BILL WALTON, DIRECT OBSERVATION AND DISTINCTIONS WITHOUT DIFFERENCES

Last week, former basketball star and 1970s’ anti-Establishment activist Bill Walton died of cancer at 71. Thus, pardon me for opening with another basketball parable.

—

At the local Y, we play games to 12 points. (I’m tempted to make a Spinal Tap joke here). On Friday, my team won four of five such games, including the final three. This gladdened my teammates and me; low, sideways fives all around. When you winnin,’ they grinnin.’

But it felt weird to be happier leaving the gym after having won those games than I would’ve been if we had lost them. To begin with, I know people who can’t walk. They’d be ecstatic to lose every game they got to play. To jump is to fly.

One should bear in mind Rudyard Kipling’s exhortation to treat “both impostors,” i.e., winning and losing, the same. A basketball game is just a game: a way to celebrate motion, to engage and energize one’s body and mind and to be, and work, together, with other humans. I’d be just as happy to play without keeping score. When I’m playing well, I know it, without counting points. When I’m not, I know that, too.

Notably, the score in each of the last three games was 12-11. We could easily have lost any of those games. Winning was pleasing because it showed that our team stayed focused and made one less mistake or maybe got one more lucky bounce than did our opponents. But winning by such a narrow margin didn’t prove that we were significantly better than our opponents. To the contrary, the close scores showed there was little difference between the various teams.

—

The same is true in many other settings and situations: if you have to look very closely to distinguish between various alternatives, the tiny difference between the outcomes presented by exercising various options isn’t worth agonizing, or changing your life, over.

While making decisions, one always weighs benefits against costs. During Coronamania, tens of millions of Americans failed to weigh the costs of lockdowns, school closures, masking, testing and “vaxxing” against these measures’ purported—but actually insignificant—benefits. Most people fundamentally erred by uncritically accepting the government and media’s phony Covid data and conceptual framework, instead of relying on direct observation and applying basic biology principles and logic.

—

Scamdemic governments imposed an absurd array of rules ostensibly designed to “stop the spread” of some purportedly universally lethal virus. Most people obeyed these rules. A subset of the rule followers became indignant when others refused to conform.

But these rules were simply theater. Washing hands, disinfecting groceries, staying six feet apart, locking down, closing schools, parks, churches and other places, face-covering, PCR testing and injecting mRNA resembled basketball teams playing games with close scores; there weren’t significantly different outcomes between heavy-handed nations and states and those who were more lenient, nor between extremely cautious and nonchalant individuals.

Jurisdictions who intervened most zealously seemed to have done worse than did the less restrictive. Despite spending twice as much per capita on medical care than does any other nation and having the most modern hospitals, the United States, with 4% of the global population, was said to have 30% of the world’s Covid deaths.

There are a few basic reasons for this disproportionality. First, American Covid death rates were higher because America has many super-old, unfit and depressed people. Many Americans consume too many immune-suppressing carbs and medications and spend too little immune system-building time outdoors.

Relatedly, American medical facilities falsely ascribed, to Covid, the deaths of many very old, very sick people who had simply worn out. CARES Act financial incentives encouraged such misreporting. Many Americans were terrified of Covid, despite knowing no one who died of it. Of the dozens of people I asked, only two knew anyone who might even have been said to have been a Covid casualty. The decedents mentioned were very old and sick. They seemed to have died with, not from, The Virus.

Some of the reported deaths may simply have not occurred. According to Substacker Jessica Hockett, some New York nursing homes reported far more deaths than they had beds. State officials refuse to release confirmatory death certificates for those said to have died in nursing homes.

Further, unlike in some other nations, American doctors refused—or were forbidden—to administer inexpensive, off-label antivirals such as Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, antibiotics to deal with secondary pneumonia and steroids to address systemic inflammation. Instead—according to those who worked in hospitals—staffs ventilated, Remdesivir-ed and sedated many to death.

—

The most fervent Covid rule followers I knew nonetheless got sick. People didn’t need much human contact to transmit some virus or other. Unimaginably tiny viruses escaped around, or through pore spaces in, masks.

And if you needed a test to tell you were sick, how sick were you, really? If tests had multi-day analytical lag times and delivered 90% false positives, were they worth taking, or believing?

Despite the near absence of observable differences regarding Covid cases and deaths in various places and periods, governments, newspapers and TV stations bombarded the public with stats, graphs and death and case tickers to build fear and spread the pro-NPI narrative, ultimately to build market demand for “vaccines.”

When VaxxFest began, it soon became clear in our personal spheres that the vaunted shots not only didn’t stop infection and spread but that the most injected became sick more often than did the unvaxxed. All the jabbed people I know got The Virus multiple times. Jab-driven immune suppression seemed clearly to have occurred.

Meanwhile, my wife, I and some others in an informal, known-to-each-other control group sought out physical encounters, wore no masks and took no shots. We’ve all been fine. This wasn’t because the masker/vaxxers prayed for our well-being.

Nor did the shots “keep people out of the hospital” or prevent them from dying “of Covid.” Plenty of the jabbed died anyway, with or without Covid. A 2024 study published in Frontiers in Immunology has confirmed that the injected were more likely to not only get sick but also to die with Covid than were the unjabbed.

This finding was unsurprising. After seeing, among the people we knew, more jabbed, than unjabbed, people getting sick with Covid—despite the government and media’s firm guarantee that the shots would stop the spread—why would one expect fewer of the jabbed, than unjabbed, to die from The Virus?

—

Whether vaxxed or not, only a tiny fraction of the population was ever said to be dying of Covid. When 99.8% of those under 60 were known to survive infection without injection, the shots had only microscopic potential upside. Even using Pharma’s self-serving data, the shots’ absolute risk reduction was less than one percent. Whether you took the shots or not, you were extremely unlikely to die from Covid. Thus, why inject an experimental substance?

Like a basketball game with a close score, the vast majority of the overall population was always at near zero risk of dying of Covid. Therefore, though it received much government, media, institutional and societal focus, the jab status of those under 65 was a distinction without a real-world difference. To most, the vaxx presented only a downside; it was all risk, no reward.

The shots seem to have needlessly killed or injured healthy people via, e.g., heart attacks, strokes, cancers and neurological disruption. I know three people who exhibited post-vaxx neurological problems. Plus three more who died of post-jab cancers and one disabled, and later killed, by post-jab strokes.

Additionally, since 2021, there have been millions of cumulative excess deaths in highly-vaxxed nations. Hundreds of thousands of these were in the US. Yes, temporal correlation doesn’t, by itself, prove causation. But it’s an important data point.

One thing is certain: the shots didn’t meaningfully extend the lives of millions who died within a year of injecting.

And while most injectees report no lasting secondary effects, the vaxx injury story is open-ended. Long-term vaxx effects are unknowable. The burden of proof is always on the party seeking to change the status quo.

—

Two weeks ago, an astute reader/commenter told this short, instructive story:

Early in the Scamdemic, here in Detroit, I overheard one side of a high-volume phone conversation from the window of a landscaper/scrap guy in a ragged old F150….it went something like this: “Mothaf*cka, if this shit was real, you woulda BEEN dead…”

Word up.

Based people didn’t need statistics or TV or government “experts” to tell them the Covid score. They directly saw that healthy, non-old people weren’t dying from this virus. And that only a tiny fraction of old, sick people might have falsely been said to have been. If people had witnessed how the Covid-infected were mistreated in hospitals, they would have concluded that many of the “Covid deaths” were iatrogenic.

Fundamentally, nearly everyone non-old and basically healthy—and even the vast majority of the old, unhealthy—survived Covid. The Motown folk epidemiologist knew this. So did any other sane person who paid attention to real life.

The non-pharmaceutical interventions (“NPIs”): lockdowns, school closures, masking and testing, plus vaxxing and giving away trillions of dollars didn’t visibly, markedly improve Covid outcomes. Nor, despite all of the data distortion and spin, did the NPIs and shots “save millions of lives.” By October, 2023, at least fifty studies had corroborated what was obvious to the naked eye: NPIs and shots hadn’t significantly lessened ostensible Covid deaths.

However, the NPIs plainly, visibly did widely damage mental health, spur weight gain, deprive young people of education, social development and memories, and devalue savings. Neither the NPIs nor shots were worth the problems they’ve predictably, observably caused.

—

Bill Walton excelled in college basketball and had a few outstanding professional seasons. But he was often injured. Overall, Walton endured 37 orthopedic surgeries and years of chronic pain. He wrote a book about his physical ordeal, describing how he struggled to walk for several years, then spent several more years on his back, often self-medicating to dull pain and considering self-euthanizing with a pistol.

In his twenties, Walton ate a vegetarian diet, eschewed pharmaceuticals and advocated “the practice of noncooperation with the existing government because of the inherent evil of that government.” In an open letter, he railed against “the systematic suppression of natural living and healing methods” and proclaimed that working class people “must not allow outsiders to prevent us from doing the things we like to do.”

These notions clearly applied during Coronamania. But in 2020, Walton abandoned these principles and joined the government-compliant groupthinkers. As late as 2022, when he was announcing a college game and his co-broadcaster noted the arena’s many empty seats, Walton told his on-air partner to “stop complaining” and exclaimed that it made sense for spectators to stay home. “There’s a Pandemic going on!” Walton shouted. “There’s fewer fans in the building because people are dying of Covid!”

Given rampant data manipulation, it’s unclear to me how many were dying of Covid at any given time, and especially in 2022. Nor did it make sense for college-age people to hide from each other. When survival rates for that group were around 99.97%, any ostensible benefit of human isolation was almost too small to measure. I also wondered why, if vaxxees believed the shots were as effective as advertised, injectees still feared The Virus.

Regardless, given his Covophobia, Walton likely injected and urged others to do so. This was a radical/reactionary departure from his organic living, government-hating days. Leftists and ex-hippies were some of Coronamania’s most doctrinaire devotees. As Van Morrison sang in 2021, where did all the rebels go, when rebellion would have mattered most?

—

Finally, I wonder if Covid shots triggered or worsened Bill Walton’s unspecified form of cancer.

Vaxx apologists will note that Walton was 71 and that many people get cancer and die at, or below, that age. And that Walton’s only brother died when he was 69.

To those who so observe: thank you for making my abiding points about human finitude, Covid’s age-stratified risks, the low overall net value of the shots and the consequent folly of mass injection.

As we get older, death becomes more likely. It just does. Despite all of the subsequent, fear-building, garbage-in, garbage-out data analysis and graphs purporting to show universal peril, no one can deny that Covid’s death risk closely correlates with age. Covid’s demographically limited risk profile was clear by mid-March, 2020.

If Covid didn’t kill the unhealthiest of those in their seventies, eighties or nineties, something else soon would have. Sure, there are many vital septugenarians, octogenarians and even some nonagenarians. But there are also a disproportionate number of very unhealthy people of those ages. I know. I’ve seen them. So have you. Far and away, this superannuated cohort were the people most likely to have died with Covid.

By acknowledging that older people die whether injected or not, those who maintain that the shots didn’t cause Walton’s cancer unwittingly affirm that the NPIs yielded no gain but caused society-wide, permanent pain.

And as the universal injections were sold to the public as an escape route from the oppressive NPIs, the shots’ unknown near-term, and unknowable long-term, risks clearly weren’t worth it.