The wretched Boris and Sturgeon got to look Churchillian and ride high in the polls as people freaked out. But why are these thousands not now shamed? Why are all involved – State, public health,, ofcom, bbc, lawyers – not feeling The Fear themselves in 2023…of justice, criminal police investigation and public retribution?
Because they are our ruling class.
‘or was there a deliberate attempt to inflate the figures in order to stoke panic and fear in the population?’
But we know that was the case, there is already overwhelming evidence for it. Doctors who dared to speak out were censored and their reputations trashed. Bizarre that just because one of the main gas lighters, the NYT, has let the truth slip we now feel we can legitimately discuss this organised terrorism of populations by their own governments.
Here is a useful test of the Project Hysteria. Ask anyone under 40 this question: what do you think the average age of covid death was? Remember the official answer will be inflated by the covid by/with. None ever guess less than 50. Always 40s. When you tell them it was over 80, they are stunned and sickened. That was not what Newspeak told them about a deafly contagion threatening all. That makes no sense of the lockdown and sacrifice. And the children?? We closed their schools didn’t we…
Well, I’ve just done this, and 9 out of 9 were absolutely clear that the average age was ‘above 75’, ‘over 80’, and so on. Where do you live? Do they not watch/read the news?
Tosh. A. Try younger, 20s. B. The average age of death stats are/were never ever presented on the News so I reckon you have just used an upmarket Unherd demo data set, hardly representative of public at large. C. London. D. Do you really believe the threat level of covid was reported objectively, fearlessly with no Project Fear and exaggeration?
Late response, sorry….No, not tosh, just data; A I went with your recommendation, all <40, 2 of which in their 20s; B oh yes they were! Not as headlines, as I recall, but you didn’t have to dig very deep, you just had to be interested; C no, rural Suffolk, UK; D no way! But that wasn’t your prompt.
In Miami Beach a police officer told me they were listing Covid as cause of death for people who died in traffic accidents. He was just obeying orders. As Thomas asks, where was this utterly deceitful, hysteria-raising, pan-Western policy push actually coming from? Why did politicians connive in it?
Complete fantasy! What drives you to post such utter nonsense?
Time and opposable thumbs.
Big Pharma shares are I believe the 6th most popular investments for USA congresspeople…..as always follow the money!!
“‘The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had the virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death,’ Leonhardt writes.”
Gawd I love it when liberals abruptly begin spouting as though they’ve just discovered it something we’ve been saying for years and for which we’ve been condemned, shouted down, and officially deplatformed and then pretend they never did any such thing.
The deaths were clearly inflated all along.
Does this admission mean I wasn’t “out there killing people”–commonplace rhetoric at the time–after all, with my refusal to comply with mandates, guidelines, etc? Too bad, I was enjoying the notoriety!
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
– H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
It becomes clear that the scare-demic – whatever else it was – was an imposition of authoritarian rule by a ruling class of “experts,” wholeheartedly supported by politicians too cowardly to speak out against the media panic-inducing fear campaign. And as the public now know, it was also a highly successful exercise in the suppression of the truth both written and spoken, enforced by a twitter mob easily roused by a post from an expert denouncing any facts that ran counter to “their truth.” And society will pay the price economically, and on many other levels, possibly for generations.
…was there a deliberate attempt to inflate the figures in order to stoke panic and fear in the population?
Without a doubt. That’s what governments do.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken
Sorry, Tor, you beat me to the punch.
Great minds think alike.
Yes, many “COVID deaths” were, in a technical sense, caused by other factors such as pneumonia, cancer, gunshot wounds, or goats, but in a deeper, more transcendent sense, they were caused by COVID.
Most weren’t. Let’s not give these people any get out of jail free cards.
I think RWH might have had sarcastic intent?
Conservatives should never attempt humour – you just aren’t any good at it.
Nah, their memes are superior…
We need to put them in jail first.
Yes most assuredly so. Gravity – although technically the agent of death in leaps from tall buildings – must be a secondary consideration as Covid concerns are surely the most implicated in the origin of such destructive impulses.
Just put Covid as the cause of death there Bob.
I believe RWH is saying that the RESPONSE to Covid was responsible for numerous deaths.
I’m assuming this is sarcasm. If so, your sarcasm needs some work
According to President Biden, over 100 people died during the Pandemic.
The official record rewrites the number….
‘And there’s still — we’re still feeling the profound loss of the pandemic. As I mentioned, we have over 100 [1 million] people dead. That’s 100 [1 million] empty chairs around the kitchen table. ‘
The question is what can be done about it to avoid the same response next time?
The first step is to realize that neither governments, nor the mainstream media nor the medical establishment are to be trusted. As always, the most harm is inflicted by those claiming to be doing the most good.
There’s another perfectly plausible interpretation, one which relies less on paranoia and conspiracy theories than some of the more far-fetched theories being suggested.
That is: governments decided to go the full lock-down route (perhaps panicked into it by scary scenarios where hundreds of thousands of people were going to die), and, having committed to that route, it obviously made sense to inflate the number of deaths attributable to Covid, to justify the policy.
The easiest way to do that was to conflate deaths by and deaths with Covid.
Personally, I felt the whole thing was an from day 1, but of course many disagree. The problem to me was the initial panic, not the subsequent attempts to justify that panic.
Excess deaths have been published. The BMJ quotes a figure of 3.1%. WHO figures are substantially higher and in line with the fantasy figures they quoted during the pandemic
If Covid deaths were over counted, where did all the excess deaths come from?
Unreliable – as is everything Fazi writes.
The UK criterion was counting any death with COVID on the death certificate. Which means that COVID was listed as either the main or a contributory cause of death. When there is more than one cause involved deciding which is the cause is anywhere from hard to impossible. The lockdown sceptics clearly wanted to count only cases where there was no other possible cause, to artificially minimise the number counted, and Fazi has managed to cherry pick some quotes (in or out of context) to back his cause. So what?
An illustrative example: If a man with respiratory disease dies after a police officer has kneeled on his neck for ten minutes, would you say that the police officer was irrelevant, and he died of natural causes? I would say that he likely would not have died except for the actions of the police officer, and so the police officer likely killed him. The same with COVID – a lot of people would not have died except for the infection, whatever other contributory causes you may find.
As for how to count them, at the beginning it made sense to count everyone with a compatible cause of death and COVID antibodies as a COVID death. since the antibodies strongly suggested that COVID was involved. It might not be that accurate, but it was the best that could be done, and it gave a reasonable estimate; determing the exact cause case by case would have required spending months of investigation on every single death. Which was obviously impossible. Now that COVID antibodies are very common and COVID-caused deaths are rarer, the probablilty that a ‘death with COVID antibodies’ is indeed caused (in part) by COVID is lower, and the estimate becomes too unreliable. Which is all standard statistics.
If you die within 28 days of getting a positive COVID test, the cause of death is COVID, even if you subsequently tested negative.
Obviously this doesn’t work for vaccines. If you die within 28 days of getting a vaccination, the cause of death will not be the vaccine.
Explain why in e.g Ireland the average number of co-morbidities of people who died from Covid was 4.2. That suggests victims were already in very, very precarious health. Now go tally the numbers of people who died with Covid who had no co-morbiodities. Very, very few. Any fool can tell Covid was not dangerous to healthy people, and unlikely to kill anyone just by itself, the statistics are screaming it out loud.
This was known from early on. The Princess Cruise liner was marooned off LA. Perfect controlled conditions to observe the spread of Covid. No crew members (younger) seriously ill or dead. Everyone affected seriously of that died were elderly passengers in their 80s already in poor health.
So the prevailing message Covid affected everyone and posed a threat to all was a huge lie, pure and simple.
There is a bit of an inconsistency here. You say that since most people who died of COVID had other things wrong with them (that is how you get average), COVID is only a threat to people who were about to die anyway. The smaller number of young and fit people who do die do not count. Meanwhile many on your side get immensely excited about a single anecdote about a young and strong athlete who dies suddenly, after possibly being vaccinated, which is supposed to prove that vaccines are dangerous to everybody. Here the rare cases do count, apparently.
But anyway your question is easy to answer. Most, but not all, people who died from COVID were among the tens of millions of people in just the UK who were old or had some health problem. Sure. They still had many years of life expetancy left, though. People make a lot of fuss over comparing the average age of COVID victims with the average life expectancy, about 82 years. They just forget to consider that people who make it to 82 on the average have another ten years of life left. If you think that it is OK to let the older and sicker people die, to save the younger and stronger from the annoyance of having to take precautions, by all means say so. It is quite reasonable to balance the costs and benefits on both sides of the equation. You just have to be honest enough admit openly to which people you want to let die, and how many years of their life you are sacrificing.
We shouldn’t be doubting the NYT, should we?
I do not. In fact I heard something similar about COVID claims in Denmark over a year ago. The way of counting COVID deaths were only ever an estimate, since it would take immense resources to decide the exact cause of deaths for everybody. At the height of the epidemic it was a reasonably good estimate (as I say above), but now more people have COVID antibodies from past sickness and the disease kills fewer, overestimation is a more serious problem. But it was never in the evidence that COVID deaths were wildly overestimated – as the anti-vaxxers would have us believe. Even today, the NYT claims, two thirds of the estimated COVID deaths are believed to be COVID deaths.
If anything has changed it is that now it is no longer a matter of life and death whether anti-vaxxers manage to ruin public health policy, we do not have to be so careful about not giving them anything they can misinterpret.
In your fourth sentence I would say that you’re making a strong case for the herd immunity argument.
You have a really unpleasant way of arguing which is to focus on making derogatory comments about motives. This reveals prejudice on your part which confirms what those you criticise suspect. That people like you are so sure you are morally superior to those you oppose that different rules apply.
No, I am not being nice. But I react badly to two things.
People who claim that it was obvious to any moron from the start that COVID was not dangerous to healthy people and that the only people dying were those who were moribund already. First the evidence for the COVID claim is not there – you should not make such enormous claims without evidence. Second it was quite clearly *not* obvious, since most people thought otherwise. When people say that, they are claiming that they are the only intelligent people in a universe of morons. I answer them accordingly
Anyone who proposes far-reaching policies without taking responsibility for the likely consequences. Like those who wanted to take no precautions against COVID but choose simply to assume away the cost in extra deaths and clogged hospitals, Or to put their faith in the Barrington declaration or other unlikely isolation schemes, without considering that none of them could ever have worked in practice.
I will give a respectful hearing to people who argue that we should have done it differently, but who admit that this was a difficult decision with some good reasons on either side. Or to people like Charles Stanhope who do think that we ought to have let the older and weaker die from COVID but who is willing to say so openly rather than hiding behind a pretence that his policies would not have had consequences.
You are displaying a considerable amount of ignorance here in the way medicines generally are assessed in terms of safety. When a young person dies or is significantly injured (e.g. myocarditis) following vaccination that is a tragedy because nothing would have happened to them had they not been vaccinated and the risk of death and hospitalization for young people following a covid infection was negligible.
As for anti-vaxxers, many who objected to the COVID vaccines, the mandates, the way they were tested and the manner or lack thereof their safety was assessed, were not anti-vax per se but objected specifically to the COVID vaccines. The two mRNA vaccines were given EUAs in the US based on a critical trial which claimed a 95% protection against symptomatic covid (not that that figure lasted very long as the efficacy of the vaccines rapidly waned to next to useless). However, the trials never looked at hospitalization and death due to COVID. If you look at the trial results carefully, you will see that for both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the number of deaths in the trials was slightly larger in the vaccinated arm than in the control arm. That should raise alert signals all over the place: there is no point in having a vaccine that protects against COVID, for example, if it increases the risk of death from other causes (e.g. cardiovascular events).
As an aside, and even Fauci admitted this in the last paper that he published, the likelihood of the COVID vaccine actually working and preventing infection was close to zero. The reason is really obvious: vaccines administered systemically provide humoral immunity but what is required to stave off upper respiratory tract infections is mucosal immunity which is not provided by the vaccines. Mucosal immunity to future infections, however, is afforded subsequent to an actual SARS-Cov2 infection.
This leaves me with two alternatives: Either I believe that is was blindingly obvious to any thinking person that the COVID vaccines and the entire approach to managing the disease was totally rubbish, and that all the people who took the desicions were wither evil or raving idiots. Or I believe that you are mistrepreseiting the situation. I opt for the latter, since the former seems too fantastic. But if you can give me a link to Fauci’s latest paper I shall read it with interest.
Why don’t you go to Pubmed and look it up. Stop being lazy.
Why don’t you just tell me – if it is real you must have it at your fingertips. Could it be that it does not actually say what you claim, and you do not want to make it too easy for me to find out? Stop being obstructive.
Why ‘too fantastic’? The vaccines failed to prevent both infection and transmissibility. Did they prevent the infected from dying? Hard to say. Again, herd immunity.
You are displaying a considerable lack of knowledge here in the way medicines generally are assessed in terms of safety. When a young person dies or is significantly injured (e.g. myocarditis) following vaccination that is a tragedy because nothing would have happened to them had they not been vaccinated and the risk of death and hospitalization for young people following a covid infection was negligible.
As for anti-vaxxers, many who objected to the COVID vaccines, the mandates, the way they were tested and the manner or lack thereof their safety was assessed, were not anti-vax per se but objected specifically to the COVID vaccines. The two mRNA vaccines were given EUAs in the US based on a critical trial which claimed a 95% protection against symptomatic covid (not that that figure lasted very long as the efficacy of the vaccines rapidly waned to next to useless). However, the trials never looked at hospitalization and death due to COVID. If you look at the trial results carefully, you will see that for both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the number of deaths in the trials was slightly larger in the vaccinated arm than in the control arm. That should raise alert signals all over the place: there is no point in having a vaccine that protects against COVID, for example, if it increases the risk of death from other causes (e.g. cardiovascular events).
As an aside, and even Fauci admitted this in the last paper that he published, the likelihood of the COVID vaccine actually working and preventing infection was close to zero. The reason is really obvious: vaccines administered systemically provide humoral immunity but what is required to stave off upper respiratory tract infections is mucosal immunity which is not provided by the vaccines. Mucosal immunity to future infections, however, is afforded subsequent to an actual SARS-Cov2 infection.
Spare us the moral preaching. No one advocated not taking steps to protect the elderly and infirm, just not putting the world under house arrest to protect the vast majority who did not need protection from the virus. Also, blithely asserting that 82 year olds have an average of 10 years more to live is absurd.
I’m glad Rasmus that you have now turned into an expert pathologist and physician. Best not to speak of things you know nothing about, especially when you convey a tone of such absolute certainty and the correctness of what you’re saying.
There is a huge difference between the proximal cause of death and the actual cause of death. e.g. If you have somebody with end-stage leukemia, the chances are the proximal cause of death will not be the leukemia but bacterial pneumonia. However, that pneumonia would never have killed the patient had they not had end-stage leukemia.
So, for example, consider deaths in nursing homes in the US attributed to COVID. The fact is that the mean life expectancy upon entering a nursing home in the US is about 6 months, and nobody enters a nursing home in the US 9different in the UK though) unless they can no longer cope at home (including assisted living, the presence of caregivers, etc…). Those people in nursing homes generally die of influenza-like upper respiratory tract infections leading to secondary bacterial pneumonia. Consequently, a very large percentage of people who died in nursing homes and whose death was attributed to COVID would have died of any influenza-like infection.
Incidentally, it would also appear that secondary bacterial pneumonia subsequent to the viral pneumonia cause by COVID was the direct proximal cause of death in many patients, and had the attending doctors not been so focussed on COVID and blindly treated COVID with things like remdesivir (which was entirely ineffective), many of those patients could simply have been saved by the appropriate use of antibiotics. A real tragedy.
Ultimately it is the available evidence that counts, Not the credentials of the speaker. Having an MD, or a PhD, or working in the health sector, as some people here like to boast about, does not prevent you from being biased, ignorant, or foolish – or just plain wrong.
I’d say we mostly agree about the difficulty of determining the cause of death when several causes coincide. Which cause is selected as the actual cause must to some extent be arbitrary, but surely the test should be: if you remove just one cause from the equation, what would have happened then? With George Floyd (my example) odds are he would have lived for years if no policemen had knelt on his neck. With your leukeamia patient odds are that he would have died in short order anyway even if that bacterial pneumonia had been cured.
Which brings us down to brass tacks. I am sure that a number of people died from COVID who were not long for this world anyway. Just like I am sure that there were people who died after having been wrongly treated by their doctors (even though the doctors, too, were expert physicians, no?). I’d say the relevant question – which is not answered by your anecdotes or Fazi’s – is: how many years of life were lost to COVID? And how many years could have been saved by ignoring COVID and treating other conditions instead (which seems to be what you are recommending?)? In the absence of direct evidence the safe choice is to go with the judgement of the established profession (that is the WHO, the SAGE and independent SAGE) who presumably have read the literature – and not with a collection of rebellious mavericks and conspiracy theorists.
Of course the final argument is direct evidence. So: where is your evidence that overall COVID caused very little loss of lived years, or that ignoring the COVID and just giving antibiotics would have been a better treatment plan? If you have links to those data please provide them – I might be convinced. Until then I shall prefer to put my trust in the WHO, CDC, SAGE etc. – who collectively have more MDs, PhDs and generally credentialled individuals than your side has.
Your last paragraph displays a complete lack of appreciation of what good medicine entails. You don’t prescribe antibiotics blindly. Likewise you don’t prescribe remdesivir blindly. One needs to consider each patient as an individual and not look over stuff, especially obvious stuff such as secondary bacterial pneumonia. Incidentally, the major cause of death during the 1918 flu pandemic was not the actual flu but secondary bacterial pneumonia. And again that was discovered by examining histology slides quite recently in a paper where one of the authors was none other than Fauci.
And to blindly follow authority shows a complete lack of independent and critical thinking. Especially when the WHO, SAGE and especially independent SGAE have been wrong at every single step during the pandemic. This masks – no evidence for their effectiveness in the community; lockdowns – completely pointless, especially when preventing people from going outdoors where transmission is close to zero; school shutdown – pointless given that children are not impacted. The only correct approach would have been to follow the recommendations of the Great Barrington declaration written by those so-called “fringe epidemiologists (as put by Francis Collins), from Oxford, Harvard and Stanford: namely focus on protecting those most at risk (i.e. the elderly). And that this was the correct approach is clearly evidenced by the outcome in Sweden.
Comparing Derrick Chauvin deliberately choking off George Floyd’s oxygen supply to someone being infected by COVID-19 is ludicrously misleading. In the first instance, Floyd’s death, despite the drugs in his system, can only be attributed to one cause. In the second instance, you’re willfully ignoring the motivations of the governments and health officials in creating worldwide panic over the pandemic.
Well Rasmus, you’ve really given yourself away here as a WHO/CDC/SAGE troll. You cannot seriously believe, after all that has occurred in the last three years, that the only arbiters of truth are ‘the experts’.
Today on UnHerd:
Today on UnHerd
24th September 2023
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