Mainstream media outlets continue to do their jobs as the ruling class pulls the strings. The New York Times is now claiming that “much more aggressive shutdowns” are needed or COVID-19 will kill one million Americans.
Isn’t this fear-mongering getting old? It should be abundantly clear that those who are desperate to keep their power are needing the public to be afraid of everything. The article published by The New York Times cites no source, but Americans, by and large, have rejected logic and reason in exchange for horrifying levels of fear.
The editorial warns, “well over a million” Americans “may ultimately die” from COVID-19. The paper does not cite a source for that estimate, which seems highly implausible based on the death toll so far, projections for the next few months, the gap between total infections and confirmed cases, and a crude case-fatality rate that continues to fall.
According to Reason Magazine, independent data scientist Youyang Gu, who has a good track record of predicting COVID-19 fatalities, is currently projecting about 231,000 deaths in the United States by November 1. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects 295,000 deaths by December 1. Assuming those projections prove to be about right, the Times is predicting that the death toll will quadruple during the months before an effective vaccine can be deployed, which might happen early next year.
The Times wants a six to eight-week hard lockdown while noting that Americans may be already tired of obeying the commands of tyrants for something that has turned out to be statically negligent, EVEN IF you believe the numbers being reported on by the media are accurate.
This is nothing more than fear-based propaganda, and that should be obvious. However, that does not mean preparations should cease. Things are going to get more interesting before this year is over. It’s hard to say what’s in store for us, but those with a grip around our throats won’t release it without a fight.
Up here in Maskachusetts, in the Berkshire Hills, we have a new form of fascism that might well be called “phasism” as our Governor Charlie Baker phases out our freedoms and our economic life. Banning music and theater and Tanglewood concerts and tennis tournaments and baseball games and track meets and schools and colleges, he has put his knee on the arterial flow of our tourist and services dependent economy and it can no longer breathe.
For the last couple months, I’ve been hunkering down and hiding out from this mad-phasist Fuhrer with his menacing black mask inscribed Science will Win and his new COVID forever police state.
Imposing a new travel ban and new alcohol prohibition rule early in August while COVID deaths sink to virtually none, the Governor has been rescinding “step 2 of phase 3” of his reopening plan. He storms at reports of a “recent [beer] kegger in Chatham, that graduation event in Chelmsford, the booze cruise in Boston Harbor, the football camp in South Weymouth, the lifeguard party in Falmouth, the prom in Cohasset,” as the inimitable Howie Carr recounts in the Boston Herald. Like some demented puritan divine, the governor seethes at “troubling clusters” of “private recreational activity”.
But I’m relieved to report that righteous scriveners and saner doctors, academics and statisticians across the land are publishing books debunking this amazing COVID madness. I’ve told you already about my Discovery Institute colleagues Jay Richards and Douglas Ax and statistician William Briggs and their demonstration in The Price of Panic (available in October) that lockdowns do no good whatsoever in suppressing epidemic but do effectively devastate much of the economy. I’ve written of my Moonshots colleague John Schroeter’s stirring ebook, already available on Amazon: Covid19: A Devil’s Choice.
With cogent authority, these books present all the statistical arguments on the insignificance of COVID compared to earlier, more deadly epidemics that brought no lockdowns or mask edicts.
Once to every man and nation, however, comes a moment to speak truth to power without statistical distractions or utilitarian extenuations. Now John Tamny, the libertarian star of Forbes’Real Clear Markets, has unleashed a devastating tract, to be published as soon as possible (AIER possibly), entitled When Politicians Panicked: The New Coronavirus, Expert Opinion, and a Tragic Lapse of Reason.
Naming names and describing the endless carnival of outrageous overreach, Tamny vividly shows that Governor Baker is just one of many demented governors reveling in power like a Charlie Chaplin Fuhrer during this mass media madness.
Tamny is not much interested in COVID-19 data, except to dismiss the virus drama as just another epidemic event like scores of others over the centuries. He derides the call to continue lockdowns until the arrival of vaccines. He quotes Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal,
“There were no vaccines for the ’57 Asian flu [that caused 70 thousand US deaths, including many young people (nearly equivalent to Covid-19 deaths adjusted for population)], or the ’68 Hong Kong flu or the 1918 Spanish flu [50 million world deaths]. They were never ‘cured.’ They ended when people decided to accept and adapt to the virus’s existence.”
Nothing offers any answer to the all-cause death data that show COVID to have been a trivial event in medical terms, with some 300,000 lives lost, average age over 80, in the face of some 58 million global all-cause deaths in 2019. COVID deaths, even according to the Imperial College of London, will be drastically fewer in 2020 than the some 1.4 million new tuberculosis deaths resulting from the lockdowns and COVID hospital distortions.
“Proper history,” Tamny writes, “will indicate that what happened in 2020 was a global debacle…The reaction by pols…amounted to the biggest crime against humanity [in two centuries]. When politicians panicked, those with the least suffered in unimaginable ways…According to a UN study he cites, some 285 million people may die of starvation [because] of “an American upper middle class that was making decisions for everyone and for whom lockdowns were merely an inconvenience or vacation.”
Bryan Fischer
Mask mania has swept the United States, with some surveys admitting that perhaps 95% of Americans are wearing them, under the entirely illusory belief that the masks are doing them some good.
Unfortunately, no scientific study has demonstrated that masks do any good at all in terms of protecting people from COVID-19. Some mask wearers may feel a little better, because they may feel like they have some protection even though in reality they have none.
Governors and mayors, caught up in the mindless frenzy, are imposing fines on constituents who go au naturale. Houston’s mayor will issue $250 fines after a single warning for those caught without a face covering. Miami issues $100 citations for a first and second offense followed by an arrest on the third offense. Broward County fines violators $1000 a day, and continued malfeasance can put someone behind bars for 60 days.
There might be some slight justification for these draconian measures if masks worked. But they don’t.
A review of the scientific literature on COVID-19 reveals that simply put, “masks and respirators do not work. There have been extensive randomized controlled trial (RCT) studies, and meta-analysis reviews of RCT studies, which all show that masks and respirators do not work to prevent respiratory influenza-like illnesses, or respiratory illnesses believed to be transmitted by droplets and aerosol particles.”
The reason is that none of the available masks have a mesh that’s fine enough to capture the COVID-19 particles. In fact, the known facts of physics and biology say that masks cannot work. “The main transmission path is long-residence-time aerosol particles (less 2.5 μm), which are too fine to be blocked, and the minimum-infective dose is smaller than one aerosol particle.” (Emphasis mine.) In other words, it only takes a dose smaller than one aerosol particle to infect someone, and none of the masks can capture even a single particle that small.
Here’s a sample of the medical literature on the subject:
Jacobs, J. L. et al. (2009) “Face mask use in HCW (Health Care Workers) was not demonstrated to provide benefit in terms of cold symptoms or getting colds” (which of course are caused by viruses). Plus, the health care workers were significantly more likely to experience headaches.
Cowling, B. et al. (2010) “None of the studies reviewed showed a benefit from wearing a mask, in either HCW or community members in households therein.
bin-Reza et al. (2012) “There were 17 eligible studies. … None of the studies established a conclusive relationship between mask/respirator use and protection against influenza infection.”
Smith, J.D. et al. (2016) “We identified six clinical studies … . In the meta-analysis of the clinical studies, we found no significant difference between N95 respirators and surgical masks in associated risk of (a) laboratory-confirmed respiratory infection, (b) influenza-like illness, or (c) reported work-place absenteeism.”
Offeddu, V. et al. (2017) “Evidence of a protective effect of masks or respirators against verified respiratory infection (VRI) was not statistically significant.”
Radonovich, L.J. et al. (2019) “Among outpatient health care personnel, N95 respirators vs medical masks as worn by participants in this trial resulted in no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza.”
Long, Y. et al. (2020) “There were no statistically significant differences in preventing laboratory-confirmed influenza, laboratory-confirmed respiratory viral infections, laboratory-confirmed respiratory infection, and influenza-like illness using N95 respirators and surgical masks.”
Conclusion: “No RCT study with verified outcome shows a benefit for HCW or community members in households to wearing a mask or respirator. There is no such study. There are no exceptions. Likewise, no study exists that shows a benefit from a broad policy to wear masks in public…All of this to say that: if anything gets through (and it always does, irrespective of the mask), then you are going to be infected. Masks cannot possibly work. It is not surprising, therefore, that no bias-free study has ever found a benefit from wearing a mask or respirator in this application.”
It’s long past time for our health officials to start dealing in actual science instead of the pseudo-science they’ve been peddling since the beginning of this self-induced, panic-driven hysteria. They should begin today to broadcast loud and clear that there is no known benefit arising from wearing a mask in a viral respiratory illness epidemic.
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