BELATEDLY ADMITTING THE TRUTH, SORT OF

Over the past few years, two immigrants in their mid-fifties became my friends. These guys are among the gentlest spirits that I’ve known, though one works like a beast with a pick and shovel and tells me he was a boxer back in the day. The other man speaks five languages and knows far more about Botany than I do.

While both men are delightful to interact with, each binge drinks every so often. One drinks until he passes out at the community gardens I manage and sometimes ends up in the hospital, drying out, for multiple days. The other becomes annoyingly loud and manic and does stupid stuff that causes him to lose jobs. He also suffers broken bones in unexplained tumbles. Both have visibly damaged their bodies by drinking excessively and seem likely to die before their time.

When I talk to these two about a given alcohol-fueled episode, they initially deny that they had drank to excess. After I mention the contrary evidence provided by the above outcomes, one admitted that, well, he might have had a beer or two. The other would only cop to swallowing a small amount of an alcohol-based herbal tincture remedy.

Please.

We’ve all seen this same denialism regarding other instances of misbehavior. Initially, the transgressor denies any wrongdoing. When confronted with specific proof, he understates the magnitude and/or frequency of the misconduct. These incomplete, and thus ultimately dishonest, admissions assuage his guilt and allow him to, at least in his own mind, save face and continue his self-deception. Like the child who hides his eyes and thinks you can’t see him because he can’t see you, the self-deceiving misrepresenter thinks he’s also deceiving the listener.

After 41 months, Coronamania exponents find themselves in the same place as unrecovering alcoholics. For nearly three-and-a-half years, they’ve wildly lied about Covid’s danger. In particular, they cited grossly inflated death tolls to build panic and to justify their failed interventions. Nearly all of those said to have died “from Covid” were old, sick and/or obese and would have died soon whether infected or not. Those who didn’t fit this profile likely died iatrogenically from destructive hospital protocols, such as ventilation and kidney-damaging Remdesivir.

Hence, there was never a good reason to limit the lives of the non-old. This virus never justified, e.g., closing schools or mandatorily jabbing hundreds of millions.

Additionally, the Covid overreactors lied about how effective the masks, tests and vaxxes were. When the shots clearly failed—as had been promised—to stop infection and spread, they moved the goalposts to “Well, the shots kept me out of the hospital.”

But the shots’ absolute risk reduction was miscroscopic. Neither I, nor many uninjected others, have ever “gotten the virus,” much less been hospitalized. When I say this to vaxxers, they tell me I’m just lucky. It’s certainly not because I masked or hid from people. Because I didn’t.

When they take the shots, and get sick but stay out of the hospital, it’s skill. When I’m fine without the shots, it’s luck. OK, then.

At long last, many of the Covidmanic are modifying their narrative. David Leonhardt’s recent New York Times article typifies this long overdue acknowledgement and abandonment of some—but not all—of the linchpin Scamdemic lies. For example, 41 months after the Scamdemic began, Leonhardt quotes an “expert” who says that Covid deaths correlate closely with old age.

Please.

As if this wasn’t obvious in March, 2020.

In an attempt to self-deceivingly save face and to appear to take a moderate, “nuanced” view, Leonhardt tentatively suggests that “the Pandemic” is over. He says that we should take comfort because, after 41 months of excess mortality, there are scarcely more than average excess deaths.

To begin with, I question this assertion; the figures I’ve seen still show significantly elevated deaths in many highly-vaxxed nations, including the United States. In the same week that Leonhardt posted his semi-apologia, statistical analyst/Subsatcker Ethical Skeptic discussed the ongoing understatement of excess deaths. According to Skeptic, non-natural deaths in late July, 2023 are still running 14% above historical trends.

Even if excess deaths were flattening, one would have to consider that many deaths of the old and sick seem to have been “pulled forward” during the Scamdemic. Given prior death “spikes” over the past three years, there are fewer old, sick, obese people around than before. Thus, fewer in that cohort should be dying recently. Accordingly, we should now expect lower than average death rates. Having normal death rates would show that some factor other than Covid is causing excess deaths. I suspect these deaths derive from the Covid shots and such lingering Covid overreaction effects as substance abuse, depression, weight gain and impoverishment.

Notably, after three years of using inflated death figures to create the panic that delivered political and economic advantages, such Covid exaggerators as politicians, public health administrators and Leonhardt now admit that Covid deaths were significantly overcounted. But, like hospitalized alcoholics who say they just had a couple of beers, the Covid-crazed won’t admit how much these numbers were exaggerated. They only admit to a 30% overstatement.

The 30% figure seems far too low for at least three reasons. Firstly, 65% percent of those who died with Covid were over 80. By that age, the average person has passed away; the bodies of those who’ve survived are wearing out. Secondly, the CARES Act strongly incentivized hospitals to overcode for Covid and families to accept death certificates blaming Covid. Thirdly, and anecdotally, though I directly know many hundreds of people, I know zero who were said to have died of Covid. I indirectly know—i.e., people I know have told me about—eight people they knew who were said to have died of Covid. Four of the decedents were over 90, two more had Stage 4 cancer, one was over 70 and very overweight with congestive heart failure and one, in his forties, was morbidly obese. Thus, eight out of eight reported “Covid deaths” that I know of involved distinctly unwell people.

By logical extension/extrapolation, all or nearly all purported Covid deaths seem to have extrinsic causes. Yet, throughout much of the Scamdemic, politicians, bureaucrats and the media consequentially pretended that all were imperiled. These officials only began to admit this gross over-attribution of deaths to Covid long after tremendous social and economic damage had been done.

Further, while he concedes that Covid deaths were overstated by 30%, Leonhardt engages in statistical sleight of hand. He continues to cite a 1.1 million Covid death toll, without deducting the overcounted 30%. Staying above the million-death threshold has too much emotional/rhetorical value to give away.

Neither Leonhardt nor other Coronamania backers ever acknowledge that medical practices that killed many were modified. Instead, in an abiding homage to Pharma, Leonhardt dutifully praises Paxlovid, while never noting that other, low-cost, off-label pharmaceutical/nutraceutical protocols worked well for many, before Paxlovid was marketed. Governments and many doctors withheld from the public information regarding these alt protocols. If Covid deaths have flattened, much of that reflects hospitals’ retreat from the ham-handed Covid protocols they previously used.

Reciting a central tenet of the Coronamanic faith, Leonhardt asserts that the shots significantly curtailed “The Pandemic.” But purported Covid deaths didn’t decline in synch with vaxx uptake; as more people injected in early 2021, there wasn’t a corresponding, sustained, linear drop in purported Covid deaths. To the contrary, ostensible Covid deaths “spiked” in 2021. In the second half of 2021, and throughout 2022, the vaxxes “wore off” and failed, on a mass scale, to prevent illness. Hence, vaxx uptake fell off a cliff. It seems highly unlikely that an ostensible decline of deaths in mid-2023 would derive from injections that failed two-plus years ago and have been widely avoided since.

Those who injected have been more, not less, likely to have become sick. If the shots didn’t—as promised—stop the spread, why would one believe those who assert that the shots make illness less severe?

Relatedly, Leonhardt never considers that viruses naturally evolve to weaker forms. Viral adaptation underlies the persistent ads urging everyone to get the latest “bivalent booster” to thwart the latest variant. But only the most gullible and fearful are rolling up sleeves for these worthless shots.

Intransigent vaxx backers continue to misleadingly characterize the vaxx data. For example, Leonhardt asserts that the non-injected are more likely, on a percentage basis, to die from Covid. By relying on percentages, rather than absolute death stats, Leonhardt unwittingly implies what is undeniably true: many of the vaxxed have died with Covid. The vaunted vaxxes’ protection from serious illness is far from ironclad.

Leonhardt’s vaxx advocacy also overlooks the statistical distortions used to make the shots look better. First, those who administered the shots strategically declined to vaxx those who were so frail that the shots might kill them. Second, it fails to take into account that those who injected weren’t counted as vaxxed for 42 days after their first shot. As the shots initially suppress immunity, one should expect the shots to increase illness and deaths in the weeks after the shot regimen begins. Injectors who died within this initial 42 days were falsely counted as “unvaxxed.”

Delivering a Schadenfreude-y dopamine hit to his Times tribe, Leonhardt reports that Covid now kills more whites and Republicans, because these demographic groups disproportionately eschewed the shots. Initially, the study seems flawed because it derived party affiliation data from voter registrations, even though many voters don’t declare an affiliation or may cross party lines when they vote. Secondly, in yesterday’s Substack, Alex Berenson identifies basic flaws in this politically-driven study. Despite media misportrayals, the study concluded that only Republicans over 75—who had less ability to decline shots and were more likely with or without the shots—were more likely to die than are Democrats. Leonhardt doesn’t mention that the study found that death rates for Democrats were higher than for Republicans between ages 65-74. Nor does he mention that death rates were the same for those under 64 in either party. Thirdly, Leonhardt’s race-based assertion seems hard to reconcile with data that jab uptake among Whites was higher than that among Blacks and Latinos and the media’s repeated assertions that, owing to medical access disparities, Covid deaths were higher among minorities.

Most fundamentally, the study shows that Democrats base their worldviews and their “Science” on political affiliation and race. But did anyone need a study to learn that?

Leonhardt also conspicuously fails to mention that hundreds of thousands have suffered apparent vaxx injuries or deaths from heart attacks, strokes or cancers. Vaxx critics say that the shots are causing a net loss, not gain, in life span.

Leonhardt also tacitly admits something that few, if any, in his camp would admit for 41 months, namely that the natural immunity that follows infection confers immunity. His belated admission of a bedrock epidemiological principle—herd immunity—that was, from 2020-23, used to vilify those who stated it is another instance of ex post facto Coronamanic jersey-switching.

Leonhardt also belatedly, but only obliquely, admits what many who cite excess deaths won’t admit: the lockdowns/closures themselves killed multitudes. Those who supported the lockdowns/closures engendered isolation, despair, overdoses, gun violence and postponed medical treatments for non-Covid ailments.

Even if the lockdown/mask/test/vaxx supporters were to properly admit they were wrong about everything, their mea culpa would be far too late. Too much damage has already been done.

The Machiavellians who concocted the Scamdemic and the media who sold it don’t regret what they did. It served their political, social and economic purposes. Thus, the truth can now be publicly admitted, though not fully. Denying some aspects of reality allows the Coronamanic to deceive the naive and to think of themselves as good, smart people for having supported lockdowns, school closures, masks, tests and shots.